Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 9B6 of Houston Stewart
Chamberlain's
The
Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane,
The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
389
6. PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION (From Francis of Assisi to
Immanuel
Kant).
THE
TWO
COURSES
I have already given (p. 241)
a definition of philosophy (Weltanschauung), and in this book I
have frequently discussed religion; ‡ I have also called attention (p.
244) to the inseparability of the two ideas. I am far from
maintaining
the identity of philosophy and religion, for that would be a purely
logical
and formalistic undertaking, which is quite beyond my purpose; but I
see
that everywhere in our history philosophical speculation is rooted in
religion,
and in its full development aims at religion — and when on the one hand
I contemplate national idiosyncrasies and on the other pass a
succession
of pre-eminent men in review before my mind's eye, I discover a whole
series
of relations between philosophy and religion, which show me that they
are
closely and organically connected: where the one is absent the other
fails,
where the one is strong and vigorous, so is the
‡ See especially vol. i. pp. 213
f., 411 f., 471.
390 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
other: a deeply
religious man is a true philosopher (in the living, popular sense of
the
word), and those choice minds that rise to comprehensive, clear,
philosophical
views — a Roger Bacon, a Leonardo, a Bruno, a Kant, a Goethe — are not
often ecclesiastically pious, but always strikingly “religious.“ We
see,
therefore, that philosophy and religion on the one hand further one
another,
and on the other hand are substitutes for, or complementary to, each
other.
On pp. 258-9 I wrote: In the want of a true religion springing from and
corresponding to our individuality I see the greatest danger for the
future
of the Teuton, that is in him the heel of Achilles, whoever wounds him
there, will lay him low. If we look closer, we shall see that the
inadequacy
of our ecclesiastical religion revealed itself, to begin with, in the
invalidity
of the philosophy which it presupposed; our earliest philosophers are
all
theologians and mostly honest ones, who pass through an inner struggle
for truth, and truth always means the sincerity of views as determined
by the special nature of the individual. Out of this struggle our
Teutonic
philosophy, which is absolutely new, gradually grew up. This
development
did not follow one straight line; the work was taken in hand
simultaneously
at most divergent points, as if in the building of a house, mason,
carpenter,
locksmith and painter each did his own work independently, troubling
himself
as little as possible about the others. It is the will of the architect
that unites the essentially different aims; in this case instinct of
race
is the architect; the homo europaeus can only follow definite
paths,
and he, as Master, to the best of his power forces his path upon others
who do not belong to him. I do not think that the structure is
complete;
I am not bound to any school, but take joy in the growth and
development
of the Teutonic work, and do what I can reverently to assimilate it. My
task in this section is, in the most general
391 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
outlines, to show
the growth and present condition of this Teutonic work. Here history
again
comes to its own; for while civilisation only fastens on to the past in
order to destroy it and replace it by something new, and knowledge is,
as it were, of no special time, the philosophical and religious
development
of seven hundred years is still alive, and it is, indeed, impossible to
speak of to-day, without remembering that it is born of yesterday. Here
everything is still in process of development; our philosophy and,
above
all, our religion, is the most incomplete feature of our whole life.
Here,
then, the historical method is forced upon us; it alone can enable us
so
to pick up and follow the various threads that the web of the tissue,
as
it was made over to us by the year 1800, shall be clearly seen and
surveyed.
*
Ecclesiastical Christianity, purely as religion, consists, as I
endeavoured
to show in the seventh chapter, of unreconciled elements, so that we
found
Paul and Augustine involved in most serious contradictions. In
Christianity,
as a matter of fact, we are dealing not with a normal
* I shall not copy what is to be found in the text-books on the history
of philosophy, for the very reason that there is none that would suit
my
purpose here. But I should like once for all to refer to the
well-known,
excellent handbooks to which I owe much in my account. It is to be
hoped
that at no too distant date Paul Deussen‘s Allgemeine Geschichte
der
Philosophie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Religion will
be so far advanced as at least partially to fill the gap which has been
so keenly felt by me while writing this section. The very fact that he
takes religion also into account proves Deussen‘s capacity to perform
the
task and his long study of Indian thought is a further guarantee.
Meanwhile
I recommend to the less experienced reader the short Skizze
einer
Geschichte der Lehre vom Idealen und Realen
which
begins the first volume of Schopenhauer‘s Parerga und
Paralipomena;
in a few pages it offers a brilliantly clear survey of Teutonic thought
at its best, from Descartes to Kant and Schopenhauer. The best
introduction
to general philosophy that exists is in my opinion (and as far as my
limited
knowledge extends) Friedrich Albert Lange‘s Geschichte des
Materialismus:
this author takes a special point of view and hence the whole picture
of
European thought from Democritus to Hartmann becomes more vivid, and in
the healthy atmosphere of a frank partiality challenging contradiction
we breathe much more freely than under the hypocritical impartiality of
masked Academic authorities.
392 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
religious
philosophy,
but with an artificial philosophy forcibly welded into unity. Now as
soon
as genuine philosophic thought began to be active — which was never the
case with the Romans, but was bound to come with the advent of the
Teuton
— the nature of this faith full of contradictions violently asserted
itself;
and in fact it is a truly tragic spectacle to see noble minds like
Scotus
Erigena in the ninth, and Abelard in the twelfth century wriggle and
turn
in the hopeless struggle to bring the complex of faith which was forced
upon them into harmony with themselves and with the demands of honest
reason.
Inasmuch as the Church dogmas were regarded as infallible, philosophy
had
henceforth two parts to choose between; it could openly admit the
incompatibility
of philosophy and theology — that was the course of truth; or it could
deny the evidence of the senses, cheat itself and others, and by means
of countless tricks and devices force the irreconcilable to be
reconciled
— this was the course of falsehood.
THE
COURSE
OF TRUTH
The course of
truth
branches off almost from the first in different directions. It could
lead
to a daring, genuinely Pauline, anti-rationalistic theology, as Duns
Scotus
(1274-1308) and Occam (died 1343) show. It could bring about a
systematic
subordination of logic to intuitive feeling, and thus conduced to the
rich
variety of mystical philosophies, which, beginning with Francis of
Assisi
(1182-1226) and Eckhart (1260-1328), was to lead up to minds of such
different
character as Thomas à Kempis, the author of the Imitatio
Christi
(1380-1471), Paracelsus, the founder of scientific medicine
(1493-1541),
or Stahl, the founder of modern chemistry (1660-1734). * Or, on the
other
hand, this unswerving honesty could cause
* See p. 322.
393 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
men to turn away
from all special study of Christian theology and spur them on to
acquire
a comprehensive, free cosmogony; we see an indication of this in the
encyclopaedist
Albertus Magnus (1193-1280), it is then further developed in the
Humanists,
e.g.,
in Picus of Mirandola (1463-94), who considers the science of the
Hellenes
as divine a revelation as the books of the Jews, and consequently
studies
it with the fire of religious zeal. Finally, this path could lead the
most
profound philosophic intellects to test and reject the foundations of
the
theoretical philosophy then regarded as authoritative, in order to
proceed,
as free responsible men, to the construction of a new philosophy in
harmony
with our intellect and knowledge; this movement — the really
“philosophical“
one — always starts in our case from the investigation of nature; its
representatives
are philosophers who study nature, or philosophic investigators; it
begins
with Roger Bacon (1214-1294), then slumbers for a long time, repressed
by main force by the Church, but raises its head again when the natural
sciences have developed strength, and runs a glorious course, from
Campanella
(perhaps the first man who consciously propounded a scientific theory
of
perception, 1568-1639) and Francis Bacon (1561-1626) to Immanuel Kant
(1724-1804)
at the threshold of the nineteenth century. So manifold were the new
paths
opened up to the human spirit when it once faithfully followed its true
nature. And by each of the courses mentioned a splendid harvest was
garnered.
Pauline theology gave birth to Church reform and political freedom;
mysticism
led to a deeper view of religion, and at the same time to reform and
brilliant
natural science; the awakened humanist desire for knowledge advanced
genuine
liberal culture, and the horizon of mankind was powerfully widened by
the
reconstruction of philosophy in the special sense on the basis of exact
observation and critical, free
394 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
thought; while
all scientific knowledge gained in depth and religious conceptions in
the
Teutonic sense began to undergo a complete transformation.
THE
COURSE
OF FALSEHOOD
The other method, which I have designated the course of falsehood,
remained
absolutely barren of results; for here arbitrary caprice and capricious
arbitrariness predominated. The very attempt to rationalise all
religion,
that is, to accommodate it to reason, and yet at the same time to bind
and put thought under the yoke of faith, is a double crime against
human
nature. For such an attempt to succeed the delusive belief in dogmatism
must first become a raving madness. A Church doctrine which had been
patched
together out of the most varying foreign alien elements, and which
contradicted
itself in the most essential points, had to be declared eternal, divine
truth; a fragmentary, badly translated, often totally misunderstood,
essentially
individualistic, pre-Christian philosophy had to be declared
infallible;
for without these prodigious acceptations the attempt would never have
succeeded. And so this theology and this philosophy, which had no
connection
with one another, were forced into wedlock and a monstrosity was
imposed
upon humanity as the absolute, all-embracing system to be
unconditionally
accepted. * In this path development followed a straight, short line;
for,
while divine truth is as manifold as the creatures in which it is
reflected,
the impious caprice of a human system, which lays down the law of
“truth“
and carries it out with fire and sword, soon reaches its limit, and any
further step would be a negation of itself. Anselm, who died in the
year
1109, can be regarded as the author of this method, which gags thought
and feeling; scarcely a hundred and fifty years after his death
* See p. 178.
395 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
Thomas Aquinas
(1227-1274) and Ramon Lull (1234-1315) had brought the system to the
highest
perfection. Progress was in this case impossible. Such an absolute
theological
philosophy neither contained in itself the germ of any possible
development,
nor could it exercise a stimulating influence upon any branch of human
intellectual activity, on the contrary, it necessarily signified an
end.
* It becomes clear how irrefutable this assertion is when we look at
the
frequently mentioned Bull Aeterni Patris, of August 4, 1879,
which
represents Thomas Aquinas as the unsurpassed, solely authoritative
philosopher
of the Roman view of life even for the present day; and, to make
matters
more complete, some lovers of the Absolute have lately put Ramon Lull
with
his Ars Magna even above Thomas. For Thomas, who was a
thoroughly
honest Teuton, possessed of brilliant intellectual gifts, and who had
learned
all that he really knew at the feet of the great Swabian Albert von
Bollstadt,
expressly admits that some few of the highest mysteries — e.g.,
the Trinity and the Incarnation — are incomprehensible to human reason.
It is true he tries to explain this incomprehensibility by rational
means,
when he says that God intentionally made it so, that faith might be
more
meritorious. But he at least admits the incomprehensibility. Now Ramon
does not admit this, for this Spaniard had learned in a different
school,
that of the Mohammedans, and had there imbibed the fundamental doctrine
of Semitic religion that nothing can be incomprehensible, and so he
undertakes
to prove everything under the sun on grounds of reason. † He also makes
the boastful claim that from his method (of rotary differently coloured
disks with letters for the chief ideas)
* See the remarks on “not-knowing“ as the source of all
increase
of experience, p. 272,
and
on the sterilising effects of universalism, p.
276.
† Cf. vol. i. p. 414.
It is very important to note in addition that Thomas Aquinas also must
seek support from the Semites and in many passages links on to Jewish
philosophers
— Maimonides and others. See Dr. J. Guttmann: Das
Verhältnis
des Thomas von Aquino zum Judentum und zur jüdischen Litteratur
(Göttingen 1891).
396 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
all sciences can
be derived without the necessity of studying them. Thus absolutism is
at
the same moment perfected in two ways, by the earnest, ethically
idealistic
system of Thomas and by the faultlessly logical and consequently absurd
doctrine of Ramon. I have already mentioned (p.
276) the judgment of the great Roger Bacon, who was a contemporary
of both these misguided men, upon Thomas Aquinas; similar and just as
much
to the point was the opinion of Cardanus, the doctor, mathematician and
philosopher, who had wasted much time on Ramon Lull — a marvellous
master!
he teaches all sciences without knowing a single one. *
There is nothing to be gained by lingering over these delusions,
although
the fact that at the close of the nineteenth century we were solemnly
called
upon to turn about and choose this insincere course lends them a
melancholy
present interest. We prefer to turn to that long, magnificent series of
splendid men who imposed no shackles on their inner nature, but in
simple
sincerity and dignity sought to know God and the world. I must,
however,
first make a remark on method.
SCHOLASTICISM
In the grouping, which I have sketched above (into theologians,
mystics,
humanists and scientists), the usual conception of a “scholastic
period“
completely disappears. And I really think that the notion may be
dispensed
with here, as being altogether superfluous, if not directly harmful,
for
the vivid comprehension of the philosophic and religious development of
the Teutonic world; it is contrary to the motto from Goethe which I
prefixed
to this “Historical Survey,“ in that it unites what is heterogeneous
and
at the same time rends links
* Here we are reminded of Rousseau‘s remark: “Quel plus
sûr
moyen de courir d‘erreurs en erreurs que la fureur de savoir tout?“
(Letter to Voltaire, 10. 9. 1755).
397 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
that belong to
one single chain. Taken literally, scholastic means simply schoolman;
the
name should therefore be limited to men who derive their knowledge
solely
from books; in fact that is the sort of derogatory sense which the word
has acquired in common parlance. But we may define more exactly. A
predominance
of dialectical hair-splitting to the disadvantage of observation — of
the
Theoretical to the disadvantage of the Practical — is what we call
“scholastic“;
every abstractly intellectual, purely logical construction seems to us
to be “scholasticism,“ and every man who constructs such systems out of
his head, or, as the German popular saying is, “Out of his little
finger,“
is a scholastic. But when thus viewed the word has no historical value;
there have been such scholastics at all times and there is a rich crop
of them at the present day. From the historical point of view we
generally
regard the scholastics as a group of theologians, who for several
centuries
endeavoured to fix the relations between thought and the Church
doctrine,
which was now almost completely developed and rigidified. Such a
grouping
may be useful to the Church historian; it took the “Fathers“ a thousand
years of bitter struggle to fix the dogmas; then for five hundred years
there raged a violent dispute with regard to the manner in which these
Church doctrines could be reconciled with the surrounding world, and
especially
with the nature of man, so far as this could be derived from Aristotle.
Finally, however, the underground current of true humanity had
undermined
more and more seriously the rock of St. Peter, and the thunder of
Martin
Luther scattered the theologians; and so on one side and on the other a
third period, that of the practical testing of principles, was
introduced.
As I have said above, from the point of view of the Church historian
this
may give a useful idea of scholasticism, but from the philosophic
standpoint
I find it exceedingly misleading, and for the history of our Teutonic
culture
it is utterly
398 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
useless. What,
for example, is the sense of saying, as I find in all text-books, that
Scotus Erigena is the founder of scholastic philosophy? Erigena! one of
the greatest mystics of all times, who interprets the Bible, verse by
verse,
allegorically, who fastens directly on to Greek gnosticism * and like
Origenes
teaches that hell means the tortures of our own consciences, heaven
their
joys (De Divisione Naturae v. 36), that every man will at last
be
redeemed, “whether he has led a good or a wicked life“ (v. 39), that to
understand eternity we must realise that “space and time are false
ideas“
(iii. 9), &c. What connection is there between this daring Teuton †
and Anselm or Thomas? Even if we look more closely at Abelard, who, as
a pupil of Anselm and an incomparable dialectician, stands much nearer
to the doctors named, we must observe that though he is animated by the
same purpose — that of reconciling reason and theology — his method and
results are so very different that it is quite ridiculous to class such
contradictions together merely because of external points of contact. ‡
And what is the meaning of linking together Thomas Aquinas with Duns
Scotus
and Occam, the sworn opponents, the diametrical contradictions of the doctor
angelicus? What is the use of trying to persuade us that it is
merely
a question of fine metaphysical differences between realism and
nominalism?
On the contrary, these metaphysical subtleties are merely the external
shell, the real difference is the wide gulf that separates the one
intellectual
tendency from the other, the fact that different characters forge quite
different weapons from the same metal. It is the duty of the historian
to bring into evidence that which is not immediately clear to every
one;
to distinguish what seems uniform, while in reality it is essentially
antago-
* Cf. p. 129.
† Cf. vol. i. p. 325.
‡ As I do not wish to repeat myself, I refer the reader to vol. i. pp.
501
f. and 244, note on
Abelard.
399 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
nistic; to unite
what seems contradictory but is fundamentally in agreement — as, for
example,
Duns Scotus and Eckhart. Martin Luther felt vividly and profoundly the
difference between these various doctors; in a passage of his Table-talk
he says: “Duns Scotus has written very well ... and has endeavoured to
teach with good system and correctly. Occam was an intelligent and
ingenious
man .... Thomas Aquinas is a gossiping old washerwoman.“ * And is it
not
perfectly ridiculous when a Roger Bacon, the inventor of the telescope,
the founder of scientific mathematics and philology, the proclaimer of
genuine natural science, is thrown into the same class as those who
pretended
to know everything and consequently stopped Roger Bacon's mouth and
threw
him into prison? Finally I should like to ask: if Erigena is a
scholastic
and Amalrich also, how is it that Eckhart, who is manifestly under the
power of both, is not one, although he is contemporary of Thomas and
Duns?
I know that the sole reason is the desire to form a new group, that of
the Mystics, which shall lead up to Böhme and Angelus Silesius;
and
with this object in view Eckhart is violently separated from Erigena,
Amalrich
and Bonaventura! And that nothing may be wanting to show the
artificiality
of the system, the great Francis of Assisi is excluded altogether; the
man who has exercised perhaps more influence upon the trend of thought
than any one, the man to whose order Duns Scotus and Occam belong, to
whom
Roger Bacon, the regenerator of natural science, confesses his
allegiance,
and who, by the power of his personality, did more than any other to
awaken
mysticism to new life! This man, who is a real force in
* I quote from the Jena edition, 1591, fol. 329; in the new wide-spread
selections we do not find this passage nor the others “dealing with the
Scholastics as a whole“ where Luther sighs when he thinks of his
student
days, when “fine, clever people were burdened with the hearing of
useless
teachings and the reading of useless books with strange, un-German,
sophistical
words....“
400 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
every field of
culture — since he has stimulated art as powerfully as philosophy — is
not even mentioned in the history of philosophy; this reveals the
faultiness
of the scheme which I am criticising, and at the same time the
untenability
of the idea that religion and philosophy are two fundamentally
different
things.
ROME
AND ANTI-ROME
My bridge will, I think, have been substantially advanced if I have
succeeded
in replacing this artificial scheme by a living discernment. Such a
discernment
must naturally in all cases be gained from living facts, not from
theoretical
deductions. We see here the very same struggle, the same revolt, as in
other spheres; on the one hand the Roman ideal which grew out of the
Chaos
of Peoples, on the other Teutonic individuality. I have shown already
that
Rome can be satisfied in philosophy as in religion with nothing less
than
the unconditionally Absolute. The sacrifizio dell‘ intelletto
is the first law which it imposes upon every thinking man. This too is
perfectly logical and justifiable. That moral pre-eminence is not
incompatible
with it is proved by Thomas Aquinas himself. Endowed with that
peculiar,
fatal gift of the Teuton to sink himself in alien views, and, thanks to
his greater capacities, to transfigure them and give them new life,
Thomas
Aquinas, who had drunk in the southern poison from childhood, devoted
Teutonic
science and power of conviction to the service of the Anti-Teutonic
cause.
In former ages the Teuton had produced soldiers and commanders to
conquer
their own nations, now they supplied the enemy with theologians and
philosophers;
for two thousand years this has steadily been going on. But every
unprejudiced
observer feels that such men as Thomas are doing violence to their own
nature. I do not assert that they consciously and intentionally lie,
though
401 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
that was and is
often enough the case with men of lower calibre; but, fascinated by the
lofty (and for a noble, misguided mind, actually holy) ideal of the
Roman
delusion, they fall a prey to suggestion and plunge into that view of
life
which destroys their personality and their dignity, just as the
song-bird
throws itself into the serpent's jaw. That is why I call this the way
of
falsehood. For whoever follows it sacrifices what he received from God,
his own self; and in truth that is no trifle; Meister Eckhart, a good
and
learned Catholic, a Provincial of the Dominican Order, teaches us that
man should not seek God outside himself — “Got
ûzer
sich selber nicht ensuoche“;
* whoever therefore sacrifices his personality loses the God whom he
could
have found only within himself. Whoever, on the other hand, does not
sacrifice
his personality in his philosophy, manifestly follows the very opposite
path no matter to what manner of opinions his character may impel him,
and no matter whether he belong to the Catholic or to any other Church.
A Duns Scotus, for example, is an absolutely fanatical priest, wholly
devoted
to the essential doctrines of Rome, such as justification by works — a
hundred times more intolerant and onesided than Thomas Aquinas; yet
every
one of his words breathes the atmosphere of sincerity and of autonomous
personality. This doctor subtilis, the greatest dialectician of
the Church. exposes with contempt and holy indignation the whole tissue
of pitiful sophism upon which Thomas has built up his artificial
system.
It is not true, as he points out, that the dogmas of the Church stand
the
test of reason, much less that, as Thomas had taught, they can be
proved
by reason to be necessary truths; even the so-called proofs of the
existence
of God and of
* Pfeiffer‘s edition, 1857, p. 626. What is here uttered negatively is
expressed in the fifty-third saying, concerning the seven grades of
contemplative
life, as a positive theory: “Unde sôder Mensch
alsô
in sich selber gât, sô vindet er got in ime selber“
(“If so man then enters into himself, he findeth God in himself“).
402 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
the immortality
of the soul are wretched sophistries (see the Quaestiones
subtilissimae); it is not the syllogism that
is of value in religion, but faith only; it is not the understanding
which
forms the centre of human nature, but the will; voluntas
superior
intellectu! However intolerant from the
ecclesiastical
point of view Duns Scotus might personally be, the path that he trod
led
to freedom. And why? Because this Anglo-Saxon is absolutely sincere. He
accepts without question all the doctrines of the Roman Church, even
those
which do violence to the Teutonic nature, but he despises all deceit.
What
Lutheran theologian of the eighteenth century would have dared to
declare
the existence of God to be incapable of philosophic proof? What
persecutions
had not Kant to suffer for this very thing? Scotus had long ago
asserted
it. And Scotus, by putting the Individual in the centre of his
philosophy
as “the one real thing,“ saves the personality; and that means the
rescue
of everything. Now this one example shows with special clearness that
all
those who follow the same path, the path of sincerity, are closely
connected
with one another; for what the theologian Scotus teaches is lived by
the
mystic Francis of Assisi: the will is the supreme thing, God is a
direct
perception, not a logical deduction, personality is the “greatest
blessing“;
Occam, on the other hand, a pupil of Scotus, and as zealous a dogmatist
as his master, found it not only necessary to separate faith still more
completely from knowledge, and to destroy rationalistic theology by
proving
that the most important Church dogmas are actually absurd, whereby he
became
a founder of the sciences of observation — but he also upheld the cause
of the Kings in opposition to the Papal stool, that is, he fought for
Teutonic
nationalism against Roman universalism; at the same time he also
stoutly
upheld the rights of the Church against the interference of the Roman
Pontifex
— and for this he was thrown into
403 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
prison. Here,
as we see, Politics, Science and Philosophy, in their later anti-Roman
development, are directly connected with Theology.
Even such hasty indications will, I think, suffice to convince the
reader
that the grouping which I suggest goes to the heart of the matter. This
division has one great advantage, namely, that it is not limited to a
few
centuries, but permits us to survey at one glance the history of a
thousand
years, from Scotus Erigena to Arthur Schopenhauer. In the second place,
derived as it is from living facts, it has the further advantage for
our
own practical life that it teaches us unlimited tolerance towards every
sincere, genuinely Teutonic view; we do not inquire about the What of a
particular Philosophy, but about the How; free or not free? personal or
not personal? It is solely thus that we learn to draw a clear line
between
our own selves and the alien, and to oppose the latter with all our
weapons
at once and at all times, no matter how noble and unselfish and
thoroughly
Teutonic he may pretend to be. The enemy worms his way into our very
souls.
Was that not the case with Thomas Aquinas? And do we not see a similar
phenomenon in the case of Leibniz and Hegel? The great Occam was called
doctor
invincibilis: may we live to see many doctores invincibiles
taking part in the struggle which threatens our culture on all sides!
THE
FOUR GROUPS
The ground is now,
I hope, sufficiently prepared to enable us to proceed methodically to
consider
the four groups of men who devoted their lives to the service of truth,
without laying the flattering unction to their souls that they
possessed
or could fully grasp it; by their combined efforts the new philosophy
of
life has gradually assumed a more and more definite shape.
404 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
These groups are
the theologians, the mystics, the humanists and the natural scientists,
in which the last-named category the philosophers in the narrower sense
of the word are included. For the sake of convenience we shall retain
the
groups thus established, but we must avoid attaching to such a
definition
any wider significance than that of a convenient and practical handle
for
our purpose, for the four classes merge into each other at a hundred
points.
THE
THEOLOGIANS
Were it my intention to defend any artificial thesis, the group of the
theologians would trouble me considerably; indeed I should be tortured
with the feeling of my incompetence. But disregarding all technical
details
which may be beyond my comprehension, I need only open my eyes to see
theologians
of the character of Duns Scotus as direct pioneers of the Reformation,
and not only of the Reformation — for that remained from a religious
point
of view a very unsatisfactory piece of patchwork, or, as Lamprecht
optimistically
says, “a leaven for the religious attitude of the future,“ — but also
as
the pioneers of a far-reaching movement of fundamental importance in
the
building up of a new Philosophy. We know what metaphysical acumen Kant
employs in his Critique of Pure Reason to prove that “all
attempts
to establish a theology by the aid of speculation alone are fruitless
and
from their inner nature null and void“; * this proof was indispensable
for the foundation of his philosophy; it was Kant, the all-destroyer,
as
Moses Mendelssohn fitly named him, who first shattered the sham edifice
of Roman theology. The very earliest theologians, who followed the “way
of truth“ had
* See the section Critique of all Speculative Theology
and
also the last of the Prolegomena to every Future System of
Metaphysics.
405 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
undertaken the
same task. Duns Scotus and Occam were not of course in a position, as
Kant
was, to undermine the “sham edifice“ of the Church by the direct method
of natural science, but for all practical purposes they had with
adequate
power of conviction attained exactly the same end, by the reductio
ad
absurdum of the hypothesis which was opposed to them. This fact was
bound to lead with mathematical necessity to two immediate
consequences:
first, the freeing of reason with all that pertained to it from the
service
of theology, where it was of no use; secondly, the basing of religious
faith upon another principle, since that of reason had proved useless.
And in fact, as far as the freeing of reason is concerned, we already
see
Occam joining hands with Roger Bacon, a member of his own order, and
demanding
the empirical observation of nature; at the same time we see him enter
the sphere of practical politics to demand wider personal and national
freedom. This was a demand of freed reason, for fettered reason had
tried
to prove the universal Civitas Dei (in Occam's day by Dante's
testimony)
to be a divine institution. And in regard to the second point it is
clear
that, if the doctrines of religion find no guarantee in the reasoned
conclusions
of the brain, the theologian must endeavour with all the more energy to
find this guarantee elsewhere, and the only available source was in the
first place to be found in Holy Scripture. However paradoxical it may
at
first appear, it is nevertheless a fact that it was the violent,
intolerant,
narrow-minded orthodoxy of Scotus, in contrast to the occasionally
almost
free-thinking imperturbability of a Thomas, playing in a spirit of
superiority
with Augustinian contradictions, which pointed the way to emancipation
from the Church. For the tendency of Thomas's thought, which the Roman
Church so strongly supported, in reality emancipated it entirely from
the
doctrine of Christ.
406 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
The Church with
its Church Fathers and Councils had already pressed itself so much into
the foreground that the Gospel had seriously lost credit; now it was
proved
that the dogmas of faith “had to be so,“ as reason could at any moment
demonstrate that this is a logical necessity. To refer further to Holy
Scripture would be just as foolish as if a captain, on going to sea,
were
to take a few pailfuls of water from the river that feeds the ocean and
throw them over the bowsprit, for fear he should not have sufficient
depth
of water. But even before Thomas Aquinas had started to build his Tower
of Babel, many profoundly sensitive minds had felt that this tendency
which
the Romish Church had introduced in practice and Anselm in theory,
meant
the death of all sincere religion; the greatest of these was Francis of
Assisi. Certainly this extraordinary man belongs to the group of the
Mystics,
but he also deserves mention here among the theologians, for it was
from
him that the champions of true Christian theology derived their
inspiration.
That, indeed, seems paradoxical, for no saint was less of a theologian
than Francis; but it is an historical fact, and the paradox disappears
when we see that it is his emphasising of the importance of the Gospel
and of Jesus Christ that forms the connection. This layman, who forces
his way into the Church, pushes the priesthood aside, and proclaims the
Word of Christ to all people, represents a violent reaction on the part
of men longing for religion, against the cold, incomprehensible,
argumentative
and stilted faith in dogma. Francis, who from youth had been subject to
Waldensian influence, doubtless knew the Gospel well; * we should
almost
have said it was a miracle, did we not know it was the merest accident,
that he was not burned as a heretic; his religion can be expressed in
the
words of Luther: “The law of Christ is not doctrine but life, not word
* See p. 132 and cf.
the conclusion of the note on p.
96.
407 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
but being, not
sign but fullness itself.“ * The Gospel which Francis rescued from
oblivion
became the rock of refuge to which the northern theologians retired,
when
they had convinced themselves that theological rationalism was
untenable
and dangerous. And they did so with the passion of combative
conviction,
urged on by the example of Francis. Duns teaches in direct contrast to
Thomas that the highest bliss of heaven will not be Knowing but Loving.
The influence which such a tendency must in time acquire is clear; we
have
already seen how highly Scotus and Occam were esteemed by Luther, while
he called Thomas a gossip. The recognition of the fundamental
importance
of the Biblical Word, the emphasising of the evangelical life in
contrast
to dogmatic doctrine must inevitably result. Even the more external
movement
of revolt against the pomp and greed and the whole worldly tendency of
the Curia was so self-evident a conclusion from these premises, that we
find even Occam attacking all these abuses, and Jacopone da Todi, the
author
of Stabat Mater, intellectually the most pre-eminent of the
Italian
Franciscans of the thirteenth century, calls upon men to revolt openly
against Pope Boniface VIII., and for so doing has to spend the best
years
of his life in an underground prison. And though Duns Scotus himself
emphasises
the importance of works almost more than any one else, while in
reference
to grace and faith he is not prepared to go even as far as Thomas, it
is
only a very superficial thinker who sees in this anything specifically
Roman, and does not realise that this very doctrine necessarily paves
the
way for that of Luther: for the whole aim of these Franciscans is to
make
will, and not formal orthodoxy, the central point of religion; this
makes
religion something lived, experienced, immediately present. As Luther
says,
“Faith is Will essentially good“; and in another
* Von dem Missbrauch der Messe, Part III.
408 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
passage, “Faith
is a living, busy, active, mighty thing, so that it could not but
unceasingly
do good.“ * Now this “Will,“ this “Doing“ are the things upon which
Scotus
and Occam, taught by Francis, lay all emphasis, and that, too, in
contrast
to a cold, academic creed. Certain much-read authors of the present day
use the terms “faith“ and “good works“ in a most frivolous manner;
without
joining issue with those to whom the practice of falsehood seems a
“good
work,“ I ask every unbiased reader to consider Francis of Assisi and to
say what is the essence of this personality. Every one must answer “the
power of faith.“ He is faith incorporate: “not doctrine but life, not
word
but being.“ Read the history of his life. It was not priestly
admonition,
not sacramental consecration that led him to God, but the vision of the
Cross in a ruined chapel near Assisi and Christ's message in the
diligently
studied Gospel. † And yet Francis — as also the Order which he founded
— is rightly regarded by us as the special Apostle of good works. And
now
look at Martin Luther — the advocate of redemption by faith — and say
whether
he has done no works, whether on the contrary he did not consecrate his
life to working, whether indeed he was not the very man who revealed to
us the secret of good works, when he said they must be eitel freie
Werke,
“nothing but free works, done only to please God, not for the sake of
piety
... for wherever they contain the false supplement and wrong-headed
idea
that we wish by works to become pious and blessed, they are not good
but
utterly culpable, for they are not free.“ ‡ The learned may shake their
heads as they will, we laymen recognise the fact that a Francis of
Assisi
has led up to a Duns
* Cf. The Vorrede auf die Epistel Pauli an die
Römer.
† See,
for example, Paul Sabatier: Vie de S. François d‘Assise,
1896, chap. iv.
‡ Von
der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen pp. 22, 25.
409 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
Scotus and the
latter to a Martin Luther; for it is the impulse of freedom — the
freeing
of the personality that is at the root of this movement. The whole life
of Francis is a revolt of the individual — against his family, against
all society around him, against a thoroughly corrupt priesthood and a
Church
that had fallen away from Apostolic tradition; and while the priesthood
prescribes to him definite paths as alone conducing to bliss, he
undauntedly
goes his own way and as a free man holds commune directly with his God.
Such a view raised to the sphere of theological philosophy must needs
lead
to almost exclusive emphasising of freedom of will, and this is exactly
what took place in the case of Scotus. We are bound to admit that the
latter
with his one-sided emphasising of liberum arbitrium shows less
philosophic
depth than his opponent Thomas, but all the more profundity in religion
and (if I may so say) in politics. For hereby this theology succeeds —
in direct contrast to Rome — in making the individual the central point
in religion: “Christ is the door of salvation: it is for man to enter
in
or not!“ Now it is this accentuation of free personality that is the
only
important matter — not subtleties concerning grace and merit, faith and
good works. This path led to an anti-Roman, anti-sacerdotal conception
of the Church and to an altogether new religion which was spiritual,
not
historical and materialistic. That very soon became clear. Luther, the
political hero, did indeed close the door for a long time against this
natural and inevitable religious movement. Like Duns Scotus he too
enveloped
his healthy, strong, freedom-breathing perception in a tissue of
over-subtle
theological dogmas, and never freed himself from the historical and
therefore
intolerant conceptions of a faith which had grown out of Judaism; but
this
attitude gave him the right strength for the right work: in his
struggle
for the Fatherland and the dignity of the
410 PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
Teutonic peoples
he proved victorious, whereas his rigid, monkish theology broke like an
earthen pitcher, being too small to hold all that he himself had poured
into it. It was not till the nineteenth century that we again took
those
great theologians as our starting-point, to enable us to pursue the
path
to freedom even in the sphere of theology.
Let us not under-estimate the value of the theologians for the
development
of our culture! Whoever with more knowledge than I possess makes a
further
study of what has here been briefly sketched will, I think, find the
work
of these men even up to our own times manifoldly blessed. A learned
Roman
theologian, Abelard, exclaims even in the twelfth century, “Si
omnes
patres sic, at ego non sic!“ * and it would be a good thing if a
great
many theologians of our century possessed the same courage. See what a
Savonarola — the man whose fiery spirit inspired a Leonardo, a Michael
Angelo, a Raphael — does for freedom, when from the pulpit he cries: †
“Behold Rome, the head of the world, and from the head turn the eyes
upon
the limbs! from the sole of the foot to the crown of the head not one
part
is sound; we live among Christians, have interaction with them; but
they
are not Christians who are Christians in name only; it were truly
better
to live among the heathen!“ — this monk, I say, when he utters such
words
before thousands and seals them with his death at the stake, does more
for freedom than a whole academy of free-thinkers; for freedom asserts
itself not by opinions but by attitude, it is “not word, but being.“ So
too, in the nineteenth century, a pious, inwardly religious
Schleiermacher
has certainly done more in the interests of a living, religious
philosophy
than a sceptical David Strauss.
* Quoted from Schopenhauer: Über den Willen in der Natur
(Section
on Physische Astronomie).
† Sermon at the Feast of the Epiphany, 1492.
411
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
THE MYSTICS
The real High
School
of freedom from hieratic and historical shackles is mysticism, the philosophia
teutonica, as it was called. * A mystical philosophy, when
completely
worked out, dissolves one dogmatic theory after another as allegory;
what
remains is pure symbol, for religion is then no longer a creed, a hope,
a conviction, but an experience of life, an actual process, a direct
state
of mind. Lagarde somewhere says, “Religion is an unconditional
present“;
† this is the view of a mystic. The most perfect expression of
absolutely
mystical religion is found among the Aryan Indians; but scarcely a
hair's-breadth
separates our great Teutonic mystics from their Indian predecessors and
contemporaries; only one thing really distinguishes them: Indian
religion
is genuinely Indo-Teutonic, mysticism finds in it a natural,
universally
recognised place, but there is no place for mysticism in such a
conjunction
as that of Semitic history with pseudo-Egyptian magic, and so it was
and
is at best merely tolerated, though mostly persecuted by our various
sects.
The Christian Churches are right from their point of view. Listen to
the
fifty-fourth saying of Meister Eckhart: “You know that all our
perfection
and all our bliss depends on this, that man should pass through and
over
all creation, all temporality and all being, and go into the depths
which
are unfathomable.“ That is essentially Indian and might be a quota-
*
Concerning
the German people as a whole Lamprecht testifies that “the basis of its
attitude to Christianity was mystical“ (Deutsche Geschichte, 2nd
ed. vol. ii. p. 197). This was absolutely true till the introduction by
Thomas Aquinas of obligatory rationalism, supplemented later by the
materialism
of the Jesuits.
† The
theologian Adalbert Merx says in his book, Idee und Grundlinien
einer
allgemeinen Geschichte der Mystik, 1893, p. 46: “One fact in
mysticism
is firmly established, that it so completely possesses, reveals and
represents
the fact or experience in religion, religion as a phenomenon ... that a
real philosophy of religion without historical knowledge of mysticism
is
out of the question.“
412
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
tion from the
Brihadâranyaka-Upanishad.
No sophistry could succeed in proving a connection between this
religion
and Abrahamitic promises, and no honest man will deny that in a
philosophy
which rises above “creation“ and “temporality,“ the Fall and the
Redemption
must be merely symbols of an otherwise inexpressible truth of inner
experience.
The following passage from the forty-ninth Sermon of Eckhart is also
apposite:
“So long as I am this or that or have this or that, I am not all things
and have not all things; but as soon as you decide that you are not,
and
have not, this or that, then you are everywhere; as soon, therefore, as
you are neither this nor that, you are all things.“ * This is the
doctrine
of Ãtman, and to it the theology of Duns Scotus is just as
irrelevant
as that of Thomas Aquinas. Before leaving the subject, upon one thing I
must insist. The religion of Jesus Christ was just such a mystical
religion;
His deeds and words prove it. His saying, “The Kingdom of Heaven is
within
you,“ † cannot be interpreted by empiricism or history.
Naturally, I cannot
here enter into a fuller exposition of mysticism, that would be seeking
in a few lines to fathom human nature where it is “unfathomable“; my
duty
consists solely in so presenting the subject that even the uninitiated
will at once perceive that it is the necessary tendency of mysticism to
free men from ecclesiastical tenets. Fortunately — I may well say so —
it is not the Teutonic nature to pursue thoughts to their last
consequences,
in other words, to let them tyrannise over us, and so we see Eckhart in
spite of his Ãtman doctrine remaining a good Dominican —
escaping
the Inquisition, it is true, by the skin of his teeth ‡ — but
*
Pfeiffer's
edition, p. 162.
† See
vol. i. p. 187.
‡ It
was not till after his death that his doctrines were condemned as
heretical
and his writings so diligently destroyed by the Inquisition that most
of
them are lost.
413
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
signing all necessary orthodox
confessions,
and we never find that — in spite of all the recommendations of the sopor
pacis (the sleep of peace) by Bonaventura (1221—1274) and others —
quietism has with us as with the Indians drained the veins of life. For
that reason I shall limit myself to the narrow compass of this chapter,
and only briefly point out what a destructive influence the army of
Mystics
exercised on the alien traditional religion, and how on the other hand
they did so much to create and promote a new philosophy in keeping with
our individuality. Usually too little is made both of the negative and
of the positive activity of these men.
Very striking is,
in the first place, their dislike for Jewish doctrines of religion;
every
Mystic is, whether he will or not, a born Anti-Semite. Pious minds like
Bonaventura get over the difficulty by interpreting the whole Old
Testament
allegorically and giving a symbolical meaning to the borrowed mythical
elements — a tendency which we find fully developed five hundred years
earlier in Scotus Erigena, and which we may trace still further back,
to
Marcion and Origines. * But this does not satisfy those souls in their
thirst after true religion. The strictly orthodox Thomas à
Kempis
prays with pathetic simplicity to God, “Let it not be Moses or the
Prophets
that speak to me, but speak thyself ... from them I hear words indeed,
but the spirit is absent; what they say is beautiful, but it warms not
the heart.“ † This feeling we meet with in almost all the Mystics, but
nowhere so beautifully expressed as by the great Jacob Böhme
(1575—1624).
In regard to many passages in the Bible, after he has explained all
that
he can (e.g., the whole history of creation), symbolically and
allegorically,
and sees that he cannot proceed any further, he simply exclaims, “Here
the eyes of Moses are veiled,“
* See
pp. 44 and 89.
† De
Imitatione Christi, Book III, chap. ii.
414
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
and goes on to interpret the matter
freely in his own way! * The contradiction is more serious when we come
to conceptions of heaven and especially of hell. To be quite candid, we
must admit that the conception of hell is really the blot of shame upon
ecclesiastical doctrine. Born amid the scum of raceless slaves in Asia
Minor, nurtured during the hopelessly chaotic, ignorant, bestial
centuries
of the declining and fallen Roman Empire, it was always repulsive to
noble
minds, though but few were able to rise so completely above it as
Origenes
and that incomprehensibly great mind, Scotus Erigena. † We can easily
comprehend
how few could do so, for ecclesiastical Christianity had gradually
grown
into a religion of heaven and hell; everything else was of little
moment.
Take up any old chronicles you like, it is the fear of hell that has
been
the most effectual, generally the sole religious motive. The immense
estates
of the Church, her incalculable incomes from indulgences and suchlike,
she owes almost solely to the fear of hell. At a later period the
Jesuits,
by frankly making this fear of hell the central point of all religion,
‡ acted quite logically and soon earned the reward of consistent
sincerity;
for heaven and hell, reward and punishment form to-day more than ever
the
real or at least the effectual basis of our Church ethics. §
“Ôtez la
crainte de l‘enfer à un chrétien, et vous lui
* See,
for example, Mysterium magnum, oder Erklärung über das
erste
Buch Mosis, chap. xix. § 1.
† See
pp. 48 and 129.
The extraordinary popularity of Erigena's Division of Nature in
the thirteenth century (see pp. 274
and 341) shows how
universal
was the longing to get rid of this frightful product of Oriental
imagination.
Luther, in spite of all orthodoxy, is often inclined to agree with
Erigena,
he, too, writes in his Vierzehn Trostmittel i. I., “Man has
hell
within himself.“
‡ See
p. 111, &c.
§
The Jesuits are only more consistent than the others. I remember seeing
a German girl of twelve years of age lying in convulsions after a
lesson
on religion. The Lutheran Duodecimo-Pope had inspired the innocent
child
with such terror of hell. Teachers of this kind should be cited before
a criminal court.
415
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
ôterez sa croyance“, says
Diderot not quite unjustly. * If we take all these facts into
consideration,
we shall comprehend what en effect must have been produced by the
beautiful
doctrine of Eckhart: “Were there no Hell and no Kingdom of Heaven, yet
I would love God — Thee, Thou sweet father, and Thy sublime nature“;
and,
“The right, perfect essence of the Spirit is to love God for His own
goodness,
though there were no Heaven and no Hell.“ † Some fifty years later the
unknown author of the Theologia deutsch, that splendid monument
of German mysticism in Catholic garb, expresses himself still more
definitely,
for he entitles his tenth chapter, “How perfect men have lost their
fear
of hell and desire of heaven,“ and shows that perfection consists in
freedom
from these conceptions: “The freedom of those men is such that they
have
lost fear of pain or hell, and hope of reward or heaven, and live in
pure
submission and obedience to everlasting goodness, in the complete
freedom
of fervent love.“ It is scarcely necessary to prove that between this
freedom
and the “quaking fear,“ which Loyola holds to be the soul of religion,
‡ there is a gulf deeper and wider than that which separates planet
from
planet. There two radically different souls are speaking, a Teutonic
and
a non-Teutonic. § In the following chapter this “man of
Frankfort,“
as he is called, goes on to say that there is no hell in the ordinary,
popular sense of a future penitentiary, but that hell is a phenomenon
of
our present life. This priest is obviously
* Pensées
philosophiques, xvii.
† Cf.
the Twelfth Tractate and the glossary to it. Francis of Assisi also
laid
almost no stress on hell and very little on heaven (Sabatier, as above,
p. 308).
‡ See
vol. i. p. 569.
§
I remind the reader that Walfila could not translate the ideas hell and
devil into Gothic, since this fortunate language knew no such
conception
(p. 111). Hell was the name
of the friendly goddess of death, as also of her empire, and points
etymologically
to bergen (to hide), verhüllen (to conceal), but
by
no means to Infernum (Heyne); Teufel has been formed
from
Diabolus.
416
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
at one with Origenes and Erigena and
comes to the conclusion that “hell passes away and heaven continues to
exist.“ One further remark most emphatically characterises his opinion.
He calls heaven and hell “two good, sure ways for man in this age,“ he
assigns to neither of these “ways“ any preference over the other and
expresses
the opinion that “in hell a man may be quite at his ease and as safe as
in heaven!“ This view, which we find in this form or in a similar form
among other Mystics, e.g., Eckhart's pupils Tauler and Seuse,
is
especially often and clearly expressed by Jacob Böhme: it is the
expression
of a philosophy which has pursued the thought further, and is on the
point
of passing from a negative conclusion to a positive conception. Thus to
the question, “Whither does the soul go when the body dies, be it
blessed
or condemned?“ he gives the answer, “The soul does not require to leave
the body, but the external, mortal life and the body separated
themselves
from it. The soul has previously had heaven and hell within it ... for
heaven and hell are everywhere present. It is merely a turning of the
will
towards the love of God or towards the wrath of God, and such may take
place while the body is still alive.“ * Here nothing remains vague; for
we manifestly stand with both feet on the foundation of a new religion;
it is not new in so far as Böhme can point in this case to the
words
of Christ: “The Kingdom of God cometh not with outward signs“; “The
world
of angels is within the place (in loco) of this world“; † but it
is a new religion as compared with all Church doctrines. In another
passage
he writes “The right, holy man, who is concealed in the visible man, is
in Heaven as
* Der
Weg zu Christo, Book VI. §§ 36, 37. This conception is
Indo-European
and proves at once the race of the author. When the Persian Omar
Khayyám
sent out his soul to get knowledge, it returned with the news, “I
myself
am Heaven and Hell“ (Rubáiyát).
† Mysterium
magnum 8, 18.
417
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
well as God, and Heaven is in him.“
* And Böhme fearlessly goes further and denies the absolute
difference
between good and evil; the inner foundation of the soul, he says, is
neither
good nor bad, God himself is both: “He is himself all Existence, he is
Good and Evil, Heaven and Earth, Light and Darkness“; † it is the will
that first “distinguishes“ in the mass of indifferent actions, it is by
the will that the action of the doer becomes good or evil. This is pure
Indian doctrine; our theologians have long since and without difficulty
proved that it simply contradicts the doctrine of the Christian Church.
‡
While the mystics
already named and the incalculable number of others who held similar
views,
whether Protestants or Catholics, remained inside the Church, without
ever
thinking how thoroughly they were undermining that toilsomely erected
structure,
there were large groups of Mystics who perhaps did not go so far in
viewing
the essence of religion in the light of inward experience as the Theologia
deutsch and Jacob Böhme, or as the saintly Antoinette
Bourignon
(1616—80), who wished to unite all sects by abolishing the doctrines of
Scripture and emphasising only the longing for God: but these teachers
directly attacked all ecclesiasticism and priesthood, dogmas, scripture
and sacrament. Thus Amalrich of Chartres (died 1209), Professor of
Theology
in Paris, rejected the whole Old Testament and all sacraments, and
accepted
only the direct revelation of God in the heart of each individual. This
gave rise to the league of the “Brothers of the Free Spirit,“ which
was,
it seems, a rather licentious and outrageous society. Others again,
like
Johannes Wessel (1419—89) by greater moderation achieved greater
success;
Wessel is essentially a
* Sendbrief
dated 18.1.1618, § 10.
† Mysterium
magnum 8, 24.
‡ Cf.,
for example, the short work of Dr. Albert Peip: Jakob Böhme,
1860, p. 16 f.
418
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
mystic and regards religion as an inner,
present experience, but in the figure of Christ he sees the divine
motive
power of this experience, and far from wishing to destroy the Church,
which
has handed down this valuable legacy, he desires to purify it by
destroying
the chimeras of Rome. Staupitz, the protector of Luther, holds very
similar
views. Men like these, who imperceptibly merge into the class of the
theologians
like Wyclif and Hus, are vigorous pioneers of the Reformation.
Mysticism,
in fact, had in so far a great deal to do with the Reformation, as
Martin
Luther in the depths of his heart was a mystic: he loved Eckhart and
was
responsible for the first printed edition of the Theologia deutsch;
in particular, his central theory of present conversion by faith can
only
be understood through mysticism. On the other hand, he was annoyed by
the
“fanatics“ who would soon, he thought, have spoiled his life-work.
Mystics
like Thomas Münzer (1490—1525), who began by abusing the
“delicately
treading reformers“ and then openly revolted against all secular
authority,
have done more harm than anything else to the great political
Church-reform.
And even such noble men as Kaspar Schwenkfeld (1490—1561) merely
frittered
away their powers and awakened bitter passions by abandoning
contemplative
mysticism for practical Church reform. A Jacob Böhme, who quietly
remains in the Church, but teaches that the sacraments (baptism and
communion)
are “not essentials“ of Christianity, effects much more. * The sphere
of
the genuine mystic's influence is within not without. Hence in
*
Cf.
Der
Weg zu Christo, Book V. chap. viii., and Von Christi Testament
des
Heiligen Abendmahles, chap. iv. § 24. “A proper Christian
brings
his holy Church with him into the congregation. His heart is the true
Church,
where he should worship. Though I go to church for a thousand years and
to sacrament every week and be absolved daily: if I have not Christ in
me, all is false and useless vanity, a worthless, futile thing, and not
forgiveness of sins“ (Der Weg zu Christo, Book. V. chap. vi.
§
16). Concerning preaching he says:
419
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
the sixteenth century we see the good
Protestant tinker Bunyan and the pious Catholic priest Molinos doing
more
sound and lasting work than crowds of free-thinkers to free religion
from
narrowly ecclesiastical and coldly historical conceptions. Bunyan, who
never harmed a soul, spent the greater part of his life in prison, a
victim
of Protestant intolerance; the gentle Molinos, hounded like a mad dog
by
the Jesuits, submitted in silence to the penances imposed by the
Inquisition
and died from their severity. The influence of both lasted, raising to
a higher level the minds of religious men within the Churches; in this
way they surely paved the way for secession.
Now that I have
indicated
how mysticism in countless respects broke up and destroyed the
un-Teutonic
conceptions which had been forced upon us, it remains for me to
indicate
how infinitely stimulating and helpful the Mystics at all times were in
the building up of our new world and our new Philosophy.
Here we might be
inclined to distinguish with Kant — who, like Luther, is closely bound
up with the Mystics, though he might not wish to have much to do with
them,
— between “dreamers of reason“ and “dreamers of feeling.“ * For as a
matter
of fact, two distinct leading tendencies are noticeable, the one
towards
the Moral and Religious, the other rather to the Metaphysical. But it
would
be difficult to follow out the distinction, for metaphysics and
religion
can never be fully separated in the mind of the Teuton. How important,
for example, is the complete transference of Good and Evil to the will,
which on close inspection we find already indicated in Duns Scotus and
clearly expressed in Eckhart and Jacob Böhme. For this the will
must
be free. Now
“The Holy Ghost
preaches
to the holy hearer from all creatures; in all that he sees he beholds a
preacher of God“ (§ 14).
* Traüme
eines Geistersehers, &c., Part I. 3.
420
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
the feeling of necessity comes into
all mysticism, since mysticism is closely bound up with nature, in
which
necessity is everywhere seen at work. * Hence Böhme at once calls
nature “eternal,“ and denies its creation out of nothing: there he
reasoned
like a philosopher. But how to save freedom? Here, clearly, a moral and
a metaphysical problem clutch at each other like two men drowning: and
in fact things looked black till the great Kant, in whose hands the
various
threads which we are following — theology, mysticism, humanism and
natural
science — were joined, came to the rescue. It is only by the perception
of the transcendental ideality of time and space that we can save
freedom
without fettering reason, that is, we can do so only by realising that
our own being is not completely exhausted by the world of phenomena
(including
our own body), that rather there is a direct antagonism between the
most
indubitable experiences of our life and the world which we grasp with
the
senses and think with the brain. For example, in reference to freedom,
Kant has laid down once for all the principle that “no reason can
explain
the possibility of freedom“; † for nature and freedom are
contradictions;
he who as an inveterate realist denies this will find that, if he
follows
out the question to its final consequences, “neither nature nor freedom
remains.“ ‡ In presence of nature, freedom is simply unthinkable. “We
understand
quite well what freedom is in a practical connection, but in theory, so
far as its nature is concerned, we cannot without contradiction even
think
of trying to understand it“; § for, “the fact that my will moves
my
arm is not more comprehensible to
* Cf.
the remarks on p. 240 f.
(vol.
i.)
† Über
die Fortschritte der Metaphysik III.
‡ Critique
of Pure Reason (Explanation of the Cosmological Idea of Freedom).
§
Religion
innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Part 3, Div. 2, Point 3
of the General Note.
421
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
me than if some one were to say that
my will could also hold back the moon in its course; the difference is
merely this, that I experience the former, while the latter has never
occurred
to my senses.“ * But the former — the freedom of my will to move my arm
— I experience, and hence in another passage Kant comes to the
irrefutable
conclusion: “I say now, every being that cannot act but under the idea
of freedom is for that very reason practically and really free.“ † In
such
a work as this I must, of course, avoid all minute metaphysical
discussion,
though indeed nothing short of that would make the matter really clear
and convincing, but I hope that I have said enough to make every one
feel
how closely religion and philosophy are here connected. Such a problem
could never suggest itself to the Jews, since their observation of
nature
and of their own selves was never more than skin-deep, and they
remained
on the childish standpoint of empiricism hooded on both sides with
blinkers;
much less need we mention the refuse of humanity from Africa, Egypt and
elsewhere, which helped to build up the Christian Church. In this
sphere
therefore — where the deepest secrets of the human mind were to be
unlocked
— a positive structure had to be built from the very foundations; for
the
Hellenes had contributed little ‡ to this purpose and the Indians were
as yet unknown. Augustine — in his true nature a genuine mystic — had
pointed
the way by his remarks on the nature of time (p.
78), and likewise Abelard in regard to space (vol. i. p.
502), but it was the Mystics proper who first went to the root of
the
matter. They never grow tired of emphasising the ideality of time and
space.
“The moment contains eternity,“ says Eckhart more than once. Or again:
“Everything that is in God is a present moment, without renewal
* Träume
eines Geistersehers, Teil 2, Hauptstück 3.
† Grundlegung
zur Metaphysik der Sitten, 3rd section.
‡ See
vol. i. p. 85 f.
422
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
or future creation.“ * Here, as so
often,
the Silesian shoemaker is especially convincing, for with him such
perceptions
have lost almost all their abstract flavour and speak directly from the
mind to the mind. If time is only a conditional form of experience, if
God is in no way “subject to space“ † then Eternity is nothing future,
we already grasp it perfectly and completely, and so Böhme says in
his famous lines:
- Weme ist Zeit wie Ewigkeit
- Und Ewigkeit wie diese Zeit,
- Der ist befreit von allem Streit. ‡
The other closely related problem of the
simultaneous sway of freedom and necessity was likewise always present
to the Mystics; they speak often of their “own“ mutable will in
contrast
to the “everlasting“ immutable will of necessity, and so forth; and
though
it was Kant who first solved the riddle, yet a contemporary of Jacob
Böhme,
the great “dreamer of feeling,“ approached very near to it. Giordano
Bruno
(1548—1600), one of the greatest “dreamers of reason“ of all times,
propounds
the paradox that freedom and necessity are synonymous! Here we see the
audacity of true mystical thought; it is not restrained by the halter
of
purely formal logic, it looks outwards with the eye of the genuine
investigator
and admits that the law of nature is necessity, but then it probes its
own inner soul and asserts “my law is freedom.“ § So much for the
positive contribution of the Mystics to modern metaphysics.
*
Sermon
95, in Pfeiffer's edition.
† Beschreibung
der drei Prinzipien göttlichen Wesens, chap. xiv. § 85.
‡
Whoever
regards time as eternity and eternity as present time is freed from all
conflict.
§
Cf. De immenso et innumerabilibus I. II., and Del infinito,
universo
e mondi, towards the end of the First Dialogue. Here by the
intuition
of genius the same thing is discovered as was established two hundred
years
later by the brilliant critical judgment of Kant, who says: “Nature and
freedom can be attributed without contradiction to the same thing, but
in different connections, at one time to the thing as it appears at
another
to the thing itself.“ (Prolegomena, § 53).
423
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
Still more important
is the part they played in the establishment of a pure doctrine of
morals.
The most essential points have been already mentioned: ethical merit
centred
in Will, purely as such; religion not a matter of future reward and
future
punishment, but a present act, a grasping of Eternity at the present
moment.
This gives rise to an utterly different idea of sin, and consequently
of
virtue, from that which the Christian Church has inherited from
Judaism.
Thus Eckhart, for example, says: “That man cannot be called virtuous
who
does works as virtue commands, but only the man who does these works
out
of virtue; not by prayer can a heart become pure, but from a pure heart
the pure prayer flows.“ * We find this thought in all Mystics in
countless
passages, it is the central point of their faith; it forms the kernel
of
Luther's religion; † it was most completely expressed by Kant, who
says:
“There is nothing in the world nor anything outside of it which can be
termed absolutely and altogether good, except a good Will. A good Will
is esteemed to be so not by the effect which it produces nor by its
fitness
for accomplishing any given end, but by its mere good volition, that
is,
it is good in itself ... even though it should happen that, owing to an
unhappy conjunction of events or the scanty endowment of unkind nature,
this good volition should be deprived of power to execute its benign
intent,
executing nothing and only retaining the good Will, still it would
shine
like a jewel in itself and by virtue
* Spruch
43. Cf., too, Sermon 13, where he says that all works shall be
done
“without any why.“ “I say verily, as long as you do works not from an
inward
motive but for the sake of heaven or God or your eternal salvation, you
are acting wrongly.“
† Cf.
the whole work on Die Freiheit eines Christenmenschen. How new
and
directly anti-Roman this thought appeared is very clear from Hans
Sachs‘
Disputation
zwischen einem Chorherrn und Schuchmacher (1524), in which the
shoemaker
especially defends, as being “Luther's idea,“ the doctrine that “good
works
are not done to gain heaven or from fear of hell.“
424
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
of its native lustre. The usefulness
or fruitlessness of acts cannot add to or detract from this lustre.“ *
Unfortunately, I must limit myself to this central point of Teutonic
ethics;
everything else is derived from it.
But I must mention
one thing more before taking leave of the Mystics — their influence
upon
natural science. Passionate love of nature is strongly marked in most
of
the Mystics, hence the extraordinary power of intuition which we notice
in them. They frequently identify nature with God, often they put
nature
alongside of God as something Eternal, but they hardly ever fall into
the
hereditary error of the Christian Church, that of teaching men to
despise
and hate nature. It is true that Erigena is still so much under the
influence
of the Church Fathers that he regards the admiration of nature as a sin
comparable to breach of marriage vows, † but how different is the view
of Francis of Assisi! Read his famous Hymn to the Sun, which he wrote
down
shortly before his death as the last and complete expression of his
feelings,
and sang day and night till he died, to such a bright and cheerful
melody
that ecclesiastically pious souls were shocked at hearing it from a
death-bed.
‡ Here he speaks of “mother“ earth, of his “brothers“ the sun, wind and
fire, of his “sisters“ the moon, stars and water, of the many-coloured
flowers and fruits, and lastly of his dear “sister,“ the morte
corporale,
and the whole closes with praise, blessing and thanks to the altissimu,
bon signore. § In this last, most heartfelt hymn of praise
* Grundlegung
zur Metaphysik der Sitten, Division 1. Cf., too, the
concluding
part of the Träume eines Geistersehers, and especially the
beautiful interpretation of the passage in Matthew XXV. 35-40,
a
proof that in the eyes of God only those actions have a value which a
man
performs without thinking of the possibility of reward. This
interpretation
is found in his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen, Section 4, Part
I., close of first division.
† De
divisione naturae 5, 36.
‡
Sabatier,
loc.
cit. p. 382.
§
By this song Francis proves himself a pure Teuton in absolute
425
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
this holy man does not touch upon a
single dogma of the Church. Few things are more instructive than a
comparison
between these outpourings of a man who had become altogether religious
and now gathers his sinking strength to sing exultingly to all nature
this
rapturous unecclesiastical tat tvam asi * and the orthodox,
soulless,
cold confession of faith of the learned, experienced politician and
theologian
Dante in the twenty-fourth canto of his Paradiso. † Dante with
his
song closed an old, dead age, Francis began a new one. Jacob Böhme
puts nature above Holy Scripture: “There is no book in which you will
find
more of divine wisdom than the book of nature spread before you in the
form of a green and growing meadow; there you will see the wondrous
power
of God, you will smell and taste it, though it be but an image ... but
to the searcher it is a beloved teacher, he will learn very much from
it.“
‡ This tendency of mind revolutionised our natural science. I need only
refer to Paracelsus, whose importance in almost all the natural
sciences
is daily becoming more and more recognised. The great and enduring part
of this remarkable man's work is not the discovery of facts — by his
unfortunate
connection with magic and alchemy he spread many absurd ideas — but the
spirit with which he inspired natural science. Virchow, who is
certainly
not prejudiced in favour of mysticism, and who shows poor courage in
calling
Paracelsus a “charlatan,“ nevertheless expressly declares that it was
he
who delivered
contrast to Rome.
Among
the Aryan Indians we find farewell songs of pious men, which correspond
almost word for word to that of Francis. Cf. the one translated
by Herder in his Gedanken einiger Brahmanen:
- Earth, thou my
mother, and
thou father, breath of the air,
- And thou fire, my
friend,
thou kinsman of mine, O stream,
- And my brother,
the sky, to
all I with reverence proclaim
- My warmest thanks,
&c.
*
“That
thou art also“: i.e., man's recognition of himself.
† Cf.,
too, p. 106, note 2.
‡ Die
drei Principien göttlichen Wesens, chap. viii. § 12.
426
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
the death-blow to ancient medicine and
gave science the “idea of life.“ * Paracelsus is the creator of real
physiology,
neither more nor less; and that is so very high an honour that a
soberly
scientific historian of medicine speaks of “the sublimely radiant
figure
of this hero.“ † Paracelsus was a fanatical mystic; he said that “the
inner
light stands high above bestial reason“; hence his extreme
one-sidedness.
He would, for example, have little to do with anatomy; it seemed to him
“dead,“ and he said that the chief thing was “the conclusion to be
drawn
from great nature — that is to say, the outward man — concerning the
little
nature of the individual.“ But in order to get at this outward man, he
established two principles which have become essential in all natural
science
— observation and experiment. In this way he succeeded in founding a
rational
system of pathology: “Fevers are storms, which cure themselves,“
&c.;
likewise rational therapeutics: “The aim of medicine should be to
support
nature in her efforts to heal.“ And how beautiful is his admonition to
young doctors: “The loftiest basis of medicine is love ... it is love
which
teaches art and outside of love no doctor is born.“ ‡ One more service
of this adventurous mystic should be mentioned: he was the first to
introduce
the German language into the University! “Truth and freedom“ was, in
fact,
the motto of all genuine mysticism; for that reason its apostles
banished
the language of privileged hypocritical learning from the lecture-rooms
and firmly refused to wear the red livery of the faculty:
*
Croonian
Lecture, delivered in London on March 16, 1893.
†
Hirschel,
Geschichte
der Medicin, 2nd ed. p. 208. Here the reader will find a detailed
appreciation
of Paracelsus, from which some of the following facts are taken.
‡ Cf.
Kahlbaum: Theophrastus Paracelsus, Basel, 1894, p. 63. This
lecture
brings to light much new material which proves how false were the
charges
brought against the great man — drunkenness, wild life, &c. The
fable
that he could not write and speak Latin fluently is also disproved.
427
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
“the universities supply only the red
cloak, the trenchercap and a four-cornered fool.“ * Mysticism achieved
a great deal more, especially in the sphere of medicine and chemistry.
Thus the mystic van Helmont (1577—1644) discovered laudanum to deaden
pain,
and carbonic acid; he was the first to recognise the true nature of
hysteria,
catarrh, &c. Glisson (1579—1677), who by his discovery of the
irritability
of living tissue very greatly advanced our knowledge of the animal
organism,
was a pronounced mystic, who said of himself that “inner thought“
guided
the scalpel. † We could easily add to the above list, but all that we
require
is to point to the fact. The mystic has — as we see in the case of
Stahl
with his phlogiston ‡ and of the great astronomer Kepler, an equally
zealous
mystic and Protestant — thrown many flashes of genius upon the path of
natural science and the philosophy based thereon. The mystic was
neither
a reliable guide nor a reliable worker; but yet his services are not to
be overlooked. Not only does he discover much, as we have just seen,
not
only does he fill with his wealth of ideas the frequently very empty
arsenal
of the so-called empiricists (Francis Bacon, for example, copies
chapter
after chapter from Paracelsus without any acknowledgment); but he
possesses
a peculiar instinct of his own, which nothing in the world can replace
and which more cautious men must know how to turn to account. The
philosopher
Baumgarten recognised even in the eighteenth century that “vague
perception
often carries within it the germs of clear perception.“ § Kant has
made a profound remark in this connection.
*
It
is noteworthy that the idea and term “Experience“ (Erfahrung)
were
introduced into German thought and the German language by Paracelsus,
the
mystic (cf. Eucken: Terminologie, p. 125).
† In
the lecture mentioned above Virchow proves that Glisson and not Haller
originated the doctrine of irritability.
‡ Cf.
p. 322 f.
§
Quoted from Heinrich von Stein: Entstehung der neueren Aesthetik,
1886, p. 353 f.
428
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
As is well known, this philosopher
recognises
no interpretation of empirical phenomena but the mechanical, and that,
as he convincingly proves, because “only those causes of
world-phenomena
which are based upon the laws of motion of mere matter are capable of
being
comprehended“; but this does not prevent him from making the remark,
which
is worth taking to heart, concerning Stahl's nowadays much ridiculed
idea
of life-power: “Yet I am convinced that Stahl, who is fond of
explaining
the animal changes organically, is often nearer the truth than Hofmann,
Boerhaave and others, who leave out of account the immaterial forces
and
cling to the mechanical causes.“ * And so it seems to me that these men
who are “nearer the truth“ have done great service in the building up
of
modern science and philosophy, and we cannot afford to neglect them
either
now or in the future.
From this point there
runs a narrow path along the loftiest heights — accessible only to the
elect — leading over to that artistic intuition closely related to the
mystical, the importance of which Goethe revealed to us before the end
of the eighteenth century. His discovery of the intermaxillary bone was
made in the year 1784, the metamorphosis of plants appeared in 1790,
the
introduction to comparative anatomy 1795. Here that gushing enthusiasm
which had awakened Luther's scorn, that “raving with reason and
feeling“
which so angered the mild-tempered Kant, were elevated and purified to
“seeing,“ after a night lit up by will-o'-the-wisps, a new day had
dawned,
and the genius of the new Teutonic philosophy could print together with
his Comparative Anatomy the splendid poem which begins:
- Wagt ihr, also bereitet, die
letzte Stufe
zu steigen
- Dieses Gipfels, so reicht mir die
Hand und
offnet den freien
- Blick ins weite Feld der Natur....
* Träume
eines Geistersehers, Teil i. Hauptst. 2.
429
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
and closes with
the words:
- Freue dich,
höchstes
Geschöpf der Natur; du fühlest dich fähig,
- Ihr den
höchsten
Gedanken, zu dem sie schaffend sich aufschwang,
- Nachzudenken.
Hier
stehe nun still und wende die Blicke
- Rückwärts,
prüfe, vergleiche, und nimm vom Munde der Muse,
- Dass du
schauest,
nicht schwärmst, die liebliche, volle Gewissheit. *
THE
HUMANISTS
It is self-evident that the Humanists, in a certain sense, form a
direct
contrast to the Mystics; yet there is no real contradiction between
them.
Thus Böhme, though not a learned man, has a very high opinion of
the
heathen, in so far as they are “children of free will,“ and says that
“in
them the spirit of freedom has revealed great wonders, as we see from
the
wisdom which they have bequeathed to us;“ † indeed, he boldly asserts
that
“in these intelligent heathens the inner sacred kingdom is reflected.“
‡ Almost all genuine Humanists, when they have the necessary courage,
devote
much thought to the already discussed central problem of all ethics and
are all without exception of the opinion of Pomponazzi (1462—1525) that
a virtue which aims at reward is no virtue; that to regard fear and
hope
as moral motives is childish and worthy only of the uneducated mob;
that
the idea of immortality should be considered from a purely
philosophical
standpoint and has nothing to do with the theory of morals, &c.
§
The Humanists are just as eager as the Mystics to
* If ye dare, thus armed, to ascend the last pinnacle of this height
give
me your hand and open your eyes freely to survey the wide field of
nature....
Rejoice, thou sublimest of nature's creatures! Thou feelest the power
to
follow her in the loftiest thought to which she soared in the act of
Creation.
Here pause in peace, turn back thine eyes, probe, compare, and take
from
the lips of the muse the sweet full certainty that thou seest and art
no
dreamer of dreams.
† Mysterium pansophicum 8, Text, § 9.
‡ Mysterium magnum, chap. xxxv. § 24.
§ Tractatus de immortalitate animae. (I quote from F. A.
Lange.)
430
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
tear down the
philosophy of religion imposed upon us by Rome and to build up a new
one
in its place, but their chief interests and efforts lie in a different
direction. Their weapon of destruction is scepticism; that of the
Mystics
was faith. Even when humanism did not lead to frank scepticism, it
always
laid the foundation of very independent judgment. * Here we should at
once
mention Dante, who honours Virgil more than any of the Church Fathers,
and who, far from teaching seclusion and asceticism, considers man's
real
happiness to lie in the exercise of his individual powers. † Petrarch,
who is usually mentioned as the first real humanist, follows the
example
of his great predecessor: he calls Rome an “empia Babilonia“
and
the Church an “impudent wench:“
- Fondata in
casta et
humil povertate,
- Contra i
tuoi fondatori
alzi le corna,
- Putta
sfacciata!
Like Dante he
upbraids
Constantine, who by his fatal gift, mal nate ricchezze, has
transformed
the once chaste, unassuming bride of Christ into “a shameless
adulteress.“
‡ But scepticism soon followed so inevitably in the train of humanistic
culture that it filled the College of Cardinals and even ascended the
Papal
stool; it was the Reformation in league with the narrow Basque mind
that
first brought about a pietistic reaction. Even at the beginning of the
sixteenth century the Italian humanists establish the principle, intus
ut libet, foris ut moris est, and Erasmus publishes his immortal Praise
of Folly, in which churches, priesthood, dogmas, ethical doctrine,
in
* Cf. especially Paulsen: Geschichte des gelehrten
Unterrichts,
2nd ed. i. 73 f.
† De Monarchia iii, 15.
‡ Sonetti e canzoni (in the third part). The first to prove the
invalidity of the pretended gift of Constantine were the famous
humanist
Lorenzo Valla and the lawyer and theologian Krebs (see vol. i. p.
562). Valla also denounced the secular power of the Pope in
whatever
form, for the latter was vicarius Christi et non etiam
Caesaris
(see Döllinger: Papstfabeln,
2nd
ed. p. 118).
431
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
short, the whole
Roman structure, the whole “foul-smelling weeds of theology,“ as he
calls
them, are so denounced that some have been of opinion that this one
work
contributed more than anything else to the Reformation. * Similar
methods
and equal ability are revealed with as much force in the eighteenth
century
by Voltaire.
The most important contribution of the Humanists towards the
construction
of a new Teutonic philosophy is the relinking of our intellectual life
to that of the related Indo-Europeans, in particular to that of the
Hellenes,
† and as a result of this the gradual development of the conception
“man.“
The Mystics had destroyed the idea of time and so of history — a
perfectly
justifiable reaction against the abuse of history by the Church; it was
the task of the Humanists to build up true history anew, and so to put
an end to the evil dream which the Chaos had conjured up. From Picus of
Mirandola, who sees the divine guidance of God in the intellectual
achievement
of the Hellene, down to that great Humanist Johann Gottfried Herder,
who
asks himself “whether God might not after all have a plan in the
vocation
and institution of the human race,“ and who collects the “Voices“ of
all
peoples, we see the historical horizon being extended, and we notice
how
this contact with the
* All the first great Humanists of Germany are anti-scholastic —
(Lamprecht,
as above, iv. p. 69). It is not right to reproach men like Erasmus,
Coornhert,
Thomas More, &c., for not joining the Reformation later. For such
men
were in consequence of their humanistic studies intellectually far too
much in advance of their time to prefer a Lutheran or Calvinistic
dogmatism
to the Romish. They rightly felt that scepticism would always come to
terms
more easily with a religion of good works than with one of faith; they
anticipated — correctly as it turned out — a new era of universal
intolerance,
and thought that it would be more feasible to destroy one single
utterly
rotten Church from within than several Churches which from the
humanistic
standpoint were just as impossible, but had been steeled by conflicts.
Regarded from this high watch-tower the Reformation meant a new lease
of
life to ecclesiastical error.
† The Indologists were the real humanists of the nineteenth century. Cf.
my small work Arische
Weltanschauung, 1905.
432
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
Hellenes led to
a more and more distinct endeavour to arrange and thus give shape to
experiences.
And while the Humanists, in thus seeking inspiration outside, certainly
over-estimated their own capacity just as much as the Mystics did in
seeking
it inwardly, yet many splendid results were achieved in both cases. I
have
shown how introspection led the Mystics to discoveries in outward
nature
— an unexpected, paradoxical result; the Humanists struck out in the
opposite
direction, but with equal success; in their case it was the study of
mankind
around them that conduced to the strict delimitation of national
individuality
and to the decisive emphasising of the importance of the individual
personality.
It was philologists, not anatomists, who first propounded the theories
of absolutely different human races, and though there may be a reaction
at the present day, because the linguists have been inclined to lay too
much stress on the single criterion of language, * yet the humanistic
distinctions
still hold and always will hold good; for they are facts of nature,
facts,
moreover, which can be more surely derived from the study of the
intellectual
achievements of peoples than from statistics of the breadth of skulls.
So too out of the study of the dead languages there resulted a better
knowledge
of the living ones. We have seen how in India scientific philology was
the outcome of a fervent longing to understand a half-forgotten idiom
(vol.
i. p. 432); the same thing
took
place among ourselves. A thorough knowledge of foreign, but related
languages
led to an ever more and more exact knowledge of the thorough
development
of our own. It must be confessed that this led, in so far as language
is
concerned, to a dark period of transition; the strong primal instinct
of
the people became awakened and, as usual, pedantic learning played
havoc
with this most sacred heritage, yet on the whole our languages came
forth
in purer beauty from the classical furnace;
* Cf. vol. i. p. 264.
433
PHILOSOPHY
AND RELIGION
they were less
powerful perhaps than before, but more pliant, more flexible and thus
more
perfect instruments for expressing the thoughts of a more advanced
culture.
The Roman Church, not the Humanists, as is so often ignorantly
asserted,
was the enemy of our language; on the contrary, it was the Humanists
who,
in league with the Mystics, introduced the native languages into
literature
and science; from Petrarch, the perfecter of the poetical language of
Italy,
and Boccaccio (one of the greatest of the early Humanists), the founder
of Italian prose, to Boileau and Herder, we see this everywhere, and in
the universities it was, in addition to Mystics, like Paracelsus,
pre-eminent
