CHAPTER XXXV

ROMANTICISM

The philosophy of EMMANUEL KANT, 1724-1804, mediated a change from the rationalism of the Enlightenment to the more spiritual thinking of the Romantic revival. KANT was a rationalist and he gave classical expression to German naturalistic rationalism in his work entitled Religion within the Bounds of Reason only, 1793. He had prepared the way for this work by his mightily influential Critique of Pure Reason, 1781, revised in 1787. But, as Heine said, he was "the executioner of Deism"; for in his Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, he taught that the will has a practical supremacy and is able to exercise its freedom.

JOHANN GOTTLIEB FICHTE, 1762-1814, seized upon KANT'S teaching of the inherent moral worth of man and made it fundamental to his own philosophy. An Essay towards a Critique of all Revelation, 1792, prepared the way for the solution of many problems untouched by KANT. In The Destiny of Man, 1800, he defined the absolute ego, on which he had built his philosophy, as the infinite moral will of the universe. In The Way to a Blessed Life, 1806, he discussed the union of the finite self-conscious life with the infinite ego, or God.

FRIEDRICH WILHELM JOSEPH VON SCHELLING, 17751854, "grasped FICHTE'S amended form of the critical philosophy" with readiness. He became the philosophical leader of the new Romantic school in German literature. AUGUST WILHELM SCHLEGEL, 1767-1845, was the literary prophet of that school; and with his brother KARL WILHELM FRIED

RICH, 1772-1829, conducted The Athenaeum, its literary organ.

SCHLEGEL traced the poetical form of the Romantic movement to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; its political characteristics he attributed to the French Revolution, 1789; and its philosophy to FICHTE'S doctrine of knowledge. The movement itself he regarded as the expression of that inner freedom and rationality which constituted the essence of the practical philosophy of KANT.1

The spirit of the Romantic revival passed into Christian literature in the works of FRIEDRICH DANIEL ERNST SCHLEIERMACHER, 1768-1834, the founder of modern theology. Having exchanged his early Pietism for the rationalism of SEMLER, he surrendered that for the romanticism of FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL whose confidence he won by an early essay.

In 1799 he published his epoch-making work, Concerning Religion; Discourses addressed to the Educated among its Despisers, which contained an elaboration of his first main principle that spiritual experience is the true basis of theology. "The rhetorical form is a fiction. The addresses were never delivered. . . . . They are a cry of pain on the part of one who sees that assailed which is sacred to him, of triumph as he feels himself able to repel the assault, of brooding persuasiveness lest any should fail to be won for the truth."2

The Discourses first justify their purpose, and then in turn discuss the Essence of Religion, Religious Culture, the Social Principle in Religion, and Religions.

So far as your feeling expresses 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

1 Cp. Ency. Religion and Ethics, Vol. IV., p. 360.

2 Edward Caldwell Moore, History of Christian Thought since Kant (1918), p. 76.

elements, of religion; there is no feeling which is not religious, save such as indicates an unhealthy condition of life (Discourse 2).

Ruin and salvation, enmity and mediation, these are the two inseparably connected fundamental relations underlying this habit of feeling, and determining the shape of the entire religious content and form of Christianity (Discourse 5).

How a Jewish Rabbi of philanthropic mind and somewhat Socratic morals, with a few miracles, or at least what others took for such, and the ability to utter some clever gnomes and parables-how One who was this and nothing more, and who, were He only this, were not fit to stand before Moses or Mohammed, could have caused such an effect as a new religion and Church to be able to conceive how this were possible one must first take leave of his senses!

In this work and in his Monologues, 1800, SCHLEIERMACHER embodied his best thoughts and his finest feelings. The Monologues deal with Contemplation, Examination, The World, Prospect, Youth and Old Age. Their main thesis is summed up in the sentence:

I live in the consciousness of my whole nature. To become ever more what I am is my sole aim; every act of my life is a special phase of this one aim. Let time bring, as it may, material and opportunity for the moulding and manifesting of my inner self I shun nothing; all is the same to me (Monologue 4).

By his Brief Plan of Theological Studies, 1811, he attempted to do for theology what the Discourses had done for religion. He set up an ideal of theological science, dominated by the view that there is an organic connection be

tween all parts of the subject. The Plan was a pioneer work in the department of Theological Encyclopaedia.

His monumental work, The Christian Faith shewn in its Agreement with the Principles of the Evangelical Church, 1821, marks an epoch in the history of the interpretation of Christianity. It has been called the most influential treatise in theology since the Institutes of CALVIN; by means of it SCHLEIERMACHER became the "reformer of the German Protestant theology." In it he defined religion as "the feeling of absolute dependence," a feeling that is a basal fact of man's constitution; he then examined the Christian consciousness and found that the specifically Christian feeling is the feeling of redemption. As the champion of experimental religion SCHLEIERMACHER transformed the whole method and scope of theological dogmatics, and focussed attention upon the idea of salvation as the vital element in Christianity.

In 1819 he began a series of lectures on the Life of Jesus. He was "the first theologian who had ever lectured upon this subject." The course was given in 1832 for the last time, but the lectures were not published until 1864. This Life of Jesus is now only valuable as a guide to the thought of its author, and as a point in the historical development of the theology of Germany. "Schleiermacher is not in search of the historical Jesus, but of the Jesus Christ of his own system of theology; that is to say, of the historic figure which seems to him appropriate to the self consciousness of the Redeemer as he represents it."

I have already said that it is inherently impossible that such a predilection (sc. for the Book of Daniel) would have been manifested by Christ, because the Book of Daniel does not belong to the prophetic writings properly so called, but to the third division of the Old Testament literature.

3 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1922), p. 62.

His contribution to the criticism of the narratives of the Life of Jesus is epitomised in the sentence:

The first three Gospels are compilations formed out of various narratives which had arisen independently; their discourses are composite structures, and their presentation of the history is such that one can form no idea of the grouping of events.

The mediating theology of SCHLEIERMACHER, and especially his lectures on the Life of Jesus as delivered in 1832, roused the mind of DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS, 18081874, whose Life of Jesus, 1835, opened a new era in the study of Christian origins. This work was intended to form a prologue to a history of the ideas of primitive Christianity; a plan which STRAUSS subsequently carried out under the title Christian Theology in its Historical Development and in its Antagonism to Modern Scientific Knowledge, 1840.

The Life of Jesus was in three parts; i. a history of earlier work in criticism and interpretation; ii. a critical examination of the career of Jesus-his birth and childhood, his public ministry, his passion and death; iii. a philosophical interpretation of the value of the life for religion. The book rendered STRAUSS "famous in a moment." "Considered as a literary work, STRAUSS's first Life of Jesus is one of the most perfect things in the whole range of learned literature. In over fourteen hundred pages he has not a superfluous phrase... his style is simple and picturesque, sometimes ironical, but always dignified and distinguished." The standpoint of this remarkable work is that:

Orthodox and rationalists alike proceed from the false assumption that we have always in the Gospels testimony, sometimes even that of eye-witnesses, to 4 Ibid., p. 78.