History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

by Andrew Dickson White

He was a deeply religious man, and the mainspring of his efforts was the desire to bring back to the Church the educated classes, who had been repelled by the stiff Lutheran orthodoxy; but this only increased hostility to him. Opposition met him in Germany at every turn; and in England, Lloyd, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, who sought patronage for a translation of Eichhorn's work, was met generally with contempt and frequently with insult.

Throughout Catholic Germany it was even worse. In 1774 Isenbiehl, a priest at Mayence who had distinguished himself as a Greek and Hebrew scholar, happened to question the usual interpretation of the passage in Isaiah which refers to the virgin-born Immanuel, and showed then—what every competent critic knows now—that it had reference to events looked for in older Jewish history. The censorship and faculty of theology attacked him at once and brought him before the elector. Luckily, this potentate was one of the old easy-going prince-bishops, and contented himself with telling the priest that, though his contention was perhaps true, he "must remain in the old paths, and avoid everything likely to make trouble."

But at the elector's death, soon afterward, the theologians renewed the attack, threw Isenbiehl out of his professorship and degraded him. One insult deserves mention for its ingenuity. It was declared that he—the successful and brilliant professor—showed by the obnoxious interpretation that he had not yet rightly learned the Scriptures; he was therefore sent back to the benches of the theological school, and made to take his seat among the ingenuous youth who were conning the rudiments of theology. At this he made a new statement, so carefully guarded that it disarmed many of his enemies, and his high scholarship soon won for him a new professorship of Greek—the condition being that he should cease writing upon Scripture. But a crafty bookseller having republished his former book, and having protected himself by keeping the place and date of publication secret, a new storm fell upon the author; he was again removed from his professorship and thrown into prison; his book was forbidden, and all copies of it in that part of Germany were confiscated. In 1778, having escaped from prison, he sought refuge with another of the minor rulers who in blissful unconsciousness were doing their worst while awaiting the French Revolution, but was at once delivered up to the Mayence authorities and again thrown into prison.

The Pope, Pius VI, now intervened with a brief on Isenbiehl's book, declaring it "horrible, false, perverse, destructive, tainted with heresy," and excommunicating all who should read it. At this, Isenbiehl, declaring that he had written it in the hope of doing a service to the Church, recanted, and vegetated in obscurity until his death in 1818.

But, despite theological faculties, prince-bishops, and even popes, the new current of thought increased in strength and volume, and into it at the end of the eighteenth century came important contributions from two sources widely separated and most dissimilar.

The first of these, which gave a stimulus not yet exhausted, was the work of Herder. By a remarkable intuition he had anticipated some of those ideas of an evolutionary process in nature and in literature which first gained full recognition nearly three quarters of a century after him; but his greatest service in the field of biblical study was his work, at once profound and brilliant, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. In this field he eclipsed Bishop Lowth. Among other things of importance, he showed that the Psalms were by different authors and of different periods—the bloom of a great poetic literature.

Until his time no one had so clearly done justice to their sublimity and beauty; but most striking of all was his discussion of Solomon's Song. For over twenty centuries it had been customary to attribute to it mystical meanings. If here and there some man saw the truth, he was careful, like Aben Ezra, to speak with bated breath.

The penalty for any more honest interpretation was seen, among Protestants, when Calvin and Beza persecuted Castellio, covered him with obloquy, and finally drove him to starvation and death, for throwing light upon the real character of the Song of Songs; and among Catholics it was seen when Philip II allowed the pious and gifted Luis de Leon, for a similar offence, to be thrown into a dungeon of the Inquisition and kept there for five years, until his health was utterly shattered and his spirit so broken that he consented to publish a new commentary on the song, "as theological and obscure as the most orthodox could desire."

Here, too, we have an example of the efficiency of the older biblical theology in fettering the stronger minds and in stupefying the weaker. Just as the book of Genesis had to wait over two thousand years for a physician to reveal the simplest fact regarding its structure, so the Song of Songs had to wait even longer for a poet to reveal not only its beauty but its character. Commentators innumerable had interpreted it; St. Bernard had preached over eighty sermons on its first two chapters; Palestrina had set its most erotic parts to sacred music; Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, from Origen to Aben Ezra and from Luther to Bossuet, had uncovered its deep meanings and had demonstrated it to be anything and everything save that which it really is. Among scores of these strange imaginations it was declared to represent the love of Jehovah for Israel; the love of Christ for the Church; the praises of the Blessed Virgin; the union of the soul with the body; sacred history from the Exodus to the Messiah; Church history from the Crucifixion to the Reformation; and some of the more acute Protestant divines found in it references even to the religious wars in Germany and to the Peace of Passau. In these days it seems hard to imagine how really competent reasoners could thus argue without laughing in each other's faces, after the manner of Cicero's augurs. Herder showed Solomon's Song to be what the whole thinking world now knows it to be—simply an Oriental love-poem.

But his frankness brought him into trouble: he was bitterly assailed. Neither his noble character nor his genius availed him. Obliged to flee from one pastorate to another, he at last found a happy refuge at Weimar in the society of Goethe, Wieland, and Jean Paul, and thence he exercised a powerful influence in removing noxious and parasitic growths from religious thought.