The War Upon Religion / Being an Account of the Rise and Progress of Anti-Christianism in Europe

by Francis A. Cunningham

THE CAUSES.

Looking into the history of the times just preceding the Kulturkampf, and the nature of the events transpiring during its progress, among the causes may be enumerated the following: 1, the liberalism of the rationalists; 2, the liberalism of certain pseudo-Catholics; 3, the desire for Protestant ascendancy; 4, the hatred of ultramontainism as incarnated in the "Old Catholic" sect; and 5, the determination of Caesarism to reduce all religion in Germany to the domination of the State.

THE RATIONALISTS.

Emanuel Kant, and then Hegel and his disciples, had opened the way to unrestricted rationalism. They taught that religion was only an inferior form of "the idea," which "idea" formed its truth only in the "superior form" of philosophy. In 1833 Frederick Richter, a disciple of Hegel, denied the immortality of the soul, declaring the doctrine the cause of every evil. In 1835, another Hegelian, Strauss, denied the divinity of Christ. In 1837, Richard Rothe wrote a book to demonstrate that the Gospel would triumph only when all churches and religious societies were exterminated from the face of the earth.

This species of philosophy, by denying the immortality of the soul, the divinity of Christ, and the value of the Church, reduced all religion to a vague form without any fixed or determinate existence. But, after all, what did Hegel and his disciples mean by religion? It is difficult to give an answer when one examines his works, barbarous as they are in style, and more nebulous in their conceptions than these of any other German writer. Nevertheless out of his misty speculations one can thus formulate his conception of religion: "Religion is only a creation, a phantasm of the mind of man, who adores a god whom he himself has formed to his own image; so that divine nature is only human nature idealized, unconfined, and then considered as a real and personal being."

From this principle which denied God, by confounding Him with man, and reducing all religion to simple philanthropy, Feuerbach deduced the theory that all theology was founded upon anthropology; that God was man, and that the love of God meant merely the love of man. Thus German philosophy had arrived at mystical atheism and was turning rapidly to open paganism with its denial of Christianity. This doctrine was preached by Stirner and by Gaspar Schmidt, who esteemed egoism as something sacred, and began to advocate revolution and anarchy.

Side by side with the school of Hegel was that of Tubingen, the head and master of which was Ferdinand Christian Baur (died in 1860). Baur had written, in 1835, a work on Gnosticism, which suggested many of the errors of Renan, and ten years later another work on St. Paul, of which Renan made much use when after denying the divinity of Christ, he wished also to deny the sanctity of Paul. Baur had once attempted to answer Moehler's monumental work, that "Symbolism" which exposed the contradictions of Protestantism and the constant doctrine of the Church.

Under the leadership of Baur, the School of Tubingen rejected the Gospel of St. John, the whole theme of which is the divinity of Christ.

While the philosophers of Tubingen and other German universities were thus assailing the divine foundations of Christianity, another class of writers, Moleschott, Büchrer, Vogt, Löwenthal, and many Protestants, were turning to naturalism and atheistic materialism, the consequences of Hegelianism. The materialistic school, which was socialistic in politics, atheistic in religion, realistic in literature, had the impudence to present itself as the savior of society.

It would have mattered little had these various systems been compelled to rely upon their un-Christian apostles for support; but the pity was that men who pretended to believe in Christianity, in the Bible, in revelation only too often listened with favor to their teachings and applauded them. Thus it was that by the time of the French War of 1870, the Protestant mind of Germany was deeply infected with rationalistic ideas, so far at least as to render it unfit to understand even the primary principles of Christianity. Under such conditions it is easy to perceive how the teachings of Catholicity, resting firmly upon the Gospels and drawing their vigor from the divinity of its Founder, could prove a very eyesore to a misguided generation.