Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature - 3. The Reaction in France

by Georg Brandes

The tendency and even the title of this book suggest comparison with the work which inaugurated the religious revival in Germany in the beginning of the nineteenth century, Schleiermacher's famous Reden über die Religion an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Lectures upon Religion to the Educated amongst those who despise it). Both works aim at counteracting the same thing, the indifference towards religion, the positive contempt for it, prevailing amongst the educated classes. Both make an attempt, now that faith has become weak, to rebuild the edifice of piety upon a new foundation. It is in this attempt that the different nationality of the authors makes itself strongly felt.

Schleiermacher, emotional and fervent, is of opinion that the only hope for religion lies in surrendering all its outworks and leading it back to its inmost stronghold, the purely personal feeling of the individual. He tries to penetrate to the very foundation of human existence, to the depth where both consciousness and action originate, to the sources of personal life. He calls upon his reader to try to realise the original condition of the soul, in which the Ego and the object are blent in one, where there is consequently no question either of perception of the object or of perception of a self differing from the object. He describes this as a condition which we are incessantly experiencing and yet not experiencing, since all life consists in its perpetual cessation and recurrence. It is, he says, evanescent and invisible, like the fragrance exhaled by dew-laden flowers and fruits, chaste and light, like a virginal kiss, and holy and fecund, like a bridegroom's embrace; nay, it is not only like all this, it is all this; for this condition of the human soul is the marriage of the universe, of the All, with reason personalised; in this condition the individual is for a moment the world-soul and feels its infinite life to be his own. "This," says Schleiermacher, "is the nature of the first conception of every living and original energising force in your lives, to whatever province it may belong; it is such a condition that produces every religious emotion."[2]

In consequence of this theory Schleiermacher regards every feeling, every emotion, in so far as it expresses the united life of the Ego and the All in the manner described, as religious. "The feelings, the feelings alone, provide the elements of religion." He maintains that there is no feeling which is not religious, unless it is the product of a diseased or depraved condition, adding a note to the effect that this holds good even of the feelings of sensual enjoyment, so long as they are not contrary to nature or depraved. His endeavour is to rescue religion from antagonism with science and culture by making it out to be the essence of every noble, nay, of every healthy feeling. A true German, he pantheistically maintains that the broad stream of life which flows through all created beings is the sacred fountain of all piety and all religions. Therefore he would do away with every definite religious system; even belief in God and immortality does not seem to him to be essential to religion. He exclaims enthusiastically: "Join with me in reverently offering a lock to the holy, outcast soul of Spinoza in the realm of shades. He apprehended the great world-spirit; the infinite was to him all in all, the universe his one and eternal love; with holy innocence and deep humility he mirrored himself in it, and it in return found its most pleasing mirror in him. He was full of religion and of the spirit of holiness."

Even the age of enlightenment did not deal so-called revealed religion a severer blow than did this emotionalism. Schleiermacher, as we see, resolves religion into feeling, and in so doing destroys its authority by making over this authority to the human soul in all its endless variability. All rules, ordinances, dogmas, and principles disappear; each individual is, by a special process, to make everything his own. For Schleiermacher maintains that "however perfectly a man may understand such principles, however firmly he may be convinced that he possesses them, if he does not know and cannot prove that they have arisen in himself as expressions of his own spiritual life and are consequently originally his own, we must not let ourselves be persuaded to believe that such a man is a religious man. He is not; his soul has never conceived; his religious ideas are only supposititious children, the offspring of other souls, whom he, in the secret feeling of his own impotence, has adopted."

Thus essentially Protestant in the good (hence not the sectarian) sense of the word is the religious revival in Germany in its beginnings. It asserts personal originality to be the one essential factor in religion, and defines as the province of religion the whole widespread realm of our warm, true feelings. Natural, healthy feeling is always holy, at no time peculiarly holy.

A marked and significant contrast to all this is provided by the principles set forth in Lamennais' great work, which forms the Latin and Catholic counterpart to Schleiermacher's Lectures. These principles, the programme of pure externality, are as follows:

1. That feeling or indirect revelation is not the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion.

2. That scientific research or reasoning is not the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion.

3. That authority is the means by which men are intended to attain to the knowledge of true religion; and that consequently the true religion is unquestionably the religion which rests upon the strongest possible visible (!) authority.

It is to prove these three remarkable and droll assertions that Lamennais has written his four thick volumes. Let us make ourselves acquainted with their very imperfect chain of reasoning.