FOURTH SECTION.
CHURCH HISTORY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
I. General and Introductory.
§ 173. Survey of Religious Movements of Nineteenth Century.
A reaction had set in against the atheistic spirit of the French Revolution, and the victories of A.D. 1813, 1815, encouraged the pious in their Christian confidence. Princes and people were full of gratitude to God. Alexander I., Francis I., and Frederick William III., representing the three principal churches, in A.D. 1815, after the political situation had been determined by the Congress of Vienna, formed “the Holy Alliance,” a league of brotherly love for mutual defence and maintenance of peace, to which all the European princes adhered with the exception of the pope, the sultan, and the king of England. Through Metternich’s arts it ultimately degenerated into an instrument of repression and tyranny.—Incongruous elements were present everywhere. The restoration of the papacy in A.D. 1814 had given a new impulse to ultramontanism, as did also the Reformation centenary of A.D. 1817 to Protestantism; while supernaturalism and pietism prevailing in the Lutheran and Reformed churches led to renewed attempts at union. Old sects were strengthened and new sects arose. Pantheism, materialism, and atheism, as well as socialism and communism, without concealment attacked Christianity; while pauperism and vagabondage, on the one hand, and the Stock Exchange swindling of capitalists, on the other, spread moral consumption through all classes of society. The ultramontanes, led by the Jesuits, reasserted the most arrogant claims of the papacy. The climax was reached when Pius IX. obtained a decree of council affirming his infallibility, while by the Nemesis of history the royal crown was torn from his head.
§ 174. Nineteenth Century Culture in Relation to Christianity and the Church.
Down to A.D. 1840, when zeal for it began to abate, philosophy exercised an important influence on the religious development of the age, both in the departments of science and of life. While rationalism was not able to transcend the standpoint of Kant, the other theological tendencies were more or less determined formally, and even materially by the philosophical movements of this period. Alongside of philosophy, literature, itself to a great extent coloured by contemporary philosophy, exerted a powerful influence on the religious opinions of the more cultured among the people. The sciences, too, came into closer relations, partly friendly, partly hostile, to Christianity; and art in some of its masterpieces paid a noble tribute to the church.
§ 174.1. The German Philosophy (§ [171, 10]).—Fries, whose philosophy was Kantian rationalism, modified by elements borrowed from Jacobi, influenced such theologians as De Wette. Schelling, in his “Philosophy of Identity,” had advanced from Fichte’s idealism to a pantheistic naturalism. From Fichte he had learned that this world is nothing without spirit; but while Fichte recognised this world, the non-ego, as reality only in so far as man seizes upon it and penetrates it by his spirit, and so raises it into real being, Schelling regards spirit as nothing else than the life of nature itself. In the lower stages of this nature-life spirit is still slumbering and dreaming, but in man it has attained unto consciousness. The nature-life as a whole, or the world-soul, is God; man is the reflex of God and the world in miniature, a microcosmos. In the world’s development God comes into objective being and unfolds his self-consciousness; Christianity is the turning point in the world’s history; its fundamental dogmas of revelation, trinity, incarnation, and redemption are suggestive attempts to solve the world’s riddle. Schelling’s poetic view of the world penetrated all the sciences, and gave to them a new impulse. Though hateful to the old rationalists, this system found ardent admirers among the younger theologians. As Schelling to Fichte, so Hegel was attached to Schelling, and wrought his pantheistic naturalism into a pantheistic spiritualism. Not so much in the life of nature as in the thinking and doing of the human spirit, the divine revelation is the unfolding of the divine self-consciousness from non-being into being. Judaism and Christianity are progressive stages of this process; Judaism stands far below classic paganism; but in Christianity we have the perfect religion, to be developed into the highest form of philosophy. The Protestant church doctrine was now again accorded the place of honour. Marheincke developed Lutheran orthodoxy into a system of speculative theology based on Hegelian principles; while Göschel infused into it a pietist spirit, which made many hail the new departure as the long-sought reconciliation of theology and philosophy. But after Hegel’s death in A.D. 1831 the condition of matters suddenly changed. His school split into an orthodox wing following the master’s ecclesiastical tendencies, and a heterodox wing which deified the human spirit. Strauss, Bauer, and Feuerbach led this heterodox party in theology, and Ruge in reference to social, æsthetic, and political questions. Persecuted by the state in A.D. 1843, the Young Hegelians joined the rationalists, whom they had before sneered at as “antediluvian theologians.” Schelling, who had been silent for almost thirty years, took Hegel’s chair in Berlin as his decided opponent in A.D. 1841, and with his dualistic doctrine of potencies, from which he finally advanced to a Christian gnosticism, obtained a temporary influence among the younger theologians. He died at the baths of Ragaz in Switzerland in A.D. 1854. He flashed for a moment like a meteor, and as suddenly his light was quenched.
§ 174.2. The domination of the Hegelian philosophy was overthrown by the split in the school and the radicalism of the adherents of the left wing, and Schelling in the second stage of his philosophical development had not succeeded in founding any proper school of his own. A group of younger philosophers, with I. H. Fichte at their head, starting from the Hegelian dialectic, have striven to free philosophy from the reproach of pantheism and to develop a speculative theism in touch with historical Christianity. Other members of this school are Weisse, Braniss, Chalibæus, Ulrici, Wirth, Romang, etc.—Herbart renounces all that philosophers from Fichte senior to Fichte junior had done, and declares the metaphysical end of their systems beyond the horizon of philosophy, which must limit itself to the province of experience. His realism is in diametrical opposition to Hegel’s idealism. Toward Christianity his philosophy occupies a position of indifference. Influenced by Kant’s theory of knowledge as well as by the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel idealism and Herbart’s realism, with an infusion of Leibnitz’s monad doctrine, Hermann Lotze of Göttingen has, since A.D. 1844, set forth a system of “teleological idealism.” He develops his metaphysical principles from what we have by immediate experience internal and external, and the invariability of the causal mechanism in everything that happens in the inner and outer world he explains as the realizing of moral purposes.—Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which only in the later years of his life (died A.D. 1860) began to attract attention, is in spirit utterly opposed to the religion and ethics of Christianity. Its task is to describe “The World as Will and Idea;” first at that stage of entering into visibility which is represented in man does will, the thing-in-itself, become joined with idea, and makes its appearance now with it over against the world as a conscious subject. But since idea is regarded as a pure illusion of the will, this leads to a pessimism which takes absolute despair as the only legitimate moral principle. E. von Hartmann went still further in the same direction in his “Philosophy of the Unconscious,” published in 1869, of which an English translation in three vols. appeared in 1884. He identifies the will with matter and idea with spirit, demands in addition to the absolute despair of the individual here and hereafter, the complete surrender of the personality to the world-process in order to the attainment of its end, the annihilation of the world. This dissolution of the world consists in the complete withdrawal of the will into the absolute as the only unconscious, so that at last the wrong and misery of being produced by the irrational will are abolished in this withdrawal. From this philosophical standpoint Hartmann attempted in A.D. 1874 to take Christianity to pieces, showing some favour to Vatican Catholicism, but pouring out the vials of his wrath upon Protestantism. His “religion of the future” consists in a yearning for freedom from all the burden and misery of being and share in the world-process by relapsing into the blessedness of non-being.—In France, England, and America much favour has been shown to the atheistic-sensual Positivism of Aug. Comte, which, excluding every form of theology and morals, requires only the so-called exact sciences as the object of philosophy. On his later notions of a “religion of humanity,” see § [210, 1]. On essentially similar lines proceeds Herbert Spencer, in his “System of Synthetic Philosophy,” to whose school also Darwin belonged. His followers are styled agnostics, because they regard all knowledge of God and divine things as absolutely impossible, and evolutionists, because their master endeavours to construct all the sciences on the basis of the evolution theory.
§ 174.3. The Sciences.—Schelling’s profound theories were of all the more significance from their not being restricted to the philosophical strivings of his time, but inspiring the other sciences with the breath of a new life. To the fullest extent the natural sciences exposed themselves to this influence. There was not wanting indeed a certain shadowy mysticism, to which especially the fancies of mesmeric magnetism largely contributed; but this fog gradually cleared away, and the Christian elements were purified from their pantheistic surroundings. Steffens and Von Schubert taught that the divine book of nature is to be regarded as the reflex and expansion of the divine revelation in Scripture. The Hegelian philosophy, too, seemed at first likely to infuse a Christian spirit into the other sciences. In Göschel, at least, there was a thinker who imparted to jurisprudence a Christian character, and to Christianity a juristic construction. In other respects Hegel’s philosophy in its application to the other departments of science gave in many ways a predominance to an abstruse dialectic tendency. Its adherents of the extreme left sought to construct all sciences a priori from the pure idea, and at the same time to root out from them the last vestiges of the Christian spirit.
The greatest names in natural science, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Haller, Davy, Cuvier, etc., are household words in Christian circles. All these and many more were firmly convinced that there was no conflict between their most brilliant discoveries and Christian truth. In A.D. 1825 the Earl of Bridgwater founded a lectureship, and treatises on the power, wisdom, and goodness of God as manifested in the creation, have been written by Buckland, Chalmers, Whewell, Bell, etc. It was otherwise in Germany. Even Schleiermacher, in his “Letters to Lücke,” in A.D. 1829, expressed his fears of the prophesied overthrow of all Christian theories of the world by the incontrovertible results of physical research, and Bretschneider in his “Letters to a Statesman,” in A.D. 1830, proclaimed to the world without regret that already what Schleiermacher only feared had actually come to pass. Physicists, awakening from the glamour of the Schelling nature philosophy, pronounced all speculation contraband, and declared pure empiricism, the simple investigation of actual things, the only permissible object of their labour. And although they handed over to theologians and philosophers questions about spirit in and over nature, as not belonging to their province, a younger generation maintained that spirit was non-existent, because it could not be discovered by the microscope and dissecting knife. Carl Vogt defined thought to be a secretion of the brain, and Moleschott regarded life as a mere mode of matter and man’s existence after life only as the manuring of the fields. Feuerbach proclaimed that “man is what he eats,” and Buchner [Büchner] popularized these views into a gospel for social democrats and nihilists. Oersted, the famous discoverer of electro-magnetism, had sought “the spirit in nature,” but the spirit which he found was not that of the Bible and the church. The grandmaster of German scientific research, Alex. von Humboldt, saw in the world a cosmos of noble harmony as a whole and in its parts, but of Christian ideas in God’s great book of nature he finds no trace. In A.D. 1859 the great English naturalist Darwin, died A.D. 1882, introduced into the arena the theory of “Natural Selection,” by means of which the modification and development of the few primary animal forms through the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest by sexual selection is supposed, in millions, perhaps milliards, of years, to have brought forth the present variety and manifoldness of animal species. Multitudes of naturalists now accept his theory of the descent of men and apes from a common stem.—In Medicine De Valenti on the Protestant side, with pietistic earnestness, maintains that Christian faith is a vehicle of healing power; while a circle in Munich on the Catholic side make worship of saints and the host a conditio sine qua non of all medicine. A more moderate attitude is assumed by the Roman Catholic Dr. Capellmann of Aachen, in his “Pastoral Medicine.”