In Berlin, where the new king held the old view that the wrongs of the Gods were the Gods’ affair, he found harbourage; and sought to put himself right with the religious world by his book Die Bestimmung des Menschen (“The Vocation of Man,” 1800), wherein he speaks of the Eternal Infinite Will as regulating human reason so far as human reason is right—the old counter-sense and the old evasion. By this book he repelled his rationalistic friends Schelling and the Schlegels; while his religious ally Schleiermacher, who chose another tactic, wrote on it a bitter and contemptuous review, and “could hardly find words strong enough to express his detestation of it.”[276] A few years later Fichte was writing no less contemptuously of Schelling; and in his remaining years, though the Napoleonic wars partly brought him into sympathy with his countrymen, from whom he had turned away in angry alienation, he remained a philosophic Ishmael, warring and warred upon all round. He was thus left to figure for posterity as a religionist “for his own hand,” who rejected all current religion while angrily dismissing current unbelief as “freethinking chatter.”[277] If his philosophy be estimated by its logical content as distinguished from its conflicting verbalisms, it is fundamentally as atheistic as that of Spinoza.[278] That he was conscious of a vital sunderance between his thought and that of the past is made clear by his answer, in 1805, to the complaint that the people had lost their “religious feeling” (Religiosität). His retort is that a new religious feeling has taken the place of the old;[279] and that was the position taken up by the generation which swore by him, in the German manner, as the last had sworn by Kant.
But the successive philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all rising out of the “Illumination” of the eighteenth century, have been alike impermanent. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of thought than the internecine strife of the systems which insisted on “putting something in the place” of the untenable systems of the past. They have been but so many “toppling spires of cloud.” Fichte, like Herder, broke away from the doctrine of Kant; and later became bitterly opposed to that of his former friend Schelling, as did Hegel in his turn. Schleiermacher, hostile to Kant, was still more hostile to Fichte; and Hegel, detesting Schleiermacher[280] and developing Fichte, give rise to schools arrayed against each other, of which the anti-Christian was by far the stronger. All that is permanent in the product of the age of German Rationalism is the fundamental principle upon which it proceeded, the confutation of the dogmas and legends of the past, and the concrete results of the historical, critical, and physical research to which the principle and the confutation led.
24. It is true that the progressive work was not all done by the Rationalists so-called. As always, incoherences in the pioneers led to retorts which made for rectification. One of the errors of bias of the early naturalists, as we have noted, was their tendency to take every religious document as genuine and at bottom trustworthy, provided only that its allegations of miracles were explained away as misinterpretations of natural phenomena. So satisfied were many of them with this inexpensive method that they positively resisted the attempts of supernaturalists, seeking a way out of their special dilemma, to rectify the false ascriptions of the documents. Bent solely on one solution, they were oddly blind to evidential considerations which pointed to interpolation, forgery, variety of source, and error of literary tradition; while scholars bent on saving “inspiration” were often ready in some measure for such recognitions. These arrests of insight took place alternately on both sides, in the normal way of intellectual progress by alternate movements. All the while, it is the same primary force of reason that sets up the alternate pressures, and the secondary pressures are generated by, and are impossible without, the first.
25. The emancipation, too, was limited in area in the German-speaking world. In Austria, despite a certain amount of French culture, the rule of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century was too effective to permit of any intellectual developments. Maria Theresa, who knew too well that the boundless sexual licence against which she fought had nothing to do with innovating ideas, had to issue a special order to permit the importation of Montesquieu’s Esprit des Lois; and works of more subversive doctrine could not openly pass the frontiers at all. An attempt to bring Lessing to Vienna in 1774, with a view to founding a new literary Academy, collapsed before the opposition; and when Prof. Jahn, of the Vienna University—described as “freethinking, latitudinarian, anti-supernaturalistic”—developed somewhat anti-clerical tendencies in his teaching and writing, he was forced to resign, and died a simple Canon.[281] The Emperor Joseph II in his day passed for an unbeliever;[282] but there was no general movement. “Austria, in a time of universal effervescence, produced only musicians, and showed zest only for pleasure.”[283] Yet among the music-makers was the German-born Beethoven, the greatest master of his age. Kindred in spirit to Goethe, and much more of a revolutionist than he in all things, Beethoven spent the creative part of his life at Vienna without ceasing to be a freethinker.[284] “Formal religion he apparently had none.” He copied out a kind of theistic creed consisting of three ancient formulas: “I am that which is”: “I am all that is, that was, that shall be”: “He is alone by Himself; and to Him alone do all things owe their being.” Beyond this his beliefs did not go. When his friend Moscheles at the end of his arrangement of Fidelio wrote: “Fine, with God’s help,” Beethoven added, “O man, help thyself.”[285] His reception of the Catholic sacraments in extremis was not his act. He had left to mankind a purer and a more lasting gift than either the creeds or the philosophies of his age.
[1] Cp. Pusey, Histor. Enquiry into the Probable Causes of the Rationalist Character ... of the Theology of Germany, 1828, p. 79. [↑]
[2] Bishop Hurst, History of Rationalism, ed. 1867, p. 56. [↑]
[3] Id. pp. 57–58 (last ed. pp. 74–76), citing Tholuck, Deutsche Universitäten, i, 145–48, and Dowding, Life of Calixtus, pp. 132–33. [↑]