f lie Dev^lopmeirt of Christianity BR 145 .P5213 1910 Pfleiderer, Otto, 1839-190S The development of Christianity The Development of Christianity EARLIER BOOKS By DR. PFLEIDERER UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME CHRISTIAN ORIGINS RELIGION AND HISTORIC FAITHS The Development of Christianity ^0wmci JUN 27 1910 / BY ^^^£6IUI^ OTTO PFLEIDERER, D.D. Professor at the University of Berlin TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY DANIEL A. HUEBSCH, Ph.D. AUTHORIZED EDITION NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH 1910 Copyright 1910, by B. W. HUEBSCH PRINTED IN U. S. A. PREFACE After the publication of my lectures on the origins of Christianity, two years ago, lay-readers expressed the wish that I continue the history of Christianity along the same lines, so that the con- nection displayed in the whole might serve as a proof of the correctness of my interpretation of the origins. I could not deny the justice of that wish ; thereupon, I resolved to supplement the first series of lectures in both directions ; a series looking back- ward, on the general history of religion, (''Re- ligion und Rehgionen")^ delivered last year and since published, and by a series looking forward on the development of Christianity to the present day, delivered this Winter before the same mixed audience. These three series of lectures form a trilogy, giving a connected and condensed review of the whole of the religious life of humanity from its primitive beginnings to the present stage of its development. Often I was painfully conscious of the great dif- ficulty of compressing the great mass of material into the narrow frame of a few lectures without 1 English translation under the title " Religion and Historic Faiths," 1907. 3 The Development of Christianity making the latter too superficial or unintelligible; but I wished to carry out the work as well as my powers permitted, hoping thus to assist some of my lay contemporaries to a better understanding of reHgious matters, or, at least, to spur them on to the reading of more comprehensive works which fill in the gaps of the present volume so that they may instruct themselves more thoroughly than is possible by this summary review. For those who desire to study the subject of these lectures in greater detail, I recommend especially the works on Church history by Baur and Hase. They are mutually complementary. The former is remarkable for his large and spirited interpretation of the main ideas of that epoch, of the fundamental thoughts of the great teachers and heroic leaders as well as of the teleological connection in the en- tire development. The latter is masterly in the wealth of detail, the art of vivid narration and the nice, intelligent characterization of the actors in their relation to their environment. The two writ- ers have in common great objectivity in the treat- ment of the material ; they have the ability to trans- pose themselves without prejudice into times past and persons distant and foreign, as well as to judge them justly on the basis of the conditions of their own day. In the introductory lecture, I defend Baur's evo- lutionistic view of history against the old Protes- tant theory of a fall and degeneration which has 4 Preface been revived recently — with more emphasis by Ritschl and his school, and enjoys a large measure of success among living theologians. Naturally, this is no proof of the correctness of that theory which dates from the days of narrowest dogmatism. Despite all appearance to the contrary, — for I do stand now in opposition to an overwhelming major- ity, — I am firmly convinced that sooner or later theology, too, will consent to an unconditional ex- ercise and logical employment of the idea of evolu- tion in the branches of biblical and ecclesiastical his- tory. Theology will gain much thereby. The greatest gain will lie in the fact that theology will overtake the other sciences, which took this progres- sive step, more than a century ago. Another ad- vantage will accrue in the decrease of internal oppositions between the different Church factions, which are at present so abnormally strong that everywhere it is dogmatism against dogmatism, each as narrow and as exclusive as the other. The evolutionistic method of thinking will change all this when it comes. It is like that legendary spear which wounds and heals the hurt. It liber- ates the thinking spirit from all heteronomous lim- itations of the past, by resolving those authorities which were supposed to be absolute into conditional products of evolution and relative factors of devel- opment. On the other hand, however, it recognizes that these things of the past — these forms of faith and Hfe which appear so strange in our day — are 5 The Development of CHristianity the natural and justified forms in which the truth appeared at certain stages of development. They are the relatively true means by which the human spirit struggles upward from the clutch of nature to freedom in God. For this reason, the old-time forms of faith are esteemed and reverenced. Thus the evolutionistic mode of thinking, and it alone, serves the supremely valuable purpose of all historical knowledge, which consists in the attempt to understand the roots of present living and striv- ing buried in the past, and the attempt to conserve their nourishing forces, without suffering them to hamper our own activity in the present and our rest- less striving after the ideals of the future. " To reconcile reverence with clearness, to deny false- hood and yet to believe and worship the truth " — in these words, the historian and philosopher, Car- lyle, rightly stated the task for which historical training should be useful to modern man. The present popular volume and its two predecessors are intended as a modest contribution toward the same end. Otto Pfleiderer. Gross-Lichterfelde, near Berlin, March, 1907. CONTENTS Introduction 9 BOOK I DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIANITY TO THE REFORMATION I. Paul and John, Apologists and Anti-gnostics . 35 II. Clemens and Origen of Alexandria .... 50 III. Dogma and Morals 66 IV. Ceremonial and Establishment 83 V. Aurelius Augustinus 100 VI. The Germanic-Roman Church 117 VII. Scholasticism and Mysticism 135 VIII. The Passing of the Middle Ages 156 BOOK II DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIANITY SINCE THE REFORMATION IX. Renaissance and German Reformation . . . 175 X. Swiss Reformation and Dissidents . . . .192 XI. Catholic Counter-reformation 21 1 XII. Protestant Sects 228 XIII. The Period of Enlightenment 247 XIV. German Poets and Thinkers 265 XV. Romanticism, Speculation and Historical Crit- icism 283 XVI. Reaction and New Struggles 301 INTRODUCTION / In these lectures, I desire to present the evolution of Christianity up to the present dayJ I do not mean this in the sense that what follows is an ex- cerpt from the history of Church and dogma, a sort of outline of the material gathered together in the text-books, but I intend to emphasize those main points in the history of Christianity which are cal- culated to show in what way, by means of (what con- necting links, and because of what natural motives the Christianity of the New Testament became the Christianity of the present.) The way is long and the connecting links are many; but it is necessary to understand this way if the difference between biblical Christianity and ours is to be comprehended, and the right of pres- ent-day Christianity is to be justified. /That right consists in being the legitimate outcome of the log- ical development of the Christianity of the Bible^ It would not be what it is, if Christianity had not passed through those nineteen centuries with which Church history has to deal. But can one really speak of an evolution ? In the title of the lecture itself, a problem is imbedded, and, when one remembers that it is only fifty years 9 The Development of Christianity since Baur of Tübingen seriously treated church history in the light of the idea of development, the problem refuses to be ignored. Not any of these — the Catholic church, the Protestant church, nor the RationaHsts — had taken it up before. (Catholicism did not treat the problem because it considers Christianity to be a given divine factor and foundation, established by Christ, through the Apostles.) The dogma of the Church is the revealed and unchangeable truth which was in the begin- ning and (merely becomes more and more clear in the course of time. ] The establishment of the Church — the Bishop's Office, the whole hierarchy rising to its highest point, the Pope — is regarded as a foundation of the Apostles, and by them each official is equipped with the divine power of a rep- resentative. Changes in the history of the Church, so it is put, are but the manifold ways in which the truth and grace resident in the Church have been attacked and are ever being attacked by the inim- ical world and the devil. The Church, however, repulses all attacks and remains ever victorious. Accordingly, action is only possible exteriorly ; with- in nothing changes. The Church remains what it always has been — a divine factor implanted com- plete in the world by God. No evolution, no sub- version within, no division into diametrical op- posites, is possible there ; there can only be defense and persistent effort to maintain externally the con- tinuity of its uniform nature. 10 Introduction In contrast to this naive, optimistic mode of thinking, old Protestantism set up a naive pessi- mistic mode, both based upon the same presupposi- tions. In the latter case, it was the " Centuriatori " of Magdeburg who set out with the same presup- position as the Catholic historians, that Christianity is offered /complete in the New Testament by a miraculous revelation from God.) This offering consists of a complete institution of salvation and redemption. The difference between the two is this: While Catholicism regards the progress of history as a process by which the divine nature of the Church is ever achieving a completer victory over the world, old Protestantism reverses the mat- ter and after asserting that the Christianity of the New Testament is divine truth, asks " what has become of that Christianity?" You have changed it into its very opposite, it says, and adds that the devil has not attacked the truth from without, but he has forced his way into the Church itself; the main article of justification by faith he has eliminated, while, as for the formation of the Church, he has had full play so that in the Pope himself, the devil is the " Antichrist " incarnate. Such is the pes- simistic answer of old Protestantism to the naive Catholic deification of the Church. Old Protestantism naturally found itself to be in an attitude of self-contradiction, in tliat it took over from the Church which was held to be per-— meated with and corrupted by the devil, the dogmas • The Development of Christianity of the first five centuries and believed in them as divine truth. These are the dogmas which origi- nated in the same period when Church-customs, Church-ceremonial and Church-establishment were in process of crystallization. (How strange it is that the wicked enemy should have been at work in the customs, establishment and certain articles of faith ; while in others, notably those most important doctrines of the trinity, the mortality of God, orig- inal sin, atonement and others, he had no hand; they were truth ! j Such a contradiction was unten- able and the old Protestant opinion of Church his- tory is explainable only in the light of its historical position. Rationalism was too enlightened to hold to such a transcendental view of history operating with the devil. In the place of the enemy from the other world, it set up the enemies of this world, the cun- ning priests who established themselves by decep- tion, and thus the whole establishment became a human construction. From this viewpoint, the whole church-history seems like a play of deception and power, a play of human opinion, error and failure. Such is the rationalistic mode of think- ing. Here, too, there can be no thought of evolu- tion, (in the theory of evolution, the central idea is that things grow from their beginnings by nat- ural necessity.^ With rationalism, everything is merely chance, arbitrariness. Unfortunately this or that Pope had such thoughts fraught with am- 12 Introduction bition for power, such false views and opinions; divine truth and divine direction are scarcely ever to be found in church-history. This was called " pragmatical writing of history," where the chance motives of individuals were brought to light in or- der to find the spirit of the times. In reality, " the spirit of the times" was, for the most part, the spirit of the men themselves, and the motives as- cribed to the actors were inventions of the his- torians. This was no more objective than the pes- simistic treatment of Protestantism, or the optimis- tic glorification of the Church, had been. (It is plain that not in Catholicism, nor in old Protestantism, nor in Rationalism had there been any word of an evolution of Christianity.] This idea of development, introduced into the science of history since Herder and Hegel, and generally ac- cepted in the writing of profane history to-day, came into its own in the treatment of church-history through Baur. ^According to him, Christianity is the religion of divine-humanity — the elevation of man to a consciousness of his spiritual unity with God and freedom in God.^ That was the novelty and peculiarity of Christianity, by reason of which it stands above all other religions. (This new re- ligious principle was in Jesus in the germ, in his pious attitude, in his active faith in God and in his pure love of man; but it was enveloped still in the Jewish forms of the messianic idea and con- fined to the Jewish people,;which is a contradiction 13 The Development of Christianity of the idea of a divine-human rehgion capable of embracing the whole of mankind. In order to rise to the full consciousness of its peculiar nature, the universal religion of the spirit had to be ff reed from the narrow confines of the Jewish national and legal religion. The apostle Paul accomplished that task,) but in doing so, he entered into opposition to the Jewish-Christian faith of the primitive congrega- tion. Thus, from the beginning the development pro- ceeded by contradictions and the whole, pure truth' was never on either side. These contradictions had to be resolved into a higher unity, which was found in the Johannine interpretation.) Similarly, through- out the course of subsequent history, each new solution became the germ of new problems and the cause of new strifes. By constant division into differing tendencies, each of which was relatively true and justified in its own day, by means of this development through contradictions, Christianity has really achieved what it was in its original idea. Such is Baur's view of church-history as the his- tory of the development of the Christian idea within the Church. To-day, this view is not the prevailing one in theology; fit has been thrust aside by the Ritschl- Harnack interpretation of church-history, which might be termed an accentuation of the old Protes- tant pessimism. Whereas the latter regarded New Testament Christianity as perfect, with a great fall Introduction in the apostolic period which followed, Ritschl and his scholars (find the perfect essence of Christianity exclusively in the Gospel of Jesus as described in the first three Gospels; and Ritschl thinks that, for this reason, Jesus the man must be accepted as God, because he alone was the true revealer of the will of God.) He holds, too, that the beginning of the decay and disease in Christianity soon followed, Paul himself having/distorted the pure Gospel of Jesus by admixing the Pharisaic theology/and the dogmas of the sacraments, while John distorted it even more by his doctrine of the divine Logos, j which became flesh in Jesus. The Greek philos- ophy thus introduced finally brought about such a complete disfigurement and obscuring of the purity of the Gospel through the Church fathers, that Church history after all is nothing more than the continuous process of " the sickening and profana- tion of Christianity," the true essence of which re- mained for the newest, that is the Ritschlian theol- ogy, to discover. i'^This radical, pessimistic judg- ment is to-day the prevailing view of church-his- tory and claims to be the result of modern sciencey It is no pleasant duty to swim against so power- ful a torrent, but it must be done where convictions based on principles are involved. As briefly as pos- sible, therefore, I will attempt to give the reasons why I cannot regard the view of church-history just described, as the correct one. Above all things else, it seems to me to be in 15 The Development of Christianity direct (opposition to the idea of evolution, which is the governing idea in the other sciences.^ " Evo- lution " I understand to be that becoming which moves according to law and strives toward an end, in which everything is fruit and seed at the same time, (in which every phenomenon is conditioned by what has preceded and conditions what is to follow?) If this is to hold true of history, too, there can be{iio absolute, perfect point which would be an excep- tion to the general law of conditioning and limita- tion^ by time and .space. Vj-east of all is it possible to find a perfect thing at the beginning of a develop- ment-series, , where the new thing in process of formation is naturally related in closest fashion to that which was, while its own peculiarity appears most imperfectly. The development out of the old, therefore, must be a gradual one, the original en- tanglement giving way to the perfection of the pe- culiarity. ^Thus, we no longer believe that when man first appeared on earth, he was the ideal man) On the contrary, we are convinced that at that time man was farthest removed from his ideal, that his nature was crudest and most bestial ;('^and that only after thousands of years he developed the spiritual freedom which makes him man^ Is it likely then that to this general rule, confirmed by every ex- perience of life and history, the history of Chris- tianity should prove to be the only exception ? Can it be that the perfect, pure realization of its nature existed at the beginning, while all that follows is a i6 Introduction sad degeneration, a senseless error and a disease? I confess that this view seems to me to contradict reason, which thinks and bases its thought on the analogy of experience, as well as on pious belief in the world-ordering providence of God. However, we are told that in this matter, not general presuppositions but certain and scientifical- ly-ascertained facts alone are decisive. Good, let us hold to facts, — real — and not imagined facts. At once, we encounter the troublesome fact, that there is such a variety of answers to the question: What was the content of that " Gospel of Jesus," of which the essence of Christianity is supposed to be the equivalent? A glance at the " life-of -Jesus " literature of the last half century gives one the impression that the old disputed question, which occupied the Apostle Paul (II. Cor. ii, 4) has not yet been settled, but that each author offers a different Jesus, a different Gospel, and a different spirit as the only true one. Is a man not compelled to suppose that these authors are offering their own spirit, their own gospel and their own ideal of Jesus, which they have read into the Gospels and, with pardonable self-deception, con- sidered the outcome of their historical research? No one will marvel at this who knows the nature of our source books, remembering that the changes and progress of the faith of the congregation are recorded in our Gospels, the strata lying one over »nd alongside the other, with the original features The Development of Christianity of its Christ-picture abundantly adorned and re- modeled, beautified by the supernatural and spirit- ualized into the ideal. fWith such a condition of the source books, not one of which goes back to the time of Jesus himself, who would dare attempt to establish with certainty what the historical basis of this vari-colored traditional material was, what Jesus himself actually believed and taught, and what he said and did? If the personality and Gospel of Jesus is an open question, not to speak of it as being the deepest enshrouded point in the entire history of Christianity, one cannot find there- in either a starting point or a norm for a judgment of the essence or of the history of Christianity 7) This difficulty of attaining certainty naturally does not shut off the attempts to see how close, at least, we may come to historical probability in these things. I, too, have attempted this, and the re- sults of my investigations I offered in those lectures on Christian Origins which were delivered two years ago and have since appeared in print. I may, therefore, be permitted to refer to those lectures for more detail. To-day I wish to pick out and em- phasize only this much: If anything of the Gospel story may be held as valid because of good evidence, it is this, that the kernel of the Gospel of Jesus was the (announcement of the coming of God's kingdom;) and that, in common with his people and his contemporaries, he understood the same to be the catastrophe to be brought about by the mirac- Introduction ulous power divine which was to make an end of the existing miserable conditions in the world, and bring about a new order of things in the people of Israel, favornig the poor and the pious, — (^the early realization, therefore, of the apocalyptic ideal of the rulership of God.^ [The presupposition, how- ever, to this expectation of an immediate rulership of God, was the essentially pessimistic view of the present world as a godforsaken, unredeemed con- dition under the rulership of those powers inimical to God, — the devil and the demons, — whose ac- tivities were seen in all diseases of the body and of the soul, and whose instruments were all the oppressors of the pious — the godless Jews and the heathen Romans^ This crass dualism had been strange to the earlier religion of Israel. In the last centuries, however, [under the influence of the Per- sian religion, and amidst the perplexities of the po- litical fate of the Jew^s, it had arisen as a natural reflection of a pessimistic mood which despaired of "^ things as they were and expected salvation only through destruction of the present and the begin- ning of a new world created by miraculous divine power.7 This dualistic and pessimistic mood gave rise to various kinds of apocalyptic writings as well as to the various messianic, popular movements with re- ligious and political motives, which came before and after the time of Jesus. In Galilee, during the first years of our present reckoning, Judas Gaulonites 19 y The Development of Christianity arose and gathered a mass of followers about his messianic banner. Then, in Judea, John the Baptist appeared with his message of the coming rulership of God and his cry for repentance. Jn his footsteps walked Jesus and Hterally repeated John's announce- ment of the coming rulership of God.J This alone makes it certain that he and the Baptist and all other Jews defined this idea in the same way. Noth- 1 ing was further from his purpose than the found- / ing of a new religion, the proclamation of a new '^ God, and the abrogation of the Law and the Proph- ets. Rather did he [Jesus] desire to fulfil them; he was inspired by the faith that the God of his fathers would not delay longer in this time of direst need,! to fulfil the promises of the Prophets to His people"; that there would be an end of the present miserable condition of the world, and that God would bring about the longed-for salvation and time of redemption. The preparation of His people for this period, Jesus recognized to be his mission, as John the Baptist had before him. But the man- ner in which he sought to carry out this mission was entirely new. He did not make use of that threatening note, preaching the terrible judgment day of God, but his was the note of a pitying, con- soling and elevating lovd He pitied the mass of the people whom he saw mishandled and rejected like sheep that had no shepherd. His heart was moved by the dire need of his people and his heart pointed the way of his prophetic mission. He did 20 Introduction not wish to separate himself from the unclean, sin- ful mass of the people as did the proud Pharisees and the timorous Essenes/nor did he, like John, fly into the desert and wait until the masses came out to him, but he followed men everywhere :;he sought them in the schools on the sabbath and in their work during the week; he had himself called to the bedside of the sick, in order to heal body and soul by his refreshing word, and he did not even disdain to sit at the hospitable table in company with the disreputable tax-gatherers. This love that went out toward people, that sought and saved them, — this is what was new and peculiar in the activity of Jesus, a revival of the best spirit of the Prophets, of a Hosea and a Jeremiah, intensified, however, by the need of the times, so badly out of joint and so feverishly strained by apocalyptic ideas. Heroic faith in the nearness of the divine deed of salvation and the redeeming rulership of God, and the urging of a benevolent love to begin with the salvation and redemption of the individual, were most intimately united in Jesus. (^With the eye of trusting love, he saw, even in the sinners rejected by the righteous, a glimmering spark of good ; in their longing for salvation, he found the possibility of the same, and the demand upon him who had it in his power not to extinguish this glimmering wick, but rather to fan It by a seeking love, by a consol- ing word and a healing deed./ The obverse of this was that he judged and condemned with sharp 21 The Development of Christianity words the self-righteous who boasted of their ex- ternal legality and were merciless toward those laxer in observance. (Against this system of legal deed-righteousness, against the seeming religion of external ceremonial practices, purifications, denials and sacrifices, — against these, Jesus used sharp words, because for him religion was truth only las an attitude of the heart, evidencing itself in the moral performance of the good.") In truth that was a new spirit, the germ of a new religion which was as far beyond the Judaism of law, as it was beyond the lawless, naturalistic heathenism. Both are sur- passed by the religion of sacred love which judges the sin and saves the sinner, which recognizes the will of God as the unconditional law, but carries it inward, so that it becomes one's own voluntary driving power of love. In so far one might well say that in the personal, pious attitude of Jesus, the religion of divine-humanity, the indwelling of the divine in the human spirit, existed in germ. Now this must not be understood as though this new re- ligious principle, the first dawn of which we per- ceive in the activity of Jesus as savior, had been in the consciousness of Jesus himself, at once com- plete knowledge finding clear utterance in his teach- ings, so that the Gospel proclaimed by Jesus would correspond exactly to the true essence of Christian- ity. In order to make any such statement, one would have to close one's eyes to the most apparent of facts, 92 Introduction [rhe fact is that the apocalyptic expectation of the catastrophic coming of the rulership of God, shared by Jesus, had as its presupposition the crassest dual- ism of the distant God and the actual world as god- forsaken and ruled by demonic powers — a dualism which is the very opposite of that intimate connec- tion of God and men which is essential to the Chris- tian religion of divine-humanity. . The fact is that, according to the apocalyptic no- tion of God's kingdom shared by Jesus,[that king- dom was to be limited to the Jewish people ; there- fore, Jesus regarded himself as sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel only : the heathen are excluded from this kingdom or can become partak- ers of its blessings only as dogs get the crumbs from the tables of their masters. And as this king- dom is a Jewish national one, so also is it an earthly condition of happiness, promising the pious that the sacrifices brought now will be repaid a hundred- fold by corresponding possessions. Such an earthly, and eudsemonistic hope of reward might be a strong motive for ethical deeds, but it could not be a peculiarly pure and sublime one. j That such a Jewish-earthly kingdom of God differs from the universally human and spiritual realm of God of our Christian faith is certainly clear and could only have been overlooked so often because the latter was involuntarily read into the older GospelsT/ (The Gospel of John, however, does place the latter in- stead of the former.) It cannot be said that this 23 The Development of Christianity is a difference merely of theoretical point of view without practical religious and moral importance, ffor the apocalyptic expectation of the early end of the present condition of the world and of the mirac- ulous catastrophe of the coming world naturally produced a tendency to flight from the world and hindered participation in the regular observances and tasks of human society: hence the undeniably ascetic features of the ethics of the Gospels, the demand to abstain from private possession, from working at one's trade, and from family ties, its in- difference to State and law and culturej For that time of the great crisis and the powerful struggle of the new ideals against the ancient world, those demands may have been natural and necessary, but it is difficult to understand how the permanent high- est ideal of Christian ethics is to be found in flight from the world and enmity to culture. Finally, it is an indubitable fact that Jesus did lay strongest stress upon theLinner conversion of the law into a moral attitude, though he did not thereby give up the authority of the entire Mosaic lawH but he did, rather, confirm its validity to the last iota ; he taught that one ought to do the moral deed and not omit the ceremonial. If the Christian Church had rested with this view of Jesus, it would never have come to that autonomous morality which alone is adequate for a spiritual religion. \ It is the merit of the Apostle Paul (who is to-day considered the destroyer of the Gospel of Jesus) that Christian- 24 Introduction ity was freed from the fetters of the Mosaic law and became conscious of the freedom of the chil- dren of Godj Whoever considers, in open and unprejudiced manner, these actual elements of Jesus's announce- ment of the kingdom and his ethics according to the first three Gospels, cannot marvel at the further fact that the object of the faith of the Christian congregation, from its very inception, never was [the earthly teacher Jesus, but ever and exclusively it was the heavenly spirit of Christ — the Son of Man who, according to the apocalyptic expectation, was to come upon the clouds of heaven to set up his kingdom, or the Son of God and Ruling Spirit, who, according to Paul, was sent from heaven in a hu- man body to redeem the sinful world by his death and resurrection, or the Logos and only-born Son of God, who, according to John, brought life and light to the world through his coming in the flesliJ In the last analysis, all of these are but different shades of expression (of the personified ideal of God's humanity, which was from the beginning and is to-day the kernel of the Christian faitlV That this profound idea of God-humanity, which is a uni- versal truth forever realizing itself throughout the whole of human history, (^was conceived in the mythical form of a one-time and unique super- natural miraculous figure, was certainly a defect, a veiling of the actual truth, but it was in no wise a degeneration, a destruction of some better knowl- 25 The Development of Christianity edge that had been; it was, rather, for the first childish stage of development of Christianity, an inevitable form of garment, an essential pictorial envelope of a purely spiritual truth.) This envelope was inevitable because the new idea of God-human- ity — the indwelling of the divine in the human spirit — stood in entire contradiction to that pre- supposed crassly dualistic view of the world which was accepted by the entire ancient world, Jewish and heathen. (To bridge over this contradiction, to overcome the ancient dualism, not only practically in the symbols of faith and observance, but also the- oretically in the philosophizing on the truth of God-humanity, — that was the task which could not be performed precipitately, but its performance required the entire development of Christianity through milleniums and still requires itf) (it is also indisputable that Greek philosophy helped in the performance of this task; that the thoughts of Platonism and Stoicism, of neo-Pyth- agoreanism and Alexandrianism, had more or less direct influence on Christian theology. One will have to go further, even, and dare to propose that the wisdom of thoughtful India had its influence, too, upon Christianity.^ Not only the legends which Luke relates of the childhood of Jesus have most surprising analogies in the Buddhistic and Brah- , manic legends, but even the central idea of the Christian faith, wherein Deity becomes human and / humanity becomes divine, had its home in India, ^ 2(^ Introduction whereas it was entirely strange to Judaism and could be found in Greece only remotely mentioned in individual myths and certain philosophic specu- lations. Granted, then, that the origin and develop- ment of Christianity was due not only to the con- tributions of the Jewish prophets, but that the wise men of India and of Greece have contributed, I still cannot see why that should be considered a destruc- tion of Christianity. " Is he the God of the Jews only? Is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also ", Paul said in his Epistle to the Romans (iii, 29). (Ought we not to be ashamed to remain so far behind this insight of the Apostle that we recognize as divine truth only that which comes from the Jews, while all of that which comes down from our own Indo-Germanic an- cestors is at once cast aside as godless error?) a, at least, confess that that seems to me a mucli too narrow and petty view of divine revelation and world-government which confines these to the Jew- ish people, while the noble Indo-Germanic race, our own ancestors, are held to be entirely godforsaken and all their wise men and deepest thinkers outside of the Christian sphere are held to be merely spirits of error.// Attempts have been made to sliow that this in- fluence of Greece upon the Christian Church was a disastrous one by demonstrating its consequences in a series of appearances of disease, which were la- beled with such names as " intellectualism, mys- 27 The Development of Christianity; ticism, moralism." /Now, I think that the intel- lectual, the mystical, and the moral, — that is to say thoughts, emotions, and movements of the will, — belong together in Christianity as in every other religion, but that the special temperament of in- dividuals and of nations naturally puts the em- phasis now on one, and again on another./ In itself, there is nothing symptomatic of disease in this in so far as one-sided tendencies are mutually com- plementary, as always has been the case with Chris- tianity. The Greeks were peculiarly well tempered for the philosophical development of Christianity. Can this be considered an injury? Or must it not rather be regarded as a necessity if Christianity wished to enter into the conflict with the ancient world of cuhure? If the Ritschlian theologians of to-day permit themselves to scold the Church fath- ers because they were metaphysicians, it is first necessary to prove that the Christian religion was capable of existence or is^still, without a metaphys- ical view of the world. , It is true that the Greek theologians did lose themselves, partially, in all too subtle and artificial speculations, but the blame for that is to be put less upon Greek philosophy than upon the most unphilosophic mythology of the be- lief of the community, which was as difficult then to harmonize with reasonable thinking as it is to- day/ We must be particularly careful not to over- look that, upon the plane of the ancient dualistic view of the world, the truth of the Christian belief 28 Introduction of /God-humanity could only be maintained by sav- ing it in the miraculous world beyond and dressing it in the mystery of a half-mythical, half-philo- sophical dogma./ In this shell it remained pre- served until the souls were so ripened that they could grasp the pure and universal truth without its covering. In the meantime the pious found their way out of the dilemma by making certain of the presence of the divine in immediate emotion and in the symbolic presentation of the ceremonial. Such was the nature of that " mysticism "/without which it is impossible to think of any living religion, and least of all a God-humanity./ Whatever there was left of the magical in this — and some of it certainly was there — corresponded to the unripe, childish stage of development which could only visualize the presence of the divinely-spiritual by sensuous means. This can only be called disease by such as hold that the childish non-differentia- tion between the spiritual and the sensual is, in gen- eral, a disease. As far as the reproach of " moralism " is con- cerned, the word could only be used in the sense of reproach where morality was /separated from all motivation by religious convictions and emotions. Nothing of this shows itself in ancient Christianity. On the contrary, from the very beginning, the de- velopment of Christian morality maintained the closest connection and an exact parallel with the dogmatic thinking and the ceremonial mysticism, j 29 The Development of Christianity The supernatural sanctity of the ascetics, who thought that the ideal of men alUed with God could only be striven for through separation from the godless world and the mortification of all sensual life, — this saintliness corresponded to the super- natural mystery of the dogma and to the ceremonial action. Throughout, the moral power of their as- ceticism was religious in motive and, if we of to- day call their action one-sidedly negative and fruit- less, /we must never forget that they were sur- rounded by the decadence of the ancient world and that they were serious in their attempt to live up to the literal Gospel ideal of perfection. The Roman world took over all of the Christian- ity of the Greek Church — dogma, ceremonial, and morals — but it also added a new and important side, (with that power of deed and inborn ruler- ship, the Romans have built up Christianity so that the organized community of the Church has re- peated the pattern of the Roman State. ; The earthly hierarchy of Church offices, reaching the apex in the Roman Bishop, was intended to be the image and instrument of the heavenly hierarchy, — that world of spirits reaching its apex in Christ. As the God-man of dogma was above the men of na- ture, so his earthly organization, the Church of many members arranged hierarchically, stands above the natural world and is in contradiction to that natural world, just as tlie saintly is to the sin- ful nature ; there is at the same time a claim to ruler- 30 Introduction ship over sinful nature, similar to that belonging to the heavenly ruler of the earth-world. The struggle to realize this ideal occupied the mediaeval period; the actual proof that it was unattainable and that its effects were, led to the breach with the earlier churchly forms of Christianity, both in faith and in life. /.The Reformation of the sixteenth century was the decisive turning point of a new epoch of Chris- tianity, not a return to primitive Christianity, for the reformers moved further from its ascetic ideal than the Catholic Church ever did. / This change affected the kernel of the Christian faith : the God- humanity was removed from its ecclesiastical notion of a world beyond and supernatural and was drawn back into a world here of actual human living./ The Germanic spirit felt the immediate presence of the Divine Spirit within itself, and, resting upon this Archimedean point, it began to lift the mediaeval world out of its grooves. At first this change came about immediately in pious self-consciousness cog- nizant of its own freedom in God, thereupon fol- lowed a new formation of the moral world, the family, the cultured society, and the state, which, conscious of their own inner divine dignity, cast off the ecclesiastical fetters. / At the same time the old Church notions of the godlessness of natural man, of the supernaturalness of the divine man, and of his one-time work of salvation, remained in- tact. However, this contradiction between an in- 31 The Development of Christianity tellectual captivity and a practical freedom could not long continue. / IThus, the old-Church Protestant- ism was followed by the new Protestantism which broke with all ecclesiastical dogmas, during the En- / lightenment, but then reflected upon the hidden truths of the Christian religion under these shells of dogma, in order to realize more purely and more J perfectly than before the truth of divine-humanity in the new forms of autonomous thinking and of the moral living of human society. Just this is / the task of present day Christianity as it is pre- sented to us by the natural and entirely logical development of the whole of the history of Chris- tianity. 32 BOOK I DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIANITY TO THE REFORMATION CHAPTER I PAUL AND JOHN APOLOGISTS AND ANTI-GNOSTICS The question has been asked whether the in- fluence of the Apostle Paul has been favorable to the development of Christianity, or whether it has not rather been harmful in its effects. In our day, not a few, even theologians, hold the latter opin- ion. The reproach is made that Paul vitiated the Gospel in that he mixed with it strange material, Jewish and heathen. True, it cannot be denied that Paul's actual teachings of Christ — as a pre-tem- poral being who descended from heaven to earth, assumed human shape, in order to sacrifice himself and die for the sake of the atonement of humanity with God and by his resurrection to overcome death, through his spirit to make man a new man and the heir of eternal life and bring men through sanc- tified actions into community with God — were very foreign to the oldest congregation of disciples. On the other hand, they touch very closely certain heathen notions and customs; the notions of gods who assumed human shape and wandered about on the earth; the myths of the suffering, dying, and resurrecting god, with the mythical customs 35 The Development of CHristiaaity by which each individual partook of the life of the god. Such notions and customs were espe- cially pecuHar to Syria and CiHcia, the regions in which Paul worked as a missionary for fourteen years. Is it not very easy to suppose, then, that what Paul saw and heard in those regions exercised a certain influence on his notion of Christ and Christ's work of redemption? Taking it for granted that this is so, that Paul actually took over that kind of mythical notion and mystical custom which he found prevalent in Antioch, and that he worked it all over in a Christian sense — the ques- tion we must put to ourselves is: Would that, then, constitute a serious reproach? Two things must first be considered. In the first place, those heathens who were to be, and wished to be converted to Christianity, could do scarcely anything with a Jewish Messiah. There was no understanding and no interest for it, still less for Jewish legal forms of divine worship; and yet as Christians, they needed certain ceremonials of worship and dogmas of faith. From where were these to be taken? What forms of faith and worship could be more easily understood by them than such as attached themselves directly to their own forms of faith and worship? This is per- fectly natural. In the second place — and this is the main point ^ — it must be remembered that Paul did not simply take over these forms of faith and worship, and 36 Paul and John leave them as he took them, but that he trans- formed them into forms and vessels of the new Christian spirit which is equally far above the worship of nature and the worship of the law. " The Lord is the spirit and where the spirit of the Lord is there is freedom." " Christ called ye for freedom, therefore stand fast and be not again harnessed in the yoke of slavery." " Everything is yours but ye belong to Christ." " The spiritual man judges all and is judged by none." These are magnificent words which proclaimed not only the liberation of Christianity from Judaism but became valid for the reformers as the magna charta of the freedom of the Christian man, and they re- main for us, even now, as the shibboleth of militant Protestantism. Furthermore, the conviction that the Lord is the spirit led Paul to the conclusion not only of the freedom of the Christian man but also of his mystical union with Christ, his inspira- tion by the spirit of the Son of God, which is at once the spirit of God. Thus he says: " Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new." " Yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." " For the love of Christ constrain- eth us; and he died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him which died for them, and rose again. There is, therefore, now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life Z1 The Development of Christianity in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death. If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit." These are great words. Surely the heathen knew something about an existence in the Spirit, in God, — something about being full of, and impelled by God. But in what sense did they understand it? Their " enthusiasm " — being in God — was a mys- tical orgy, a wild delirium of the senses, an obses- sion by the spirits of madness, of licentiousness. Now this whole swarm of heathenish demonic spir- its fled and disappeared in the face of Paul's teach- ing of the Lord who is the Spirit, the spirit of truth and of continence and of love. This Spirit does not show itself in the shape of moments of sense- less rapture, but it reveals itself by making new the whole of man from within, transforming him into a divine mortal and urging him to a life pleas- ing in the eyes of God. Never before had that ele- mental power of religious enthusiasm, in and of itself so dangerous, been held in check in such won- derful fashion and changed into a spiritual main- spring of good. And never before was the un- trammeled morality of the God-filled heart raised so far above all merely external legality of a wor- ship of the letter as in the case of the Pauline teaching of the Lord who is the Spirit. In it the miracles of the past and the expected miracles of the apocalyptic future were turned inward, spirit- ualized into a continuous inner experience — into 38 Paul and John an experience of the pious soul itself, of that soul which is suffused of the spirit of Christ, in which all natural selfishness dies, and which elevates it- self to a life for God and in God which, strength- ened by the spirit of Jesus, feels itself to be strong enough amidst all the weakness of the flesh to over- come the world victoriously. In such case, the future kingdom of God, hoped for by the primitive Christian in his messianic be- lief, is a present factor; for it is a reality in the congregation of the faithful, who are moved by the spirit of Christ, who are his body, and who live his actual manner of life on earth. From this view- point, the historical Jesus himself simply appears as the first-born among many brothers, as the proto- type of a humanity united with God. Now I ask: Is this all actually a perversion of Christianity, as is said to-day, so that we must go back from Paul to primitive Christianity — or does it not rather constitute the longest step forward of Christianity in its development into a spiritual religion of hu- manity? I beg of you to consider this question earnestly. Naturally it is true that this move, as every move forward, had to be purchased and was bought at the cost of a keen differentiation of the spirit of Christ from the Christ of the flesh, and in this minimizing of the historical life of Jesus on earth, there was undoubtedly a certain danger that Chris- tianity might evaporate in the play with thought- 39 The Development of Christianity pictures of speculative fancy. With Paul this dan- ger does not really yet appear, for he was held in check by his deeply religious nature in which this spirit of Christ was not merely a mind-picture, but life and truth. With the Gnostics, who have much in common with Paul, the danger became clearly ap- parent. The Gnostics were inclined to follow the lead of Paul; his contrast of spirit and senses, they exaggerated into an irreconcilable contradiction. Hence they could think of Christ only as a purely spiritual being who had never been a mortal man, but who had merely taken on the appearance of human figure; one who had never really died, but only put on the semblance. Thus, doubtless, the union of the divine and the human in actual living, which was the essence of Christian belief, would have been placed in doubt by Gnostic spiritualism; that contrast which Christianity essayed to over- come would have been declared invincible. The Church well knew this danger and therefore fought against Gnostic dualism and docetism. The object was to achieve an alliance in regard to the person of Christ, wherein the two sides, the ideal and the real, became one, insoluble, inner unity. This occurred first in the Christ image of the fourth Gospel, which the Church tradition calls John, and which, without doubt erroneously, it at- tributes to the Apostle himself. This Gospel writer strove to present the life of Christ on earth from the viewpoint that in him the divine Logos, that 40 Paul and John original mediator of all divine revelations, had be- come flesh in the world and in humanity — Jesus the personal revelation of the eternal, ideal Son of God, full of grace and truth. No longer is the death of Christ the only means of salvation, of reconciliation betvi^een God and humanity, as v^ith Paul, but this union of the two, of the divine and the mortal, has been completed in the appearance of the Logos as man, and it is continuously revealed in the entire divine-human life of Jesus. We might express this fundamental thought of the fourth Gospel writer in modern form somewhat as follows: In his image of Christ, he seeks to visualize that religious truth that God does not stay far from man, but dwells in him and would re- veal Himself in and through him, and that, despite the earthly limitation of his mortal nature, man is destined to be, and is capable of being the son of God, the vessel and instrument of the divine spirit, as well as to feel his own power. In a word, it is the idea of divine-humanity, the union of the divine and mortal being by moral self -surrender to God — that cardinal idea of Christianity — in which lies the contrast of what was new in this religion, as against all former religions. That it is which was first brought to clear and new expression in the Gospel of John, and that was never lost and never can be lost to Christianity. It remains the central teaching in the formation of ecclesiastical dogma. But it must not be concealed that the man- 41 The Development of Christianity ner in which this cardinal truth finds expression in the Gospel of John, suffers from the same diffi- culties which became apparent later in ever more oppressive and painful fashion in the formation of Church dogma. Briefly stated, this is the difficulty : In Christ the oneness of the divine and the mortal was to be typically visualized, and yet he was to be placed outside and beyond all the rest of humanity as a divine being incarnated, a divine person de- scended from heaven, never, however, a man. This mythical notion was actually prepared by Paul, and — let us be clear about this too — for its period, it was the inevitable form of presentation of the true idea of the moral process of union of the divine and the mortal; it was unavoidable not only for the congregation of the simple faithful, for whose understanding there is ever the necessity of a sym- bol of the spiritual truth, but it was required equally for the deep thinking teacher of the Church, himself. The reason is simple, when we consider that the presupposition of the acknowledgment of Christian faith was the consciousness of the depth between the divine and the human, a chasm which was first announced by the great Plato; that was the dark foil against which was painted the Chris- tian pronouncement of the union of the divine and the mortal. Therefore, this new truth could only be understood in this form: that a unique, divine person from above entered into the world in the 42 Paul and John form of a heavenly and earthly being, a combina- tion of God and of man, making a God-man. The Church dogma of the double nature is, in fact, present in germ, in Paul and in John, but with them the mythical shell is transparent and the truth of divine-humanity was to be seen much more clearly than in the later dogma. The Christ of John says, in his farewell prayer, that his own should become entirely one with the Father, as Christ him- self had become one with Him. A little before that he promises all of those who love God and keep His commandments that the Father will come to them and dwell in them; that is, that they should become such God-filled men as Christ himself is. Thus, though he is called the unique-born Son of God, Christ appears, at bottom, to be the type of pious man, God-filled. All the messianic idea is here more completely done away with than in Paul. Christ is king not only in the messianic Jewish realm, but in the realm of truth, and his kingdom is not to come in the future in miraculous fashion, but it is actually present in the congregation of the faithful, by whom God is worshipped in spirit and in truth. Now, compare these grand thoughts and expressions of the Gospel of John, this truly spir- itual view of Christianity, with the words of the older tradition, with such words as the unbreak- able validity of the Mosaic law, or with those about eating and drinking in the messianic kingdom with 43 The Development of Christianity the patriarchs, or with those about the fabulous fecundity in the messianic kingdom, where every vine will bear a thousand bunches, and every bunch a thousand grapes, and every grape yield a thou- sand measures, an expression which the old con- gregation attributed directly to Jesus. Compare this naive Jewish idea with the spiritual idea of Christianity in the Gospel of John, and then judge which side has the higher truth, then judge whether the Gospel of John is of less value, as some people dare to maintain to-day, judge whether it is not in fact, just as Clement of Alexandria, and Luther and Schleiermacher said, the crown oi the Gospels, in truth the " spiritual Gospel." In the direction indicated by Paul and John, the Apologists and Church fathers of the second and third centuries developed this idea of Christ into a worldly view which was well suited to win over and to convince the cultured among the heathen. The fundamental thought of the Apologists is one taken over from John; that Christianity is the full revelation of the divine Logos, which had scattered the seed corns of truth previously, not only in the Jewish prophets, but also in the sages of Greece, and which had brought the fulfilment and perfec- tion of these partial seeds of truth, in Christ. The sense of this Logos-dogma, as taught by the Apol- ogists and Church fathers, is completely misunder- stood if it is thought that they wished to change 44 Paul and John the Gospel into a philosophic cosmology and drag it down to the service of a knowledge of nature. What do these Church fathers care about knowl- edge of nature? Were they scientific in our mod- ern sense ? They were far removed from any such thing. Their purpose was to fit Christianity into the frame of an all-embracing worldly view, es- pecially of a tcleological consideration of history. And therewith they desired to make clear the pecul- iar newness and superior truth of Christianity as against previous religions, while at the same time maintaining its great antiquity, its reaching back into the very beginnings of time, even to the origins of human nature. Thus they did not minimize Christianity, but rather they showed a large knowl- edge of its universal importance as a world religion and they also showed a noble breadth in their open and joyous recognition of the good in the pre- Christian world. In this sense, for example, Justin, the Apologist and martyr, said, about the middle of the second century, that all of those who ever lived in com- munity with the Logos, such as Heraclitus and Sophocles, were Christians before Christ, even though their times considered them to be atheists. That is a beautiful expression which needs to be taken to heart to-day. The Apologists are fully conscious of the new and saving significance of the Christian revelation. Tatian gratefully bears wit- ness that the Christian truth was for him a release 45 The Development of Christianity from miserable slavery, a release from the fetter by which he found himself hemmed, — the fear of the demons, of death, and of the dark fate of this world as well as of the uncertainty and insecurity of human knowledge demonstrated by the contradic- tion of the philosophic systems, each one warring with the others. The Apologists call the Christians the new third people which stand above the Jews and the heathen and represent the new species of humanity to which belongs the future. In fact, there are tones of deepest Christian mysticism sounded by the author of the letter to Diognetus when he describes the Christian life in its contrast between internal and external, so that the Christians externally are modest, low, poor and oppressed, while internally they are rich in God, free from the world, joyful in hope, patient in sorrows, active in love. Thus, there was really a sound, broad, truly Christian view of the world worked out by the Apologists. As the Apologists in the narrower sense of the word had undertaken the defense of Christianity against the heathen world, so Tertullian and Ire- naeus, the Church fathers, made it their task to defend the ecclesiastical creed of the congregation against the Gnostics. This new front placed the whole consideration of heathen culture and philoso- phy in a polemical position, for the heretical gnosis was considered its fruit; in particular, Tertullian, that African of temperament, who might be called 46 Paul and John an ancient Rousseau, being such a bitter enemy to all culture, was great in these polemics and regarded with hatred and scorn the entire Greek and Roman culture as the play of the demons, which would be consumed by the fire of judgment. Not even a Socrates found favor in his eyes. And yet that same Tertullian who opposed all culture for the sake of the one truth of Christian revelation, was he who said so well that the human soul is by nature a Christian woman, and that at bottom Christianity was nothing more or less than human nature re- covering its original health and purity which had been perverted by the demons. Irenaeus worked out this thought later into a sort of Christian philos- ophy of history, which revolves about that deep thought that Christianity is the completion of crea- tion, the fulfilment of the destiny which was in the beginning placed by the divine Logos in humanity ; namely, that it partakes of the divine life. Ac- cording to Irenaeus, Adam, the first man, did not harmonize entirely with his divine destiny, there- fore he succumljed to sin and guilt in order to be- come conscious of his imperfection and to become receptive of his higher destiny. According to the view of Irenaeus, the history of humanity was a divine education of our species, following various steps of revelation which repeat one another in in- dividual men, according to their period, and which have found completion and termination in the Logos incarnation of Christ. That was the second crea- 47 The Development of Christianity tion in which, for the first time, the true, divine nature of humanity became reaHzed. At the same time, the reaHzation was accompanied by a hbera- tion from the God-opposing powers of sin and death which had held man in their clutch. In Christ, the second Adam, there is achieved the harmonious uni- ty of all that had been separate before; God steps into humanity, God is recognized by it, and man becomes conscious of his divine being. " Therefore did the Son of God and Logos be- come man, so that man, receiving the Logos, and receptive of its adoption, might become the Son of God. By his birth as a man, the eternal word of God keeps its promise of the heritage of life for those who had inherited death by their natural birth. By his anguish, however, the God-man con- quered the enemy of humanity, destroyed destruc- tion and ignorance, and gave to life, truth, and per- petuity.'' According to Irenaeus, sah^ation was brought about by the divine Logos, the eternal ideal of hu- manity, appearing in Christ as a man, and in his life and death was typically realized the human destiny to communion with God, Therewith did he release in the human species that power by which it might escape from the prison of its temporal nature and lift itself to the true life in God. This was a Chris- tian philosophy of history which stood far above the mythical fantasies of the Gnostics; in many ways it remnids us of modern thinking, such as 48 Paul and John Lessing's idea of the education of the human race. It is, however, true that even in Irenaeus there are to be found the na'ive hopes of the oldest Church, such as that of the sensuous glories of the chiliastic kingdom of Christ on earth, the spiritual interpreta- tion of which he earnestly avoided. Herein, as in their freer attitude toward tradition altogether, Clement and Origen, the Alexandrian philosophers of religion, differed advantageously from the de- fenders of the ecclesiastical rules of faith. 49 CHAPTER II CLEMENT AND ORIGEN THE ALEXANDRIANS For centuries Alexandria had been the classic spot for the reconciliation of Greek thought with oriental faith. It was there that, about the begin- ning of our era, the Jewish philosopher. Philo, sought to bring about a connection between Jewish law and Stoic ethics — between Moses and Plato — by means of the allegorical interpretation of Scrip- ture. At the beginning of the third century, it was the task and object of the Catechist School in Alexandria, the first Christian theological institu- tion, to bring about a similar connection between Christian faith and Greek wisdom. There Clement, the Christian philosopher, taught Christian, Jewish, and even heatlien pupils and attempted to base, as well as to explain Christianity, philosophically. As Philo had found in the divine Logos, the unity of the Old Testament revelation and philosophic reason, so the same idea served Clement as the foundation of the philosophy of the history of religion, which makes Judaism and Hellenism the steps leading up to Christianity. The divine Logos 50 Clement and Origen which had enlightened man from the beginning (the Gospel of John had taught this too J had not only enlightened Moses and the Prophets, but, according to Clement, it had been effective among the heathen and awakened the wise men of Greece, giving them philosophy as a guide to righteousness. Jewish prophecy and Greek philosophy were both the pre- paratory means of education for the divine truth of the Gospels. In Christ appeared the whole truth, in Him all former seeds of truth were ripened and became the common possession of humanity. Clement says : " The beginning of light put every- thing into the light, now all is Athens, all is become Hellas." Compare that with Tertullian's expres- sion : " What have Athens and Jerusalem in com- mon, what the Platonic Academy and the Church? We have no further need of a desire for knowledge since Jesus Christ, and no further need of scientific research since the Gospels." Compare these two expressions and you have before you the width of the chasm between the optimistic and the pessimistic notion of the relation of Christianity to culture and science — an opposition which has continued to our own day. Many as there may be on the side of TertuUian, I believe that we hold with Clement. As Clement regarded the history of religion as an education of humanity from an imperfect to a perfect knowledge of truth, so the development of Christian living, regarded from the same viewpoint, appears to be progress from mere faith, conviction, 51 The Development of Christianity through to complete knowledge. While he does hold faith to be the general basis for all salvation, at the same time above faith stands knowledge, the gnosis which understands the content of faith and is able to explain it on the basis of reason. There- fore, as an indispensable aid, philosophy belongs to it ; not that the theologian, the Christian gnostic, has to hold to one certain philosophic system; no, he is to choose the best from all systems. In fact, by busying himself with philosophy, he ought to acquire the ability to think through spiritual things and to recognize the deeper meaning of the tradi- tional faith. It is this knowledge mediated at least by philosophy, if not directly originating in philosophy — it is this knowledge which Clement seeks to harmonize with traditional Church beliefs by the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. What he really brings is a very free criticism which hides behind the fiction that the allegorical inter- pretation had continued by means of a tradition which had been conserved as the secret of a narrow circle, but which in the end may be traced back to the Apostles. It is a fiction, but it is character- istic that even for Clement such a need should exist, that the truth as he understood it had to be veiled by a mysterious and ancient revelation. It was not different with the Neo-Platonists and Neo-Pythag- oreans. According to Clement, the object of the gnosis is not God, but the divine Logos. God Himself is not 52 Clement and Origen knowable. He is not thinkable under any name or any predicate. True, we do use beautiful names for God in order to avoid erroneous notions, but not as positive expressions for His being, which is far too high and too sublime for finite terms. For the Christian, however, this nature of God is not un- knowable in every respect ; it reveals itself through the divine Logos, the instrument and image of God. By this Logos, Clement understood, on the one hand, the universal workl-building and world- governing reason in the sense of Stoic monism ; one might say it is God from the side of His activity in the world as creative principle. On the other hand, agreeing with Philo, he understood it to be a being which differed in certain respects from God, His Son who first gave us natural life, as the mediator of the creative omnipotence of God, and who then appeared as our teacher, in Christ, in order to give us eternal life through knowledge of the divine will. He is the source of all divine revelation in the natural world, in the moral and spiritual world, and in the Christian knowledge of truth. Thus Christ is the prototypical appearance of that divine principle of the true and the good which was active from the beginning in the world — a principle w^hich completes the divine destiny of the education of humanity from the beginning througli all history. Preparatory steps of this education are found in Jewish prophecy and heathen philosophy. It was completed in Christianity, but there, not to the same 53 The Development of Christianity extent in all, achieving perfection only in the Chris- tian who knows, the Christian gnostic. It is said of him that he is no longer driven by fear and hope as the simple Christian whose belief is based on authority; but, in knowledge and love of God, he raises himself above all earthly things and, being himself of the succession of Christ, becomes here the godlike man freed from all low affects. It is not to be denied that this ideal of the Chris- tian gnostic bears a very close relationship to the Stoic ideal of the wise man, as portrayed by Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus ; thereupon is based the reproach of Greek intellectualism which has been cast at the Alexandrine Fathers. In all fair- ness it must be remarked that the Stoic ideal finds here a Christian deepening through the love of God and the imitation of Christ. Now that is not in- tellectual, but Christian thinking. And I do think, also, that this Alexandrine ideal by reason of its freedom from the authority of tradition and its in- dependent, autonomous, religious knowledge and moral conduct of life, is in fact an ideal which maintains its full truth and strong justification in our own Christianity. It seems to me that when the Alexandrine Fathers set up this ideal, they did not pervert Christianity; but, from their high prophetic watch tower, they looked out toward the future development of Christianity; from a distant past, they reached out their hands toward the great spirits of modern times, toward Lessing and Kant, 54 Clement and Origen who found also the autonomous, religious and moral personality to be the ideal of human destiny. Therefore, we ought to cherish a sympathetic rever- ence for the Alexandrine Fathers and not endeavor to lower them by derisive blame. Origen was the most celebrated of the disciples of Clement. In his eighteenth year, he became the successor of Clement in the Catechist School of Alexandria. Up to that time he had busied himself with the science of language and with scriptural exegesis. Among his pupils there were gnostic heretics and heathen philosophers, and therefore he was forced to make closer acquaintance with phil- osophy; for this reason he attended the school of philosophy conducted by Ammonius Sakkas, the Neo-Platonist. Concerning the success of the phil- osophical studies of Origen, Porphyry reports that while Origen did make great progress in philosophy, as a Christian he falsified all the good that he had learned, in that, while he Hellenized his teaching of God and the phenomena, at the same time he substi- tuted foreign myths for the Hellenic material. Origen's teaching was, in fact, a mixture of Christi- anity and philosophy. While philosophy served him as a means of defense for and basis of Christianity, undoubtedly it did also have a determining influence upon the content of his credal teaching. It ideal- ized the traditional notions of the faith of the con- gregation and transformed them into philosophic thoughts which were in part very distant from the 55 The Developmeot of Christianity original mythical sense of the congregational tra- dition. On the other hand, the philosophic ideas which he took from Greece were bound up with the tradition of the congregation so that naturally such a mixture seemed, to a man like Porphyry, to be a falsification of the Hellenic ideas. But by this very alliance of philosophic thinking with the images and legends, popular beliefs. Origin became the founder of theological dogmatics (the task of which always was to harmonize the Christian faith of tradition with the spirit and, as far as possible, with the construction of the present age). The Christian faith could only overcome ancient culture and attract the philosophers by entering into some form of Greek speculation. On the other hand, the ancient culture could only be preserved for later ages at the price of an alliance with Chris- tian faith. If the necessity for such a historical process be recognized, there can be no reproach against the Church fathers that the product of this mixture did become a very imperfect expression of Christian truth, one which could not possibly make pretension to infallible authority. Origen never did make any such pretension. This claim was made afterward when the theological dicta of official councils were fixed by very highest sanction and were transformed into ecclesiastical and civic doctrinal law. Then the weakness became ap- parent, but Clement and Origen are innocent in the matter. They had no such intention. They dif- 56 Clement and Origen ferentiated between a theological gnosis of the progressives in the congregation and the simple religious faith of ordinary Christians. Although they did hold the free, scientific knowledge of faith to be higher than unknowing acceptance, yet they were far from desiring the transformation of any deduced formulae of scientific speculation into articles of faith. Origen gives us these golden words on the sub- ject : " What we consider especially high, the ideas of the philosophically cultured, we dare to present in our public utterances only when we know that the majority of our listeners are persons of insight ; we hold back the deeper things when the auditors do not seem to stand upon the proper plane of insight and seem rather to be in need of the milk for in- fants." How much conflict and confusion would have been spared the Church if she had conserved this principle of wisdom and patience, instead of forcing all under the yoke of dogma. For Origen, too, the veil behind which he hid the opposition be- tween philosophic thinking and Church tradition, was that age-old customary allegory which was first converted into an actual system by him. As the body is to the soul in man, and the soul is to the spirit, so in Holy Writ the literal sense is to the moral sense, and this latter to the spiritual sense. The latter contains much unworthy of God and use- less for salvation, for example: the legends of crea- tion in which God Himself laid out the world as a 57 The Development of Christianity garden; or the legends of Paradise and the Fall; or of the bodily, visible converse of God with the patri- archs. These legends, all, cannot be believed literally because they would drag God down into the domain of mortality. He is convinced, too, that some of the Gospel stories can only be understood as allegories and he based his spiritual interpretation in such fash- ion that it reminds one of the modern theory of myths. " The evangelists have not actually under- stood many of the extraordinary deeds of Jesus and have given purely spiritual things in the form of stories; they preferred the external to the spiritual truth, so that not seldom they preserved the spiritual truth in a measure in the garb of untruth." That is a deep thought. With it compare Plato who charac- terizes the myths of his popular religion as '' noble untruth," in so far as under the garb of poetry there lies hidden a deeper truth which is compre- hensible to the great mass only in this form. This judgment upon the mythical in popular religion, in which the Alexandrian theologians coincide in prin- ciple with Plato, seems to me to deserve more atten- tion to-day than it usually receives. There would not be so much dispute for or against the literal truth of myths if it were remembered that that is not the question, after all; they are merely dresses, poems, in which there lies hidden a deeper spiritual meaning. Regard for a moment the doctrinal structure of Origen, — what might be called the first Christian dogmatics. 58 Clement and Origen According to Origen, if we are to know God as far as it is possible for us, then we must lay aside His purely spiritual being, everything which might be an imperfection ; before all things, then, human affects, finite changes, and inner contradictions. There can be no division in God between goodness and righteousness, but righteousness is nothing else than order in the evidencing of goodness. — The omnipotence of God must always be thought of as directed by His wisdom, so that He can do nothing unreasonable; the content of His activity is at all times bounded and defined by this limitation. Again, he offers a statement bearing great conse- quences, namely: the one in which divine omnip- otence is identified with the reasonable world order, so that one cannot think of it as an unhmited activity or an activity in which there is the possi- bility of everything absurd, as is the popular notion. The omnipotence of God is the omnipotence of perfect, reasonable spirit, through and through guided by reasoned thoughts which reveal them- selves in the ordered and unbreakable laws of the world order. The revelation of God is mediated by the Logos which is *' the eternally generated son who differs personally from the Father, who is subordinate to Him and is at the same time a par- ticipator in His eternal divine being/' Origen made the Logos more decidedly independent of God than had formerly been the case, a separate person- ality. That was an entirely natural consequence 59 The Development of Christianity of the longstanding identification of the Logos with Jesus in the Church faith. Yet it was a fateful move, this personification by which was made a beginning of all of those deduced speculations concerning the inner Divine Being, — speculations which led to the manifold contradictions in the dogma of the Trinity, concerning which we shall have more to say later. That same relationship of equality of being and of dependence holds in the relationship of Son and Spirit. This, too, is an independent hypostasis, subordinate to both, yet di- vine in being; so that the One Divine Being divides Itself into three divine hypostases differing in activity, three hypostases which bear the relation of three concentric circles to one another. The activity of the Father permeates the entire world of being; the activity of the Son includes all reasoning creation; the activity of the Spirit is concerned with the saints of the Christian congregation. Such is the so-called modalistic or economic dogma of the Trinity. As power, God is being in all being, as reason in everything reasonable, as goodness in the saints of the congregation. Following the Bible, the Church before and after Origen considered the creation of the world as something begun in time. Origen cannot accept this because it would contradict the unchangeable omnipotence of God if at any time there had been no object for God's activity. That would contradict the unchangeability of the Divine Being, which 60 Clement and Origen means that His omnipotence is ever active and His goodness ever going forth. According to Origen, every world has a beginning and an end, but the series of finite worlds is itself infinite, without be- ginning and without end. There was ever a world, though not ours, and there never will be a time when there is no world. The Stoics taught similarly but they thought of an unending return of all that had been, a view held by Nietszche in our own day. But it is not thus that Origen thinks. He holds to a series of worlds following one upon the other — the one rising a step higher than the other, representing thus a teleological development so that every later world brings to ripeness the seeds that were imbedded in the former and itself pre- pares the seed for that which is to follow. That is a splendid thought which, mutatis mutandis, can be compared to the modern theory of evolution. However, what is the driving force of this end- less becoming and disappearing and the reason for the present being of the world as it is? It is not any blind force of nature, not any physical neces- sity, but rather the moral character of creatures as expressed in their freedom. Fichte's idealism re- minds one of this turn in Origen's teaching of crea- tion. Origen explains it more in detail as follows : The inequality of the creatures cannot have its basis in divine righteousness which is a law of equality for all ; the basis must be in the creature. There, however, it is only freedom by which there is any 6i The Development of Christianity possibility of change and of manifold development; that is the reason why the different creatures have different places in the world of phenomena. Origi- nally, all souls are equal, but by reason of their freedom, they grow cold in their love to God ; they become idle in their conservation of the good ; they sink more or less by reason of the weight of their earthly body, and thus they remove themselves fur- ther and further from their divine origin. To each belongs that place in the world corresponding to its moral worth. Here there is no predestination by groundless divine decrees, but each is the forger of his own fortune : the darkness of earthly fate be- comes the light of the moral world order. But how does this teaching, which Origen took over from Plato — whether Indian influences were active here too need not be discussed — harmonize with that Biblical tradition? Origen knows an answer. Paradise was not actually meant, for God would not plant a garden like a peasant. It must be an allegory. And that allegory, of course, stands for the ideal condition of the soul in its celestial pre- existence. Then too, the Fall, as it is described in the Bible, is impossible and unbelievable. That, too, is an allegory and means the individual fall of each soul from the world of mind into the sense world of phenomena. The fallen souls have not lost their divine tendency but — the Church accepts this too, — they have succumbed to the power of the senses 62 Clement and Origen while retaining their essential freedom and the pos- sibility of betterment. Even the demons can better themselves. The whole of the history of the world serves the divine education of humanity for the pur- pose of its spiritual clarification, freedom from the fetters of sensuality and from the tyranny of demons. This education achieves its goal in the incarnation of the Logos. In this matter, too, Origen was the first to fix certain thoughts. He says that the soul of Jesus was at first like other souls, but since it alone clung to the Logos in un- changeable love, it became one with the Logos so that it took on his being; that is, it became deified and thereby the body which it took on participated in supernatural qualities. Incarnation, then, is the eth- ical process by which the divine Logos becomes one with a morally pure human person, which may be regarded as the realization of the universal ideal of God-humanity, differing only in degree from the Logos which dwelt in the prophets and the pious generally. Salvation consists in the imitation of this process in all those who believe in the Gospels : " In Jesus the union of the divine and human nature had its beginning ; by its community with the divine, human nature was to become divine and that not alone in Jesus but in all of those who, by their faith, achieve a conduct of life such as Jesus taught, rising thus to a community with and friendship of God." This sentence shows that Origen not only did not think of an intellectual or even physical 63 The Development of Christianity deification, but did think of an elevation of the human spirit and a union with the divine essentially related to him, mediated entirely by morals. Orig- en did not wish to set up any dogma concerning the work of salvation, but he conceded to various views a relative truth according to the needs of men. He said : '' For different souls, Christ is the way, the physician, the door, the lamb of God, the high priest. On every plane of reasoning creatures is He all things to all. He became flesh in order that those who could not see Him as pure Logos might comprehend Him. Blessed are those men, how- ever, who have arrived at that stage at which they no longer need Christ as physician or Savior, but only as the Logos and the truth." As with Clement, here too, the Christian ideal is that personality which has become autonomous through a moral taking on of the truth. Several steps of the Christian life lead to this goal. First of these is the faith of authority: fear and hope are here the motives of an unfree obedience and here the sacraments are necessary as symbols of the spiritual for the senses. Above that rises the know- ing spirit to the free love of God which strives be- yond the external laws to perfection through moral purification and self-discipline. The souls thus purified arrive in Paradise, that is they achieve the spiritual condition of perfect purity and bliss in unity with God. In this teaching there is no place for any resurrection of the flesh nor for the chil- 64 Clement and Origen iastlc kingdom of Christ on earth. In the place of the latter comes the great thought of a general kingdom of God wherein all peoples Greek and Roman and barbarian shall be united by a common morality and a common religion, a realm in which there shall be no oppression by force, but a free moral community in which all are governed by the Logos and in which those who excel in piety and wisdom shall draw up the others and lead them on to a life pleasing to God. Such is the Christian interpretation of Plato's ideal state and of the Stoic thought of a universal kingdom of God governed by the Logos. As Seneca says, In regno (Dei) nati sumuSj Deo parere libertas est. In this Alex- andrine theology, the sensual mythology and future hopes of early Christianity were as far spiritualized and moralized as was possible on the ground of the Church faith. The best thoughts of Greek philosophy were here united with the moral earnestness and all-encom- passing love of humanity of the Gospels, in such fashion that they became the common property of Christian theology and of the Church. CHAPTER III DOGMA AND MORALS The development of the Church dogmas of the Trinity and the natures of Christ followed the lines of the theology of Origen. Naturally, I cannot tell here the complicated story of the disputes over these dogmas. You can learn them from any history of the Church or of dogma. However, I will attempt to outline the gist of the matter in dispute. The Church sought to visualize, in the person of Christ, the essence of the Christian faith, that is the unity and community of life of God and of men. This gave rise to the question : How is the divine in Christ, designated Logos from the time of the Gos- pel of John, related to the One God, the Creator of the world, the God of the Old Testament re- ligions ? To this, those who emphasized God as the one and only Ruler, and were, therefore, called Monarchians, replied that the Logos is really not a personality differentiated from God, but is His own reason and wisdom which shows its power and demonstrates its activity in individual men, as of old in the Prophets, so especially in Jesus. In another instance, expressed in this way: Father, Son, and Ghost are three forms of revelation in which the 66 Dogma and Morals One Being, the Deity, projected Itself into the world as a phenomenon. This might be compared with an actor who appears in various roles though he be only one person. Originally, the word " person " was the designation of the role of an actor. According to them, the Deity revealed Itself in various roles. But this monarchian view seemed not to give sufficient emphasis to the peculiar dignity and sublimity of Christianity above the other pre- Christian religions. On this account, the Apolo- gists thought of the Logos as originally dwelling in God as His own reason, but then stepping out be- fore the creation of the world and becoming His Son, the mediator of divine revelations and the subject of incarnation. This view, however, re- minds us in too suspicious fashion of the Gnostic phantasies of emanations, outpourings from the essence of the Deity, which did not seem harmoniz- able with the sublimity and unchangeability of the One God of the Old Testament religion. Hence Origen taught : The Logos is a special person differ- ing from the Father, who did not become in time, but He was eternally born of the being of His Father. This, however, must never be regarded as a physical process, but as a purely spiritual and eternal relation of dependence, just as the sun always produces light. Such is the formula of Origen. This formula, too, gave rise to new and long-winded disputes. Arius, the Alexandrian pres- byter, found this notion of an eternally produced (^1 The Development of Christianity Son contradictory and not harmonizable with the strict conception of God. He opined that eternity might be predicated of the One God alone, the One who Himself never became, the Creator of all things, hence also the Creator of His Son, whom He once created in time as His instrument, — created, however, before the creation of the world. Therefore, according to Arius, the Son is not eternal and born of the nature of the Father, but is rather a creature of God, who became in time. In a word, he is ranged in the series of creatures, he is not a divine but a finite being, a creature. Ahhough he was elevated by his moral attributes to a hkeness to God, yet he was not eternal and not equal to God. According to Arius the Son is a kind of demi-God, an antique Eros. This teaching of Arius was condemned as wicked heresy by his Bishop, Alexander, and by the other Egyptian Bishops. On the other hand, many Asiatic Bishops heartily agreed with it. The result was a lively dispute in the Church, particularly in the Orient, whereby a split in the Church threatened. This was very bad for the Emperor Constant! ne. At that time he had turned officially as the first Roman Emperor, to Christianity and placed himself in the position of the protecting patron of the Church. This was not done through piety, but be- cause he found it a useful means for binding all the strands, in his endeavors toward political unifica- tion. This made a unity in the Church necessary 68 Dogma and Morals above all things. This explains why the Emperor tried to end these disputes in friendly fashion at first, admonishing the theologians to harmony and begging them to desist from their quarrels and come to an understanding. He underestimated the bear- ing of this question and his wishes were, therefore, not heeded. Consequently, he called a general gath- ering of the Bishops at Nice in the year 325. He opened the proceedings with an address in which he advised them to come to an agreement. At this Council, finally, after much hesitation, the teaching of Arius was condemned and the identity of the nature of the Son with the Father, homousie, pro- claimed to be the only correct dogma of the Church. The pressure brought to bear by the Emperor may have been the reason why the very great majority of the Bishops agreed to this Nicene confession of faith. But it would be very superficial to trace back the victoiy of the Catholic confession of faith to such an external cause alone. At bottom there were religious interests at stake in this decision ; the name of Athanasius, the great Alexandrian theo- logian, proves that. As a young man, he had been at Nice and during five decades, thereafter, he con- ducted a long and varying struggle as the chief op- ponent of the Arian dogma and defender of the Catholic belief in the homoiisic of the Son. The greatness of this man, who, despite years of calumny, persecution, and fears for his life, of- fered himself in order to achieve the victory of his 69 The Development of Christianity faith, — the greatness of this world-historical char- acter is never properly realized when it is approached with such phrases as *^ dogmatic, quarrehng, Greek intellectualism ! " No, there is no doubt that this man was of a deeply religious nature. His theology was the expression of the Christian belief in re- demption, conditioned by the notions and the grade of culture of his period. His leading thought was this : Christ has put us into communion with God, inasmuch as He was God and became man, so that we, through Him, should become divine. Christ could not have achieved that had He been a creature. For into communion with God one can come only through God. It would be heathenish to worship a creature and, since the Church has been worship- ping Christ in fact for a long time, He must be more than creature. He must be God and eternally produced. The same follows directly from the con- cept of the Father. The unchangeable God must have been ever a Father; therefore, He must have had a Son always. The generation of the Son is not to be thought of as a physical process, but in similar fashion to the sun generating light. In order to impart divine life, the Spirit must Itself be divine, not merely a creature-like being. It follows that the Deity contains three independent hypostases, persons — the Father as the head, the Son and the Spirit, alike in nature but subordinate to Him. As the Logos is true God from eternity, so during the time of His appearance on earth He 70 Dogma and Morals took on true humanity — body, soul and spirit. According to Athanasius, therefore, the oneness of God and of man appeared in prototype in Christ, so that, through Him and from Him, it might be realized in us all through imitation. That is the ever-recurring thought and therein lies revealed the truly religious motive in the teaching of Athanasius. He wished to find the realization and guarantee in Christ of the complete union and community of divine and human beings. Therein he was right and that is the permanent truth of his teaching. In the Arian dogma, that would not have been pos- sible, for there is in fact a being inserted between God and man which was neither God nor man ; there would not be any reconciliation of the opposition of God and man, but the irreconcilabihty would have been made permanent. Arianism is essen- tially a retrogression of Christianity to heathen polytheism and the Jewish opposition of God and man. Such is the tremendous importance of this dis- pute, and one cannot circumvent it by bandying phrases, as though these men had simply been beating the air. No, they knew well what they wanted and they had their deep rehgious interests. Athanasius was right in his struggle with Arius, but we must add that, although he saved Christian- ity in its higher truth from Arianism, yet he could only do that with the presupposition of his own period, a period which thought of the relationship 71 The Development of Christianity between the divine and the human, the spiritual and the natural, in deeply pessimistic fashion. This re- lationship they regarded as an opposition as deep as an abyss and insuperable. Consequently they could not think of the reconciliation of this opposi- tion other than as a pure miracle. That unique experience of the miraculous figure of a God-man is, in fact, an inconceivable mystery, just as Ath- anasius formulated it. This became the more ap- parent v^hen one questioned further: How was it possible for this divine Logos person to merge with human nature into the unity of a single per- sonal life? This question was the axis upon which the strug- gles of the fifth and sixth centuries turned. The Alexandrian theologians of the fifth century sought to think of this union of the two as though the hu- man nature lost itself in its union with the divine nature of the Logos, just as a drop of vinegar leaves no trace when poured into the sea. According to this, the essential part of the divine man would be the divine, whereas the human part would be in- finitesimally small — actually nothing more than a semblance. These men were called Monophysites. The theologians of Antioch protested against them. They did not want to be robbed of the true human- ity, particularly the moral prototype in Christ : there- fore, they did not wish the relation with the divine Logos to be looked upon as a mixture, but as a union of two independent subjects, the divine Logos 72 Dogma and Morals and the human Jesus. In these two views, the full God-manhood was not achieved: in the case of the Alexandrians, because the human side rose to and disappeared in the divine; in the case of the Anti- ochians because the divine and the human were divided into two parts, while the unity of the person, the important thing, was lacking. For this reason, after a long struggle, which need not be detailed here, the Church rejected both of these extreme views, Monophysitism and Nestorianism, as the Antiochian view was called. It did accept the compromise formula suggested by the Roman bishop, Leo. At the Council of Chalcedon, it was decided as Church dogma that, in the person of the God-man, the divine and the human natures were neither separated nor mixed but allied in such a unity that each of these natures, in its own peculiarity, could maintain itself and be active ; in other words, that in the God-man, divine omnipotence, divine omniscience, and divine holi- ness, as well as human weakness, human suffering, human limitations of knowledge and volition, ex- isted at one and the same time. You ask, how is such a thing conceivable? We must confess that it is inconceivable. Such a being as the one con- structed by this formula is not a man of our kind, and therefore it was a correct conclusion that at the close of his dogmatic development through John of Damascus, the human personality of the God- man was denied and only a divine I in him posited. 7Z The Development of Christianity That was logical, but the impossibility of think- ing such a construction became apparent. What remains of the humanity of the God-man, if the human "I" be missing? How can there be hu- man thinking, feeling, and willing, when the " I," the subject thereof, is not there? It must be con- ceded that this is unthinkable. Therewith, I close my short review of the genesis of the Christian dogmas of the Trinity and Christ. We have seen that, while the Church did follow along the lines of right intention in regarding the unity of the divine and the human in the God-man Christ as a type, it failed in its intention and that it could not but fail under the dualistic, pessimistic, and mythical presuppositions and forms of thought of the period. In its way, the Church did bring to expression the idea of God-manhood, but only in the form of a mythical miraculous being In whom the actual human side was made entirely subordinate to the divine. Such is the end of this development of dogma. The worst, however, was that these mysterious formulas of the double nature of Christ and the three persons in God, the One Being, were now elevated to articles of faith to which everyone had to submit if he did not wish to expose himself to the danger of punishment by the Church, — ex- communication; to which may be added that the Byzantine State imposed heavy civil punishments on such as did not conform to the formula. Free thought concerning Christian truth, such as had 74 Dogma and Morals been exercised by Origen and Clement, and such as must be exercised in every period anew in order to be clear in its own mind concerning the truth of its own faith, — such free thinking was stifled by civil and ecclesiastical law; and Christianity was forced into the fetters of ecclesiastical dogmatic authorities. What religious value and what moral power can be granted to a faith which is accepted on the authority of inconceivable formulas? That is a very serious question. In order not to judge unjustly, we must not for- get that in those same centuries in which these theological struggles were so passionately fought out, Christianity showed itself as the power of sal- vation for innumerable pious men. True, the moral life and striving of the Christianity of that day suffers from the same one-sided lack of moderation as found its expression in the theological dogmas. As the human side suffered in the dogma of the God-man, so in the moral ideal the thing sought was not so much the purification and ennoblement of human nature, as an asceticism which mortified the flesh. This is explained by that pessimistic "world-fleeing," tired-of-life mood of that period of ancient decadence. This mood and manner of thought was neither a product of Christianity, as its opponents maintained, nor was it, as many theo- logians assert, smuggled into Christianity from the outside through the destructive influences of Greek philosophy; but an unprejudiced eye sees that this 75 The Development of Christianity mood was found by Christianity everywhere, both in Jewish and heathen circles and that, for that rea- son, Christianity made it a presupposition, a foil to its salvational faith. " For the fashion of this world passeth away," says Paul, and therefore one must not seriously concern himself with it. (I Corinthians, vii.) The old Christians prayed: " May grace come and the world pass away." " The Lord is nigh. He comes to judge the quick and the dead." Upon this, in fact, hinges the faith and hope of the Christians in the beginnings of the Church. In the expectation of the early end of the world, the care for bliss in the world beyond su- perseded all terrestrial interests. That was inevita- ble. Added to this was the deep moral disinte- gration of the heathen world of that day, wherein alongside the crudest brute force and the holding life cheap, there raged unbounded sensuality, by which art, particularly the drama, w^as dragged into the depths. The Christians whose gaze was di- rected at the impending judgment of the world by Christ could only experience utter revulsion at such a society. To them, heathen culture was only the pomp of the devil, as Tertullian named it. Against this heathen sensuality the Christian spirit was to guard itself by a struggle against and mortification of the flesh. The contrast with the environment in- tensified this polemical ascetic tendency of primi- tive Christianity, as was entirely natural. How could Christian sympathies feel for political life 76 Dogma and Morals in a state in which the freedom of the nations, as well as of individuals, was entirely destroyed, in which everything was interwoven with heathen cus- toms and signs and symbols, in that realm which had clearly enough evidenced its enmity toward the Christians by repeated bloody persecutions? In fact, it is no wonder that many of the Christians considered the Roman world-empire to be the em- pire of the devil, engaged in his last desperate strug- gle, soon to be entirely overcome on the judgment day. From the Apocalypse of John, we find this view and we can trace it through the Nicene period to Augustine. This belief in the impending end of the world and the fear of the rulership of demons influenced the moral life of the Christians of the first centuries in many ways, both favorably and unfavorably. The fear of the destructive traps of the demons, which threatened even Christians, spurred them on to a conduct of life which was eternally vigilant and strict in self -discipline. The hope of the early triumph of Christ and of his kingdom inspired them to marvelous heroism in sacrifice, patience, joy in sorrow, and courage in death. But a sane view and an active hand for the moral tasks of terrestrial life were not possible with such a gloomy outlook. What good was it to at- tempt to improve the conditions of society if they were all soon to be subject to destruction? The only valid duty could be the alleviation of the im- The Development of Christianity mediate sufferings of those nearest, through benev- olence and philanthropic acts. This duty the Chris- tians performed, and in such fashion that even the heathen were filled with wonderment. But an all- embracing activity for the sake of the whole of society was missing because of the lack of a positive interest in worldly affairs. Even the family, the nearest communion, seldom found positive moral valuation. It was regarded merely as a necessary evil which the Christian might have, but which it were better for him to disdain. In this sense, Paul expresses himself in I Corinthians, vii; it is the ruling view of the Church fathers and is maintained to this day in the Catholic Church. Though the Church never agreed to so sharp a statement as the rejection of marriage, it did regard celibacy as the higher ideal; at first it forbade a second marriage, at least, to the clericals, and we find this as early as the pastoral letters. Yes, even the Nicene Council almost decided upon the celibacy of the priesthood. Only by the advice of Bishop Paphnutius, the Egyptian, were they kept from it. Though he had been an ascetic from his youth, he urged the continuance of the marriage of the priests on moral grounds. In fact, opponents to this as- cetic immoderateness were not lacking. Clement of Alexandria, for example, was convinced that the Christian could maintain his moral perfection in every position in life, in wealth and poverty, in mar- riage and celibacy. He placed marriage even higher 78 Dogma and Morals than celibacy; for, by reason of its varied moral tasks, it was more serviceable for a complete de- velopment of Christian virtue than celibacy since the unmarried had only to consider the salvation of his own soul. These are purely Protestant thoughts. The representative of the Catholic view was Ter- tullian who had on occasion drawn a very pretty picture of the spiritual communion of Christian couples, but w^ho regarded celibacy so much higher that, in his eagerness to extol it, he put marriage on a par with immorality. Herein, he shows him- self to be a follower of Montanism, that sect in which the enthusiasm of the primitive Christians, the world-estranged hope for the hereafter, reacted fanatically against the beginnings of the worldliness of the Church. When the Church rejected Montanism as heret- ical error, it freed itself from the exaggerations of earliest youth and took account of existing con- ditions. But as it held fast to the principle of the ascetic ideal, it arrived at that peculiar compromise between ideal and reality which found expression in the dogma of double morality — the lower which is commanded for all Christians, and the higher which is recommended to those wlio strive for per- fection. This perfection was understood to be celibacy, voluntary poverty, and frequent fasting. One may well say that this Catholic dogma of the double morality, *' the commands and suggestions," is not upon the high plane of moral idealism which 79 The Development of Christianity decides a man's value upon the basis of his indi- vidual actions or according to the purity of his at- titude, his unselfishness, and goodness. That is conceded, but we do not wish, therefore, to over- look that the dogma of the double morality was not an arbitrary invention of the old Church, rather that it hangs together with the ascetic tendency of primitive Christianity out of which, naturally in the course of its development, there rose the world Church. Think of the command which was given to the rich young man: wouldst become perfect? Then go, sell what thou hast, and give it to the poor; thus shalt thou have treasure in heaven. It was this saying which impelled the pious Antonius, a rich Egyptian, to give away his entire fortune, to desert his home and to retire into the desert where he lived many a long year in a rocky grotto, strug- gling with the demons which came out of the hor- rors of the desert and the fantasies of his own soul which threatened to destroy his peace. This Saint Antony allowed himself to be lured to Alexandria during the persecutions of Maximian, in order that he might thus gain the much-desired martyrdom. On this journey, however, he did not meet death but many friends and admirers who beheld in him the ideal of Christian sanctity. Among these was Athanasius who later became his biographer. The example of Saint Antony found many imi- tators among the world-weary of the fourth cen- tury — men who were weary of the struggles and 80 Dogma and Morals strife of ecclesiastical parties and longed for peace and solitude. In Egypt, retirement from the world became such an epidemic that the cities were de- serted, while the desert was peopled. In the begin- ning, each hermit lived for himself, but finally they moved closer to one another, formed colonies, and thus developed the monaster ial community of monks. Pachomius, a disciple of Saint Antony, who had learned the blessings of discipline in early experience as a soldier, is considered the first founder of a monastery. As conditions of admis- sion into the community, he set up absolute poverty, abstinence from sexual intercourse, and uncondi- tional obedience. By Basilius the Great, it was made the task of the monks to care for the souls of the laity. Fixed rules for an order, however, were first given by Benedict of Nursia for the first West- ern monastery, founded in 529 on Monte Cassino. Therefrom came the Benedictine Order. Benedict softened the ascetic strictness and imposed upon the monks as a duty, besides religious exercises, some form of industry. By the copying of re- ligious and profane manuscripts, by teaching the young, by missionary work, by daily labor, by tilhng and cultivating the land, by building churches and monasteries — by all these activities the monks be- came worthy bearers of culture. But, as I said, that did not happen until later in the Western coun- tries; in the Orient the kernel of monastic life, the object in itself, remained asceticism. At all times 81 The Development of Christianity the monks remained, therefore, the eHte corps of the Church, because they were the ranking representa- tives of the ecclesiastical ideal of sanctity. Since the days of the Montanists, the realization of this ideal by the layman was not expected. The great- est of the theologians, Athanasius, Basilius the Great, Hieronymus, and Augustine, were enthusi- astic spokesmen of the monkish ideal. Monasticism is only the practical expression of that same dualis- tic mode of thinking, that same tendency toward the supernatural, superhuman, supermundane, which found its theoretical expression in the dogma of the supernatural miraculous God-man and of the funda- mental sinfulness of natural manhood. 82f CHAPTER IV CEREMONIAL AND ESTABLISHMENT The more the doctrine of the God-man removed him to a distant heavenly height, the more tirgent became the need of bridging the yawning chasm be- tween him and mankind on earth. This was the purpose served by the worship of the saints. It is easy to call this a new form of idolatry, but it is more correct to understand how this worship arose, psychologically and historically. The psy- chological motives, revealed by the worship of the martyrs, those first Christian saints, are especially clear. It is that same feeling of piety which led to the worship of Jesus himself. In loving remem- brance, the friends of the dead man cling to his image. They feel themselves to be one with him in such deep communion that, in moments of ecstatic worship, they seem to see his very self, they seem to hear him speak words of admonition and con- solation. Death, too, adds its transfiguring activ- ity to the picture of the deceased, strips him of earthly limitations and blemishes, and lifts him to a supermundane glory. When a worshipper adopts one saint as his own ideal, he feels himself there- by filled with a higher power; he considers this 83 The Development of Christianity power as an emanation from his ideal to which he has raised himself; thus it was entirely natural that he did not only pray for the saint, but prayed also to him, that his wishes might be fulfilled through the intercession of the saint. This is an entirely natural process which was at first supported by the after-effects of heathen cus- toms and emotions. It had been an old custom of the heathen, in their private affairs, to turn not only to the general gods, but also to private protecting gods and to heroes, who were more intimate with the individual. Each district, each city had its own hero, its own protecting deity; the memorial days and feasts of these local deities were celebrated by customs and festivities, local and peculiar. It is only natural that the heathen-Christian congrega- tions wanted something to take their place and found that something in the feasts of the saints. In some cases only the name was changed while the customs and habits, unchanged, were transferred to the local saint. Then followed apostles and prophets; but from the fifth century on, they were all preceded by Mary, the mother of Jesus. With- out doubt, there were also heathen examples which influenced this worship too ; her surname, Panhagia, had formerly been that of Venus Urania, and tlie picture of the Mother of God, with the boy Jesus in her arms, bears a very strong resemblance to the Egyptian mother of the gods with the Horus boy on her arm. The heathen mother of the gods, how- P4 Ceremonial and Establishment ever, was transfigured in Mary into the Christian ideal of woman and that from both sides, virginal purity and merciful mother-love. Certainly this new queen of heaven was a welcome substitute and companion-piece for the female element of the an- cient heathen deity, but it is no less certain that the Mater Dolorosa, enthroned as the queen of heaven, was a real Christian ideal, the female expression of that same fundamental Christian ideal which we visualize in male form, for ourselves, in the image of Christ, — namely, that from the seed of sacrifice and pain, the miraculous power of love arises, vic- toriously superior to need and death of earthly life. That is the real thought in the cult of Mary. As there had been chapels erected to heathen heroes over their bones and their relics, so there were chapels built over the graves of the martyrs; here, too, there grew up a worship of relics which confined itself not only to their bones, but extended to the garments of the saints and the instruments of torture by which they had been put to death, the places where their footsteps were known to have been and where their bodies had been finally in- terred. Countless legends of miraculous works which transpired in these places and were brought about by these relics came into being. The ma- terialization of religion loomed large, but there was underneath a natural feeling, namely, that the visi- ble thing made present, for the pious one, the spirit with which it had at one time been in relation and 85 The Development of Christianity thus became the mediator in an association of re- ligious ideas. On that spot where some good man had walked, a sacred memory rested. So the cross of Golgotha became for all Christendom the mirac- ulously active symbol for the faith which overcomes the world. If the relics are to be judged as visible symbols which release associations of religious ideas, then the ceremonial is a dramatic symbol which presents the sacred story of legend in such fashion that the worshipping congregation experiences immediately the reality which it feels, and thus achieves the ef- fect of some past fact. After all, that is the mean- ing of all rites of worship: a dramatic representa- tion of past facts for the purpose of taking in to the spirit of the worshiper the experience which he is repeating. This is especially true of the rites which, since the third century, the Church desig- nated as Christian mysteries, sacraments. They do not go back as far as Jesus, but the origin of the sacraments lies in the Christ spirit of the congre- gation, which spirit gave itself in them a dramatic expression. At the same time, it must not be over- looked that the forms of these rites, for the most part, originated in pre-Christian religions and were not original inventions of Christianity. They were only filled with the new Christian content ; that was ever the way in which the Church formed symbolic rites. Existing things were taken over and new interpretations given to them. 86 Ceremonial and Establishment Baptism is a ceremonial of acceptance into the congregation. It was probably taken over from the disciples of John. It was made a sacrament as early as Paul who, in this act of external nature, which consisted in the immersion of the one bap- tized, beheld a repetition of the entombment of Christ and his resurrection from the grave. In fact, the one baptized experienced in himself, through this imitation of a former action, that which was typical in Christ and took place exter- nally — namely, the old man dies with Christ and with Christ lives again, a new man for spiritual life. This idea of rebirth through sense action has undoubted likeness to the Mithra mystery. There, too, we have an immersion in water present- ing a picture of resurrection; wherefore those who perform this action called themselves " reborn for eternity." As far back as Tertullian this likeness was remarked and he explains that the demons aped Christian customs. But he overlooked the fact that the heathen mysteries were much older than the Christian. Even the anointing of the forehead with oil, in connection with baptism, which later became the especial sacrament of confirmation, has its ex- act parallel in the Mithra cult. The Last Supper was originally a love-meal of the Christian brotherhood, an activity of brotherly love on the part of the rich, who contributed the means for the common meal, in favor of the poor. At first the prayer which was spoken then was one 8^ The Development of Christianity of thanks for the natural gifts of God, as it is found in the teachings of the Apostles, without any mys- tical secondary relation. Therefore, these love feasts are also called " Eucharisties " i. e., thanks- giving. These religious meals of the brethren were a widespread custom in the non-Christian, the Jew- ish as well as the heathen, world. At the Chris- tian meal, there was an especial sanctity through the recollection of the last meal of the disciples with the master and the memories of his sorrow and his death. Paul was the first who added this second meaning to the love- feasts of the Christian broth- erhood. Finally, there was added a third meaning which was entirely strange to the primitive Chris- tian congregation, while very closely related to heathen customs : Paul calls the blessed bread and the blessed cup a community with the body of Christ and his blood, and the enjoyment of them is the means of entry into a mysterious alliance with Christ, just as those who celebrated a sacrificial meal entered into mysterious alliance with the de- mons by the enjoyment of the meat of the sacrifice. Hence the old idea of the sacrificial meal as a holy communion whereby one partakes in some fashion of the life of the god; this age-old idea Paul ap- plies to the Christian supper. Thus, the latter be- came a mystery, a sacramental action which soon became differentiated from the love- feast and united with the actual worship of God, in order to sug- gest thereby that it was a real rite of worship and 88 Ceremonial and Establishment not an ordinary meal. By this sacramental interpre- tation, Paul took over heathen notions as they were customary in the heathen religions and applied them to the Christian meal. To this, then, there were added further notions which were self-evident for the realism of the ancient cults and their mysticism, just as they are now impossible of understanding and perhaps revolting to us. Even Paul regarded the materials of the supper as a kind of Tabu, the unworthy enjoyment of which brings physical death in its train. From this it naturally follows that, on the other hand, a worthy enjoyment of the food is a means toward life, an antidote against death, and a means of salvation for immortality — as Ignatius especially works it out. With Justin and the Alex- andrian theologians of the fourth century, the con- nection of the bread and the Logos appears as an imitation and continuation of the alliance of the Logos with the human nature in the incarnation of Christ. The sacrificial death for salvation was to be an imitation and continual repetition through the Eucharist. Li the beginning, the supper was a memorial feast; then we find the notion, even as early as Tertullian, that the gifts of the rich are a sort of sacrifice which were offered to the poor, hence to God — as a memorial meal for the death of Christ, on the one hand, as a sacrifice to God on the other. In fact, that was close to the synthesis which makes this action a bloodless repetition by the priest of that sacrifice which Christ once made 89 The Development of Christianity on Golgotha — a bloodless repetition for the salva- tion of the living and the dead. This view gave rise to the Mass as the representa- tion of the drama of supernatural salvation, from the incarnation to the death of the God-man, — an ever repeating miracle accomplished through the priests who thus appeared to be the donors of the grace of salvation, in the stead of Christ. Now, we Protestants are accustomed to condemn the Mass as something repugnant because of its magical and hierarchical relations, but even here we ought not to be unjust toward the old Church, which is, after all, the mother of us all, and in her favor, as an excuse for her if you wish, we ought to remember two things which most moderns scarcely ever re- member. First, this view of the sacrament cor- responds so exactly to the realism of the ancient mode of thinking, in general, and to the ancient mystical worship, in particular, that the entry of the Church into these ideas was inevitable; they were practically forced upon her by the stream of heathen that poured into the Church. She had to reckon with them and nobody thought it wrong that the spiritual was thought of in connection with the sense symbol. Such is the ancient realism of wor- ship, in which we who would judge historically must transpose ourselves. Second, we must consider that under this temporally-conditioned veil of the idea of the Mass, there were hidden, in fact, real religious ideas and Christian emotions. In the 90 Ceremonial and Establishment process of the sacred action, one felt and saw the spiritual presence of the God-man; the mystery of the supermundane and inconceivable dogma, in a certain sense, found completion and correction in the sensuously tangible sacrifice of the Mass. In the action, it was felt that God is not only beyond, the God-man not only in heaven, but that he was present in the congregation as the divine force of their faith and love. Theologians with spirit, such as Origen and Augustine, recognized this ideal con- tent and expressed it. Augustine in particular gave this interpretation of the Eucharist, that it was ac- tually the congregation itself which was the mys- tical body of Christ, ever ofifering itself up, in faith and love, to God. Thus, everything magical disap- pears and merges into a higher ideal view of the mystery. Hand in hand with the development of dogma, custom and worship, moves the establishment of the Church. In the formation of the Bishop's office, in the second century, the Church created for itself an in- stitution which secured its existence and furthered its development in the struggle with enemies without and within. From the close of the second century, these Bishops made the claim that they were the successors of the Apostles, installed by them and, by means of the ordination of the laying on of hands, equipped with the power of binding and loos- ing. This was just as unhistorical a fiction as that 91 The Development of Christianity parallel fiction by which the Church doctrines of faith were traced back by direct tradition to the Apostles. Neither the one nor the other is the case. The post-apostolic congregations had their per- sons of rank, " clerus," namely presbyters or elders, and episcopoi or overseers, trustees or superiors who directed the affairs of the congregation; also dea- cons who performed the lower works such as the care of the poor and the like. These clericals were simply commissioned by the congregation itself, in- stalled by the free choice of the rest of the congre- gation, without any spiritual privilege. In spiritual authority, the prophets and teachers were far ahead of them, though they had no titles of office but were merely differentiated by an equipment with the spirit of prophecy and the ability to teach. Thus, the original form of the establishment was free and rested on the basis of equality and freedom, hence purely democratic and without a trace of hierarchy. Such a condition could not exist permanently. This rein granted the free inspiration and teaching of in- dividuals whose norm was an inner impulse — all of this proved more and more impossible; disputes and confusion were the consequences, caused by personal ambition and desire for novelty. In the Epistle of the Roman Clement to the Corinthians, these practices were castigated. At the same time erroneous Gnostic teachings sought entry into the Church, and against them, this subjective princi- pe Ceremonial and Establishment pie, the spirit, was no protection. The need ex- isted for a firmer organization of the congregation. It was natural, especially in the congregations of the larger cities, that the chairmanship of the col- lege of the presbyters, which had not been the prerogative of any one person in the beginning, should become a position for life, a dignity resting upon one overseer, episcopus, whose duty it then was to conduct the services, to decide upon the ad- mission of persons into the congregation, as well as the forgiveness of sinners or their exclusion from the congregation. More and more, this became the exclusive privilege of the episcopus, who rose above the presbyters who had been his equals, as a monarch rises above his aristocracy. The Ignatian Epistles furnish us a glimpse of this origin of the monarchical episcopate in the congre- gation. There we read that no Church action is valid without the consent of the Bishop, that one must be subject to the Bishop as to Christ; only those belonged to God and Christ who were at one with the Bishop. The Bishop is thus the visible head of the individual congregation, as Christ is the invisible head of the entire Church. On the other hand, these Bishops, in so far as they are subordi- nate to Christ and equal in rank one w^th the other, are the successors of the Apostles, installed by them and, by laying on of hands, sanctified as the bearers of the Holy Spirit, possessors of the merciful gift of truth — that is of the correct, ecclesiastical doc- 93 The Development of Christianity trine, the tradition of which was entrusted to them by the Apostles. That was the ruling viewpoint of Irenaeus and Tertullian, the two main opponents of the heretical Gnosis. In their struggle, they used as a weapon the Church tradition represented by the Bishops, the authority for which they based on the statement of the apostolic succession of the Bishops. The possession of the true spirit and of the true tradition belongs together, they are mutual conditions. Tertulhan did not concede that the Bishops exclusively had the right to direct Church discipline, to decide upon forgiveness of sins, or exclusion from the congregation. As a Montanist, he sought to preserve this right for his prophets, namely those personalities who excelled in rigoristic asceticisms and visions. Obviously that was il- logical. According to this, the principle of enthusi- astic individualism was to be valid in the field of church discipline but was no longer to hold in the field of theory, of dogmatic belief. It was not diffi- cult for the Roman Bishops, with their clever sense of the practical, to overcome this inconsequence. By rejecting Montanistic enthusiasm, this principle of subjectivity, and by granting the right of forgive- ness of sins to the Bishop, they strengthened the authority of the office of the Bishop in general, and of the Roman Bishop in particular, for all future time. As early as the middle of the third century, Cyprian perfected the idea of the hierarchy so that 94 Ceremonial and Establishment the dignity of the Old Testament priest was trans- ferred to the clerics, and they were made the ex- clusive bearers of the rites of worship, as the priest had been in the Mosaic law. This was paralleled by the development of the Supper into a sacrifice. Where there is a sacrifice, there must be a priest who offers the sacrifice. If Christ as the High Priest, had brought the unique sacrifice on Golgotha, it seemed a closely related conclusion that, in the altar service representing that sacrifice, performed by the Bishops and presbyter, they were serving as priests in Christ's stead, representing the congrega- tion before God and distributing God's mercy to the congregation. In the middle of the third century, the foundation of the ecclesiastical hierarchy had been laid thus far; the clerics were the privileged proprietors of the power of Church doctrine, of the power of discipline, and of the services at the altar. In the consciousness of that period, they united the three offices of the Old Testament theoc- racy, prophet, king and priest, and therewith they became the predestined heads and masters of the coming Christian theocracy. On the basis of the Episcopacy there developed, during the course of the following three centuries, the Roman Papacy, and thereby a tip was set upon the proud edifice of the hierarchical pyramid. The political and military organization of the Roman Empire served as a model. The Bishops of the capital cities of the provinces gained in power over 95 The Development of Christianity the Bishops of the other cities and called themselves Metropolitan; and among the Metropolitans there arose superior Metropolitans, the patriarchs of the large dioceses in the capital cities, Alexandria, An- tioch, Byzantium, and Rome. That the conflict between these most powerful Bishops was finally decided in the Romans' favor was naturally condi- tioned by historical circumstances, and there was no need of the legend of Peter as the first Bishop of Rome for an explanation. It was naturally the im- portance of Rome itself, as the capital city of the world, that city into which all the strands of culture and of spiritual life were gathered, out of which issued the government of the world — it was the importance of Rome, this school of the classical art of government, which very early gave the Roman congregation its peculiar power, so that it was not long before it became proverbial : all congregations must follow the model of Rome. The privileges of their position the Roman Bishops knew well how to employ to the full. In all important disputed questions concerning ceremonial. Church discipline, or dogma, the Roman Bishops found and decreed that which served the purpose and met the need of the times. In the Easter question, for example, at the close of the second century. Bishop Victor was the representative of the progressive Western custom against the men of Asia Minor who wished to hold fast to the old tradition and were, therefore, put under the ban. Then again, in the question 96 Ceremonial and Establishment of the rigoristic penitential discipline, Zephyrinus and Calixtus represented the cause of the same human understanding against Montanistic excesses. They declared that a world church could not shut itself up in a conventicle of saints, but must hold wide open its door for all the world. During the Arian disputes, the Roman Church was the support of the Nicene Athanasian creed. At that time the Eastern Church was split within and swayed un- steadily from one side to another. In the disputes concerning the double nature of the God-man, it was the diplomatic cleverness of Leo the Great which proposed the means by which the two ex- tremes could be united, and it was he who put it through in the Chalcedonian Confession. The same Leo the Great was so clever that he did away with the public confession of sin in the presence of the congregation, that custom which made men ashamed, and he substituted private confession to the priest. At first this was simply a popular al- leviation of the strict demand for penitence. It w^as an act of popular alleviation, but at the same time it gave an immense increase to the power of the priests over the conscience. In the powerful consciousness of rulership there was resident in this Church prince, the idea of the mediaeval papacy. He says : " In the name of Peter, I stand at the head of the Church ; according to the command of God and the Apostles I render judgment ; according to the inspirations of the Spirit I speak and teach 97 The Development of Christianity and make firm the unsteady hearts of the brethren. Upon me falls the honor if the Church is well gov- erned, and upon me has been laid the care of it." For this same end, the other Bishops were to work together with him and hearken to the disposition of the apostohc chair. He did want the cares of the Church shared with him, but not the power over it. As Peter precedes the Apostles, thus the chair of Peter is to all the other Bishops' chairs. These were the claims, these the convictions of the great Leo who was Bishop of Rome about the year 450. And as is usual in the history of the world, that fortune favors the clever and the bold, so did it happen here. Historical circumstances played with favor toward the clever Roman Bishop's governmental and political claims. The trans- ference of the emphasis of worldly empire to the East seemed to elevate the dignity of the Byzan- tine Metropolitan, who was a creation of that court, above that of his Roman rival, but in truth the mat- ter was reversed. The ecclesiastical authority of the Roman Bishop thus grew far beyond that of all the oriental patriarchs, because the Roman Bishop was far less dependent on the Byzantine Emperor. There dwelt in these Roman Bishops the same proud spirit of ecclesiastical independence and superiority which found typical expression when Bishop Am- brosius of Milan forced a public penitence in Church upon Emperor Theodoric the Great, who had in- stigated a great slaughter of the inhabitants of Thes- 98 Ceremonial and Establishment salonica because some officers had been murdered. When the West Roman reahn broke to pieces amidst the storms of the migrations of peoples, then the throne of Peter was the rock which stood un- moved in the billows of political fate, and the Ro- man Pope became the heir to the Roman Emperors. 90 CHAPTER V AURELIUS AUGUSTINUS That the development of the Western Church during the centuries of the middle ages was differ- ent in kind, more moved and richer than that of the Eastern, was occasioned not only by the difference of external political situation (as I pointed out in the last lecture) but it lay also in the inner spiritual peculiarity of the development of Christianity in the East and in the West, corresponding to the dif- ference in character between the Greek and Roman Christianity. The Western Church never had so much sense for theological speculations, for ques- tions concerning the nature of God or of the God- man. She did accept the dogmas that had been formulated in the Orient, but her actual interests were in other directions — the practical questions of Christianity, the moral education of the human will by the Church. This practical tendency got its re- ligious deepening and didactic formulation through Aurelius Augustinus, who impressed his spirit upon the Western Church, as Origen and Athanasius had impressed theirs upon the Eastern Church. Inasmuch as the theology of Augustine is based for the most part upon his personal experiences, as 100 Aurelius Augustinus told by him in his confessions, I will give a brief review of his life. Augustine was born in the year 354 in Tagaste near Hipporegius, in Numidia, where he afterward lived and died as Bishop. His father was a re- spected city councilman. From him Augustine in- herited his spirit of rulership and passionate tem- perament ; while from his pious mother, Monica, he got his deep religious sense. As a student of rhet- oric, he lived a fast and loose life in Carthage. Discontented with himself and with the world, he became a disciple of Manichaeism, whose doctrines promised solutions for all the world riddles; his mother suffered much when he became a Manichsean, and she sorrowed for her son to such an extent that a Bishop said to her in consolation: *' No son of so many tears can ever be lost." Afterward the young rhetorician went from Car- thage to Rome in order to practise his profession there. From Rome he went to Milan and made the acquaintance of Bishop Ambrosius, whose personal- ity made a powerful impression upon him, yet he could not convert himself to the Church faith. A general doubt, the natural accompaniment of his moral disintegration, made him most unhappy. Two leaders there were who helped him out of his maze : Plato and the Apostle Paul. Plato showed him in the inwards of the thinking spirit one, and the truest, revelation of the God who is spirit and truth; in the Epistles of Paul, he found the con- lOI The Development of Christianity firmation of his own experience of the struggle between the flesh and the spirit, of the slavery of man and of the rulership of his natural passions and desires; and he, too, found the way of salvation through divine mercy. That was the culmination that brought him to a decision. He decided to be- come a Christian, a Catholic Christian, and on Eas- ter night of the year 387, he permitted himself to be baptized. The sacred rite made a deep impres- sion upon his soul and held him without cessa- tion to that Church whose best armor he proved to be for centuries thereafter. Soon he returned to Africa, became Bishop at Hippo and lived there in monastic-like association with friends and schol- ars, though without actual rules for the order. He lived a restless, active life, caring for the souls of others, preaching, and writing. His writings served the purpose of edificatory reading for the Church and the attack on the three main heresies of the time : First, the Manichaeans who taught a gnosis similar to the Persian dualism and held human nature to be something originally bad, the work of an anti-God. Second, the Pela- gians who, contrariwise, declared human nature to be good with a freedom for all good which could never be lost. Third, the Donatists who withdrew from the Church because it did not correspond with their ideal of saintliness. These were the three main opponents against whom Augustine's activity, both as preacher and as author, was directed ; and 102 Aurelius Augustinus in his theology, the various sides appear as one or the other opponent appeared, so that they never fit together without contradiction. This makes pre- sentation difficult, but as far as is possible in a brief space, I will attempt to sketch it. Against the heretical Manichseans, Augustine stands firmly on the ground of the Church faith to which, however, he demanded (agreeing therein with Origen) the complement of a thinking reason. He says : " Authority commands faith and pre- pares for reason ; this, then, leads to the understand- ing of the thing believed; not as though we were to believe in order to set aside reason; no, God does not hate in us that which He has created in us as an advantage over all other creatures. That which we hold firmly in the security of belief, is to be made visible by the light of reason. As a reasoning be- ing, the soul is allied with the supersensual and the unchangeable. It possesses the capacity of know- ing the nature of truth, just as the eye is so arranged that it can know the visible world." But where are we to find truth ? That is the great question. The answer runs thus: " Wander not outside of your- self. Turn inwardly into yourself, for the truth dwells in the inner man, and if you find your na- ture changeable, swing yourself up beyond your- self, strive thither where the light of reason itself has its source, seek the truth in the silence and the leisure of the spirit, in the simplicity of the heart, not outside in space. The purer the spirit, the 103 The Development of Christianity better able is it to see the truth ; to love God means to know God." Augustine's judgment concerning the philoso- phers was more favorable in his youth than in later years. He thought, of the Platonists especially, that in many things they approached Christianity and that, if they were to return to-day and see the Church, they would acknowledge: This is the realization of that which we darkly surmised. " The Christian has no need to fear the truth which the philosophers taught, but he should quietly take it over from them, its false possessors. A good Christian knows that the truth which he acknowl- edges belongs to his Master, wherever he may find it." According to the conviction of Augustine, the Christian theologians thus have an advantage over the heathen philosophers, whose opinions were ever subjective and whose teachings contradicted the one the other, while the Christian has firm ground for his conviction and a safe guide in the divine revela- tion, both as Holy Writ and the Church. Which of these two norms, however, should be highest when making decisions? Augustine's answer to this question varies according to the opponent whom he attacks. Against the Donatists, he says : " I would not believe the Church without or contrary to Scripture." Against the Manichseans : '' I would not beheve Scripture if the view of the Church did not lead me so to do." He never gave any expres- sion which might harmonize these two statements. 104 Aurelius Augustinus He simply presupposes that these two norms are not contradictory. In doubtful cases, the Church tradition decides : " What the entire Church has maintained, whatever obtained at all times, that we must believe that was handed down through apostolic authority; even if it is not to be found literally in Scripture, yet it must have flowed from the same source and thus achieved apostolic au- thority." That became the fundamental view of the Church from Augustine's time and to this day has remained so in Catholicism. Let us look at the doctrinal structure built on this basis. Its main parts are the dogmas of the triune God, of man, his sin and redemption, and of the Church as the institution for redemption, as well as the God-State destined to rule the world. As a kind of Christian Plato, one might say, Augustine reveals the depths of his religious spirit by the way in which he deduces the consciousness of God from pious self-consciousness. He reasons thus: In our changeable and imperfect being and knowledge and volition, we are the finite image of God who is the unchangeable Being in all changeable existence, the enduring truth and universal source of wisdom for all human thinking, the perfect beau- ty for all our emotions, the complete goodness, the releasing and blessing power of good for all our volition. As such perfect eternal truth, beauty, goodness, God is in a word the highest good, sum- mum boniim; to cling to Him is the true, yes, the 105 The Development of Christianity only complete happiness of our soul, for '' in that we are created toward Him, our hearts can find no peace until they rest in Him." In this conviction, our theologian unites the thinking based on Plato with the inner experience of his own pious spirit, as he himself expresses it in those beautiful words of the Confessions: " I loved thee late, thou divine Beauty! Thou wast in me, yet was I without and sought thee there. Into thy beautiful creation did I plunge myself with my ugliness; for thou wast with me, yet was I not with thee, for the outer world did hold me far from thee; then didst thou call unto my deafness, then didst thou kindle a light in my blindness, then didst thou breathe life into me. Thou didst touch me, and, all aglow, I longed for thy peace. I did taste thee, and am now a-hun- gry and athirst for thee." The purely Platonic effort to think away all tem- poralness and changeability, all limitations and op- positions, from the one eternal Being of God, is remarkable. Thus the persons of the Trinity, ac- cording to Augustine, are at bottom only different relationships of the One Being comparable to the various sides of our spirit, memory, intellect, and will, which can be differentiated but which can never be separated, the one from the other. Thus the divine attributes do not exist one alongside the other, but rather one in the other. Omnipotence is at the same time Omniscience, goodness and love are at the same time righteousness and bliss. Be- io6 Aurelius Augustinus yond a doubt these are deep thoughts, but more's the pity that they stand in irreconcilable contra- diction to those other teachings of Augustine, such as that of the creation of the world in time, and particularly that of the double ordinance of divine predestination (of which we are to speak later) in which there seems to be revealed an inner dualism of the divine will. These disharmonies in Augus- tine's teaching of God are explained simply by the varying sources and motives, partially Platonic, partially biblical-ecclesiastical, partially gnostic- dualistic — motives which crossed and recrossed frequently in the thinking of this rare spirit. We encounter similar disharmonies in his doc- trine concerning man. Against Manichsean pessim- ism, Augustine defended the optimism of the Old Testament dogma of creation as emphatically as did the Greek fathers. That dogma holds man to have been created good with freedom for good and with a destiny which was to make him the Image of God and the master over all nature. But when the Pela- gians taught that this freedom for good was so peculiar to our species that It was the permanent pre-supposltlon of all moral direction and education, Augustine refused to agree, but maintained rather that the original condition of freedom and happi- ness of man had been lost in Paradise Itself through a misuse of freedom by disobedience to the divine command. As Augustine himself shows, this act emanated from the evil motives of pride and self- 107 The Development of Christianity love, which were then present, which were latent, and which simply broke through in the Fall. This, too, was not only inevitable but, after all, healing, for only thus could the disease be cured happily in that it broke out. So then Augustine can speak of " the happy guilt of Adam," which gave rise to his salvation. But to this reasonable view how can we harmonize the statement that Adam's fall was a voluntary guilt with most horrible consequences for the whole of the human race; that as a punishment for the first misuse, the freedom for good was lost to men thereafter — in the place of Paradise, an abysmal wickedness, an eternal, continuous destruc- tion came over all humanity as the penal conse- quences of Adam's first sin? Because, so August- ine teaches, all are descended from the first parents and with that first parent in whom they were con- tained, they have sinned. Thus has this first sin descended upon the whole race of his descendants, so that ever after each human child is burdened at birth with inherited sinful instincts, with sinful desire and with damnable guilt, so that each human child, irrespective of whether it ever wished or did anything wicked, became heir to eternal damnation because he was burdened with the guilt of Adam. It would be the prey to destruction if it were not saved by baptism, which frees man from this in- herited burden. Various motives, without doubt, were active in making up this pessimistic judgment of the natural man. The first thought is, that io8 Aurelius Augustinus Augustine had been a Manichsean at first, and that the after-effect of this Manichseism makes its ap- pearance in this crass dogma of inherited sin. Then, too, it must be remembered that Augustine, a hot- blooded youth of African descent, had experienced the deep conflict of the flesh and the spirit within himself, the unholy slavery of the will to the desires. In addition, there is the specifically Church interest of the Bishop whose saving grace of the Church could be glorified by contrast with the sinfulness of the natural man. However, the deepest motive was that inner experience of his own Christian spirit, the misfortune without God and the fortune won through God and in God. Listen to his own words in the confession : " Enter into my heart and make it drunken, that I forget my wickedness and embrace Thee as my one possession, say to my soul ' I am thy salvation.' Let me hasten at Thy loving call and cling to Thee. I would die in order never to die, so that I see Thee. The house of my soul is narrow, do Thou widen it. It is all- encumbered, make Thou it clean. Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou wilt." As the misfortune in the inner dispute of the will with itself consists in this, that the good which it actually wills it does not actually perform, so grace consists in that the good does not remain merely an external law, but becomes the object of voluntary love and so- the object of one's own willing and joyous acting. Man can only be created anew from 109 The Development of Christianity the evil to the good will through the eternally good God. This is an unearned, free gift, for what can a man deserve before he loves God, and how could he love God before he had experienced God's love? As such an unearned free gift, grace shows itself to men from the very beginning, in the baptism of little children, even, who receive it involuntarily. Hence, freedom of the will is not the pre-supposition or condition of grace, but its effect, in so far as it is grace which first frees the will from its natural slavery to sin, fills it with the love of righteousness so that the good is looked upon as its very own nature and performed through innermost impulse. However, if grace is the sole cause of salvation this question arises : how comes it that grace is not active for all, but only in some? The answer reads : The reason cannot be in man, for men are all by their nature equally sinful, so that not one of them deserves grace. Hence, the reason for the limited activity of grace is in God Himself, namely in His double ordinance of predestination, inasmuch as in His eternal pre-knowledge and pre-volition, He has destined some to salvation and others to damna- tion. For the elect, to whom God would reveal His will of grace, it is made real through word and sacrament and, in fact, it is made real to them in- fallibly in that they are not only called but remain preserved in the faith until the end. He who is once chosen can never fall again. The damned are hopelessly and unalterably lost, whatever may be no Aurelius Augustinus their deeds or efforts. With certainty one cannot say who has been chosen, not during his hfetime or at least not until the end of it, if he has persisted to the end. This uncertainty of each concerning his salvation (salvation which has been fixed upon in the secret ordinance of God) Augustine says is good, for it occasions in man that he remains humble with regard to the ecclesiastical means of grace, whereby, at least, he attains a relative prob- ability of the salvation of his soul. In the end, then, it is the Church spirit of Augustine which softens the hardness of his dogma of pre-destination and explains it. For, if grace is bound to the ecclesiastical means of salvation, the end is the glori- fication of the Church as the one distributor of salvation. Cyprian's saying, extra ecclesiam, nulla saluSj is for the first time, theologically based by Augustine. For the oriental Church this thought was ever strange, before Augustine as well as after him. If the Church is the vessel containing all divine grace, the organ, the institution for the distribution of all grace, then all salvation of men depends on their proper relation to the Church. Augustine is perfectly logical when he cries at the schismatic Donatists : " Everything may be had outside of the Church excepting salvation; and even if one believes that one is living a good life, for the sake of this one crime of separation from the Church, one shall not partake of life but of the wrath of God which rests in The Development of Christianity on those who separate themselves." Separation from the Church is a cardinal breach of love, and v^ithout love no salvation can exist. When the Donatists said that the decisive characteristic of the true Church v^^as moral purity, Augustine replied that this was rather in the right granted to the ecclesiastical establishment by its divine founder, the exclusive possessor and distributor of grace through the ecclesiastical means of grace. And when the schismatics pointed to their own righteousness and enthusiastic witnesses, visions, ecstasies, and granted prayers, the Catholic Church pointed out its support in the righteousness in Christ and named as its wit- ness, Holy Writ. " Against this lightning and thunder, all else is merely the smoke that blinds on earth." Church salvation rests on an objective communion whereas everything that is subjective depends upon obedience and self-sacrifice or ends in empty semblance and illusion. This is the expres- sion of the Catholic consciousness of the inclusion of all salvation in the objective Church establish- ment and its priestly activities, which remains ever external and strange toward the individual spirit, the reverse of Protestant inwardness and freedom of personal life in God. Why has the Catholic Church the only truth? Augustine says because she alone rests on the foun- dation of the Apostles and the prophets, because she alone has the unity and perpetuity held together by the possession of the Holy Spirit and the apos- 112 Aurelius Augustinus tolic Bishop's office. The spirit of Christ is, there- fore, pecuHar to the CathoHc Church alone, because she is the apostoHc, that is. Bishop's Church, tracing back her Episcopal organization (which is obviously a fiction) to the Apostles who, for their part, go back to Christ himself. According to Augustine, the Church is also the Holy Church; even though upon earth she is not a congregation entirely of saints, but consists of good and bad members, she is nevertheless the holy; because she possesses the sacraments and the Church discipline, she has the means to make men holy. Baptism especially is the reception Into membership of the body of Christ, with the forgiveness of original sin. Because this latter is born with the children, therefore are they freed from It through baptism and may be taken into the saving arms of the Church. Here it is clearly seen how the dogma of the universal sinful- ness of the natural man and that of the supernatural institution for grace of the Church mutually support and condition one another. As the possessor of the means of grace, the Church is naturally the infallible authority on belief for the faithful. What the uni- versal Church teaches by the mouth of her Bishops as apostolic tradition, that alone is the divine truth revealed by Christ as against the multitude of errors of heretics and schismatics. In his great work. De Cimtatc Dei, Augustine described the Church as the terrestrial appearance of the God-State In opposition to the Roman world- 113 The Development of Christianity state. The world-state had its origin in the pre- earthly fall of the evil spirits, and its earthly begin- ning is Cain's murder of his brother. Its course, then, runs through the world realm of the Assyrians and ends finally in the Roman Empire. The God- State begins with the good world of angels and on earth begins with Abel, the first martyr. It con- tinues through the history of Israel which leads on to the Christian Church. These two states differ not only in their origins and courses, but also in the in- nermost principle of their being. Self-love, force, and desire for rulership govern in the world-state. The Empire is a robber state and all the civic virtues of its members are no better than glittering crimes. While the peace on earth guaranteed by the state through its code of laws is a relative good even for the citizens of the God-State (hence the Christians certainly will obey the laws of the state in earthly matters), nevertheless the legal order of the state is only an organ of selfishness which really serves the demons more than God, and aims merely at the security and conservation of body, life, and prop- erty, not of the eternal and imperishable possession. The Church alone, which has as its object the eternal possession of seeing God beyond, is the God-State which rests directly upon divine right. Hence the Church stands far above the earthly state in dignity and rights. This fundamental view of the Papacy is here expressed with entire certainty. The state has merely the duty of obeying the Church, for it is 114 Aurelius Augustinus human while she is divine. According to Augus- tine, it is the duty and obhgation of the state and the nobihty to suppress all heretics and schismatics, that is all opponents of the Church, if need be even with force. Augustine was the first to give this dire in- terpretation to the phrase Compellite. intrare! Augustine thinks this force will really not be a severity but a healing medicine. Thus we see clearly the difference between the Augustine-Roman and the Greek conception of the Church. According to the Greek view, the Church is a community of dogmatic belief, of ceremonial celebration, and of ascetic life; the attitude toward the world is passive and toward the state submissive. According to Augustine, on the other hand, the Church is the hierarchically organized God-State whose task it is to subordinate the world to the Christian spirit and who must therefore necessarily strive toward a rulership over the world and all that is in it. For this reason, the Eastern Church led a quiet, contem- plative life through centuries, while the Western Church, through its rivalry with worldly powers, stirred the world but also made history. I repeat, it was Augustine who impressed his spirit on the Western Church. From him goes forth the deep religious moral interpretation of Christianity as the saving and educating grace, free- ing the will from sin and guilt, from slavery and misery. Therein Augustine was the successor of the Apostle Paul to an extent such as no theologian 115 The Development of Christianity before him; and at the same time, he was the pre- cursor of mediaeval mysticism and even of the Ref- ormation which attached itself to him in various ways. On the other hand, we must concede that Augustine did ally grace to external Church media and mediators. By his view of the hierarchically organized institution of the Church as the earthly appearance of the kingdom of God, founded directly by God, he laid the foundation for mediaeval Catholicism with its religious mechanism and its striving for theocratic rulership of the world. Thus we may say that the two worlds which later went apart, and to this day separate the peoples, rested peaceably together in his breast. He held harmoniously the ecclesiastical subjection and externality of Catholic Christianity with the per- sonal subjectivity and freedom of Protestant Chris- tianity. ii6 CHAPTER VI THE GERMANIC-ROMAN CHURCH De Civitate Dei, the book by Augustine, the old Church father of whom we were speaking at the close of the last lecture, was the favorite reading of the Emperor Charlemagne, the founder of the Germanic-Roman Church establishment and Em- pire; thus, in a sense, the latter might be regarded as the realization of Augustine's idea of the ruler- ship of the world by the Church as the civitas Dei. Obviously that old Church father had no idea that those same Germans who just at the time of the writing of that book, were pouring down over the Roman provinces, devastating wherever they hap- pened to be and creating barbarism — that these barbarian tribes were destined to be the bearers of the world-governing Church-State. Let us see how this came about. A brief glance at the origins of German Christianity is necessary. The first German Christians were Goths who were converted by Christian missionaries or captive Christians on the other side of the Danube; chief among them was Ulfilas (Woelflein) who had been sent to the Byzantine court as the ambassador of his people, was converted there, baptized in 341 and "7 The Development of Christianity ordained as Gothic Bishop. He translated the Bible, at least the greater part of it, into the Gothic language and his translation is the oldest monument of the early period of our tongue. The Christianity of this Ulfilas and his Goths was not Catholic but Arian, such as that which was general in the Orient before Theodosius; and without doubt this form was easier and more comprehensible to the newly converted heathen than the complicated Catholic dogma of the Trinity. It must be emphasized, also, that these Goths and Germans, heretical from the viewpoint of the Church, were almost always patient with the Catholic inhabitants of conquered Roman provinces. Thus Aurelius Cassiodorus, the Chan- cellor of the Emperor Theodoric, says: " We can- not force our religion upon others, since it is impos- sible to force anyone to believe against his will." That is an important speech, which sounds like a premonition of future German Protestantism. The difference of faith between the conquerors and the conquered, the difference between Arian and Athanasian Catholic faith, was a heavy barrier to the fusion of both parts, and thereby to the union and consoHdation of the new German Empire. Hence, it was of great importance for the future that Chlodwig, the king of the Franks, through his Burgundian wife, the Princess Clothikle, became a convert to Catliohcism. Whether this was be- cause of a vow made in the dire necessity of the Alemannian fight is something that need not be con- ii8 The Germanic-Roman Church sidered here. This much is certain: that person- ally Chlodwig was as little of a good Christian as Constantine after him. With both of them, the deciding motive was policy. Nevertheless, for the Church, it was a favorable turn fraught with many consequences. The example of the mighty Franks, King as well as people, was soon followed by the other Germans, the West Goths in Spain, Longo- bards and East Goths in northern Italy. The Anglo-Saxons in Britain were converted by Bene- dictine monks sent by Pope Gregory, and thus from the beginning were connected with Rome. Out of this Anglo-Saxon Church went forth Win- fried or Boniface, who possesses a certain right to the title of " Apostle of the Germans." Boniface was a missionary in Hesse, Bavaria, and Thuringia. He founded monasteries and Churches and bound them, as well as the others which had been founded by Irish monks before him, with closest ties to Rome. He certainly did so optima fide, and per- haps it was necessary because by this connection alone was it possible for him to defend himself against the obstinate German Christians, or rather, to organize and discipline them. When he attempt- ed to convert the heathen Friesians in his old age, he suffered a martyr's death in 755. The haughty love of freedom of the Saxons, who lived between the Elbe and the Harz, held out longest against conversion. It was only after many bloody upris- ings put down by the victorious sword of Karl, that 119 The Development of Christianity they submitted to the Prankish Empire and the Cathohc Church. Naturally such an accepted Christianity could be little better in the beginning than a masked heathenism. It could hardly be otherwise. Hea- then customs and festivals were continued under Christian names and interpretations : for examples, the Yule feast became Christmas, the feast of the spring goddess, Ostara, became the Easter festival (hence the name), the midsummer feast became John's Day, the autumnal feast of all souls became All Saints' Day. Nor did the old gods disappear entirely from the consciousness of the old Germans ; now, as then, there was mysterious fear of their incalculable power, except that they were no longer thought of as gods but as demons, and in this guise, protection against them was sought through magic. The magic which forced its way into the Christian religion was none other than the old cult forms of the heathen Germans. The rites which had been formerly practised for the gods were now changed into magic against the evil powers of the demons. This was especially true in the dangerous weeks between Advent and the day of the Three Holy Kings, on which the old Wodan, the wild hunter, and the Goddess Freya, Frau Holle, ride through the air. Many popular customs are maintained to this day, particularly those customs practised in the Christmas holidays. The Church opposed only the plainly heathen superstition, such as 120 The Germanic-Roman Church conjuring the dead, prophecying by the flight of birds and by their entrails, — as to the rest, that which was present remained and thus Christian superstition was augmented. Bishop Gregory of Tours expressly declares as godless the use of the terrestrial aid of a physician instead of the aid of the saints and the relics. The moral influence of the Church, too, was weak, and it faced a very diffi- cult task for, with continuous war, the crude bar- barism of the victors led to a terrible confusion of morals. It was particularly bad when the weak Merovingian House ruled in France. A new epoch did not begin until the strong Karo- lingian rule ordered public life, made it permanent, and formed a close alliance with the Church. From that time on, emperor and priest stood in mutual relation, a relation which in the beginning was a mutual working together, a mutual support, but which ended in a stern struggle by which both sides destroyed one another in time. As early as Pipin, the Emperor had his accession to the throne — though contrary to formal rights — sanctioned by the Roman pope, Zachary. He simply based his justification of this move on Old Testament ex- amples, where it is true there is mention of not a few palace revolutions, as that of Samuel and David or in the history of Elisha and Jehu. Such palace revolutions, which had been put into action by holy men, served as a justification for the Pope when he sanctioned Pipin's illegal accession to the throne. »The Development of Christianity For this, the new KaroHngian King had to show his gratitude when the Pope (the successor of Zachary) called upon Pipin for help against the threatening forces of the Longobards. Pipin went, conquered the Longobards, took a portion of their territory which had formerly been under Greek rule, and gave it to the Pope as permanent Church property. At the same time he had himself de- clared Protector. This was the beginning of the Church State. The example of his father was followed by his greater son, Charlemagne. The mighty ruler of an empire which extended from the Ebro to the Eider and extended as far south as Benevent, lived and fought for the ideal of a Christian world empire, for the reaHzation of which he considered his life cast. He ruled not only the State, but also the Church, and expressly called himself her pro- tector and helper. In fact, it was only the formal recognition of an actual, existing relation when Leo III on Christmas Day in the year 800 crowned Charlemagne, in Rome, the Roman Emperor. In the eyes of the whole Western Christian world, he thus became the rightful successor of the Roman Emperors with all their claims to world-rulership. By this confirmation of Pipin's doing, the Pope became independent of the Byzantine court, but, as a matter of fact, he became dependent upon the new Roman and German Emperor. The Church again became an imperial Church, as it had been under 122 The Germanic-Roman Church Constantine a political institution which bought the protection of the state at the high price of its de- pendence upon a political power. But it must be conceded that this dependence of the Church upon German imperial supremacy was beneficial only, and served her well during the wise rulership of the great Charlemagne. It served as a sound inner development of Christian culture, an education of the then very barbaric Germans to moral Christian manhood. The privileges and duties of the clerics were accurately regulated by the Emperor, their political activities narrowed, the wicked customs of the sale of spiritual offices abolished, and the regular election of the Bishop, subject to confirmation by the King, re-established. Through the embassadors whose duty it was to visit the provinces annually and make reports to the Emperor, he reserved the right to decision on all temporal and spiritual re- lations and conditions in his realm. Strong laws were made concerning Church customs — concern- ing baptism (naturally, the baptism of children), concerning regular fasting on Church fast days, concerning the burial of the dead instead of heathen cremation. At the same time, the Emperor occu- pied himself with furthering the education of his people. He established a court school of the higher grade under the scholar, Alcuin, and sent forth to the clergy a remarkable proclamation in which they are admonished not to neglect their scientific culture, but to cultivate it, in order that they may the more 123 The Development of Christianity easily and the more corrxtly enter into the secrets of Holy Writ; furthermore, that they should admit only such men as had the capacity to learn and the instinct to teach others. These were well directed words, for were there not many priests who scarcely knew the art of reading and writing? Besides, Charlemagne desired that the German mother- tongue be held in honor alongside the learned Latin, the language of the scholars. He himself made the attempt to write a German grammar. He had the German folk-songs gathered in order to hand them down to posterity. Unfortunately, in consequence of the indolence and antipathy of the clergy, these have been lost. Thus, it is not enough to call Em- peror Charlemagne the Protector of the Church : he must also be called the spirited educator of the Ger- man people to Christian culture. The weakness and lack of harmony among the successors of Charlemagne gave certain energetic Popes of the ninth century, — such men as Nicholas I and Hadrian H — manifold opportunity to lay claim to rulership not only over bishops and arch- bishops, but also over princes and the Emperor. They did this in such fashion that it was actually new, even though they based it on fictitious docu- ments of ancient date. This falsification of docu- ments, the so-called pseudo-Isidorian Decrees, which originated in France about the middle of the ninth century, served from that time on as the principal weapon of the papacy in its struggle for world- 124 The Germanic-Roman Church rulership, both against the bishops' hierarchy and, especially, against the temporal powers. Apparent as was the forgery of the pseudo-Isidorian docu- ments, they yet soon found acceptance everywhere. The reason for this was that they corresponded to the spirit of the times and helpfully met the personal wishes and interests of many a cleric for whom it was more convenient to be dependent upon the dis- tant Popes than upon the all too near archbishops or dukes, princes, and kings. Partially religious motives, partially temporal interests, aided the principle of the Isidorian Decrees to victory, the principle of the sole rulership of the Pope in the entire Church among all peoples. Obviously, it all depended upon the kind of man who was at the head of the Church, whether he was one who enjoyed the respect of the Christian peoples and was filled with Christian earnestness, or whether he was a cheap creature of the temporal powers, as was the case in the first half of the tenth century, when the Popes were completely under the influence of wicked in- triguing women. This darkest chapter of the history of the Popes is a chronique scandaleiisc, the most interesting point of which is that the Papacy was not entirely lost in the bog. Help came from two sides to save it — on the one hand, the German Emperors, and on the other hand, the new revival of the Church spirit by the monastic orders. The great Saxon Emperor, Otto I, deposed the unworthy John XII, and was the first one to force 125 The Development of Christianity the Roman nobility and clergy never again to install a Pope without the sanction of the Emperor. Of course, they only kept their oath as long as Otto was there with his force of arms. Otto I, II, and III, dissipated their best forces at the Sisyphus task of restoring discipline and order at Rome. When, after Otto Ill's early death, Roman excesses had again reached their highest point, it was a German Emperor, the energetic Henry III, who took up the cause of the Papacy, deposed three unworthy Popes at once, and installed in their stead Suitger, the worthy Bishop of Bamberg, as Clement the Second. Obviously, these interferences in Roman disorder were looked upon by the German Emperors as though the restoration of order had been their duty. They felt themselves to be the protectors of the Church ; they believed that they were acting for the good of the Church and, in fact, such was the case. But did they reap any thanks from Rome? The Popes felt themselves deeply humiliated by this interference of a temporal power and were thus irritated to a lively reaction, to an assertion of their independence as against the empire. Again and again, the Emperors saved the Papacy from the morass of Roman factions, and for this the Church charged them with unjustifiable use of force and demanded independence of the power of the German Emperor. Strange! It was just about that time that a new and powerful Church spirit awoke, emanating from the monks, especially those of 126 The Germanic-Roman Church Cluny. The spirit of mediaeval Christianity which strove to rule the world by denying it found its most spirited and forceful instrument in the monk, Hildebrand, who had been the actual soul of Ro- man papal policy under the four Popes succeed- ing Clement II until he himself, in 1073, ascended the throne of Peter under the name of Gregory VII. The first step which this powerful man took was to put into practice the theory that had long obtained but had been entirely disregarded as a Church regu- lation, the celibacy of the priesthood. As was natural, Gregory met with the most lively opposition of the priests, especially of the lowest clerics, in every country, particularly Germany and England. But the Pope fell back upon the voice of the people as his support. By far the great majority of the mass of the people were completely in sympathy with the mediaeval belief in the ascetic ideal repre- sented by the monks ; they wished to see in the priest the representative of this ideal, and thus they were easily prepared to support the stern, heartless de- mand of Gregory and to put it through with their fists. The second demand of the Pope touched the freedom of the Church in the choice of its servants, especially the bishops. Until now, the latter had been dependent upon the feudal lord by reason of their feudal possessions, and by investiture with ring and staff obligated themselves to him in feudal 127 The Development of Christianity loyalty. Gregory pronounced this the sin of simony, that is the sale of spiritual offices for worldly possessions. He said that it was not fit that the hands entrusted with the sacraments should be placed in the bloody hands of a layman and that the holy insignia should be received from him. That was old Church custom, truly, but it had long been in disuse ; the acceptance of temporal estates was as much In the interests of the bishops as of the nobles, who thus secured the Church power for themselves by making bishops of the knights ; in them they had true vassals, binding these bishops to themselves as feudal lords over them and obligating them to serve their purposes. In this struggle, Gregory found himself opposed by the nobles and the higher clergy who did not desire to give up their feudal territory. Thirdly, Gregory wanted to have the supervision over the princes themselves, in his capacity as God's political representative whose duty it was to see that the laws of the kingdom of heaven were maintained in every country against the whim of earthly princes; he felt himself entitled to depose princes who opposed him and to release their subjects from their oaths of loyalty. Gregory demanded of Henry IV the following oath : " I swear fealty to Saint Peter and his deputy, the Pope; all which he prescribes I shall follow, as is proper for a good Christian." For this general office of judge, he referred to the Gospel statement of binding and 128 The Germanic-Roman Church loosing, in which Jesus made no one an exception, not even the lords and princes; all of them are made subject to Saint Peter and his deputy. In this, too, the mood of the period and the needs of the people met harmoniously the papal desire for rulership. For the people had long been in the habit of looking to the spiritual ruler in Rome for aid against the injustice of their temporal rulers. The idea of Church rulership was not only Gregory's personal thought, but had for a long time governed the think- ing of the mediaeval peoples. Victory was made much easier by the moral weakness and whim of King Henry IV, which had stirred the popular con- sciousness and had given justifiable ground for irri- tation and complaint. Thus the Pope might appear to the German people as the representative of divine justice against royal injustice. Under such circum- stances, the struggle between Emperor and Pope, brought about by Henry's rude action, could have no other end than the one it had — the deep humilia- tion and degradation of Henry at Canossa. But here, too, the Pope overstretched the bow by his ruthless severity. The brusque humiliation of the German King irritated the feeling of the German people and thus the majority turned from the Pope back to the King. Excommunicated once more, Henry was thus able to cross the Alps with a great army and sit in judgment upon the Pope. In his extremity, the Pope called upon the Normans for help and they came, but in what fashion! They 129 The Development of Christianity plundered and they burned Rome so that the Romans, in despair, execrated the Pope ; and when the Normans withdrew, the Pope had to follow them. He went to Salerno and died there in 1085, unhumiliated and certain in his faith of the justice of his cause. His last words were : " I have loved righteousness and hated unrighteousness, and there- fore I die in exile." Now, what do you think: Are we to condemn this Pope ? Certainly he was a hard, proud, incon- siderate man who ruthlessly trod upon the holiest feelings of men, who tore wives and children from the sides of countless priests, who urged citizens on against their exiled princes, and who lighted the torch of civil war in our fatherland. However, much as all this may anger us, we must concede that he did not do any of this through personal pride or vanity, but he was impelled and supported by the idea of the unlimited rulership of the Church over the world which was the then governing ideal of mediaeval Christianity. Whatever of the activities of Gregory H may outrage us morally, it must not be put upon him personally but rather as the error of the Catholic system, that Christianity externaliz- ing the idea of the kingdom of God in the visible Church; with the opinion that the organized priest Church with its head in Rome is a direct foundation of Christ; and with the superiority of this pseudo- divine foundation over the truly divine order of society and over the laws of conscience. Out of 130 The Germanic-Roman Church these errors of the Catholic system there followed, as a natural consequence, all the conduct of the great Pope, Gregory II; to us that conduct naturally seems outrageous. Nevertheless, we must concede that he was a man of such power as is not often met with in the history of the world. His work lasted long beyond his life. His influence became greater and greater, reaching its highest point in Innocent III. From that time on, it waned ; it dis- integrated, and finally became submerged in the spirit of the new age which arrived at a conscious- ness of the untruth of mediaeval Christianity in general. We cannot follow, here, the individual phases of its development, but I will point out a few of the principal ones. Under Henry V, the son of that Henry who had been humiliated at Canossa, disputes broke out con- cerning the investiture, which ended in the so-called Concordat of Worms in 1122. There the Emperor yielded up the investiture with the spiritual insignia and reserved the right of decision in disputed elections; he yielded with the condition that the bishop elected was to receive the fief of the realm in return for his performance of that which was just, the feudal oath. That was the only conces- sion, practically of little importance, which the Pope made to the Emperor. As for the rest, by the free election and investiture of the Bishops, there was thus created a development of the papal power such 131 The Development of Christianity as had never existed before. This paved the way for the victorious rulership of the Papacy as against the Emperor. The rest of this struggle makes up the sad history of the imperial House of the Stauffen. Frederick Barbarossa did not want to have his imperial rights diminished in the face of the claims of Hadrian IV. He held it to be wrong that the Germans should obey a strange Bishop. He cher- ished the idea of the separation of the German Church from Rome and the foundation of a national Church with Treves as its capital. Unfortunate^, these never became more than wishes; the German Church would have been something entirely differ- ent. However, the realization of this plan was impossible, for it was in opposition to the inter- national, universal world-policy of the imperial Stauffens. This weakness which lay in their uni- versal world-policy was soon spied by the keen Ro- man Popes, particularly Alexander HI. This Pope knew how to use the national mood of the northern Italian cities, which sought freedom from German pressure, against his enemy, Frederick I. As is well known, there followed that unfortunate war in which the Stauffen emperor was deserted by the Guelph prince and suffered the defeat of Legnano. This resulted in the Peace of Benevent and a treaty with the Pope on the basis of the Concordat of Worms. At the same time, the hierarchical prin- ciple won a victory over Henry II of England. 132 The Germanic-Roman Church When Thomas ä Becket, the Archbishop of Canter- bury, was murdered by Norman knights in the church itself, the anger of the people was kindled and they, worshipping the murdered man as a saint, held the King responsible for the murder and brought things to such a pass that nothing remained for the King but to do penance in the Church. And in what fashion? Over the grave of the mur- dered Archbishop, his most hated opponent, the King had to submit to public chastisement. When Innocent III, a man of pre-eminent talent and culture, ascended the throne of Peter, political conditions were favorable to his plans. In Ger- many, he was twice able to give the King's crown with a free hand ; first he gave it to Otto of Bruns- wick, and when he found him no longer tractable, Innocent took back the crown and put it on the head of his ward, the young Stauffen, Frederick II. During his lifetime, the latter maintained peace with his guardian and respect for the Pope. Later we shall see how all this changed after the death of Innocent. In the marital troubles of the French King, Philip Augustus, Innocent showed himself to be the upholder of the indissolubility of the marriage bond and forced the French King to sub- mission by the dreadful weapon of the interdiction of the entire French Church. Innocent used the same weapon against John of England, but went a step further. He freed the whole English peo- ple from their oath of loyalty and directly demanded 133 The Development of Christianity that the King of France ascend the EngHsh throne. Thereupon John reHnquished his lands in order to receive them back as a fief from the papal legate. This was such a humiUation of the English na- tional feeling that the aristocracy of the country — nobles and clergy — met together in order to lay the foundation of national freedom from the power of the Popes and from that of their own King, in the Magna Charta. Here, for the first time, the papal might was defeated by the might of national sei f -decision ; that was an important event, which later found frequent repetition. In 12 15, at the Lateran Synod, to which Bishops from all Christian countries, even of the Greek Church, had come. In- nocent celebrated his last and most glorious tri- umph. Then Innocent showed himself to be the un- hampered lawgiver concerning the belief and dogma of the Christian world. He decided upon the regu- lar duty of confession, the inquisition, — that is the searching out and extermination of all heresy, — and finally, the command forbidding the reading of the Bible by laymen. These laws all served to strengthen the clergy in its deep-seated power over the innermost thinking and feeling of the people, so that every contradiction and opposition to the uni- versal power of the papal church was strangled at birth. These instruments of power were fearfully employed through the centuries. And yet, in the end, what could they do against that power which is firmer than the rock of Peter — against the rea- son and the conscience of a human personality? 134 CHAPTER VII SCHOLASTICISM AND MYSTICISM Our last lecture dealt with the mediaeval period which attained its highest point during the rule of Innocent III. Our review of it showed that at this period the Church became organized uniformly as a Papal hierarchy, so that from the Roman center the whole Western world might be governed. Si- multaneously with this ecclesiastical and political organization and world-rulership, the teachers of the Church, the theologians, sought to organize the beHefs of Christianity into one uniform system, a system in which they embraced all human thought and knowledge so that, by the uniformity of Church dogma, they might govern the entire world-view of Christianity. This was a process parallel to the striving of the Popes for Church and political ruler- ship over the kingdom of the world. This task of organizing the Christian belief into a uniform, sys- tematic world-view was taken up by the teachers of the school theology, — the Scholastics. They did not seek to develop the individual dog- mas, as the old Church had formed them ; they con- cerned themselves with the formal working out of the traditional doctrinal material. Their object was 135 The Development of Christianity to make of it a logical, connected, formal doctrinal unit, whereby philosophic dialectics were used as an instrument in order to make the thinkableness of the dogma plausible and comprehensible. No one thought of such a thing as independent criti- cism at that time. The truth of the dogma was simply posited, resting on divine revelation, and all that was sought was to make this supposedly given, infallible truth plausible to the understanding by means of formal dialectics. That this task was from the beginning impossible because of the inner contradiction, became more and more apparent in the course of the development of Scholasticism. Three phases of Scholasticism may be differen- tiated. I. During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it was believed that the dogma could be known through reason and the attempt was made to prove it by reason. II. In the second phase, the thirteenth century, there was more prudence and modesty. The gen- eral basis, the natural theology, is all that they at- tempt to prove through reason ; no longer the actual positive dogmas of Trinity, incarnation, sacrament. With regard to them, they are merely protected against the doubts of opposition: the possibility and thinkableness, not the necessity of, the positive dog- mas, are to be proved. III. In the third phase, the reasonable thinking of the dogma is entirely given up and its incon- 136 Scholasticism and Mysticism ceivability is declared to be a sign of its origin in divine revelation which must be believed on the strength of authority. In the history of Scholasticism itself, there was actually completed its own disintegration and dis- solution in consequence of the impossibility of that which it sought; namely, the demonstration of the reasonableness of dogmas. The disintegration of Scholastic theology occurred in the last centuries of the mediaeval period at the same time with the Churchly hierarchy and world-rulership. The father of Scholasticism was Anselm, Arch- bishop of Canterbury. He became famous first by reason of his ontological proof of the existence of God. He said that the existence of God could be deduced through a syllogism out of the concept of God as the most perfect being, inasmuch as the concept of a perfect being demands that this being also exist, for otherwise existence would be lacking to his perfection; or, again, the concept of a being which did have existence would be more perfect than that of God. Kant characterized this proof as a school-joke, for existence does not belong to the characteristics of a concept. In the ontological proof of God, there is evi- dent a naive trust in the power of formal logic of the understanding, in the capability of human think- ing to arrive at truth by deductions and conclu- sions out of general concepts. Anselm became more famous through his second book, Cur Deus 137 The Development of Christianity homo? in which he attempted to prove the necessity of the incarnation by reason. Ansehn assumes that human sin is the violation of the honor of God, therefore a great crime against the majesty of God Himself, which necessarily demands either punish- ment, — even to the extent of the death of all men, — or satisfaction. This satisfaction must cor- respond to the sublimity of the object injured, namely, the Divine Majesty. It must, therefore, be an infinite quantity, some performance of infinite value. Humanity can produce no performance of infinite value, 'since it performs only what is finite and imperfect, and, moreover, since it is obligated to perform all good and, therefore, cannot achieve any excessive merit. Because God must receive some absolutely valuable gift and, because of its limitations and imperfections, humanity cannot pos- sibly do so, therefore, God Himself, as the Second Person of the Deity, had to become man, so that by his infinitely valuable service, as a man, for the rest of mankind, he offered satisfaction to God the Father. This satisfaction does not yet consist in his moral activity, to which he, as all others, is obliged, but in his voluntary, innocent passion and death, to which he, as the Holy One, was not ob- ligated. There was no guilt for which he had to do penance; hence his death was a voluntary per- formance and gift to God, a gift of infinite worth; it was the life of the God-man Himself which he offered. The Father could not accept His infinitely 138 Scholasticism and Mysticism valuable gift without reward. But the Son, being a God Himself, needed no reward, and therefore God divided the reward among the relatives of the God-man. Those relatives, sinful men, were unable to pay, and for his sake He pardons their guilt and withholds the punishment deserved. This teaching is important not only because it was the basis of Luther's teaching of atonement and the Protestant dogma which holds to-day, but also from a Churchly and historical point of view, because it is the true mirrored picture of the whole Church and temporal world-view of the middle age. In each feature, this can be followed and proved. Its presupposition that the sin of man is an injury to the majesty of God which God may not forgive without demanding satisfaction, this presupposition corresponds exactly with the conception of honor and the ethics of mediaeval knighthood. The death of the God-man as a voluntary performance, as guiltless suffering, as a gift of infinite value to God, corresponds to the ascetic, mediaeval view that suffering is in itself an object, is in itself good and pleasing to God. The higher the rank of the suf- ferer, the higher is the value of his suffering, and so the most valuable suffering of all is that of the God-man. Again, that the rewards of the God-man are transferable to others, that they are valid for us and are accounted to us — that corresponds to the Church teaching of the rewards of the saints, who may do penance, suffer, and die one for the 139 The Development of Christianity other; while on the other hand, it corresponds also to the criminal law of the middle age, according to which criminal action may be bought off by blood- money. The amount of this money is taxed ac- cording to the value of the injured object. The murder of a free man, for example, can only be atoned for by a higher sum than the murder of a slave. This mediaeval legal theory, which was not done away with until the time of Charles V, con- trolled the satisfaction theory of the Church dogma. Constructed on the presuppositions of its time, this satisfaction theory of Anselm corresponds to the mediaeval mode of thinking so exactly that it may be conceived easily that it was generally accepted, if not without conditions, by the Church. One thing alone is difficult to concede, that this teach- ing, originating entirely in mediaeval presupposi- tions and conditions, remained a permanent criterion in the Church, even in the era of Protestantism, which gave up all of those presuppositions of ec- clesiastical and temporal nature. For the Protes- tant Church, Anselm's theory is a remarkable an- achronism which, from the Protestant standpoint, is just as little to be understood as it is natural from the standpoint of the middle ages. A freer and bolder spirit was Peter Abelard, the learned teacher at the Dome School in Paris. True, his purpose was not an opposition to, but an ex- planation and basing of the Church dogmas. But in his dialectic method, which seemed to play with 140 Scholasticism and Mysticism the sacred material, he hit upon new ways of recon- ciling the contradictions which he found in the dog- mas. There lived in him an instinct of indepen- dent, reasoning thought which so differed from the authoritative belief of the Church that the con- tradiction was difficult to hide. Characteristic is his reverence of the heathen philosophers, of whom he judged that the divine wisdom of creation and the value of the morally good had been more purely known by them than in the Jews' petrified worship of the letter. His first book was a dialogue be- tween a Jew, a heathen philosopher, and a Christian — a prelude to Lessing's Nathan. In this case, de- cision was not had through recourse to authorities, but through the reason in the matter itself. Al- though Christ remains the victor, his Christianity is very strongly rationalistically re-formed. The notions of heaven and hell are simply given up as a popular religion and are spiritually changed into moral concepts of good and evil. Equally as com- promising as this dialogue, for orthodoxy, was his book entitled Sic et non, wherein the contradictions of the Church authorities in their answers to ques- tions of belief and life are arranged in such fashion that one authority controverts the other; by con- tradictory sentences taken from the Church Fath- ers and Scholastics and placed in parallel columns, they mutually nulHfy one another. The outbreak of conflict with Cliurch authority gave rise to Ab- elard's Tractate concerning the divine Trinity. 141 The Development of Christianity Abelard seeks to interpret this mysterious dogma in terms of reason, inasmuch as it is possible neither to believe nor to preach when one does not under- stand. He interprets the three persons as names for the attributes which belong to the Divine Be- ing; power, wisdom, and goodness, a differentiation which he expressly showed was to be found as early as Plato and the heathen Sibyl — one which had only been more clearly and decisively expressed by Christ. Such a rationalization is very simple and appealing, but it cannot be denied that the outcome is quite different from Church doctrine. Abelard's doctrine was condemned by the Synod at Soissons, and the author confined to the monastery. He soon escaped and, in the Oratory of the Holy Paraclete, gathered about himself a great host of students, so that in the course of time he was able to resume his activities at the Dome School. His enemies found no peace, however, until he had been con- demned anew and excommunicated by the Synod at Sens — excommunicated and condemned to life- imprisonment. He appealed to the Pope and at the same time fled to Cluny, where, two years later, he ended his active and much tried existence. The Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux had been his main opponent ; Abelard's reasoned dialectic, he op- posed with the mysticism of the heart, with that same one-sided passion which, at the close of the eighteenth century, romanticism employed against rationalism. Hausrath has given a fine charac- 142 Scholasticism and Mysticism tcrization of Bernard. He calls him the accurate type of Roman saint, soft by nature, but obsessed with the Old Testament zealous spirit. As a youth he had been a kind of troubadour, a singer of love- songs, then a penitent and reformer, a monk-prince, a spirited author, a powerful orator, and the great- est actor of his day; but with all his gifts he served no other master than the hierarchical idea of subjecting the world to monastlcism, and of fill- ing it with monasteries, and the monasteries with penitents. He was thoroughly In earnest in his denial of the world, yet he sought ever rulership over it. He desired the kingdom of peace, but by reason of his goading toward pilgrimages to Rome and crusades, there is more blood on his conscience than on that of any other man of the century. He began with a reformation of monastic life, and his order became more luxurious than any other; he was a visionary, a wonder-worker of naive credi- bility, and yet a wise statesman with a view as broad as the horizon which could possibly open up to the head of such a far-reaching order. He longed for the solitude of a cell, and yet he played a hand In all the activities of the Church and of world-politics, — in short he was a real representative of a system which, under the semblance of despising the world, aimed to rule it — the real prototype of the Ultra- Montanists who always carry religion In their mouths, through their dubious ways, and at the same time strive for the supremacy of their party. 143 The Development of Christianity The theologians, Hugo and Richard, of the Pa- risian Monastery of Saint Victor, were milder than the monk Bernard. They occupied a sort of middle position between the Scholastics and the Mystics. They distinguished three steps of piety: the first is a simple beHef, on the basis of authority; above that, is the belief which is conscious of its rea- sons through reasoned convictions; and lastly, the highest step is the seeing of God, the mystical vision of the divine truth which is grasped by the pure heart in unmediated emotion. John of Salisbury, the friend of Thomas ä Becket, also reproached Scholasticism on account of its one-sided, reasoned dialectics which lost themselves in formal concepts, and against it he set up practical directions for the life of society. The evil consequences which Abelard brought upon himself by his Icarus flight of bold dialectics caused the Scholastics who followed him to be more careful; they kept closer to the traditional material in the dogmas of belief. First, Peter of Lombardy gathered all the material of Church dogma into his four volumes of " Sentences " — a systematically ordered collection of dogmatic statements of the Church fathers concerning Church, world and man, God-man, sacraments, and the perfection of the Church. It might be called the first systematic Christian dogmatics. These volumes became the text-book for the later work of the Scholastics. That work consisted in transforming the material 144 Scholasticism and Mysticism thus gathered into a logical and connected whole, and for that purpose the AristoteHan philosophy, which had been learned through the mediation of the Arabic philosophy, was employed as a formal means of assistance. Up to that time, Aristotle had been entirely unknown to the Christian world, at the close of the twelfth century they made his ac- quaintance, and in the thirteenth, he became the greatest luminary in the heavens of authority, the ruler of thought, and, as Dante called him, " the master of those who know." He became the indis- putable authority concerning worldly wisdom, just as the dogma had become the indisputable authority concerning divine wisdom. Under this double yoke the Scholastics worked. The task of welding this double tradition into one uniform whole was the impossible labor through which Scholasticism neces- sarily brought about its own disintegration. Albertus Magnus was the ^' polyhistor" of his time. He gathered up all the knowledge then known and worked it into his Scholastic theology, into his dogmatic system. Out of his school came Thomas Aquinas, the Doctor Angelicus, as his mar- veling contemporaries named him. In the Siunma Theologiae, Thomas united Church tradition, Neo- platonic mysticism and Aristotelian dialectics into one system ; not only the mediaeval Church, but also the Catholic Church of to-day, has thought that sys- tem to be the essence of all truth. In fact, the Summa of Thomas is the most faithful expression 145 The Development of Christianity of the mediaeval world-view as it emerged out o£ the mixture of mediaeval philosophy and Church dogma. The architecture of that construction was mixed, and its materials of two entirely different natures — super-reasonable dogmas of faith built on a foundation of philosophic knowledge. Ac- cording to Thomas, although reason cannot prove the positive truths of faith, as Anselm and Abelard thought they could, yet reason cannot controvert them. Inasmuch as reason can only acknowledge its own hmitations with regard to positive knowl- edge, she herself demands her own completion by revelation, for she can arrive only through super- natural revelation at her absolute goal which con- sists in the supernatural condition of transcenden- tal bliss in the vision of God. Thomas is in accord with Aristotle when he desig- nates the nature of God as purest activity, actus purus. He is absolute simplicity in itself and is comprehended by our understanding only through various concepts. Thomas, too, teaches as Augus- tine taught, that the Three Persons of the Trinity are to be conceived as relations of divine thought and volition. Since, according to Thomas, the di- vine activity is thinking which has itself for an ob- ject, noesis noeseos, the Son is the self-created object and image of the divine thinking, and the Spirit of His willing. But, you ask, how can three persons come out of this? Well, Thomas does not know, himself. The theological thought made a strong at- 146 Scholasticism and Mysticism tack in its attempt at a reasoning knowledge of dogma, but it was repulsed by the rigid incompre- hensibility and super-reasonableness of dogma. With all the dogmas of the system of this other- wise keen thinker, the same thing is repeated; this is especially true of the doctrine of the creation and government of the world. He concedes, as Aris- totle did, that for reason, it would be the most nat- ural supposition that the world had no beginning in time, but was eternal like God, as though it were the divided phenomenon of a one, undivided divine nature. For reason that would be the more prob- able, but Thomas thinks it necessary, on the basis of revelation, to believe in a beginning of creation in time. Again, it is reasonable to think of Divine Providence as the dependence of all finite causes upon an all-deciding general or first cause, on God, Whose activity reveals itself in the connection of all finite causes among themselves. However, now and again, Thomas sees fit to nullify this order and accepts an immediate activity of the first cause in miracles. In accord with Augustine, Thomas teaches that man lost his original righteousness through the Fall, but thereby he lost only a supernatural addition to his nature ; his own nature was not spoiled. At the same time, however, the original righteousness was held to be the actual nature of man. Salvation is completed through the merit of the innocent suf- fering of Christ which, although in itself a per- 147 The Development of Christianity formance of infinite superabundant value, neverthe- less was to be continued and completed by the meri- torious performances of Christians themselves. The power to achieve the good is bestowed upon men through the sacraments, the mediums of divine grace. Through them he becomes capable of the performance of good works which God then con- siders man's own actual merit. The sacraments are means and bearers of a supernatural power; the purpose of the seven is to sanctify the whole of hu- man life, from birth to death, in all man's social relations. In the mass, there is a real change of the elements and at the same time a real repetition of the sacrifice of Christ by the celebrant priest. In the penitential sacrament, the Church practises her right of imposing temporal punishments according to her will, and of remitting punishments, even those of the world beyond under certain conditions, on the ground of her possession of the treasure of grace — that is, the heaped up merits of the saints which she distributes to each one according to his worth, so that he is relieved thus of temporal or super- mundane penalties. This dogmatic system rises to the hierarchical power of the Church over the ter- restrial and celestial welfare of humankind. It is remarkable that a system which is based on Aris- totle, the heathen philosopher, and his natural rea- son, should find its apex in the absolutely supernat- ural, the priestly power over things here and be- yond. Here you have the whole mediaeval period 148 Scholasticism and Mysticism with its crass contradictions of the natural, the su- pernatural, and the unnatural! As an opponent to Thomas, the theological mas- ter of the Dominican monks, there appeared Duns Scotus, actually the Scotchman John of Duns, a keen theologian of the Franciscans. He was as celebrated a critic as Thomas was a systematizer. By his critical analyses of the theses of his pred- ecessor, he prepares the dissolution of the whole Scholastic theology, that was involved in the funda- mental thought of the Scotistic theology. As Thomas had been a determinist, so Duns Scotus was an indeterminist ; or, in other words, as Thomas subordinates volition to knowledge, so Duns subor- dinates knowledge to volition. Using modern terms we should say, the one was an intellectualist and the other a voluntarist. The freedom of God and of man was the leading viewpoint of Duns's theol- ogy. His idea was that God did not need to con- sider anything meritorious because of any inner necessity of value. It is meritorious only because God wills it so. Hence, one might no longer speak of the necessity of salvation through Christ, but one may only believe on the basis of positive rev- elation that it had been God's will to accept the deed of Christ as an infinitely valuable one, just as God suffers the imperfect deeds of men to be considered meritorious as a matter of his own will, and this we are to believe on the ground of the authority of the Church. But it could n't be proved. 149 The Development of Christianity Altogether, the doctrines of belief withdraw from reasonable thinking and are exclusively the matter of positive belief which is the more meritorious the more it opposes reason, hence bringing the sac- rifice of the intellect. From this point, it was not far to the main- tenance of the double truth which is the counter- part of the double morahty, which we have spoken of before. The doctrine of the double truth is this : First, there is the natural truth, knowable through reason, for the philosophers; second, the supernat- ural truth revealed by God, naturally not to be known by us but to be believed on the basis of authority. These two truths stand alongside, though opposed to, one another, and yet both are held to be equally true. That is asking reason more than she can bear. Just as truly as there are not two reasons but only one, so truly can there be but one truth. In the doctrine of the double truth, there is revealed that deep difference which continues throughout the entire course of thinking of the later Scholastics. Under the mask of an obedient belief in authority, such as Duns Scotus demands, the sceptic imp is hidden. And in ques- tions such as those set up by later Scholasticism and seriously debated — for example, whether God might have taken on not only the human nature but that of a donkey or a stone — in such questions Scholasticism clearly mocks itself and declares its own bankruptcy. 150 Scholasticism and Mysticism Out of this wreck of Scholastic thinking, mys- ticism saved Christianity in the sanctuary of the heart. Beyond the rigid concepts of the under- standing and the conclusions of logic, which were to bridge over the chasm between the finite and the infinite and yet never could, mysticism turned to the immediate emotion or feeling of the oneness of the soul with God. At one time this mysticism allied itself to the speculative thinking of Plato and thus prepared a new theology arising from religious ex- perience and leading to freer speculation ; at another time it confined itself to practical wisdom evidenced by purity of heart and life. First of all, we must speak of the great master of speculative mysticism, Meister Eckhart of Stras- burg; his sermons and his writings started a great movement of the spirits of the times, especially in the Rhine country. He was well acquainted with Holy Writ, with the Church fathers and Scholastics, especially with Augustine and Thomas, but he did not care about basing Church doctrine, he wanted to show the way of the soul toward God. For his deep religious speculation, he created his own lan- guage. His sermons in the Allemannian tongue carry one away with their power and convincing quality. The Church had made the thought of God- manhood an inconceivable, supermundane mystery. Eckhart made it the central point of religious ex- perience and the source of religious speculation. God's real nature is such that he does not stay for 151 The Development of Christianity Himself alone, beyond, but that He reveals Him- self as the life of the whole world and of all men. Without creatures God were not God. He can do as little without us as without Himself. What creatures are in truth, that they are in God, through the existence which God Himself has imparted to them. It is the goodness of God that He imparts Himself to all, but only in the human soul is God present in Godlike fashion. The soul is, therefore, God's resting-place in which the temporal and the eternal are allied. Our spirit is the divine spark within us, wherein is completed the alliance of God and the soul. As God contains all things in Him- self, so it is in our soul; the soul is the micro-cosmos in which all things are contained and are led back to God. Therefore, there is no difference between the Son of God and the soul. Humanity itself is the one Son whom the Father eternally bore, but the individual man is only a limited phenomenon of all human being. li I put aside the limitations of self, which separate me from others, and return to the simplicity of my spiritual being, then all that remains is the pure nature of the soul which is so one with the nature of God that the soul might almost be called God itself and the creator of all things. Whatever separates us from God is but the deceptive semblance of self which chains our volition. Hence, man must release himself from the fetters of self and creature love, must have noth- ing and desire nothing excepting God, and expe- 152 Scholasticism and Mysticism rience God in the solitude of his spirit. *' Shall I make God with thee? Then must thou first be- come as nothing, must give up all thy willing and thinking and offer up thy soul pure to God, must not will anything excepting what He wills; then hast thou no need to care for righteousness, but let God be active in thee, and then in thy love of God art thou certain of thy bliss which can never again be destroyed by the evils of the age. Ever and ever therein goes on the incarnation of God as in Christ, for the Father did not bear the Son only in eternity, but ever and ever does He give birth to Him in the soul of him who offers himself to Him, and what the Son has taught us in Christ is merely this, that we are the selfsame sons of God." — By these thoughts, so far ahead of their time, the Meister of Strasburg stretches his hand across five centuries toward the classical German thinkers of modern times. His successors in South Germany and in the Netherlands — Tauler and Suso, Ruysbroek and Thomas ä Kempis — put aside his speculative thoughts to a great extent and confined themselves mainly to the ethical content of his mysticism, and continued this mainly along its ascetic world-deny- ing side. Only the unknown author of the " Ger- man Theology " (we know merely that he be- longed to the " Deutschherren " of Frank fort-on- the-Main, in the fourteenth century) is another such genius as Eckhart. In him are well balanced 153 The Development of Christianity throughout the deep knowledge of the nature of things and practical ethics. The author says with Eckhart: ''God is the Being of all being, the Life of all living, the Knowledge of all knowing, all things have their nature truer in God than in themseh^es, and this is true of their powers, their knowledge, their life, and everything else; other- wise God were not everything good. So all is good, and God will have it so, and so it is not contrary to Him. Only one thing is contrary to Him, sin, and this is nothing else than that the creature wills other than God's will." With great emphasis, the author turns against " the free spirits " who de- duced from the mystic unity of God a moral in- differentism and egoistic superhumanity. He asks : " What then is a man who is completely God or GodHke? This be the answer: He who is illum- inated throughout and glows with the divine light, who is inflamed and burns with the divine love. Light or knowledge is nothing and has no value without love. Though one may make many no- tions of God and His attributes for himself and think that he knows exactly what God is: if he have not love he will neither be completely God nor God- like. H there is to be real love there, then the man must hold fast to God and give up all that is not of God or that is against God. Such love unites man with God so that he never can be separated from Him. Where, however, there is the true light and 154 Scholasticism and Mysticism the true love, there too is Christ, for in truth they are both one." Our time is too short for a more detailed study of this profound writing which, as you know, was so highly thought of by Luther that he published it twice with a preface. Most recently it has been published under the title, Das Büchlein vom voll- kommenen Leben, Eine deutsche Theologie in the original text, critically edited, with a capital intro- duction by Herrn. Buettner. I advise you to get this little book. I am sure it will captivate you. iSS CHAPTER VIII THE PASSING OF THE MIDDLE AGES A BRIEF review of the closing period of the mid- dle ages, the three centuries from Innocent III to the Reformation are to occupy us to-day. These are the main points to be kept in mind : First, the dis- integration of the papal hierarchy; Second, the rise of the new supports and instruments of the Church, the mendicant monastic orders of Franciscans and Dominicans; Third, the growing opposition to the Church system in the consciousness of the laity and of some of the theologians ; Fourth, the increase of strength in the new worldly ideal of culture. This last point we will take up next time and we will begin to-day with the disintegration of the papal hierarchy. After the death of Innocent III, the struggle be- tween Pope and Emperor was renewed with great- est passion on both sides. Gregory IX attacked the great Stauffen Emperor, Frederick II, with the spiritual weapon of the ban and with the temporal weapon of a revolt of the Northern Italian cities. Frederick, however, was more fortunate than his predecessors. Italy succumbed to his superior pow- er and his superior culture laughed at the papal ban. 156 Passing of the Middle Ages In fact, Frederick was far ahead of his century, both in scientific enhghtenment and in statesman- ship. Instead of fearing the papal ban, as the Em- peror before him had, he reversed the weapon. In an open letter to the princes, he made the heaviest accusations against the Pope : " Ye princes, pity the Church for her head is weak, her prince is a bellowing lion, in her midst sits a disloyal man, a smirched priest, a scatter-brained prophet. Truly this misfortune comes closest to us and we feel most keenly the consequences of papal misdeeds, but in the end our disgrace is also yours, and your sub- jugation seems an easy thing when once the Ro- man Emperor is subdued. We are not writing this as though the power to turn away this misfortune were lacking, but that the whole world may see that the honor of all temporal princes is attacked when one of them has been insulted." In a second letter to the Christian world, apos- tolic poverty is contrasted with the insatiable greed of the Pope, and thus the hierarchical system was struck at its most vulnerable point, a point which at the same time most angered the laymen. Fred- erick wrote to Henry III of England that it would be a work of love to take their possessions from the clerics and to lead them back to the apostolic life and the humility of their Master. But the ac- complishment of such bold plans of reformation was not to be thought of under the Stauffen Emperor whose power was split by the Italian rulership. As 157 The Development of Christianity long as he lived his spirit was equal to all the papal intrigues, and after his death misfortune fell upon his house. We might say that Italy caused the im- perial house of Stauffen, and with it the old German imperial power, to bleed to death. However, the victory of the Popes was dearly bought. They called in the French to aid them against the German Emperor, and the consequence was that they fell under the authoritative influence of the French kings. At the close of the thirteenth century, Boniface VIII did try to play again the role of the great Pope Innocent III. The result showed how the times had changed. When Boniface insulted King Philip of France, the latter sought and found sup- port in the French people; he called a parliament not only of the nobility and the clerics but added the third estate, the citizens, whose national self- consciousness ranged itself on the side of the King and against Rome. This parliament immediately had the foreign prelates arrested and confiscated their possessions. Thereupon, in his infamous bull, Unam Sanctam, the Pope declared that all human creatures are subject to the Pope under the pain of loss of bliss. King PhiHp had him who proclaimed the bull arrested, and accused the Pope of heresy, in the assembly, because he assumed infalhbility, thus leading men to idolatry. The Pope's reply was the interdiction of France and the grant of rulership over France, as a fief, to the German King. But IS8 Passing of the Middle Ages that didn't help. The power of the Roman curses broke against the united opposition of the French people which formed a bulwark for its King against the Roman Pope. Therein the French people have always been exemplary and we can only marvel at them and envy them ! Thus, supported by his peo- ple, Phihp could dare to take the Pope prisoner at Anagni and suffer him to be plundered of all his treasure. Although he was soon freed, he died of a broken heart shortly after his return to Rome. His defeat marked the beginning of the decline of papal temporal power against which there had risen the national spirit of the nations. The French Pope, Clement V, who had bought his election by concessions to Philip of France, was the first to make his seat the little town of Avignon in South France, and therewith, in 1305, he began the sev- enty-two years of the so-called Babylonian exile of the Papacy. The Popes at this time were simply instruments of the French kings and it was but nat- ural that it served them little toward gaining respect among the other nations. The dispute between the German Emperor, Lud- wig the Bavarian, and the French Pope, John XXII, was the occasion of the first literary polemics con- cerning the rights of State and Church in princi- ple. Augustinus Triumphus, the papal defender in this dispute, wrote that, as the Pope was God's dep- uty in care of all of the royal realms of the world, he might depose all kings if he would; for all kings 159 The Development of Christianity are his officers. Against this, MarsiHus of Padua, the learned friend of the German King, wrote a memorial, Defensor Pads (The Defender of Peace), wherein he defends the independence of the state emphatically, recommends the abrogation of Church territory, and of all temporal force in matters of faith, and rejects the validity of the papal interdict. He goes so far as to fall back upon Holy Writ as the sole authority and makes his appeal to a general council of the faithful. Mar- siHus is the first to make use of historical criticism as a weapon against the hierarchy, in that he is the first one to doubt the legend of the Bishop's Office of Peter at Rome and to endeavor to demonstrate that it is a baseless myth. Besides these bold the- oretical declarations which show Marsilius actually to be far ahead of his time, the conflict between the German Emperor Ludwig and the Pope had this practical consequence; at the meeting of the Kurfürsts at Reuse they declared that the election of a German King was dependent entirely upon their choice and independent of every papal inter- ference. Thus, also among the German princes, the vaunt of the foreigner finally wakened the feeling of national independence. It is a pity that Ludwig did not take the decided stand and fall back upon this national feeHng, as the French King had done. Soon after the return of Pope Gregory XI to Rome, the schism between the Italian Pope, Urban VI, and the French Pope, Clement VII, began and l6o Passing of the Middle Ages they mutually excommunicated one another. The bishops and the monastic orders took sides, — in short, the consequence was a helpless confusion of the entire Church. In order to overcome these evils, the University of Paris demanded a general Coun- cil v^hich was to take up the reform of Church disorders in general. As a matter of fact, this Council was called to meet at Pisa. It was without result ; for, while the two unworthy Popes were de- posed, their place was filled by John XXIII, a one- time sea pirate and notorious criminal. At the next Council, of Constance, in 141 5, he, too, was de- posed, Martin V was chosen as his successor — a shrewd diplomat who understood how to render all the reform measures of the Council nugatory by making separate treaties with the individual nations, and who made it heretical to appeal from or against the Pope at any Council. Against this the reform party, powerfully represented by the French Chan- cellor, Gerson, maintained that a general Council was superior to the Pope and based this on the authority of Christ. The efforts of Gerson and his followers brought about the third reform Coun- cil, at Basle. The session lasted from 1431 to 1449, but it achieved equally little. Its reform decrees, intended to bring about the independence of national Churches and the limitation of the papal power, failed because the Italian papal party pro- tested ; because the German princes were weak, and because the royal minister ^neas Sylvius, who 161 The Development of Christianity later ascended the papal throne as Pius II, was too crafty. At first he belonged to the reform party, but, cleverly noting how things were going, he went over to the papal party, and then he knew how to talk over the weak Emperor, Frederick III, so that all the accomplishments of the reform councils were given up by the Concordat of Aschaffenburg. Again the French were wiser. They knew how to use the opportunity of the moment in the Sanction of Bourges, wherein the Basle decrees were made the basis of the independence of the Gallic Church. The pitiable weakness of the attempts at reform of the Councils had demonstrated that a reform of the Church from above, from Emperor and Pope, was impossible. It showed that any real renewal of the Church had to come from below, from the people themselves, from the individual consciences of Christians. The last Popes of the close of the middle ages were merely temporal princes, generals, and art Maecenases ; as to the rest, they were actually heath- en in attitude and action. Innocent VIII was called the father of Rome on account of his numer- ous illegitimate children. His infamous Witches Bull was made the basis of gruesome persecution of witches, bringing unspeakable misery upon Chris- tendom for centuries. Alexander VI and Caesar Borgia, his son, were virtuosos in vice, without shame and without conscience. Julius II was a bold warrior, a sharp statesman, a Maecenas of art, 162 Passing of the Middle Ages anything but a cleric. Leo X was a good-natured friend of the ItaHan humanists and shared their heathen way of thinking. A saying of his is re- ported, though we cannot make sure of its au- thenticity, a saying characteristic enough of the reputation which he bore : " 'Tis known how much that fable about Christ has helped us." Thus the Papacy arrived at the derision of its own religious basis. The idea had lived to its end and its rights were forfeit. This must not be understood to mean that it never had had any rights, that it had not been a beneficial institution for the education of the crude peoples, but the rights which it had in its own time were forfeited with the Reformation and perhaps even before, — and they were forfeited for- ever. From such a disintegration of the Hierarchy, we must turn back and consider the period of its great- est success, the beginning of the thirteenth century. It was at that time that it acquired its most power- ful supports in the mendicant orders, the Francis- cans and Dominicans. The founder of the Franciscan Order was Saint Francis of Assisi, the most attractive of all the saints of the Catholic Church. His was a truly childlike, pure soul, aglow with the love of the suffering Redeemer, of the poor and the sick, in fact, of all creatures, for Francis regarded the an- imals and the flowers, the sun and the stars, the wind and the water and the fire, as his dear broth- 163 The Development of Christianity ers and sisters. His was an enthusiastic love of all, by which there appears a new sesthetic, mystic feeling for nature in the world, — as full of prom- ise as the rose of sunset. After youthful years of gaiety the young Francis was overcome by the deep pain of the vanity of all earthly things, a deep world-pain which before had driven many into soli- tude. Francis, too, gained his first peace through his life as a hermit near the little church, the Por- tiuncula, close to Assisi. But his heart was gripped by those words of the Mass which tell of the sending of the disciples without shoes or staff, without gold or girdle. Triumphantly he cried, *' That it is which I have sought." Thereupon he laid aside girdle, sandals and staff and took to the road in order to preach to his people the Gospel of Jesus, to proclaim repentance, denial of the world, and therewith peace with God. Comrades newly con- verted, men of the lower ranks of the people, soon joined with him, and they wandered about beg- ging and preaching. Francis was convinced firmly even then that this little band, seemingly so futile, would be changed by the Master into a great people reaching to the ends of the earth, and he was fully conscious of the great importance of the mission of his work. However, he did not desire to act with- out the blessing of the Church and, in order to ask it, he had himself introduced to Pope Innocent HI by the Bishop of Assisi. At first the Pope is said to have received him in hard and imperious fashion 164 Passing of the Middle Ages but the humble submission of Francis moved him so that he granted his blessing and gave him per- mission to preach even though Francis lacked the priestly ordination; he did, however, reserve the formal confirmation. Francis was thus enabled to begin the organization of his comrades who called themselves Minors, less than the others. They were not to attach themselves to monasteries, but were to go about as itinerant preachers, caring for the souls of the poor and the sick, and meeting once every two years, at Easter, at the Portiuncula Church. Like Buddha, Francis was at first filled with misgivings and doubts toward the women, but this was changed by Clara Scifi, who revered him greatly and begged him to present her as the bride of the Master. Practically Francis abducted her, though with her consent, from her parents' house. He took her to a friendly nunnery, cut off her hair with his own hands, and consecrated her as a nun. It was a pure, delicate, entirely Platonic romantic relation which existed between Saint Francis and his visionary friend, Clara Scifi. For her sake he founded the Order of Santa Clara, which became the woman's section of the Franciscan Order. To the Franciscan monks and nuns, there was added a third circle, that of the lay brothers and sisters, under the name of the Tertiaries. They remained of the world, they married, and simply obligated them- selves to live a pious life in the fulfilment of all Church duties. These Tertiaries became the popu- i6s The Development of Christianity lar basis of the mendicant orders who thus gained a strong influence over all ranks, but especially over the lowest masses of people. After his death Francis became the subject of countless legends and was worshipped as a wonder- working savior, the image of the Redeemer. Ac- cording to a report, not entirely verified, Francis is said to have borne the stigmata of his Master. In direst need, the appeal to the dead was considered so effective and of such miraculous power that the saying arose of him : " He hears even those whom God Himself doth not hear." Thus he is more benevolent or more powerful than the love of God Himself. Protestant zealots have decried this as blasphemy. However, they overlooked the fact that in this case there is another expression of that same instinct leading to the worship of human medi- ators which, in fact, lay at the basis of the worship of Jesus. In any event, Francis of Assisi, who did not merely play sentimentally with the Gospel ideal of poverty but held it in full earnest, had far more similarity and relationship to Jesus than had all the reformers of the sixteenth century, and certainly more than those modern Protestants who preach theoretically the return to primitive Chris- tianity but practically harbor no such thought ! The unprejudiced historian has not the slightest doubt on this subject. All of this gives rise to the question: Why did not the decisive reform of the Church emanate from i66 Passing of the Middle Ages Francis? And this is the answer: Because there was lacking in him, despite all his love and imitation of Jesus, the Pauline Christlike spirit, the spirit of personal freedom in God, and because in him its place was too powerfully held by the legal and Church spirit which enslaves the personality. By this devotion to Church, the poverty ideal of Francis differs from that of the heretical Waldenses. It must be conceded, nevertheless, that the subjection to the Papal rulership guaranteed the continuation and persistence of Francis's life work. For its in- ner purity that dependence was fraught with dan- ger. As the mightiest instrument of the Church, the Franciscan order soon became the main repre- sentative of all Church evils, of superstition, of hierarchical greed and moral corruption. The vow of poverty did not deter the Franciscans from build- ing the most marvelous monasteries, from gather- ing the greatest treasures, wdiich, they declared, were treasures that they were merely using while their actual proprietor was the Pope. Certainly this was nothing more than a formal fiction. No Order was so eager to glorify the Papacy as the Franciscans and the Order of the Dominicans, which had been founded by Dominic about the same time, and which reckoned it their main merit that they either converted or suppressed heretics. The Dominicans then became the craftiest masters of the inquisition; this fame was theirs beyond all other Orders. In the struggle between the popes 167 The Development of Christianity and the kings and emperors, the mendicant friars were the troop militant of the Pope and they egged the peoples on against their political superiors in favor of the popes. The disgraceful trade in in- dulgences, by which forgiveness for sin was achieved for gold, lay in their hands. This trade in indulgences came in consequence of the crusades and at first meant the relief from some other kind of performance, such as the promised share in a crusade or similar pilgrimage, but soon it came to mean the release from all the punishments which the Church might impose here or beyond, and thus finally it became a means by which forgiveness of sins and release from guilt might be bought. Out of these mendicant Orders came celebrated theo- logians, such as Thomas Aquinas, the Dominican, and Duns Scotus, the Franciscan. In general, how- ever, the mendicant Orders became the gathering places of all such superstitions as feared the light. The Franciscans were the bitterest enemies of all the scientific activities of the humanistic scholars. Thus does the history of the mendicant monastic Orders confirm that which had been shown by the failure of the reform Councils, namely that an in- ner renewal of Christianity might not be expected from the Roman papal Church. The instinct of the simple folk-consciousness had long felt that, hence the religious awakening of the last mediaeval centuries was mainly through inim- ical attitude toward Church and clerics. It was 168 Passing of the Middle Ages thus also with the Waldenses. Their founder was Peter Waldo, a rich citizen of Lyons, who was inspired to the ideal of Gospel poverty and apos- tolic teaching by the reading of the Gospel writings. At first Waldo did not desire to break w^ith the papal Church. He merely asked permission from the Pope for lay preaching. Such permission was granted and then withdrawn on account of suspicion of heresy. A new attempt on the part of the clever Innocent III to maintain '' the brotherhood of the poor " in the Church had no permanent result. The stronger section of the Waldenses soon cut loose entirely from the Church and declared it to be a synagogue of evil doers, the Babylonian whore, and her servants to be hirelings, blind leaders of the blind, whose places were to be taken by apostolic itinerant preachers. They denied the papal power of the keys, the efficacy of the saints, and the doc- trine of hellfire, etc. But with all their opposition against the clerics, they soon formed, among them- selves, a new set of clerics who were to be entirely without property and wives. They were soon di- vided into several hierarchical ranks and they alone had the privilege of giving the sacrament. The Waldenses held fast to the idea of the priest Church and rejected it only in the form of the Roman priesthood. Later they became acquainted with the Hussites and with the reformation of Luther and, it seems, changed and purified their former doc- trines. 169 The Development of Christianity " The Apostolic Brothers " were more radical than the Waldenses. They prophesied the destruc- tion of the papal hierarchy by the victorious advent of a king; but with the rejection of the ecclesiastical order they demanded also the rejection of the civic order. A fearful bath of blood made an end to the greater part of their adherents. " The Brothers of the Free Spirit " accepted the pantheism of the Parisian theologian, Amalric of Bena, and deduced from it that practical indif- ferentism which lay beyond good and evil; they demanded equality and freedom, as well as com- munity of goods and wives. " The Friends of God," in Alsace, were more harmless and so, too, were the " Brothers of the Common Life," founded by Gerhardt Groot, along the lower Rhine. They practised a kind of prac- tical piety after the fashion of the mystics, Tauler, Ruysbroek, Thomas ä Kempis. They were indif- ferent toward the Church, but their attitude was not inimical. So strong was their denial of the world and so narrow their circle of thought that they could not directly affect and effect a renewal of the Church. The most distinct predecessor of the Reforma- tion was John Wycliffe, the famous Oxford theo- logian who first made a name for himself by his bold defense of his university against the shame- less importunities of the mendicant monks and the French Popes. When Pope Urban VI con- 170 Passing of the Middle Ages demned him, Wycliffe advanced to an opposition against the entire Church system. He character- ized the Pope as the apocalyptic man of sin, and reverence of him as blasphemous idolatry. The mendicant monks, he called the army of the anti- Christ, the dogma of transubstantiation (dogma of the changing of the bread) as both unevangelical and unreasonable error. According to Wycliffe, the true Church is no other than a community of those chosen for bliss and among them there is no difference between priests and laymen. Christ alone is to be acknowledged as the head and the Holy Scriptures as the only law. In order to make this one valid source of truth the common posses- sion of all, Wy cliff e began a translation of the Bible into English; the hierarchy strongly con- demned this as an invasion of its privilege and a profanation of sacred things. Wycliffe was par- ticularly incensed by the sale of indulgences which treated guilt and merit as material things separable from the personal will, whereby all personal re- sponsibility would be set aside. This was an at- tack upon one of the worst and most vulnerable points of the Catholic Church system; it was the same attack which Luther later made. Even after his death, the Council of Constance condemned Wy- cliffe, ordered his body dug up from the grave and had it burned. The views of Huss concerning the Church were suggested by Wycliffe. He worked on the lines of 171 The Development of Christianity Wycliffe, at Prague, and was put under the ban by Pope John XXIII. He appealed to Christ and a gen- eral Council. He was invited to attend the Coun- cil of Constance and went there armed with Em- peror Sigismund's letter of protection. Unfortu- nately, Sigismund allowed himself to be talked over by the Roman prelates who said that a promise need not be kept to a heretic, and he gave poor Huss over to the hatred of his theological and political enemies. In the summer of 1415 he was burned; but the flames of that funeral pyre lit all the Hus- site wars and far more, for they were the begin- nings of the later religious wars. 172 BOOK II THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRIS- TIANITY SINCE THE REFORMATION CHAPTER IX RENAISSANCE AND GERMAN REFORMATION During our last session we found that, from the fourteenth century on, Christendom was full of a lively feeling of a deep-rooted conflict between the idea and the reality of the Church; it experienced the need of a reform of the Church from the top through all its members. We saw, too, that all at- tempts at reform, officially on the part of the Coun- cils, and heretically by sects and individual theo- logians, ever proved fruitless failures. The question arises: How is it that this need should have been so strongly felt and yet the Refor- mation not have come about much earlier than through Luther? Fundamentally, I think there were two reasons underlying this phenomenon. First, at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the ground had not been sufficiently prepared for a general reformation. The Church's view of the world still held men too closely and their horizon was entirely too narrow. Men had not yet awak- ened to a consciousness of personal independence. This first condition of any successful reformation was brought about by the Renaissance at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth 175 The Development of ChristianiXy century. Second, to the Renaissance there was added the concentration of religious striving for one thoroughgoing, comprehensible, religious idea such as was possible only in a personality of such deep religious quality and at the same time of such uni- versal popularity as appeared in the person of Luther. By Renaissance, we understand, in general, the revival of the sciences in the fourteenth and fif- teenth centuries. Actually, it was far more than a mere literary movement. The Renaissance was the awakening of an independent mode of thinking and of a natural manner of feeling, for which proto- types were sought among the men of Graeco-Roman antiquity; it is also the elevation of the personality to a consciousness of its natural human rights against all fetters of Church dogma and customs. People were tired of looking at the world through the glasses of scholastic pseudo-science, they longed for the fountains of purer truth and beauty, and they believed that they found these in the art, the poetry and the philosophy of Graeco-Roman an- tiquity. For this purpose, they called teachers of the Greek language and literature from Constanti- nople to Italy, they gathered the manuscripts of poets, philosophers and historians. Plato, the phil- osopher, became the favorite teacher of these new thinkers. Art treasures were dug up and the dust of centuries which covered them was removed. These treasures of art and science were collected in 176 German Reformation museums and libraries ; taste and style were formed by a study of them, and thus the attempt was made to widen the horizon. The Italian humanists, how- ever, did not go beyond a mere imitation of the ancient form in prose and poetry, while in conduct theirs was, at the same time, an imitation of the heathen manner of life which consisted in a separa- tion of discipline and custom from the natural. With all this there was not the faintest idea of a renewal of religion and the Church. Outwardly, the humanists conformed to Church regulations, but as for themselves they never concealed their disrespect toward Church doctrine. It is self-evi- dent that this indifferentism was not the ground from which any positive reform could arise. All this changed when the humanistic sciences spread among the peoples north of the Alps, when the schools of the larger cities of the realm and sev- eral local universities cultivated them. Then there awoke a study of the ancients with an earnest spirit of scientific research and testing which soon could not desist from the very sources of religion and the sacred writings of the Bible. Just at the right moment, the new invention of the art of printing came to help this new pressure of the spirit. In the year 1455, Gutenberg was able to send out into the world, from the press at Maintz, the first printed Bible. In the same year Reuchlin was born, and soon thereafter, 1467, Erasmus. These are the two most famous and most deserving representatives of 177 The Development of Christianity German humanism, particularly because they ap- plied their wealth of learning to the service of Biblical research. In conscious contrast to the Ital- ian humanists, Reuchlin devoted himself to the study of the Hebrew language, and by the publication of the first Hebrew grammar in 1 506, he made possible a study of the Old Testament in its original lan- guage. When the Dominicans made this profana- tion of Holy things the reason for bitter perse- cutions, Reuchlin's name was the banner of the Ger- man humanists against the '' Obscurantists/' Then appeared those Epistolce obscuroriim viroriim in which the ignorance and vulgarity of the monks was set forth for the gaiety of all Europe. Eras- mus was the acknowledged head of the learned world of his day. He knew well the dire need of the Church and sought to reform it by substituting genuine scientific theology based on a healthy un- derstanding of the New Testament and the Church for scholastic pseudo-science. In 15 16, he pub- lished a critically purified text of the New Testa- ment with a Latin translation and notes added. Later he prepared editions of the Church Fathers with prefaces and notes, thus equipping the armory of the reformers for their struggle against the hierarchy and Scholasticism. It ought not to be a personal reproach against Erasmus that he himself did not become a reformer, for his retiring and sickly student nature was terrified by the tumult of the open struggle. Truly he did what he could ; 178 German Reformation he did that for which he was called, in that by his scientific work he prepared the ground in which, alone, the seed of the great reformers could thrive. Such was the merit of Erasmus, and of Reuchlin. What neither the great powers of the Church nor the lights of humanistic science had been able to achieve was brought about by the simple Augus- tine monk, Martin Luther. Neither the demands of Church politics nor critical doubts of science were his starting point, but a genuine mediaeval fear of the wrath of God had driven him into the mon- astery, and there, in the hot struggle for the salva- tion of his own soul, he experienced the inadequacy of Catholic means of redemption and of monkish castigation. There he found release from the need of his soul in the Pauline belief in the grace of God and justification by faith. This evangelical con- viction, tested in his own experience by Luther, came into direct conflict with the senseless disorder of the Catholic sale of indulgences as it w^as then practised in Germany by the Dominican, Tetzel. This conflict was the cause of Luther's appearance as a reformer. But even when Luther nailed his celebrated theses on the doors of the church at Wit- tenberg, he was not conscious of any conflict with the Church and much less was it his purpose to bring about conflict. Not until the Leipsic dispute with Eck, who tried to embarrass Luther by having him called before the Council, was he led to free himself entirely from Church authority. " I be- 179 The Development of Christianity lieve that I am a Christian theologian and Hve in the realm of truth, therefore I will be free and will give myself prisoner to no authority, be it Council, or Emperor, or Pope, in order that I may with full confidence confess all that I have known to be truth, whether it be accepted or rejected by a Council. Why should I not dare the attempt when I, one, can cite a better authority than a Council ? " This better authority was Holy Writ, in so far as it coincided with his religious experience and evi- denced itself as divine truth and as the revelation of the bliss-bringing grace of God. Not as an ac- tual collection of Biblical books was Scripture an unconditional authority for him. He, too, exer- cised his religious criticism upon them. He judged of the old Prophets that they had not built always with gold and silver, but that chaff and straw re- mained. He compared the story of Jonah with the fables of Greek antiquity, and the Epistle of James he called an insipid epistle, and the Apoc- alypse of John he considered entirely non-apos- tolic because his spirit could not rest in this book. " What does not impel Christ, that is not apostolic, even though Saints Peter and Paul teach it. However, whatever preaches Christ, that would be apostolic, even though it were taught by Judas, Ananias, Pilate, or Herod," that is, Scripture as a whole is not an unconditional authority for Luther, but only that part of it which he recog- nizes as its Christian kernel and can acknowledge i8o German Reformation as such because it satisfies and corresponds to his own reHgious need. In so far we may say that, for Luther, the highest court is the inner conviction of the faithful heart which has become certain of its God, and that is the new principle of Protestantism, — the religious inwardness and self-sufficiency of the pious personality, its independence of all medi- ators and mediums. It cannot be denied that Luther did not logically carry out this principle, but that it was limited in him by his attachment to the his- torical, traditional form of his faith, and the con- sequences of this soon became apparent. First, let us view this new principle as the foundation of a new world of faith and life, clearly presented in the three great reformatory writings of the year 1520. In the book To the Christian Nobility of the Ger- man Nation, concerning the Improvement of the Christian Rank, the general priesthood of all Chris- tians as against the religiously privileged rank of priesthood, is taught, and the hierarchical claims of the latter are unequivocally rejected as being un- evangelical. Thereupon a healthy moral order of the whole of civic life on the basis of national self- decision, independent of Roman guardianship and exploitation, is demanded and the outlines of such a new formation drawn. In the sermon. On the Freedom of the Christian Man, the sum of a Chris- tian life is drawn in characteristic fashion. A Christian man is the free master of all things 181 The Development of Christianity through the faith, which is none other than a union of the soul with Christ whereby it exchanges all of its evils for his goods. Hence, the believer is a king and a priest, capable of all things and worthy of standing before God. This is not the outcome of his works, for as the tree is, so is the fruit. Thus the good person makes the good works, and not vice versa. It is the gratitude for God's gift of grace which impels man to be pleasing to God and to become a savior for his neighbor, as Christ had become a savior for him. Thus, from faith flow forth love and joy of God, and out of love a free, joyous life in the service of one's neighbor. Only those works are actually good which are designed to serve the neighbor, — not those which are calculated upon reward and as a purchase price for heaven. Faith thus becomes the root of a pure, unselfish morality for a work-performing Christian : in short, " A Christian being lives not for himself alone, but in Christ through his faith, and in his neighbor through his love." Here then is the noble essence of mediaeval mysticism, its inner piety purified by its former denial of the world and elevated to be the motive of a deed-producing terrestrial morality. How far this is from all Church ceremonial worship, one can see in that great reformatory tract entitled On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. The entire Catholic doctrine of sacraments, first of all the Mass, is therein rejected. The Mass is not, as the Catholic Church taught, a magically effect- 182 German Reformation ive performance of the priest, not sacrifice and work of men, but the promise of the Word combined with the sign, which is effective not in itself but only through faith, through that faith which is the real eating and drinking. In fact, faith effects that which baptism symbolically means, namely, the death of the former and the resurrection of the new, spir- itual man. The other sacraments are rejected as unbiblical, so too the monastic vows, the confes- sional, the sacramental consecration of priests and the canonical laws of marriage. The purely Prot- estant, fundamental thought of this treatise is the nondependence of the personal redemption of Chris- tians upon sacraments offered by priests. This thought is again worked out in the treatise : Instruc- tion for Children of the Confessional. Therein he says : " Would the priest give up the sacrament, then must he let sacrament, altar, priest, and Church go hence. For the divine word is more than all things, 'tis that which the soul cannot get on with- out, though it can do without sacraments. Then will the right Bishop Himself feed thee with the spiritual sacrament. Therefore take heed and let no thing be so great that it can drive thee contrary to thine own conscience." As a consequence of this independence of the personal conscience toward the sacramental acts of the priests, there ought to follow the independence of conviction as to the dogmatic laws of the Church; but as to this it must be conceded that the period 183 The Development of Christianity of the Reformation was not ripe for such a general recognition of freedom of conscience and convic- tion. At that time each party demanded freedom for itself and denied it to the others. It was not long before the conclusion of personal freedom of conscience was practically drawn. However, it must be especially remarked that Luther at least, differing therein from all the others reformers, fundamentally rejected compulsion in matters of conscience. In his book, Concerning the Bounds of Obedience toward Temporal Superiors, he says : " God can and will have nobody to rule over the soul excepting only Himself. To Him alone can the thoughts of the soul be plain. Therefore, it is in vain and impossible to compel by force this belief or that belief. Force does not do it. It is a free work in faith, to which no one can be forced. God's word should do battle here. If that can achieve nothing, then the thing will have to be left undone by temporal force. Heresy is a spiritual thing that cannot be scourged with iron and that cannot burn in any fire." In fact, these are the fundamentals of the modern freedom of conscience which Luther, hastening far ahead of his time, clearly recognized. Thus we may say that Luther's writings of the years from 1520 to 1523 are the boundary stones of the new period. They are the genuine expres- sion of the Protestant spirit in which the Renais- sance, the awakening of man to the modern con- sciousness of personality, came into religious 184 German Reformation activity. If we add the invaluable gift which Luther made to our people in that translation (be- gun on the Wartburg) of the Bible into a generally comprehensible and warm German language — if we consider the superhuman impression made by his personal heroic courage as evidenced from the very beginning when he burned the papal bull on his way to Worms, and his attitude in Worms, where he gave testimony of his evangelical faith before Em- peror, princes and prelates, in untrammeled and undisguised fashion — if we take all these things together, then we can understand the tremendous inspiration, the popular rejoicing which went out toward him from all circles of the German realm and from far beyond its borders. The pious souls found therein the fulfilment of their longing for immediate inner communion with God. The humanistically cultured found therein freedom from superstition, from spiritless ceremonies, and from unnatural monasticism. Those bent upon national and social things found therein freedom from cleri- cal corruption, from stranger rule of the Romans and from their exploitation of our people. On the occasion of the first martyrdoms for the new faith, Luther could thus begin his hymn of victory: "Summertime is at the door. And wintertime is gone. The tender flowers are coming out: He who hath thus begun, He will have all well done ! " 1H5 The Development of Christianity But oh, there fell a frost upon that night of spring ! It was that fanatical radicalism — which made its first appearance in the prophets of Zwickau, then in the peasant wars, and finally in the horrors of the Anabaptists of Münster, — that thus found expression and had to be choked by streams of blood. Luther's popularity thereby suffered a severe blow. The conquered accused him of betraying his people, the victors accused him of being an accomplice in the destructive revolution. Worst of all, was the reaction on Luther's own mood. He became hesi- tant as to the consequences of his own work for freedom, and therewith the conservative, Churchly, specifically mediaeval background of his conscious- ness began to appear more strongly; in strange contradiction this mood gained force over the newly won evangelical freedom. At first this became apparent in the ill-boding dispute concerning the Supper. When Karlstadt, Oekolampad, and Zwingli denied the real presence of the body of Christ in the Supper on the basis of reason and of exegesis, Luther stuck to the evangelical letter: " This is my body." It was not only his Bible faith which forced him to this, but it was more the need of a firm, tangible pledge of forgiveness of sin in the sacrament. To Luther this seemed to be guaranteed only by the real presence of the body of Christ as a material, miraculous gift which might be enjoyed by all, even the unbelievers. Thus did Luther fall again under the spell of the Catholic i86 German Reformation magic of sacraments which he had decidedly over- come. From this renewed valuation of the miracles of the sacrament resulted the theory of the omnipres- ence of the body of Christ. He is present not only at the Supper. How could He be present at every Supper celebration if He were not omnipresent? That could be explained only by saying that the divine omnipresence had been imparted to the human nature of Jesus at incarnation. The Scho- lastic dogma of Christ, with all of the miraculous and irrational trimmings, was re-established. Thus the faith which, in the original sense of the dogma of justification, had been nothing more than a confident reaching out for the grace of God — that is an im- mediate relation of the pious heart to God Himself — now became again a theoretical acceptance of doctrines of belief, miracles, inconceivable dogmas, and mysteries; and every one who would not and could not accept this doctrine of the Supper, Luther now deemed to be a damned heretic. Such reason as opposed these miracles was howled down by Luther as Frau Hulda and Bride of the Devil against whom no protection was too strong. Yes, he praises the unreasonableness of all revealed doc- trines of faith from the fall to the resurrection of the flesh ; he holds it to be false to speak of faith and of God's word in such fashion .as though reason might well accept them, when in fact she opposes all articles of faith. He even lauds as the strongest 187 The Development of Christianity proof of faith that it " twists the neck of reason, strangles the beast, and thus brings Lord God the best sacrifice and the best worship of God." Although romantic theologians may count this passionate hatred of reason on the part of Luther to be another of his titles to fame, the sober histor- ian may be permitted to judge that it was his weak side, fraught with danger for himself and for his lifework. Reason, so mishandled by him, paid a bitter revenge upon him by those attacks and doubts which so fearfully plagued him that he could hold them to be the direct works of the Devil. Naturally explained, they were only the consequences of the unreconciled, rigid contradiction of the two souls in his one breast — the mediaeval believing monk, and the Protestant free reformer. His hatred of reason was fatal for his reformatory work, which stopped half accomplished; it was fatal for his Church which was burdened again with the old blind dogmatic faith ; finally, it was fatal for the German people, for without doubt the Lutheran theologians must bear the blame for the greater part of those dire blows of the seventeenth century brought about by their narrow-minded obstinacy and mad heretic hunting. With all the imperfection and backwardness of Luther's dogmatic faith and of his Church, we must not forget that his ethics ever remained good Protes- tant ethics. The founder of the Lutheran Theolog- ical Church may have been caught still in its medi- German Reformation aeval nature, but the founder of the Protestant minister's home, the loving father of the family, the host who joked gaily with his guests, released the Protestant world from the unnaturalness of Catholic monasticism and from ascetic hatred of the world. He became the creator of Protestant morality in that he freed the temporal, moral life in family and vocation, in state and society, from the Catholic blemish of unholiness and reinstated them in their dignities and rights, as God willed. As Goethe says, through Luther we have recovered the courage to stand on God's earth with a firm foot and to feel ourselves God-given human natures. According to the judgment of Wundt, the modern philosopher, Luther's ethics is at once worldly and religious : worldly in the sense that it imposes upon men work and activity in the world, as a duty ; and religious in so far as faith is the source from which all fulfilment of duty springs. The same philos- opher remarks correctly that Luther was in error when he considered his ethical world-view to be a return to primitive Christianity. Luther, rather, brought a new ethics to the world; with its joyous courage of life that ethics belongs to the Renais- sance and is far removed from world-fleeing, primi- tive Christianity and medisevalism, but these latter for their part differ just as decidedly from the ancient heathen ideal of culture by their religious motivation. Luther's active Christianity is the combination of the humanistic ideal of the Renais- 189 The Development of Christianity sance with Germanic Christianity, and that is the essence of Protestantism altogether. Melanchthon, the friend and assistant of Luther, represented in remarkable measure the humanistic side of the Reformation. Luther had urged him to theological studies, for Melanchthon, by training and tendency, had been a humanistic philologian closer to Erasmus than to Luther. He shared Erasmus's fear of the tumult and the public struggle. At the Augsburg Parliament, this fear- fulness led him to the most doubtful concessions so that the Protestant princes actually disavowed him. For this lack of courage, however, he made up brilliantly by his scientific knowledge. In his Loci communes (which grew out of lectures on the Epistle to the Romans), he presented the Protestant ideas in systematic form for the first time, and that in purer form than in the later Confessio Augus- tana. In the latter, he held as close as possible to the old dogma. In his first edition of his Loci he intentionally sets aside the old Church dogmas of the trinity, incarnation, and the natures of Christ, regarding them as Scholastic hypercriticism ; he was convinced that it was enough for a Christian to know what law and sin are, and how man can arrive at forgiveness of sin and the power of the good. In the beginning, therefore, he held to the purely human, moral side of the Gospel and disregarded the mysterious dogmas concerning things beyond; he did not do this later. Into his Loci, Melanch- 190 German Reformation thon afterward inserted these dogmas; also into the Confessio. Melanchthon rendered peculiarly good service in the development of ethics, wherein he sought to combine Aristotle with the Biblical Chris- tian view. In his teaching of the lex naturae, of the lumen naturale, there is the humanistic feature of his thinking, which differentiated it always from rigid Lutheran theology. Thereby he became the founder of the humanistic culture of German Prot- estantism, a healthy counter-balance to Luther's hatred of reason and to the dogmatic zeal of Lutheran theologians. Thereby, he became the founder of the school system in Germany and earned the honorable title: Praeceptor Germaniae. 191 CHAPTER X SWISS REFORMATION AND DISSIDENTS At the same time with Luther, but independently of him, Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss, became a re- former. He did not have to pass through the relig- ious struggles and crises as Luther did, but his was rather a harmonious nature of clear and quiet under- standing and of a lively sense of social obligation. At the University of Basle, he devoted himself to humanistic studies under the influence of the pro- found scholar, Thomas Wittenbach, who early opened his eyes to the valuelessness of Scholastic science and the evil of the commerce in indulgences. Later, he devoted himself earnestly to the study of the Platonic-Stoic philosophy as given out by Pico of Mirandola. He remained ever the friend of the ancient classic and was convinced that the works of Plato, Seneca, and Pindar had also flowed from the source of the divine spirit. The result of this humanistic culture was his first break with the medi- aeval ecclesiastical world-view. When he became a practising minister and saw the evil consequences of clerical rule on popular morality, he sought the sources of a purer popular religion and popular morality and found them in the New Testament; 192 Swiss Reformation but not only in the Pauline dogma of justification but also in the entire New Testament, and especially in the Gospels and the ethical precepts of the New Testament writings. The purpose of Zwingli's reformatory activity was not to find consolation for the fear-filled conscience of the individual, as had been the beginning in the case of Luther who based his work on his own experience, but rather toward a renewal of moral Christian society after the pat- tern of the New Testament, after the ideal of the kingdom of God. The purification of the Church, from false tradition and superstitious ceremonial, was inextricably bound up for him with the refor- mation of the body politic according to the principle of Christian ethics. The republican constitution of Zurich was both an opportunity and a command. The many-sidedness of his ecclesiastical and politi- cal reform activities correspond to the wide horizon of his theological world-view. This view was in no wise an enemy to philosophy, but was, rather, closely allied to it. It was not the product of a deep inward religious experience born of pain and struggle, as with Luther, but the product of a broad, clear, intellectual culture and an earnest, moral con- science. This culture he had won in the school of the ancients. There he had accustomed himself to clarity and logical thinking and so he wished to present Christian truth in a well ordered connection of comprehensible thoughts. The theology of Zwingli is the fust presentation 193 The Development of Christianity of the Christian faith freed from all Scholasticism. It stands much closer to modern thinking than the theology of all other reformers. This is most clearly seen in Zwingli's teaching concerning sin and redemption. According to Zwingli, sin is the con- flict of the spirit and the flesh, which has its natural origin in the spiritual and sensual nature of men; that it is native to them and did not enter into them from without appears first through Adam's fall. Adam's fall is only the first appearance of that which necessarily makes its appearance at some one time in the life of every man. As a natural breach between self-love and the will of God, Zwingli holds, sin is more an inborn sickness than a guilt. Sin does not assume the character of guilt until this inborn sickness makes its appearance in individual events — activities contrary to the law. These are sins in the sense of guilt. That which is inborn is not sin but a lack, an evil, a sickness, which must be cured, but for the sake of which no one will be damned. From the beginning, God arranged redemption with sin. Their beginning is coeval with the beginning of human religion and that is the beginning of all history. It is realized in history in the manifold forms of divine revela- tion, which is not merely limited to the Jewish people, but is present with all other peoples, particu- larly the Greeks. In Plato and Seneca, the heathen philosophers, the divine spirit was just as active as in the Old Testament prophets. Zwingli thinks, 194 Swiss Reformation therefore, that pious heathen may also enter into bHss. Therefore, too, he cherishes the hope that in heaven above he may meet the great heroes of antiquity, Socrates, Numa, Cato, Scipio, and that he will make their personal acquaintance there. That is a truly humanistic thought, which is so far removed from the Augustinian dogma of the in- herited sin and damnation of natural man, that Luther said, when he heard those words of Zwingli, that if that were true nothing in the entire Gospels could be true. The revelation of salvation achieved completion in Christ as the organ of the divine Logos in which the rulership of the spirit over the flesh found typical perfection. The work of salva- tion, however, does not rest so much upon the suf- fering of one for all as satisfaction for God, but rather on the imparting of His higher Being to us ; in other words, in the activity of salvation of the Holy Spirit, which might also be called a higher potentiality of the all-effective will of God in the world. The Holy Spirit, too, is not something absolutely supernatural thrown in from without, but is rather the natural and human in which there is already present the divine kernel with the potenti- ality of higher humanity. The activity of the spirit of God in man is faith, that is the trustful giving up of self of the creature to God in order that God*s will shall determine his. Faith does not stand in contradiction to good works, for it is the impulse to all good work as well as to knowledge. 195 The Development of Christianity For him who is illumined by the spirit of God, therefore, there is no longer any inconceivable mystery. For this reason the faithful must not be required, as by Luther, to hate reason and to strangle it. According to Zwingli, faith is the highest power of our reasoning activity, altogether, and can, therefore, never come into conflict with the remainder of the reasonableness of man. Inas- much as the opposition between spirit and flesh at least partially continues after the rebirth, faith has to test its reality by showing itself to be the practi- cal energy of our higher I, holding the lower side of our nature in check; this lower nature subjected, it must make it the organ of what is reasonable and good. It is the task of the believer to govern the flesh and to overcome lawlessness in the world. Therein faith demonstrates its reality. In this form of Protestantism, the idea of holiness makes a long step in advance of Luther's interest in salva- tion, the interest in the certainty of salvation. Thus the world- forming power of struggling ac- tivity and puritanical rigor of morals are the specific features of Reformation piety as early as Zwingli ; but to a greater degree in Calvin. From this point of view, Zwingli's conception of the Church may be understood. It is the invisible community of the chosen, the true believers. The visible Church consists of the invisible congregations which hold to God's word ; and this visible Church is related to the invisible as man's body is related to 196 Swiss Reformation his spirit. That is, it is the phenomenal form and organ of the invisible Church. Because the con- gregation is the community of believers inspired by the Divine Spirit, a general priesthood is her special prerogative. There is no difference between a privileged priestly rank and the laity. Zwingli gives this one peculiarly Swiss turn; he has united with the general priesthood, the general judgeship in spiritual and temporal, in religious and moral affairs. This belongs to the congregation which is represent- ed by its self-chosen clerics as its representatives and organs. It is the duty of the clerics or preachers to care for the Christian order of congregational life on the temporal, political side in conjunction with the temporal rulers. The state is naught else than the popular order of moral activity on the part of believing Christians. Hence, it is the place of the realization of the kingdom of God, which Provi- dence and redemption strive to achieve. For the reformed religion, the state thus has a religious meaning from this viewpoint, and it has a religious task at which the congregation of believers and the clerics, their representatives, are obligated to work together. For all time following this became a most important thought to Swiss Protestantism; it did have its doubtful obverse, as we shall soon see, under Calvin. The state is the wordly side of the Christian congregation which represents the king- dom of God. Thereon rests the dominating posi- tion which Zwingli occupied in the communal life 197 The Development of Christianity of Zurich; the same with Calvin later in Geneva. As regards the sacraments: in the frame of this world-view they could have no other meaning than as symbols having far less value for the individual than for the congregation. So baptism is nothing else than the sign of obligation on the part of the individual member to the congregation. The Sup- per is the general ceremony of thanksgiving for redemption. Christ is not really present in the bread, as Luther taught, but spiritually present in the mind of the believer. The Supper, then, is not actually a mystical means of salvation, but is a ceremonial morally active, in which the congrega- tion expresses externally and tangibly its community of faith and life; therewith the communal spirit is revived and strengthened in all the members ; hence it is a morally valuable and effective ceremonial, but not a magical act of worship. We may well ask the question whether this view of the sacraments is more adequate for the Protestant spirit than that of Luther, and whether its passionate rejection on the part of Luther and his theologians was really justi- fied. If Luther had been able to listen quietly to Zwingli's conception, at bottom a simple, clear, and deeply moral one, — if he had considered it — how different would have been the after course of the history of Protestantism! After Zwingli's early death (he died as a hero with the sword in his hand on the battlefield of Kappel, 1 53 1,) the leadership of Swiss Protest- 198 Swiss Reformation antism fell upon John Calvin. He was born in France and educated in law and theology; from 1 541 to 1564, he was the spiritual leader of the Church and civic communal life in Geneva. Cal- vin's strength lay in his art as the logical system- atizer of Protestant theology and as the effective organizer of the Protestant Church of the country, not only as a community of believers but also as a community of moral living. Both of these things, however, were under the presupposition of the cur- rent understanding of Scripture and the current non-differentiation between morality and legality, between the power of the Church as a moral in- stitution and the power of the state as a legal insti- tution. This difference, so well known to us, was not known by that age. As contained in his four books of the Institiitio religionis Christ iancE, Cal- vin's theology unquestionably rises in formal per- fection superior to all the theological works of the sixteenth century. It is equally certain that it stood upon the ground of a legal, dogmatic posi- tivism, a positivism which finds the truth fixed and finished, given in the infallible canon of divine revelation in the Old and New Testaments. There- fore, it is only a matter of proper interpretation and amplification of doctrines to present all of Christian truth which, on the basis of its sources as uncon- ditional divine authority, must be considered valid doctrinal law by every pious individual. A critical judgment of single parts of the Bible, such as can 199 The Development of Christianity actually be found in Luther, one cannot speak of with Calvin. Such criticism of separate pieces of the Bible would have been regarded as godless opposition to divine revelation and lawgiving. Just as positive as is this basis of the authority of Scripture, is also the point on which the whole Cal- vinistic theology hinges ; that point is the divine pre- destination which Calvin, following the lead of Augustine, took to be the double decision of the choice of one for bliss and the condemnation of the other to eternal damnation. He is of the opinion that we must never ask according to what ground this double divine decision is made. Just so little may we complain of its injustice. For Calvin says the ground lies simply in the free and unlimited will of God, and this is the unique norm of all righteous- ness. We never dare to ask whether that which God does is just; it is just because God so wills it. If God wills to create a great part of mankind destined to eternal damnation, we must consider it righteous simply because He wills it so. To the criticism that, by this fatalism, all moral self- decision would be done away with, Calvin and his disciples answer with the practical demand upon each individual that he have a care that he make certain of his own attachment to the number of those who are chosen by the seriousness of his faith, by the sternness of his moral self-discipline, and by the power of his activity for the molding of the world to the honor of God. Now it must be conced- 200 Swiss Reformation ed that the practical outcome of this deterministic doctrine was not men with feeble wills or diseased ones, but, on the contrary, most marvelous heroes of will power. Psychologically, that may easily be un- derstood; for a believer will not think of himself that he belongs to the lost but, just the reverse, be- cause he is a believer he will count himself with the chosen; as one who is chosen, the eternal decision of God gives him the firmest possible support for his whole life and striving. If one would put it that way, his religious fatalism makes him immune from all the dangers of this world. Again accord- ing to Calvin, as with Zwingli, the Church is the invisible community or sum of the chosen. It may, however, scarcely be called a community, since the individual chosen ones are scattered all over the world within the visible Church. The visible Church is the means of realization of the invisible, of the realization of the eternally divine decision of redemption and choice. In the faith of the in- dividual outside of the Church there can be no thought of salvation. Therein Calvin differs essen- tially from Zwingli. The characteristics of the true Church are as follows: doctrine according to law, control of the sacraments, and Church discipline. Minor devia- tions on the part of the Protestant State Churches were permitted but Calvin condemns the Roman Church most harshly because of its fundamental er- rors. He thinks she is not even entitled to be called 201 The Development of Christianity a Christian Church. It is remarkable that Calvin himself throughout shares with the Roman Catholic Church that essential characteristic of a strictly exclusive spirit. It is a Christian's right and duty to suppress errors of faith and moral obliquities; and the arm of the political superior is the natural instrument of its performance. With all difference of theoretical foundation, this Church theory amounts practically to that of CathoHcism: the political superior should serve as an instrument of the Church in order that her teaching of faith and morals and her establishment be carried out, also in order that the people of the separate Christian communities should be moulded into the one true congregation of God, into the God-State according to the Biblical ideal. By preference, Old Testament models and Old Testament kings who carry out the will of the prophets and the priests are cited. Dif- ference between the political rule of the Old Testa- ment and the spiritual rule of the New is never allowed. These are Calvin's fundamental thoughts ; in cor- respondence with them the Church and civic, com- munal hfe of Geneva, and that of several daughter Churches directed by disciples of Calvin, were developed. The Church at Geneva became sim- ply a Protestant theocracy. A rigorous Church discipHne was practised there by means of a police and judicial system completely submissive to the clerics. It was a Church and civic regime which 202 Swiss Reformation governed not only the Church faith but also tHe temporal and moral life of the members of the con- gregation to such extent as no mediaeval Church previously had in the remotest degree. This strict Church discipline led to gross excesses. Of sad fame are the executions of Gruet, the sceptic, and of Servetus, the anti-trinitarian — both directly urged by Calvin. Servetus was not even a citizen of Geneva. He was a Spaniard who was dwelling in Geneva merely as a guest, and it was during this temporary stay that he was haled as a heretic upon the urging of Calvin. In other things, too, it was a fearfully rigorous discipline under which the people of Geneva in that day had to live. Gaieties of every kind, immor- ality, adultery, and even lighter breaches, such as singing, the reading of trivial songs and romances, card-playing, theater-going, omission to attend Church and communion, the wearing of extravagant clothing, the giving of rich banquets, light speech concerning Church matters and persons — all of these were severely punished and the penalties Draconic. Haeuser, the historian, rightly remarks : " This manner of handling human beings was more Spartan and Old Roman than it was Christian." It was, in fact, that kind of discipline with its totally brutal suppression of the individual for the purposes of the weal of the community. There are, however, things which must be said and allowed as an excuse for Calvin ; Calvin would not be rightly judged were 203 The Development of Christianity we not to take the following into consideratioa First, this system met the governing notion of the period, in which the mediaeval view that heresy is a crime which should be politically punished was still too deeply rooted for even the cultured to break away from it. Among the reformers, Luther was the only one who clearly recognized and uttered that heresy cannot and should not be suppressed by force. Luther, too, had a far finer feeling for the difference between Old and New Testament religion than any of his contemporaries, especially the then ruler of Geneva. Then we must consider, also, that this city was, in a certain sense, the border bulwark of Protestantism and was surrounded and threat- ened by powerful enemies of its civic and ecclesiasti- cal liberty. It was, too, the refuge city of many Protestants who had to flee from Catholic countries. In order to fuse these varied elements and to unite the citizens, who were split up into parties, so that the city might become one harmonious whole, one well disciplined army of determined defenders of civic and Church communal life against external enemies, there was needed a discipline so strict, a rule and regulation so stern as would be necessary during the days of siege when the enemy threatens the fort. Finally, one may be permitted to point out the success of these measures. Theo- cratic Geneva, with its strict Church discipline, did become in fact the most fruitful garden for the pro- 204 Swiss Reformation duction of strong, heroic characters who, under the most difficult circumstances, held high the standard of Protestantism, opposed the Catholic reaction not only with the patience of suffering as in the Lutheran Church, but also with the courage of attack and the will to win victory. In fact, these Calvinistic heroes became the saviors of Protestant- ism when soon after the Catholic superior power in the world politics of the day used its full force to oppress them. They became the saviors of Protes- tant freedom of faith and conscience, even though they were only struggling for their freedom, not for that of the others who did not acquiesce in their doctrine. The heroic struggle for their freedom resulted in a gain for the freedom of belief and conscience of all men. On the tablets of the history of the world the heroic deeds of the Calvinist heroes of faith are ineffaceably written. I will not enter into detail here. You are certainly acquainted with the details from your histories. One thing only I would mention: In Austria, which was once Lutheran, Protestantism was entirely destroyed by the Hapsburg counter-reformation. In the Cal- vinistic Netherlands, however, opposing the same Hapsburg power. Protestantism was victorious. There you see the difference between the Lutheran religion of pious emotions and of suffering patience as against the Calvinistic religion of active will and of fighting force. According to this, judge, then, 205 The Development of Christianity how much the Protestant world owes to the heroic will power of Calvin and to his strict educatory discipline. In order to understand the Reformation of the sixteenth century in its full meaning as the turning point of two ages, one must not confine one's atten- tion merely to the two Church formations, the Lu- theran and the Swiss, in which the Protestant prin- ciple gave itself new Church form and figure but in which also there is an impure mixture of the old and the new — one must also turn one's attention to those little communities and individual pious thinkers who were despised in those days as vision- aries and revolutionaries and who were persecuted as such; for in them an unprejudiced view of his- tory will acknowledge the finding of the freest representatives of the Protestant spirit, yea in part the prophets of its later development. The various dissidents of that time are usually designated by the collective name " Anabaptists." They were called thus because many of them re- jected baptism of children as unevangelical and a contradiction of the Protestant principle of faith. However, this designation is inaccurate and hkely to lead one astray because it picks out a single and secondary characteristic which is in fact not appli- cable to all of them. In any event, it is not appli- cable to the most important of all the dissidents, to Sebastian Frank, the author of many popular writings ■■ — religious, historical, and geographical 206 Swiss Reformation in nature. In these writings, there is revealed a spirit of broad free outlook, deep and independent in its thinking. The Lutheran theologians perse- cuted him as a vicious heretic simply because he took the Protestant principle of immediate alliance with God and the freedom of the Christian person- ality far more seriously than they themselves were either capable or willing to take it. Frank protested against the idolatry of the word of the Church the- ologians, against their doctrine of inherited sin, of atonement through vicarious satisfaction, es- pecially however against the compulsory character of the new Church, which seemed to him to be a decline from the Christian into the Jewish. The written word, which Frank says the reformers had made their idol, has often enough deceived and con- sequently its various interpreters teach contradic- tory doctrines. For this reason Frank set up against it the inner word, the natural life, which resides in everyone, even in the heathen, and which spoke out just as much in Plato as it did in Isaiah. He makes the fine remark that even nature contains a word of God, nature, too, is a living bible in which the pious heart can learn more than all the impious can learn from the Bible ; for he who does not understand God's works, he cannot hear God's words. Then, too, Adam and Christ are in every man in so far as he is flesh and spirit. The Christ of the flesh, that is the Savior of history, was pre- sented to us by God as an example, that through 207 The Development of Christianity him we may be able to grasp God. He is, there- fore, the revealer of God's will, because in him all things are perfect and revealed, which were before secret, veiled, and unconscious in the pious heart, only the world did not know it and first became aware of it through the proclamation of Christ. But the historic sufferings of Christ must be re- peated in all of his members and in us, too, the word must become flesh, suffer, die, and rise again. As the leader, Christ has smoothed the way and per- mitted us to see what the way of life is, but His suffering is of no use to anyone until it comes into full realization in him, until he knows what God meant by him. " Many now make an idol of the letter, inasmuch as they do not even beg God to in- terpret His secret for us. For Scripture alone can- not change a wicked heart, else would the learned in Scripture have been the most pious. Temples, too, pictures, feasts, sacrifices, and ceremonies, do not belong in the New Testament because that is noth- ing more than the holy spirit, a good conscience, a pure soul, an innocent life in righteousness, and genuine faith." Frank was no Anabaptist, inas- much as he was indifferent toward baptism, as toward all other ceremonies. He was disinclined to join the sectarian activities of the Anabaptists. His was a deep-seated religious nature for which it sufficed that he had God in his heart, that he felt himself to be a member of the invisible congrega- 208 Swiss Reformation tion of those believers who among all peoples seek God. Caspar Schwenkfeld was also an opponent of the theological tendencies of his time. He was con- demned because he laid more stress upon the inner word than upon the written word, upon the Christ in us in the pious spirit more than upon the Christ for us and the merit gained through him. Small congregations gathered about Schwenkfeld and their descendants are still to be found in America. Hans Denk w^as a pupil and friend of Oeko- lampad, a man whose piety and theological train- ing have been expressly testified to, yet he was driven from city to city as an enemy of Lutheran teaching and died early. He denied the Lutheran doctrine of inherited sin, of eternal damnation, on the ground that God is love which could save and willed to save all. In every man, there is a spark of this divine nature, the inner Christ — a spark which could be kindled into a flame of righteousness through the exemplar of the historical Savior. In a letter to Oekolampad he writes : " I have no care for any other result than that many join in praising the God and Father of our Master, Christ, whether they be circumcised or baptised or neither ; I am far removed from those who wish to attach the kingdom of God too strongly to ceremonies and elements of this world." The Church theologians drove such men, who 209 The Development of Christianity were far from any fanaticism themselves, from city to city, condemned them and persecuted them, and thus these theologians forced the Anabaptists into fanatical opposition; naturally their religious en- thusiasm allied with fantastic dreams of an earthly kingdom of Christ, of universal liberty and equality, and finally with revolutionary lawlessness and deeds of force, led to the wickedest of horrors and ex- cesses at Münster. It is gross injustice to lay such excesses of fanatics at the door of all dissidents. Men like Denk, Schwenk f eld, and Frank recog- nized more clearly and more logically than the Church theologians of the sixteenth century the Protestant principle of the immediate alliance of the pious spirit to God, the principle of the contin- uous completion of the revelation of the divine spirit in the human soul, the principle of the free moral autonomy of Christian personality. Nat- urally such men were far ahead of their time and, therefore, they were lonely and misunderstood, as are all the prophets of purer ideals who rise too far above their age. 210 CHAPTER XI CATHOLIC COUNTER-REFORMATION The reaction of the Catholic Church against the Reformation movement was employed partly in resistance to Protestant deviations from dogma through a decided settlement upon the opposing Catholic dogma. Thus, for the great part, these received their first definite bounds and were ele- vated to the position of dogmatic laws of binding authority. Thus the Catholic principle became narrower, more one-sided, more unfree than it had ever been before. On the other hand, the reaction tended to do away with the grossest disorders and led to the establishment of a better order and disci- pline, especially in the education of the clerics ; thus it tended to a certain purification and renewal of the Church on the old ground of Roman authority. This strict formulation and inner purification of Catholicism was the work of the Council of Trent. At the same time the Catholic Church acquired a new militant host in the Order of the Jesuits, which, by a more clever adjustment to new circumstances, was better able than the older Orders to make ef- fective opposition to Protestantism and to raise the fallen power of the papal Church. Finally, we must The Development of Christianity here consider those instruments of force, — the in- quisition, the censorship of books, and the pohtical regulations for the suppression and extermination of Protestantism in countries under Catholic ruler- ship, — out of which there developed, in the second half of the sixteenth and almost the whole of the seventeenth century, those religious wars which our task does not require us to describe here. From 1 518, there was a demand for a council on all sides, but the Popes purposely, through fear of a diminution of their claims to power, naturally set these demands aside. Finally in 1545, at Trent, the Council met. But it met at a time when the in- dependent formation of a Protestant Church in op- position to the Catholic had gone on so far and become so firm that a reunion was no longer possi- ble. Neither was this the purpose of the papal party, which from the beginning formed a ma- jority of the gathering. This became evident at once when the assembly did not do what the Em- peror wished, namely, occupy itself with meas- ures for Church reform first, and then take up the disputed rules of faith; the assembly did just the reverse, following the wish of the Pope, and began with the disputed questions, settHng upon doctrines concerning writ and tradition, sin and justification, Church and sacrament, deciding these in the strictly Catholic sense. Political events led to a long interruption of the synod, and when it reassembled in 1562 the Protestants were no long- 212 Catholic Counter-Reformation er inclined to take any part in it. The former resolu- tions were simply sanctioned again and the restora- tion of the Church begun. Characteristically enough, it began with the establishment of an In- dex librorum prohibit orum — the catalogue of for- bidden books. The Austrian and French governments demanded far-reaching Church reforms at that time. They demanded the permission of priestly marriage, of the layman's cup at the communion, of the language of the country in the service, and, finally, reform of the monasteries and limitation of the papal power. These were demands made not only by Catholic governments, but also by many of the higher clerics, bishops and prelates, who either avowed or favored them. But the Roman legates, with the Jesuit Lainez at their head, sought to ac- complish their purposes by the divide et impera pol- icy as they had at Constance and Basle. They knew how to win the princes and gain over the opposition prelates by favors and one by one make them support the Roman interests, so that the papal authority might be firmly grounded and become en- tirely independent of all temporal control. Lainez declared that Christ had commissioned Saint Peter, " Feed my sheep." But sheep are unreasonable an- imals and therefore they are not entitled to any share in the government. He says further, the Church was founded by the God-man Christ him- self, a purely divine institution of unconditional 213 The Development of Christianity authority. Temporal power originates with the peoples, therefore its nature is human and condi- tioned. These are the fundamental thoughts which form, to this day, the basis of the entire thinking of Catholicism and we ought to make note of that. These views of the Romans were successful and the new foundation of the unlimited authority of the Pope was the soul of all the decisions of the Council of Trent. That which was done for re- form remained far behind even those demands which had formerly been raised by Catholics generally, and it was still further limited by the prerogative of pa- pal sanction. However, it must be conceded that the reform decrees had this effect: a firm ecclesiastical order and discipline were introduced ; care was had for the education of preachers in priest seminaries, and the mendicant monks were limited to the churches of their own Order. Regular provincial synods of the clerics were estabHshed; the entire Church custom, as well as the Catholic faith in general, was regulated by strict and generally bind- ing rule intended to serve as a firm dike against all innovation. Therewith all movements of a freer Protestant spirit, as they had, in former days, ap- peared now and again in the old and mediaeval Church, were cut off from the Catholic Church after Trent. Thus, by the Reformation, as a kind of secondary effect thereof, the Catholic Church be- came narrower and less free than it had ever been before the Reformation. What the Church lost in 214 Catholic Counter-Reformation extent of outer territory, she supplanted by a more rigid centralization of the power which culmi- nated in the papal apex. In the new Order of the Jesuits this power found at the same time an extremely effective instrument of its temporal and ecclesiastical activity. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of this order, was born in 1491. He was originally a Spanish knight filled with the thirst for deeds, romantic love, a devotion to the Church. In the war with the French he had been wounded and rendered unfit for service. He exchanged his temporal knighthood for a spiritual knighthood, gave away all his possessions and begged his way to Jerusalem where he acted the part of a missionary so awkwardly that he was sent home again. By his castigations and inflam- matory preaching, he caused himself to be suspected of heresy at home. Twice he was arrested and released upon the promise that he would immedi- ately take up regular theological studies. This he did at the Universities of Salamanca and Paris. At the latter place he won over to his ideas six en- thusiastic converts, among them Lainez and Xavier. They united to form a spiritual knighthood in the service of Jesus and the Most Holy Virgin. Be- fore all things, they vowed that they would prac- tise their knighthood in missions to the heathen wherever the Pope desired to send them and in whatever fashion he desired to use them. In 1540, Pope Paul III confirmed the new Order. That is 215 The Development of Christianity; the year of the foundation of this celebrated Order. Ignatius composed the spiritual exercises for his disciples, but these show less spirit and more fanat- icism and tenacious will. Lainez, a man of un- doubtedly keen understanding and genuine dom- inating spirit became the organizer of the Order. It was he who stamped upon the Order that mili- tary organization to which it owes its success. The Professij or members of the most intimate circle of the Order, took upon themselves not only the three monastic vows, but promised also uncondi- tional obedience to the Pope. Below them were the Scholastici, and the third, the widest circle, the " af- filiated of minor observance,'* who remained in their worldly career and merely obligated them- selves to obey their superiors. They were like the Tertiaries of the Franciscans — an institution which in that case had proved to be very useful. At the head of each province there was a Provin- cial and by them the General of the Order was elected. He possessed dictatorial power limited only by the six Admonitors who were his adju- tants and could make complaint against him at the general meeting. Decision in matters of law-giving and of discipline rested finally with the general meeting. Unconditional obedience nominally was yielded to the Pope, actually it was yielded to the General of the Order who was even designated "the vicar of Christ." The whole refined disci- pline and asceticism of the Jesuits looked toward 216 Catholic Counter-Reformation the training of men to such an obedience that they would suffer themselves to be used by their supe- riors as instruments without will, " like cadavers." Every natural tie of blood relationship or friend- ship, of rank or fatherland, was loosed for the mem- bers and these were rooted out of their souls in favor of an exclusive union with and submission to the Order and its object of world-rulership. With praiseworthy keenness and energy the Order served this purpose of subjecting human society to the Catholic Church, and to the Roman increase of power. An especial means was the care, educa- tion, and direction of youth, especially in the high- er ranks. While the older Orders (excepting the Benedictine) in the main had only crude and ig- norant monks, the Jesuits laid very great value upon culture and science from the beginning. The universities under their direction were recognized far and wide. They taught not only elegant Latin but also the exact sciences, physics, and mathemat- ics; even philosophy and dialectics were taken into their curriculum (they were the first to take these in). Naturally this was subject to the immovable presupposition of the authority of Church tradition which would not admit of independent science seek- ing truth for its own sake. For this reason, while many thorough mediocrities went forth from the Jesuit Order, they can show no man of genius in research, no innovating discoverer in any of the fields of knowledge. The main thing was the drill 217 The Development of Christianity in instruction, the development of a formal dialectic cleverness in disputation and a brilliant rhetoric for the purpose of defending the Church doctrine and of opposing the heretics either in a battle of words or by means of fascinating pulpit oratory. Philos- ophy was pursued only from the standpoint of the old Scholasticism ; the introduction of new questions and the battle over principles were forbidden. After that what does philosophy mean? If one cannot talk about principles, I think it best that philosophy be dropped. Jesuit ethics is entirely controlled by its highest object, nominally the glori- fication of God, actually the glorification of the Church or, to be more exact, of their own General. Whether the Jesuits literally enunciated the prin- ciple " the end justifies the means," or whether they did not is a question about which there has been much dispute but which has not nearly as great an importance as has been attributed to it. This sen- tence in itself is entirely unprejudicial and I should not know how else one could give value to actions other than according to the final purpose which they are to serve. If the object is really holy and un- conditionally obligatory, then the necessary means thereto are naturally justified and part of duty. There is no question about this. The mistake of Jesuit ethics in no wise lies in that formal principle, that the object conditions the moral value of the means, but it consists in the false view of the su- preme object. According to our Protestant convic- 218 Catholic Counter-Reformation tion, which may be considered identical with tKe general human conviction, the supreme object may consist only in the fulfilment of the will of God in some universal human realm of the good, in some moral world order whose object is the perfection of man. In the place of this unconditional final object, the Jesuits set up the very conditioned rela- tive purpose of the glorification of the Church, more exactly speaking the very questionable one of the ruler ship of the Roman Church which, even in its very best times in the later mediaeval ages, never coincided with the all-embracing thought of the kingdom of God. Since the Reformation, the Ro- man papal Church had been rather a hindrance than an aid to the coming of the kingdom of God on earth. If this limited, doubtful purpose, the ruler- ship of the Church, is elevated to the highest moral purpose and standard of value, then the result is indeed a denial of the true moral world order and can end only in the worst consequences possible for individual moral action. It cannot be denied that the Order of the Jesuits did carry over into the Church the consciencelessness of Machiavellian policy. It did call the most immoral and most criminal acts good if they did but seem useful for the Churchly striving for rulership. In order to justify this lax morahty to moral consciousness the Jesuit teachers thought out a refined system of sophistical dialectics, calculated solely to choke the unprejudiced judgment of conscience by sophistical 219 The Development of Christianity arguments and argue away the difference between good and evil. Thus, for example, the Jesuits ex- plained the reservatio mentalis — the reservation by which one says something and means it in a differ- ent sense than that which the hearer must under- stand. This reservatio mentalis the Jesuits them- selves expressly declare permissible in statements made under oath to the authorities. Especially the principle of '' probabilism," according to which the judgment of any act depends entirely upon whether one can offer a probable ground therefor, served as a justification of their morals. As such probable ground it is sufficient to offer the authority of any teacher who under certain circumstances declares a certain act permissible. And where the authori- ties contradict each other, it is permissible to follow the more useful opinion if it have any kind of a seeming basis in its favor. For example, Escovar, the Jesuit teacher of ethics, gathered together in his casuistry for father confessors various most doubtful questions and decisions and of these I shall present a few : '* May I kill him who purposes to bring a charge against me which threatens to bring me great hurt, even if that charge be true?" Answer: "In the affirmative on probable grounds ! " " May I kill him who has injured my honor in that he has cuffed or wiiipped me?" Answer: '* The noble may. The citizen may not because his honor is not so nice!" 220 Catholic Counter-Reformation According to Jesuit ethics it is deadly sin only when an action is performed with complete knowl- edge of all evil consequences according to their whole nature, and with a will governed in no wise by passion. Inasmuch as these two are never en- tirely present, there are in fact no sins which are deadly sins but only sins of smaller blame, aton- able through penitences. The Jesuits, therefore, were extremely lenient and most sought, therefore, as father confessors. They were praised because they knew how to make the yoke of Christ mild and easy, for with them, so the saying went, a sin was more quickly forgiven than committed. Thus did they murder the conscience of men in order to place themselves in its stead. Naturally we must not fail to note that what they did, at bottom, was to draw the very last con- sequence of the whole Catholic standpoint of authority, which makes the good and the true a Church tradition and command on the basis of a positive revelation, instead of an autonomous de- mand of conscience based on one's inner self, as Protestantism had done from the beginning in prin- ciple, at least, even though it did not carry out this thought logically to the end. This partial nature of ecclesiastical Protestantism, its being caught in old dogma, its stiffening up in disputes about dogmas — these things made the work of the Jesuits in the counter-reformation far easier than it otherwise would have been. It was a repetition 221 The Development of Christianity of that age-old experience, testified to even in the. Gospels, that the children of the world are wiser than the children of light. While the Lutheran theologians were quarreling in honest but blind zeal over their fruitless dogmatic theories, the Jesuits were the smart and adroit men of the world, who knew how to flatter their way into the courts as political counselors, and to recommend them- selves to cultured circles through the progressive methods employed in teaching in their schools, and to fascinate the masses by their popular oratory, by the brilliance of Church splendor, and by their propagation of every superstition. They under- stood human nature and they leaned on its weakest side. That is always a policy which is certain of success in the world. In this fashion it can be easily understood why it is that they so often suc- ceeded in hemming the progress of the Reformation and partially winning back the ground already lost. Especially was this the case in South Germany, in Austria, in Switzerland, and in the Rhine coun- tries. In the latter, Canisius the Jesuit developed a most fruitful and in part most successful activity as the author of Catholic catechisms and as an itinerant preacher. It was so successful an activity that his followers compared him with Boniface, the apostle of the Germans, and he was like him, a narrow spirit, a Scholastic believer in authority, entirely bent upon the subjection of the German people under the Roman yoke. 222 Catholic Counter-Reformation Far greater opposition than in Germany, where the Cathohc courts in every way favored them, the Jesuits met from the beginning in France. It was the strong French national feehng, ever their praiseworthy characteristic, represented by the par- Hament of Paris, which opposed the Jesuit activity in liveliest fashion. They were recognized as a danger to the Gallic Church; as early as 1554, the scholars of the Sorbonne recognized the mischiev- ous character of the Jesuit Order, as was evidenced more and more clearly as time went on. Finally, when Chastel, a pupil of the Jesuits, made a mur- derous attack on King Henry IV, the parliament decided to exile the Jesuits because they led the youth astray, because they disturbed the public peace, because they were enemies of the State and the King. Unfortunately, Henry IV was not courageous enough to carry out the parliamentary resolution. That was a fatal weakness for him. A few years later, in 16 10, he fell by the murder- ous hand of Ravaillac. In the same year, the Jesuits were driven out of England by James I, and also out of the Netherlands, but by their ser- pent-like wisdom and perfect organization they were nevertheless able to increase their power and their possessions until the peoples were no longer able to bear them. At the close of the eighteenth century, the ban fell upon them from Rome itself. Later, in the period of the Restoration, the re- actionary possessors of power used them, with 22^ The Development of Christianity much other old plunder, as a frightful rod of cor- rection on the backs of the peoples groaning for freedom. When one remembers that the Jesuits especially, by their intrigues, conjured up the unspeakable misfortune of the Thirty Years' War over our own fatherland, then one certainly must think that we Germans have every urgent reason to hold these dangerous enemies at arm's length ! To the spiritual weapons of the Catholic counter- reformation weapons of force were added by Catho- lic governments — preeminently the inquisition and the censorship of books. In the same year in which the Jesuit Order received its papal sanction, the Spanish Inquisition was planted on Italian soil. The preparation of this institution was committed to Cardinal Caraffa. According to the instruction of 1542, the court of faith was not to wait until the charge was proved against the accused, but upon the least suspicion he was to be punished to the extreme, and it was not to lower itself by any regard for rank or high protection or by any false patience. Thereupon the inquisition in Italy and Spain acted with most fearful severity; by exile, prison, funeral pyre, they rooted out all heresy from Spain and Italy in a few years. In Spain, they killed not only religious but also political free- dom to the root ; they broke the spirit of the people, so that this nation, once so bold and venturesome, sank into a lethargy and political weakness which has been growing more profound ever since. In 224 Catholic Counter-Reformation the Netherlands it was the attempt to introduce the inquisition which gave the impulse to revolution and resulted in the freedom from the Spanish yoke. Religious and political freedom was the soil out of which grew the beautiful flower of Dutch art and science, the rise of her commerce and her industry, the wealth and welfare of the country. Thus beau- tifully was the Gospel word exemplified in the free- dom-loving, courageous Netherlands : " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you." In contrast, let me mention several sad examples of what happened to science in Spain and Italy. When Luis de Leon, the Augustine monk of Sal- amanca, pronounced the Hebrew text of the Old Testament to be higher than the Vulgate and ex- plained the Song of Songs to be a poem of bridal love (which it is held to be to-day, generally) and when he translated it into Castilian, he paid for his temerity with five years in prison. In Italy, Gior- dano Bruno, the Dominican, rendered himself under suspicion of heresy by doubts concerning the dogma of transubstantiation, and he was compelled to flee. After irregular wanderings through France, England and Germany, he returned to Italy in 1592. He was arrested in Venice and handed over to Rome. There he was brought to trial because of his remarkable natural philosophy, in which lay the seeds of the philosophic systems of Spinoza and Leibnitz, and the trial ended in 1600 by a funeral 225 The Development of Christianity pyre in the flower market, on which Bruno was burned. On the three hundreth anniversary of that memorable day, the city of Rome set a monument to him on the spot where he died, as testimony that, despite fire and sword, the world does move and the spirit cannot be exiled! Galileo, professor at Pisa and Padua, has become world famous by his epoch-making discoveries in the realms of physics and astronomy. Because of his defense of the Copernican teaching of the movement of the earth about the sun, he was called to Rome, cast into prison by the Inquisition, and by threats of torture forced to take back his statements. The poor seventy-year-old man submitted, and who shall con- demn him for so doing? Nevertheless, they put him under strict supervision and forced him to re- main silent until his death in 1642. The year of the death of the great physicist and astronomer, Galileo, was the birth year of the still greater astronomer, Newton. Thus does the torch of science pass from one hand to another through the centuries, but it is only in Protestant countries that its light can spread far and free. Until 1820, Galileo's teaching was condemned by the Church in Italy. In Toul- ouse, Vanini the learned physician was arrested on the charge of atheism and, despite his deposition that every blade of grass was a proof of God's exist- ence, he was burned in 1619 for atheism and witchcraft. But with even greater power than by the funeral 226 Catholic Counter-Reformation pyre, the counter-reformation worked with the cen- sorship of books, which not only breaks the body but even the spirit. Paul IV instituted the censor- ship of books while Cardinal Caraffa was in Italy. No book, whether old or new, might be printed or sold without permission of the Pope. In the year 1559, Erasmus's edition of the New Testament, which is printed in the front of the Thanksgiving Breva of Louis X, was put on the Index. Not only poets, such as Petrarch and Boccaccio (and with him it is possible to understand it), but even Church Fathers, such as Athanasius and Augustine, though they were not put on the index of forbidden books, were put among the books needing purification and correction. So, too, the learned historical work of Paolo Sarpi, an important scientific work in which the history of the Council of Trent is all too honestly described, at least more honestly than the Inquisition wished — this splendid book was placed upon the Index and the author feared for his life. Certainly the censorship of books was a fearful weapon, and it is alone sufficient to explain why science and spiritual progress could make no head- way in those countries which were under Catholic rule. To-day censorship is another matter. To- day it is merely a blunted weapon, and in fact the weapon is so blunt that the best possible advertise- ment for any book is to have it put on the Index. 337 CHAPTER XII PROTESTANT SECTS Between the old Church Protestantism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and the new Protestantism, which begins with the Enhghten- ment of the eighteenth century, the Protestant sects stand, both as to time and as to content ; they are the sects which in part were produced by the period of the Reformation and in part were formed later as a reaction against the dogmatic rigor and religious narrowness of the official Church. Out of the Reformation period came the Ana- baptists and the anti-trinitarians. In the beginning they were closely allied, being mainly represented by the same men. Later, however, they divided in such fashion that the Baptists confined themselves to a practical opposition to the popular Church while the anti-trinitarians limited themselves to a theoreti- cal opposition to Church dogma. Among the Ana- baptists there had always been a moderate section which did not approve of the revolutionary fanati- cism which, as is known, culminated in the horrors of Münster, a moderate section whose only desire was to achieve a practical Christianity in the sense of the Sermon on the Mount. " The baplismally 228 Protestant Sects inclined," as they called themselves, were organized by Menno Simons, a Lovvlander, who was at first a Catholic priest, but who, through study of Holy Writ and books of the Reformation became a Baptist. He founded numerous Baptist congrega- tions in North Germany and gave them such a con- stitution as harmonized with the civic order of soci- ety. In 1 561, Menno died in Holstein. In the Netherlands the Baptists were tolerated. Later too, in Germany and England, and to-day they are among the largest Church communities in America. The characteristic of the Mennonites is a striving toward simple Biblical Christianity which they seek to realize through a purely Christian congrega- tional life. But as to Church dogma, outside of Scripture, they are indifferent. They rejected the baptism of children as contrary to Scripture, in- jurious and superstitious. Thus, also, they rejected the oath, the use of arms, and divorce. In their Confession of Faith of 1580, they declared the civil government to be necessary for the present world order, but foreign to the real or true kingdom of Christ. Hence the congregation of the reborn honor civil superiors by a passive obedience, but they themselves take no active part in office-holding. It is the same precept as in the primitive Christian congregation, and as Tolstoi lays it down to-day — altogether he is probably the only Christian to-day who is really in earnest with the morals of the Ser- mon on the Mount. 229 The Development of Christianity The anti-trinitarians and the Unitarians differ from the Dissidents, spoken of in a previous lecture, by a criticism of Church dogma based on the under- standing. They were mainly ItaHan Protestants who had sought and found refuge in Switzerland. The best known among them is Laelius Socinus, a man of much spirit and fine culture, who made the personal acquaintances of Swiss and German re- formers during his many journeys. And despite his many dogmatic doubts and hesitations, he main- tained a friendly correspondence with them. Alto- gether he was a man of such noble and charming character that he won respect everywhere. His early death in 1562 was fortunate for him, in so far, at least, as it saved him from the sad fate of his col- leagues who were soon after persecuted in Switzer- land, in Germany and in the Low Countries. They fled to Poland and founded a congregation there. Faustus Socinus, the nephew of Laelius, collated their doctrine in the so-called Catechism of Rakau. In many ways it is an interesting doctrine on account of its deviations from Church forms, which are both original and one-sided. It was a moralistic rationalism on a supernatural basis. Their strength lay in a reasoning criticism of Church dogma, their weakness was the lack of all religious and philo- sophic depth. The main viewpoint of their criticism is the rejection of the Trinity on the ground that the three Persons manifestly contradict the unity of Divine Being. Further, they were the opponents 230 Protestant Sects of the God-manhood of Christ, the doctrine of the double nature, because the two natures, the divine and the human, cannot be present in one person. They were particularly strong in their criticism of the Church doctrine of atonement. The vicarious satisfaction in the death of Christ, so the Socinians said, contradicts the divine grace which forgives of itself, as well as judges, inasmuch as moral guilt is not transferable and the innocent cannot possibly atone for the guilty ; and, further, the physical death of one Jesus Christ cannot be an adequate atone- ment for the eternal death of all sinful men. Alen in general have no need of atonement, for God is love and grace from the beginning and there never did rest on mankind any damning guilt. That is a far-reaching criticism of Church dogma in all its main points. If w^e wish to be honest we must con- cede that this criticism, with its dissection of Church dogma by reason, is correct and has not been an- swered to this day, in fact it cannot be answered ! While the Socinians were right in this negation of the Church form of faith, it must be said that their own way of believing was problematical, even fantastic and mythological. The Socinians taught that originally Christ was simply a man who dif- fered from other men by his supernatural concep- tion; then, before entering upon his office as teacher, he was bodily removed to heaven in order to get a course of instruction personally from God concern- ing the divine will, so that he might proclaim 231 The Development of Christianity authentically, as a proper teacher of men, the will of God. As a reward of his virtue and his martyrdom, God raised him again bodily from the dead and lifted him to heaven. Then God confided to him the rulership over the whole world, nature and history — and this all to the man Jesus. A man who omnipotently governs the entire course of the world in nature and history, that is the purest kind of myth, — not one jot less unthinkable than the whole Church mythology, except that it dif- fers from the latter by its entire lack of religious and philosophical content of ideas. On this myth of the deification of the man Jesus rests the entire Socinian dogma of salvation. The Christian be- lief consists in the knowledge of and action accord- ing to the divine laws as revealed by Christ, and in the hope of that immortality prophesied by Christ. The source of our knowledge of both command and prophecy is exclusively Holy Writ. The Socinians do not recognize any such thing as a natural knowl- edge of God through reason. By what means do we know the truth of Scripture? — This is the saddest part of their doctrine. — By the miracle stories of the Gospels, which are accepted as real history. On the basis of these miracle stories, we are to accept all the rest as a positive proclamation of a world beyond, and to hold it to be true without any inner knowledge of this truth. You see Socinianism is the most wonderful mixture of contradictory stand- points. It is easily to be understood that such a 232 Protestant Sects mixture of flat moralism and fantastic, supernatural- istic mythology was so estranging and repulsive to both Protestant and Catholic Church theologians, that they would not recognize the Socinians as Christians. There are two reasons for this. First, they felt naturally the religious emptiness and flatness of this rationalistic, moralistic, watered Christianity; and second, they felt too, perhaps half uncon- sciously, the importance of this criticism of Church dogma, the strength of the opposition reasoning which was here urged by a keen, one-sided under- standing against the form of Church dogma — criticism which they could not rob of its strength in any way by scientific proof. Both of these things must be thought of in order to understand the thoroughly inhospitable attitude of all Christianity toward the Socinians. For historical consideration the importance of Socinianism consists in this, that it represents the logical conscience of Protestantism, that, with equal strength and one-sidedness, it em- phasizes the protest of the reasoning, thinking spirit, (never rightly recognized by official theology) against the irrationality of traditional dogma. Therewith it became the predecessor of Enlighten- ment and of the New Protestantism of the eight- eenth century. When, in the middle of the seven- teenth century, the Socinians were driven out of Poland by the counter-reformation of the Church, they fled to Siebenbuergen, where they had taken The Development of Christianity firm root from the beginning, and, as far as I know, single congregations exist to this day. They then found refuge in Prussian cities under the tolerance of the great Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm. Later they merged with the Arminians in the Republic of the Netherlands. There and in Germany the rise of Enlightenment put an end to them. Unitarian con- gregations have maintained themselves in England and in America, but without any direct connection with the old Socinians. A middle position between Soclnianism and ex- treme Calvinism was taken by Arminianism which, although condemned by the Synod at Dordrecht in 1 6 18-19, was able to maintain its existence. By the aid of important scholars such as Episcopus, Limborg, and Hugo Grotius, it succeeded in exercis- ing an influence toward the amelioration of Calvin- istic orthodoxy. Arminianism is a Biblical super- naturalism which concedes to reason in the exegesis of Scripture far more validity than the orthodox Protestantism of either confession ever had done ; yet it never went so far in its rationalization as did Socinianism. The deviations of the Arminians from orthodox Protestantism relate mainly to the dogmas concerning predestination, atonement, and the inspiration of Holy Writ. The Arminians taught that human freedom, not lost through sin, worked together with grace, that grace did not work alone and was not invincible, as Calvin declared. They opined that divine predetermination was 234 Protestant Sects simply a foreknowledge of free human actions. Further, they explained the death of Christ not as a vicarious means of atoning for the injured honor of God, but rather as an exemplary punishment which was not so much demanded by divine justice as by divine wisdom deciding thus for the purpose of per- petuating the moral world-order. In order to maintain the validity of the moral law in the con- sciousness of men, a validity which would have been in danger if God had simply forgiven sin and omitted punishment, — in order that the exemplary punishment might emphasize the punishableness of sin (in this exceptional case an example was made of one completely innocent), therefore did God bring about the death of His son as a means of salvation. Thus spoke the juristic theologian, Gro- tius. Grotius also uttered the demand for political tolerance of various religious faiths; and scientific- ally based this demand on his philosophical natural law. Therein he was followed by the philosophers, Locke and Spinoza, of whom we shall treat in our next lecture. Common to all dissidents and sects was the decided interest in the moral and legal free- dom of each religious individual; therein they repre- sented the Protestant principle more logically than did the official churches — thus much must be con- ceded to them. The latest congregation builders of individualistic enthusiasm, a quality common to most Protestant dissidents, were the Quakers or, as they called them- 235 The Development of Christianity selves, the Friends. The contemplative shoemaker, George Fox, was their founder; he died in 1691. He was a pious man but he was an enthusiast who held his inner illumination to be much more valuable than the worship of God of the official Church. In many ways, he reminds us of that German theo- sophical shoemaker, Jacob Boehme. Robert Bar- clay, 1676, framed the Quaker confession of faith. His fundamental thought is the retirement of all external means of salvation, even Holy Writ, be- hind the inner light in the heart of man. They said that this inner revelation was active in the wise and pious of all peoples and had been from the be- ginning; that from it originated the illumination of the Biblical prophets and apostles. Therefore, it is true that Holy Writ is a valuable treasure of the Church, because the authors had been illumined, but it is neither the last source nor the highest rule of truth; it is possible to understand it correctly and redeemingly only by the inner light. But if Holy Writ is merely of relative importance, then sacra- mental performances are entirely without meaning. They did not originate with Christ, but they are really pre-Christian ceremonials from which Christ had indeed freed us. The true baptism is naught else but the baptism of the spirit, the true commun- ion is the spiritual alliance or union of the soul with Christ, which needs no external eating or drinking. Hence, since everything rests finally upon the spirit, 236 Protestant Sects which works where it wills, there is no need of spe- cial Church offices or clerical ranks, but the Quak- ers among themselves are all equal brethren and in the gatherings of these pious men he who is im- pelled by the spirit rises and gives utterance to that which the spirit has poured into him at the mo- ment. If the inspiration is lacking, the congrega- tion sits silently in meeting. The strength of the Quakers lay from the begin- ning in their practical piety, their honesty, their sobriety, their patience and equanimity, and above all in their effective brotherly love — these are their most beautiful characteristics. In consequence of their principles, they refused to serve in war or to take an oath. They look down upon all the usual forms of social politeness, address one an- other as '^ thou " and do not remove their hats in any assembly. They despise all beautiful sem- blance and are altogether solid citizens and good business people who get along everywhere. Their great world historic merit lies in this, that under the leadership of the great William Penn, they did, for the first time, embody in their political govern- ment in Pennsylvania the fundamental law of civic and religious freedom, that they did practically car- ry it out, and then that in the General Assembly of 175^' by the resolution of the abolition of slavery, they did give the first impulse to the emancipation of the slaves, accomplished in the nineteenth cen- 22,7 The Development of Christianity tury. Thus we must say that the Quakers, in re- gard both to civil and to religious things, were pioneers of popular liberty. Within the Lutheran Church, Pietism formed not a sect but a peculiar tendency and party. It em- anated from Philip Jacob Spener, born in Alsace, chief pastor in Frankfort a.M., then court preacher in Dresden, and finally preacher in Berlin until 1705. Spener was a man of great piety and high moral earnestness and of great practical knowledge of life. He was a man who was driven to his re- form activities by sorrow over the needs of his time and over the petrifaction of the Lutheran Church into a dead dogmatism, morally fruitless. He said : " I believe that not all has been accom- plished by the Reformation which should have been accomplished, and the generations following ought to be obHgated to work at its completion." For us that is a self-evident truth, but for the days of rigid Lutheranism it was a great discovery and it took a bold man to express it. In his Pia desi- deria, of the year 1675, Spener demanded, first of all, a renewal of the spiritual rank by a deeper and more edifying study of Scripture, by a higher val- uation of pious living, as against dead, scholastic knowledge, by a more tolerant attitude toward the erring and unbelieving, and finally by more serious employment of the idea of the general priesthood, through the use of the members of the congregation for the common service of piety and morality in 238 Protestant Sects the congregation. To this end Spener began, after 1670, his private religious gatherings for edifica- tion (collegia pie talis) in which the laymen also were permitted and asked to give their religious experiences. According to Spener, only he can be a good theologian who has been reborn and, there- fore, can speak from experience concerning sin and grace. All theological study has this object : name- ly, to produce that inner experience in the servant of the congregation. Although Spener did not di- rectly attack Church dogmas and founded no new sect, yet in his emphasis of inner piety, the emo- tional experience, there was indirectly yet decided- ly a devaluation of dogmatic formulas of belief. On this account, the orthodox strongly reproached him with indifferentism. In the Lutheran separa- tion of holiness from justification, Spener recog- nized a moral danger which led to self-deception. Faith was to prove its truth by its fruits in the moral, earnest conduct of life. As against the all too lax morals so often prevailing among the ortho- dox Lutherans, Spener urged ascetic self-discipline and moral strength. He urged not only abstinence from coarser sins, but also from such temporal pleasures as gaming, dancing, visiting theatres, making journeys and the like. In general, the char- acteristic of a true Christian is a disgust of the world resulting in the quiet inward equanimity, the longing for heaven. There is no question that here- in Pietism was much closer to mediaeval mysticism, 239 The Development of Christianity particularly that of Thomas a Kempis, than to the moral view of life of Luther. But that which with Spener (as with Calvin) was the expression of an earnest moral attitude, degenerated among the Piet- tists of Halle into an unhealthy coquetry with the pain of sin and drought of heart, with grace and bliss; in short, it degenerated into emotional ex- cesses which withheld them from active life in the world. However, with all such excrescences, as were not seldom found in aristocratic circles and among Pietistic women, we must not forget what the Pietism of Halle did in the way of philan- thropic works. August Hermann Francke founded the orphan asylum in Halle through contributions made entirely by fellow believers. It must be con- ceded that Pietism is a one-sided culture of emo- tional religion, in which neither the understanding of science nor practical work at the cultural tasks of society was given proper place; that must be con- ceded. But it must also be said that the Pietistic demand for personal experience was a return to the beginning of the Lutheran reformation; that Pie- tism continued this thought and thereby prepared the ground for the revival of Church and theology, concerning which we are to speak later. Among the pupils of the orphan asylum at Halle was the young Count Zinzendorf, who had early given evidence of talent for establishing and di- recting communal societies in the congregation. When he learned of the '' Maehrisch Brothers," the 240 Protestant Sects remnant of the old Hussites who were leading a persecuted existence under the Austrian govern- ment, he invited them to settle on his own territory on the Hutberg in Oberlausitz, and the settlement bore the name " Herrnhut." In 1727, Zinzendorf became the founder and the head of the Herrnhut Congregation of Brothers, which was to become " A little place of rest for the invisible congregation and a leaven for Christianity." The leading prin- ciple, expressed in his own words, is as follows: " Those who are within the brotherhood should always bear a loving relation to all the children of God in all religions. They should never judge and never begin a quarrel with those who think differ- ently, but each is to conserve himself in Gospel sim- plicity and purity." Zinzendorf had no desire to found a new sect or belief, as little as Spener had. Inside of the large Church he wanted to gather a little church of the truly illumined. Because the colony was founded on the basis of the Maehrisch Brothers, it was a simple matter to give this special congregation its own independent organization. Naturally Count Zinzendorf was the Director. He had himself ordained by Jablonsky, the Maehrisch Bishop and court preacher at Berlin. He held the succession of the episcopacy in his congregation in high esteem. Overseers, servants, nurses for the sick and the poor were also chosen. The congre- gation was divided up into little choirs which met daily for the purpose of edification. From 1731 241 The Development of Christianity on, a regular mission to the heathen was energet- ically carried on as a standing task of the congre- gation, and mission stations were planted in all parts of the world — the first Protestant mission- ary undertaking. The central point of Herrnhut piety was the pious vision of the suffering Savior so that the heart might be moved, gripped, and blest by the sight of suffering love. The centraliza- tion of their pious emotions upon this one point gave their services a simple heartiness and natural- ness, which, while it may have lacked the dogmas and Church ornamentation, did nevertheless bind all the Brothers together in mutual love. It was an organization which one may consider to be the ennoblement of Protestant order and life. This religion of emotion was entirely indifferent toward dogmatic conceptions and confessional differences. " It is entirely indifferent whether a soul be Re- formed, Lutheran, or Catholic, if it but fall at the feet of the Savior." This picturesque language usual in the congregational worship set itself with a grand carelessness, and we shall have to say na'ivete, above and beyond all dogmatic decision and correctness of concepts. Christ was now a brother, now a father, now a bridegroom, now the husband of the soul, and accordingly God Father became grandfather and father-in-law, and as such was quietly retired by the actual sole rulership of the deified Savior. Inasmuch as the Holy Spirit was assigned to the role of the divine mother (as 242 Protestant Sects was the case in the old Christian Gnosis) there re- sulted a proper heavenly family to which the pious soul was allied in some very close relationship, such as grandchild, or son-in-law, or husband. Zin- zendorf himself boasts that he had established the family idea, that being the most respectable among human ideas, in place of the idea of the Trinity. In so far he is perfectly right, for in fact all the world of religious ideas emanated from the idea of family. We are equally reminded of some age- old customs and notions of worship found in nature religion by the indelicate and awkward fashion in which Zinzendorf paints the mystical union of the soul with the Savior in pictures of mundane bridal love and marriage. To the spiritual love idyls, in which much occurs that is pretty and much that is ugly, in strange contrast stands the so-called blood- theology of the Herrnhuters — their tendency to wallow in what I might almost call a certain lust for monstrosities of fantasy, the pictures of the suffering and dead Savior, the wounds, blood, cross, grave, corpse, yes, even the odor of the corpse! This, too, is a contrast to which there are many analogies in the history of ancient and mediaeval religion: I suggest the orgiasms of the worship of Cybele and Adonis in the heathenism of Asia Minor, and for the middle ages I recall the wounds of Saint Francis of Assisi. Thus the Herrnhuter religion (connectedly described in Spangenberg's book, Idea fidei fratriim, 1779) offers much that 243 The Development of Christianity is of interest to the historian of comparative re- ligion, which may, in a measure, recompense him for the lack of all clear concepts and philosophic thinking in that circle. Wide as is the Herrnhuter faith, so narrow is their life. In their settlements are no monastery walls, no vows of poverty and celibacy, and yet there is something of a monas- terial spirit, an unfree subjection of the individual under the order of the society and the moral dis- cipline of the congregation, which enters into the most personal affairs of the individual — such as the choice in marriage — and which is kept up by an oppressive system of mutual spying and reproof. In this regard, in the matter of personal unfreedom and horror of public life with its tasks of culture, the Herrnhuters are not a whit behind the Pietists of Halle; yet they wanted to be so different from them that they called them " miserable Christians," because the Pietists seldom went beyond the misera- ble pain of sin and the struggle for repentance, while the Herrnhuter piety is a peace in the joyous emotion of the atoning love of Jesus — a purely Lutheran type but with a strong twist to the fem- inine. At the same time with Herrnhuterism, Meth- odism came up in England. This, too, was a sep- aratist reform movement, a reaction of a lively piety against the petrifaction of the public Church. John and Charles Wesley, both students at Oxford, united with several other hke-minded comrades and 244 Protestant Sects established regular hours of edification, agreeing to a seriously moral manner of life, and the estab- lishment of a home and foreign mission. Through Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans, John Wesley became so deeply impressed by the subject of sin and grace that one day, in 1738, his experience of the feeHng of grace burst upon him as a sudden conversion. He undertook a journey to Herrnhut and, upon his return, at once began to preach under the open heaven, for the churches were naturally barred against him. His own in- spired sermons and those of his friends dealt with sin and hell on the one hand, with the grave and bliss on the other. These sermons made a power- ful impression on the mass of listeners. Amid spasms and ecstasies, weeping and laughing, sor- rowing and rejoicing (not unlike the old Christian enthusiasm of the "speaking of tongues"), the conversions of masses came about. Wesley and George Whitfield, who as a preacher was even su- perior to Wesley, parted on the question of the doctrine of predestination. Wesley, followed by the majority of the sect, accepted the mild tendency of the Arminians; Whitfield, that of the stern Calvinists. In 1743, Wesley gave Methodism a firm organization in which much was taken over from the Herrnhuters; for example, the division of the congregation in classes and bands which, from time to time met for the exchange of re- ligious experiences. Wesley's relation to the Epis- 245 The Development of Christianity copal Church was exactly the same as that of the Herrnhuters to the Lutheran Church. Wesley did not desire to be counted among the dissenters. He strove rather for a religious renewal of the Church in general. The circumstances of the times caused them to become a special Church sect with the larg- est following in England and America. Methodism owes this to its Calvinistic force of will and action which differentiates it from the Lutheran emotion- al rapture of the Herrnhuter. ^6 CHAPTER XIII THE PERIOD OF ENLIGHTENMENT In the religious movements of the Protestant sects, discussed in our last lecture, the Protestant spirit had reacted on its religious and moral side against the petrifaction of the Church and striven for a religious revival of Christianity. Except in the case of the Socinians, they had undertaken no reasoning criticism; and yet, intellectual independ- ence of thought, according to the laws of reason on the basis of actual experience, does belong to the nature of the Protestant spirit. Hence it could not be long before this side of the reaction against the Church system also made its appearance. From the middle of the seventeenth century to the close of the eighteenth, it took place in that movement usually designated " Enlightenment." With all of its intellectual one-sidedness, Enlighten- ment was doubtless a fruit of the Reformation and the Renaissance — an important step in the devel- opment of the Protestant principle. For as a mat- ter of fact it was Enlightenment which completed the break with the mediaeval world-view, the one in which even the Protestant churches up to that time were caught. Enlightenment first laid the 247 The Development of Christianity foundation for the modern manner of thinking, the one in which we Hve to-day, for whose develop- ment, however, other factors have been added since the close of the eighteenth century. Various causes were active in bringing about the age of Enlightenment. First of all, the rise of the natural sciences which gave a new vision into the width of the world and the lawfulness of natural phenomena. Philosophy took over and generalized their methods and applied them to the religious mode of thinking. Out of philological studies, there arose a new science of history, too. A sense of critical judgment of sources of history and tra- dition was awakened; and when this was applied to the Bible, it led to the shaking of the doctrine of inspiration. Finally, there was added the new formation of political relations after the religious wars of the seventeenth century, whereby state power in religious matters was first diminished here and there and finally removed. I must limit myself in my discussion of this great and many-sided epoch of the spirit. Curiously enough that epoch has as yet received no compre- hensive and connected description, probably because victorious romanticism and its haughty despisal of Enlightenment refuses to acknowledge the deep- rooted importance of the latter. I will select a few of the main points out of the diversity, those points which were of epoch-making importance in the de- velopment of the Christian faith. 248 The Period of Enlightenment Three years after Luther's death, in 1543, Coper- nicus's book, On the Courses of the Heavenly Bodies, appeared. Although in imperfect fashion, in embryo, it teaches the present-day heliocentric world system as against the old geocentric system. Melanchthon foresaw the danger to theology in- volved in this discovery, and demanded its suppres- sion by the state. But the theologians bothered very little about these things, being deeply immersed in their dogmatic disputes, — until the beginning of the seventeenth century, when Galileo, the dis- coverer of the telescope and the founder of math- ematical physics and mechanics, further developed and established the Copernican astronomy, for which he had to pay by imprisonment and recanta- tion, all of which we spoke of in a previous lecture concerning the Inquisition. The Roman Inquisi- tion correctly saw that in this new astronomy a new and greater danger than all the theological heresies together threatened the Church system. The least of these things was that this astronomy showed the impossibility of the Biblical story of creation. In fact, it destroyed the entire stage upon which was played the whole traditional story of revelation, from the Fall to the reappearance of Christ. If the earth is changed into a rolling ball in the universe, what becomes of heaven above, the seat of the blessed — and of hell below, the place of the damned? What becomes of the de- scent and ascent of the Son of God, of the whole 249 The Development of Christianity dramatic movement of upper and lower spirits? Must not the disappearance of the cosmic frame of the story of revelation carry with it the disappear- ance of that story itself? In the light of this, the sternness of the Inquisition is conceivable from the Church standpoint — but naturally it did not hem the progress of science. In the course of the seventeenth century, Kepler and Newton pushed astronomy to such an extent that it became certain knowledge of the universe, and sought to know the lawfulness in the movement of heavenly bodies as well as in the phenomena of earth. The leading-strings of Aristotelian philoso- phy were quietly thrown aside and a questioning of nature herself was begun so that by experiment her secrets might be arrived at directly. For this inquiry, mathematics offered the precise form. The rise of mathematics and the exact sciences in general sharpened logical thinking, awakened a sense of the regularity and lawfulness of eventua- tion, of the relation of cause and effect — in short it opened the eye to the real world in contradis- tinction to the mediaeval world of fantasy and fable in which angels and devils took the place of nature. This new mode of thinking, developed along the lines of the natural sciences and mathematics, was formulated by the philosophers under general prin- ciples and main fundamental thoughts — all of them together making up a world-view. Various 250 The Period of Enlightenment as were the ways of the individual philosophers, in this they were unanimous, that they no longer would have theological authority master them by any fixed rule of fate, but that the inner law of thinking, itself, should furnish them their norm. Descartes demanded doubt of everything which could not stand the test of thinking as the begin- ning of all true knowledge, for the only certainty was the thinking "I" itself: Cogito ergo sum! Spinoza began with the highest general thought of God as the Infinite Being in whom thinking and extent, spirit and nature, are one. According to Spinoza, God is not a personal being of any kind such as we men are, separated from the world and passing a lonesome existence in heaven, but He is the indwelling cause in the world, the One Eternal Being whose collective phenomenon is the world of time and space, from whom as a cause all in- dividual being and becoming follows with mathe- matical necessity. Just as unchangeable as is the Divine Being itself, so unchangeable is also the law of causation which governs the world. There can be no breaches of this law by miracles, for thus God would contradict Himself, for the laws of na- ture are nothing else but the eternal forms of His causality. Man has no right to demand miracles, for that would be a supererogation on the part of his own finite, limited being. Rather it is proper that man should yield in unselfish humility to the all-powerful will of God. Such was the faith of 251 The Development of Christianity Spinoza whom his contemporaries looked upon as an atheist, while Goethe and Schleiermacher re- garded him as a saint. As against the monism of Spinoza, the Jewish philosopher, Leibniz, the German idealist, defended the reality of things individual. According to him the world is a system of acting and conceiving pow- ers, souls (he called them monads), the harmony of which is based in the creative understanding of God. All life, according to Leibniz, is development from within outward, the object of which is the growing perfection of each being, that is an ever more complete accommodation or harmony of each with every other being, with the whole of the world. Of all possible worlds, God created the best possible, that is, the one in which the most perfection could possibly come to realization. The evils of the world do not contradict this in the least, for in a world of finite things they are partly inevitable, but they are also means to the end of the development of life, and thus means toward the increasing perfection of the whole. Out of this knowledge of the all- wise ordering and regu- lation of the world, springs the human love for God, the perfect good. And this in turn becomes the motive for the good action of man toward his fellow men. Correct knowledge and virtuous ac- tion, Leibniz holds to be the two characteristics of true piety, which while it holds Church dogmas high in honor yet regards them as imperfect at- 252 The Peiiud of Enlightenment tempts to express religious truth; but that truth must never permit these dogmas to force a rejection of reason. Leibniz says that would be the charac- teristic of an obstinacy bordering on delusion or hypocrisy ! As against the idealism of Leibniz, John Locke, an Englishman, urged sensualism, that is to say, he taught that all the content of our consciousness comes from without by sensual perception. Our knowledge rests upon experience and it is the more certain the more immediate are our own percep- tions and the less they rest upon foreign presenta- tion. Hence, no revelation is valid which contra- dicts our experiential knowledge of the world. A disregard of reason by which a revelation is in- troduced would be, according to Locke, an excess which would in the end destroy both reason and revelation and set up in their stead groundless im- aginings. So, according to him, too, Christianity must be understood in reasonable fashion, namely, as a pure moral law with the hope of future bliss; thus understood, its content does not go beyond reason. But the belief in supernatural revela- tion is justified so far as it is held to be the form which was practically necessary in order to gain universal authority for its moral truth. The Church is a free association of conviction, an as- sociation which has as its object life according to the law of virtue, and, therefore, it must be kept well apart from the legal organization of the state. 253 The Development of Christianity tocke details his idea that the state must never mix in religious matters by laws of force, for religion is a thing of personal freedom. For the realiza- tion of this idea of tolerance which Locke repre- sented, in accord with Leibniz and Spinoza, he him- self furnished an example in the constitution which he drew up for the American free state of Caro- lina, 1669. That was great progress, the impor- tance of which is not adequately honored to-day, because the thought which was then absolutely new has become self-evident for us. The English and French Freethinkers or Deists, as they were called, attached themselves to Locke, just as the German Rationalists did to Leibniz. In 1696, John Tolland wrote a book maintaining that Christianity is not mysterious and that there is noth- ing in the Gospels either contrary to or beyond rea- son. Matthew Tyndall sought to prove that Chris- tianity is as old as creation and that the Gospel is nothing more than the renewed proclamation of the religion of nature. As unchangeable as human na- ture is the true religion, and its content is one with morality. Whatever goes beyond that is supersti- tion which the heathen and the Jews had mixed with the true religion until Jesus Christ restored the orig- inal natural religion. After that, the priests of the Church disturbed and distorted the truth anew by their superstitious errors and ceremonies. This opinion was acclaimed in Germany and for a long time remained the gospel of Enlightenment. Ac- 254 The Period of Enlightenment cording to Shaftesbury, religion is the optimistic belief in the beauty and goodness of the divine world-order, which is valuable as the basis and motive of a free and beautiful morahty, but this had been polluted and disturbed by the reward and punishment faith of Church dogmas and in the end turned to its very contrary, — to inhumanity, — so that the state and the authorities mix in and, under the pretense of caring for the salvation of the soul beyond, thoroughly torture men here. While most of these Freethinkers began with the supposition of an essential agreement between historical Christianity and the religion of reason, others, such as Bolingbroke and Dodwell, strongly emphasized the opposition between the two, claiming that irrationality was the specific characteristic of positive belief and of revelation, and held it to be both impossible and not permissible to make any at- tempt at mediation between religion and reason ; this was a massive supernaturalism behind which was hidden a thoroughgoing scepticism. This scepticism it was which the most important of all these Free- thinkers of the eighteenth century, David Hume, worked out into a finely spun theory, in which one may find the completion as well as the destruction of the theology of Enlightenment which emanated from Locke. As Hume ruined philosophic em- piricism by his theory of knowledge, in that he doubted the validity of our logical categories of substantiality and causality, and by keen reasoning 255 The Development of Christianity sought to prove the impossiblHty of any certain causal conclusions, he too subjected the religious presuppositions of the Deists to a disintegrating and destructive criticism in his book On the Natural History of Religion, iyS7- He first demonstrated that the presupposed original religion was not a high moral monotheism, but had been a low, crude polytheism or belief in spirits; that this had not emanated from reasonable thinking, but was rather the product of the power of imagination and the sentiments of the heart, — fear and hope, with uncer- tainty concerning the actual cause of events added. The origin of religion, then, is not to be discovered in pure human reason, but in the impure human pas- sions and imaginations, in the irrational side of man. In his dialogues on natural religion, he dem- onstrates completely the theoretical weakness of the proofs of God's existence, and the uncertainty and indefiniteness of natural theology based on logical arguments. His advice was to take refuge in posi- tive religion, though at another time he condemns all positive religions as both unreasonable and com- mon superstition. That was a radical scepticism historically justified by the fact that it uncovered the fundamental error of all preceding Enlighten- ment, — its psychological and historical superficial- ity; but this, on its part, was too one-sidedly nega- tive to be a halting place. For this reason, scep- ticism in England never became widespread. Hume met with success in France where Voltaire 256 The Period of Enlightenment and the Encyclopaedists, Didefot and D'Alembert, became his most influential representatives. Vol- taire was educated in the school of the Jesuits and in the aristocratic society of Paris as a scoffer. During his three years' stay in England, he became acquainted with the writings of the Deists, and on his return he spread their views throughout France in his numerous books. Without any philosophic depth but with healthy human understanding, with lively wit and control of literary form, Voltaire fought not against religion in general (for he held fast ever to his belief in God) but against the re- ligion of the Church, which he held to be a struc- ture of deception and a fount of misery. As an ex- cuse for him it may be offered that while he was well read yet he lacked all historical understanding of Christianity. Again, he lived in a time and an environment which set before him the deepest cor- ruption among the clerics, in bigoted as well as frivolous society. And, finally, it was the memories of the French Bartholomew's Night, the dragonades of Louis XIV, and the Albigensian Wars, which in Voltaire turned their torches against Christianity, — as Strauss aptly remarks in his monograph on Voltaire. While Enlightenment led to a breach with Chris- tianity in France, in Germany it preserved a more thoughtful attitude looking to a reconciliation of Christianity with modern culture. This was in Hne with its origin in the optimistic idealism of Leibniz's 257 The Development of Christianity philosophy. Christian Wolff, who was professor in Halle from 1707, rendered meritorious service in the propagation and popularization of it. In his book Reasonable Thoughts concerning God, the World, and the So ids of Men, Wolff attempted to base the belief in God, Providence, and immortality, as the essential content of a natural theology, on logical proofs. He did not deny historic revela- tion, he merely maintained that it goes beyond rea- son; he held that it never could be in opposition to it and that, therefore, it is the prerogative of reason to pass upon the characteristics of a true revelation. The Pietists of Halle regarded this as a danger to positive faith ; they joined hands with their old en- emies, the orthodox Lutherans, against whom they had until now defended the freedom of the indi- vidual conscience, to battle against the common foe whom they spied in the rising rationalistic philos- ophy of Wolff. The Pietist accusation against Wolff (that he was an atheist and fatalist) brought about the decree of Frederick William I, which drove Wolff from Halle under pain of the halter. He fled to Marburg. When, however, seventeen years later Frederick the Great ascended the throne, — that friend of Enlightenment and tolerance who permitted everyone to achieve bliss after his own fashion — Wolff was called back to Prussia, that is to Halle, with all honors. And therewith the ruler- ship of the Pietists there was ended. During the entire rule of this great King the golden age of 258 The Period of Enlightenment German Enlightenment lasted; with all its freedom and historical subjectivity, it never became a friv- olous mockery of religion; and the great King him- self Was too seriously conscientious not to respect the honest faith of every man, even the most ortho- dox. This is evidenced by that reply to Ziethen : — '' I have every respect for his faith, let him hold fast to it ! " In the German Enlightenment we distinguish two tendencies; one popular and philosophic, and the other theological and historical. The main expo- nent of the former was the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek published by Nikolai, the Berlin book- seller, a bold and honest zealot for the rights of the healthy human understanding. By his overvalua- tion of himself and by his silly derogation of all which was beyond his narrow horizon, that of a prosaic understanding, he brought it about that the great poets and thinkers held him up as the per- sonification of all Philistine mediocrity, which place he occupies to this day. A colleague of his, as far as attitude was concerned, was the Berlin Jew, Mendelssohn, who popularized the Platonic doc- trine of immortality in his PhcedoUj playing the part of a modern Socrates. In the interest of his Jewish co-religionists, he demanded the separation of the state from both Church and religion. More important was The Nezv Apology of Socrates by the moral philosopher, Eberhard, who defended the humane morality of the heathen against the Augus- 259 The Development of Christianity tinian dogma of inherited sin, which presents the most beautiful virtues of the heathen as merely brilliant sins and according to which all men are damned because of the sin of the first man and will be saved onty through the non-sin fulness of another man. To the reproach that he was mixing up philosophy and theology, Eberhard replied that in the end the theological systems are nothing else but philosophy, and, therefore, cannot be judged other than by philosophy, and in general these two sciences are not separated in the realm of truth, but only in books. Besides, dogmatics was richly dow- ered with Wolff's philosophy and popular Enlight- enment by such enlightened theologians as Sack, Teller, and Baumgarten. This was an Enlighten- ment which was strong on the side of its criticism of Church dogma, but altogether too flatly eudae- monistic and utilitarian to do justice to the religious and moral depth of Christianity. Of special importance for the further develop- ment of German theology were the historical-bib- lical works of theologians like John David Mich- aelis, Ernesti, and Semler, who was professor in Halle from 1752 to 1791. Semler has been called the father of rationalism. Perhaps that is an ex- aggeration, but in any event he was its classic rep- resentative in the eighteenth century. He began as a Pietist, passed through the school of Baumgarten the rationalist, then, by assiduous study of the New Testament and patristic literature, Semler achieved 260 The Period of Enlightenment an independent, scientific standpoint; he arrived at a conviction which, despite all its faults, — and it naturally shares those of its day, — stands as the beginning of all modern historical critical theology. By his criticism of the canon, he tore down the hedge of inspiration which, as he himself said, had been put all around these writings. He showed that the New Testament was not a uniform doctrinal law book which had, so to speak, fallen from heav- en, but that it had grown as a collection of first century evidences of Christianity. So, too, by Church history, he showed that the dogmas grew up under the conditions of time and individual; and in so doing he often took the part of the heretics against the orthodox. Therefore, according to Semler, the dogmatic formulas belong only in the public Church religion, a sort of conventional form for what is commonly believed, but they do not be- long authoritatively in the private religion of the individual Christian ; for the latter only that part of historical tradition is of value which leads to the moral betterment of men. Semler holds that the kernel of Christianity is the moral religion of rea- son which, while it rests on the authority of Christ, needs to be interpreted by reason. An understand- ing of Bible and Church history serves this pur- pose when critical resciarch is free from prejudices. In this fashion Semler sought to combine the free- dom of scientific research with a conservative piety toward historic Christianity. Consequently it was 261 The Development of Christianity no departure from his principles, but merely a dis- play of the positive side as against radicalism, which made him the opponent of the superficial Bahrdt and the Wolfenbuettler Fragments. It is to be regretted that it resulted in a sharp personal conflict with Lessing, but it can be both understood and forgiven. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was an Enlightener of the grandest style, who placed all of his excep- tional spirit at the service of Enlightenment in most diverse departments. However, he was so far su- perior to the other representatives of German En- lightenment, both in width and depth of spiritual gift, that it may be doubted whether one can count him of their ranks; whether he is not rather to be considered their opponent and their conqueror. By his broad manner of thinking, he rose far beyond all petty utilitarian standards ; by his historic sense, he broke with their unhistoric subjectivism; by his incorruptible clarity and truthfulness, he brushed ruthlessly away the fog of their partialnesses and the dogmatism of their self-satisfied arrogance of infallibility. Lessing was not pleased with the or- dinary Enlightenment of his time, not because it was Enlightenment or progress, but because it was not nearly clear and decided enough, because its philosophy was too superficial, and because their combination of the old and the new seemed to him too varied a mixture of the impure and the unclean — a mixture of such muddy nature that 262 The Period of Enlightenment the old orthodoxy consequently seemed preferable to him. Lessing judged the so-called *' reasonable Christianity " of the modern theologians of his day as one might judge of certain theologians of our day : " Too bad that one neither knows quite where he nor where his Christianity rests ! " Ap- parently the old theology quarrels with the same human understanding, but the new theology prefers to bribe it. For this reason, it would be better to make a compromise with the open enemy in order to guard more carefully against the secret one. In fact, Lessing was more radical and, at the same time, more conservative than all the Enlighteners of his time. He was more radical in his attack on the idolatry of the Bible and all traditional his- toric faiths, and he was more conservative in his understanding of the religious ideas in Church Christianity. His publication of the Wolfenbuet- tler Fragments, which had been written by Rei- marus, afforded occasion for the celebrated theo- logical polemics against Goetze, the chief pastor at Hamburg. The main thought of these polemics is as follows: The Bible is not Christianity and the letter is not the spirit. Christianity had long been present before there was any New Testament Bible. Much that is in the Bible has nothing to do with Christianity. The Bible contains but is not the re- ligion. The historical part of the. Bible is subject to doubt, but the religious truth of Christianity no longer depends on the historic truth of the Bible; 263 The Development of Christianity; for accidental truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason. Yet with all the relativity of historical bits of traditional myths and legends, Lessing is able to value the im- portance of history altogether as a progressive " ed- ucation of the human race." In all religions, he seeks nothing but the movement according to which alone the human understanding could have devel- oped and which involves the errors of childish stages of development which deserve neither scorn nor anger. Just as the New Testament surpassed the Old, as the second and better elementary book, so the progress of the divine education can lead up- ward and onward to a new, eternal gospel, and at the close of his Education of the Human Race, he cried enthusiastically : " It will come, it will cer- tainly come, the age of the perfection of man, when man will do good because it is good and will not do good simply because arbitrary rewards have been set for the deed. Go thy unnoticeable pace, Divine Providence, but do not let me doubt Thee because Thou art scarcely noticeable, do not let me doubt Thee even when Thy steps seem to go backward. It is not true that the shortest line is always the straightest ! " a64 CHAPTER XIV GERMAN POETS AND THINKERS After the second half of the eighteenth century, the one-sided reasoning tendency of Enhghtenment was met by a new tendency which might be desig- nated as a second renaissance. It was a new strug- gle of personality to make all its natural powers and instincts effective for all, freed from the fetters of dictation as well as from all the rules of a level- ing and automatic reason. This tendency orig- inated with Rousseau, the passionate defender of the rights of the heart against the brain, of nature against culture, of individual freedom against the convention of society. Many were the echoes wak- ened in Germany by his cry, " Back to nature ! " And they who echoed were now sensitive souls, now strugglers of genius, and again pious mystics. The ferment of these visionaries of genius, at first cloudy and confused, later clarified to a purer and more beautiful ideal of humanity. The first proph- et of this new ideal was Herder; its poetical rep- resentatives were Goethe and Schiller; its philo- sophic exponents and interpreters were Kant and Fichte, Schleiermacher and Hegel. This German revolution of the spirit, which paralleled the French 265 The Development of Christianity Revolution in politics and was at least equal in im- portance to it, as far as the history of the develop- ment of Christianity is concerned, — this revolution of the human spirit I cannot undertake to describe in detail to-day. I must confine myself to a short description of the religious views of these German poets and thinkers (for the details see my Gesch- ichte der Religionsphilosophie seit Spinoza, 3rd ed- ition). Herder's religious views underwent various changes, but through them all runs the one thread of protest against the vulgar Enlightenment, against its darkening of reason, against its empty conceptual formulas, especially against its arrogant and senseless view of history. Everywhere Her- der's interest was in the immediacy of man's soul life, in the fundamentality and peculiarity of the emotions of the individual as of peoples, and in the naturalness as well as natural growth of their forms of expression. As he held aloft in poetry the native force and beauty of the folk-song as against the artificial rules of the schools, so, in re- ligion, he gave proper value to the power and beauty of the Bible as against the dogmatic rules of the Church. He rejected all arbitrary and artificial ra- tionalistic twisting of Bible language and demanded, as the first condition of a religious comprehension, a loving immersion of one's own self in the spirit of the Oriental poets and prophets, with particular re- gard for the peculiarity of each epoch and the indi- 266 German Poets and Thinkers viduality of each writer. In his book, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, Herder wakened for theologians, as well as for laymen, the sense of religious truth and poetic beauty contained in the Bible, indepen- dently of all dogma and criticism. Herder's writ- ings on the Gospels display his genius, containing results which show that his keen eye had seen, ahead of its time, the peculiarity of each of the Gospel writers. In his judgment of the Gospel stories, the assthetic religious sensing of their ideal content loomed so large that, in very joy over the beauty of the stories, he could never bring himself to a serious testing of their historical reality. It cannot be denied that this romantic weakness considerably lessens the scientific value of his Bible research. This lack, however, is far outweighed by his fine understanding of the peculiar spirit of the Bible writers as inspired witnesses of personal revela- tions, of experienced religion. By this means. Her- der paved the way for the genuine historical, scien- tific understanding of the Bible, which is equally as far removed from the denial of Enlightenment as from a blind faith in authority. For the under- standing of extra-biblical history of religion, too, Herder was a pioneer. While the Enlightenment looked upon the nature mythologies of the nature rehgions as valueless superstitions, Herder was the first to show that they are really the most lively religious consciousness of the childhood of man, that everywhere in nature, wherever life, light, and 267 The Development of Christianity force appeared, there a revelation of deity was felt, there its order and creative power were reverently seen. As the song is the mother-tongue of all poetry, so the myths and legends are the mother- tongue of all rehgion. This correct dictum is not highly enough regarded even to this day; we are still too deep in the rationalism which condemns a myth rather than estimates the truth of the myth, which is entirely independent of the problematic, historical facts. In so far, I think, that even to-day we ought to go to school to Herder. While Herder had much friendly patience with the myth- ical parts of historical religion, yet the transforma- tion of these mythical popular legends and notions into dogmatic tenets was equally obnoxious to him. In the Church dogma he could see only arbitrary doctrinal opinion, '' a rag-fair of old phrases," which have nothing at all to do with religion as a matter of the spirit, which are the grave of re- ligion. By reason of his own peculiarity and the circumstances of his time, we can well understand how his historical sense failed him all at once. The consequence was that he did not enter deeply enough into the historical peculiarity of the Christian re- ligion, and, therefore, that he had too little direct effect on the further formation of theology. For him, Christianity was from the beginning only pure humanitarianism in the sense in which a child of the eighteenth century understood it ; with its moral optimism it was difficult to harmonize the Biblical 268 German Poets and Thinkers Church thought of sin and redemption. In this re- spect Kant and Schleiermacher were deeper than Herder. Like Herder, and yet more than he, Goethe and Schiller stood beyond the contradiction of Enlight- enment and Church faith. Because of its super- ficiality and its vulgar utilitarian spirit, they heart- ily despised Enlightenment, while toward the Church faith they felt themselves entirely free. Drawing from the depths of their own genius, in- spired and fructified by the manifold culture ele- ments of their rich and active period, they created a new ideal of humanity, one which in its form was far removed from the ecclesiastical but which, at the same time, by its purely human truth and by its high moral purity, presented itself as the product of the Protestant Christian spirit and was mightily effective in its later development. It cannot be glossed over that Goethe repeatedly confessed himself to be " a decided non-Christian " and that he expressed himself repeatedly and with perfect frankness on the things which separated him from Church Christianity, — in a letter to Lav- ater, as follows : " I yield you the joy of enjoying everything in one individual; and with the impossibility that one individual can do enough for you it is glorious that there remains one picture from ancient times into which you can carry over your all and mirror your- self in it, that you can worship yourself. But I 269 The Development of Christianity cannot call it other than an injustice and a robbery that you pluck out the most precious feathers of the myriad birds under heaven as though they were usurped to decorate exclusively your bird of para- dise; this it is which necessarily aggravates us and seems unbearable to us, who have given ourselves over to every truth revealed to and through men and, as the sons of God, in ourselves and in all of His children, worship truth." Further, " You hold the Gospel as it stands to be divine truth; not even a voice from heaven could convince me that a woman without a man could conceive and that a dead man could rise from the grave. Rather I hold these to be blasphemies against the great God and His revelation in nature. You find nothing more beautiful than the Gospels. I find a thousand writ- ten pages, old and new, from the hand of God- gifted men, equally as beautiful and indispensable to humanity." Goethe, you see, was offended by the counter-nat- uralness of the Biblical Church belief in miracles and by the narrow exclusiveness of the idolatry of a single individual; in short, he was offended by what we might call the mythological part of the tra- ditional Church belief. Did he, therefore, in his faith reject its religious kernel? In no wise! Goethe was far removed from that. On the con- trary, he protested against the mythical form of the Church faith because it seemed too small, too narrow for his belief in the eternal omnipresent 270 German Poets and Thinkers revelation of God in nature and history. Let us recall his beautiful words: "The acknowledg- ment of God wherever and however He may reveal Himself, that is actually bliss on earth ! " He rec- ognizes the divine power spread through all life in nature; he finds eternal love everywhere active. In human history he recognizes the continuous rev- elation of God who did not retire to rest on the sixth day of creation, but is as continuously active as on the first day. Especially in human product of the highest kind, in each great thought which bears fruit, he recognizes gifts from above, real children of God whom man ought to receive and honor gratefully, in that he holds himself to be the instrument of a higher world government, a worthy vessel for the reception of divine influence. In general, this is the nature of religion according to Goethe's beautiful characterization: a grateful yielding to the divine source of all truth and good- ness surpassing all our concepts, elevation to it with the request for a pure heart and large thoughts. Concerning the peculiarity of the Christian religion, he gives us some fine thoughts; in Wilhelm Meis- ter' s Apprenticeship, he speaks of three kinds of reverence which religion ought to awaken in man: reverence for that which is over us, that which is about us, and that which is under us. Christianity achieves the last, which is the most difficult, in so far as it acknowledges lowliness and poverty, suf- fering and death to be divine, and is able to revere 2/1 The Development of Christianity and come to love even sin itself and crime not as hindrances but rather as aids to holiness. " Since this object has once been reached, humanity never can go back and it may be said that the Christian religion can never disappear again ; since it has once divinely embodied itself, it can never again be dis- solved." True, he does add that the highest re- ligion comes out of those three reverences only when man reverences himself as the best that God and nature have produced. To sum it all up we may say, Goethe sees the peculiar merit of Christi- anity to be that it has helped man to a clear and permanent certainty of his own spiritual freedom, dignity, and sublimity as against the accidents of the sense world. But he knows, too, that this self- estimate of the spirit can only be bought at the price of the self-denial of his finite self-quaHty. " For, so long as thou hast not that Die and be! thou art only a sorry guest in this dark world." Therefore, he bows in reverence before the moral sublimity which emanates from the person of Christ in the Gospels as the most divine fashion in which the di- vine has ever appeared on earth. Finally, for his good Protestant world-view, his hearty sympathy with Luther is characteristic. Shortly before his death he said to Eckermann : " We do not know, in general, what we owe to Luther and the Reforma- tion. We are free from the fetters of clerical narrow-mindedness, we have become able to go back to the source and to grasp Christianity in its 272 German Poets and Thinkers purity. Again we have the courage to stand firmly on God's earth and sense ourseh^es in our God-given human nature. Though the culture of the spirit may ever progress, natural science grow in extent and depth, and the human spirit widen as it will, it will never go beyond the sublimity and moral cul- ture of Christianity as it shines through the Gospels. But from a Christianity of word and belief it will come ever more and more to a Christianity of atti- tude and of deed." — Such was Goethe's confes- sion at the close of his rich life. Schiller's attitude to religion and Church was essentially the same as Goethe's. Because beneath the garb of religions the religion itself lies, there- fore he did not profess any of the Church religions, on acount of religion. His religion is moral ideal- ism, but not only in Kant's sense as obedience to the categorical imperative of duty, but also as the cer- tainty of the eternal truth and world-conquering power of the divinely good as felt in the heart. According to Schiller, God should not remain for us a commanding will beyond, but we are to take Him up in our will, to feel Him as our possession, as the bliss-producing and freeing power of elevation be- yond the anxieties of earth into the ideal kingdom. This carrying of the divine within, this humaniza- tion of it, Schiller regarded as the differentiating advantage of Christianity ; its peculiar nature he characterized with rare understanding in a letter to Goethe : 273 The Development of Christianity *' In the Christian rehgion I find the tendency to the highest and noblest and the various appearances of it in life seem to me so hateful and distasteful merely because they are unsuccessful representa- tions of that highest. If one seeks to cling to the actual characteristic feature of Christianity, which separates it from all monotheistic religion, it is to be found in nothing other than the abrogation of the law, the Kantian imperative, in the place of which Christianity would have free incHnation. In its pure form, therefore, it is the representation of beautiful morality or the incarnation of holiness and, in this sense, the unique aesthetic religion." In this sense Schiller's poem, '' Ideal and Life " may be taken as the most profound paraphrase of the fundamental idea contained in the Christian doctrine of salvation. Recall that beautiful distich in which Schiller yields the palm of victory to Christianity: " Religion of the cross, thou alone dost weave in one Wreath the double palm, humility and strength." Schiller's moral ideal originated in the philos- ophy of Kant, that foundation of modern German philosophy. Before Kant the Enlighteners proudly boasted of their reason and their freedom. What true reason and true freedom actually were, that was a matter about which those enlightened were not very clear. They had confused the reason with the temporary opinion of the naive human understand- 274 German Poets and Thinkers ing, and freedom they had confused with the un- controlled desire of an undisciplined eudaemonistic will. Then Kant came and showed that he alone is truly enlightened who knows how to use his understanding properly according to the laws pecu- liar to the thinking spirit ; that he is not free who wishes to place his revolutionary license in the stead of whatever exists, but he alone is free who rises by true reform of thinking to moral self-decision according to the inner laws of reason. Kant worked out these inner laws of reasoning thought and will in his Critiques of pure and practical reason and the power of judgment. In the first he showed that all our knowledge is bound to the material given to us by sense perception, that the formation of this chaotic material into the ordered world of our consciousness is entirely a matter of our self-activity, whereby our spirit is ever bound to its original, peculiar forms of thinking, time and place, and to the forms of thinking of the logical categories. Upon the original innate necessity of these forms of viewing and thinking rests the truth of all our know^ledge, which has its limitation, hov - ever, in that those forms are only valid in their ap- plication to temporal and spatial experience, to the phenomena of our consciousness, — not to the " things-in-themselves " which are at the bottom of all those phenomena. Therefrom Kant con- cludes that all speculation concerning the things beyond experience is a flight beyond the lim- 275 The Development of Christianity its of our knowledge, and therefore can yield no real knowledge. In this way, the proofs of the existence of God and of immortality given by the philosophy of Wolff lose their power. The self- certainty of their dogmatic presupposition, upon which the self-satisfaction of Enlightenment mainly depended, is thus destroyed. For this reason Kant was given the name, " the destroyer." This abroga- tion of all pseudo-knowledge, according to Kant's purpose, was not to serve doubt, denial and dis- belief, but on the contrary was to prepare the ground for a deeper and better foundation of faith. The latter does not lie in the theoretical but in the practical reason, or in conscience whose feeling of duty is the one undeceiving, undoubtable certainty of anything beyond sense. Naturally the content of practical reason is, in the beginning, only the unconditioned, formal demand to act as all others should act or treat each man as an end in himself, and not merely as a means to an end. From this fundamental fact or fundamental demand of our moral reason, there results a series of further conse- quences which form the content of our moral reasoning faith. First, ought presupposes able, hence the freedom of our moral self-decision ; again, the fulfilment of the moral law of reason finds in the desires of our sensual nature an obstacle which can never be fully overcome. Therefore, within a limited period of time, it can never be fully realized; hence the concKision that there is an un- 276 German Poets and Thinkers limited period of time in which we may strive for that perfection which presupposes the unHmited continuance of pure personal life, without which we could not strive for perfection ad infinitum; finally, the moral task can only consist in the highest good, that is, in the harmonious union of happiness and worthiness of joy, or virtue; more popularly ex- pressed, in the harmonious connection of the world of the senses with the world of morals. The ability to bring about such a harmonious connection is en- tirely beyond our powers. If it is to be possible, however, (and it is demanded as our highest task) then it is only thinkable under the presupposition of the existence of a God who is almighty, omnis- cient, and just causation, possessing the ability to put the world of sense and the world of morals, virtue and happiness, into a harmonious unity. These demands of practical reason do not base an actual knowledge which admits of logical proof, but a belief which is morally based and adequate for practical living. We ought to live as though there were a God and an immortality. We ought to make this practical belief the permanent norm of our practical living. This moral reasoning faith which regards all duties from the viewpoint of divine commands and finds God the author of the moral law and guarantee of its realization in the highest good, — that is the kernel of all religion, to which the statutory doctrines of the various Church religions are related merely as garment- 277 The Development of Christianity forms (vehicles), as means of introduction neces- sary and useful in their time, as shells and supports which became superfluous and obstructive as soon as men rose to a consciousness of their true human dignity. Until that time, the traditional Church teachings should be interpreted as allegories of moral truths. Kant himself gives a sample in his book on Religion within the Limits of Reason. That, too, has the defects of its period, but it is im- portant enough, and contains enough profound thoughts to deserve the attention of the philosophers and historians of religion of all time. Kant starts out from the same deep opposition which governs all of his moral philosophy ; it is the opposition of the moral law of reason to the natural sensual and selfish desires of man, which he desig- nates as a radical evil because of its opposition to its reasonable purpose. It is radical evil in so far as it must be presupposed before all conscious, free activity of the will, for man finds that opposition as a given fact within him from the beginning. This is close to what the Church means by the doctrine of inherited sin, only that according to Kant there can be no thought of a historical inheritance of a first sin from Adam. Such a thing cannot exist in the moral realm, but it is a natural condition which cannot be other but which will not remain because it contradicts the idea of man himself. It is the same thing that Zwingli called the natural infirmities of man. With this presupposition of the 278 German Poets and Thinkers naturally bad, man cannot become good by any merely gradual reform of his morals, but a revolu- tion of his entire manner of thinking; a new birth, alone, can complete it. But how can one arrive at that? Kant says it can only be by a deed of indi- vidual freedom, for each one must make himself good; but it is helpfully effective to visualize the ideal in a historical example of such remarkable moral sublimity as was furnished by Jesus. Hence, we may regard Jesus as though in him the ideal of the good had appeared, and that without holding him to be anything more than a naturally born man. The question whether the historical Jesus fully corresponded to the ideal or not, is a question which it is neither possible nor necessary for us to answer ; for in any event the actual object of our religious belief is not the historical man, of whom we have only external information, but the object of our religious belief is the ideal of a humanity pleasing to God, which, because it is based in our super- sensible nature, may be thought of under the sym- bolical image of an ideal son of God coming from heaven. Whoever believes in this ideal Son of God, to which Jesus is related as the visible example — in other words, whoever takes the moral idea of the good into his spirit and suffers himself to be governed by it, is just in the eyes of the Searcher of Hearts, that is, he is as he ought to be because the good attitude of the heart makes good all pres- ent defects in the conduct of life. The guilt of the 279 The Development of Christianity past need not worry one in whom the good attitude has come to hfe, because the new man in us vicari- ously suffers for the guilt of the former man in the natural pain of self-conquest and patience. There- in consists the simple truth of the Church doctrine of the vicarious merit of the Son of God; but in the exact sense of the words, according to which guilt is wiped away by the suffering of another, it is not correct, while in the sense that it is the Son of God in us who ever anew makes good vicariously the failure of the man in us, it is correct. Certainly this is a profound thought ! Thus you see that Kant throughout sought to interpret the historical and mythical parts of Church faith as practical, valuable symbols of ideal truths; the source and confirmation of these ideal truths, however, is not to be found outside of us in some holy books, but inside of us in the moral experiences of our own pious natures. The mystics of all times have taught the same thing. Kant and his philo- sophic successors have only formulated the unde- cided emotions and views of the mystics in con- crete concepts and deduced them from the nature of our moral consciousness. Only a few words to-day concerning Fichte: Johann Gottlieb Fichte typically represented the movements of the spirit of his age in the Protean changes in his philosophy. He started from the absolute freedom of the ego, which has no limita- tions outside of itself but its own self -activities, sets 280 German Poets and Thinkers up the limits of the not-I, the object, thus becoming itself the creator of its own world. Things are what we make them to be. Nature is nothing of itself; it is merely the means which the I posits for its free activity, the material of our moral action. The object of this action is the realization of free- dom in a moral order of souls, in the mutual inter- action of free personalities. Alongside this moral world-order there is no longer any room for an extra-worldly God. In this order, moral action finishes within itself. At this extreme edge of the philosophy of the I, Fichte could not remain. He swung back into a religious mysticism which in the end stands closer to Spinoza than to Kant. In Fichte's writings of about 1800, it is the one divine life and light which brings itself in the realm of finite souls to its manifold broken phenomenon. Accordingly, religion is no longer merely the moral action of individual men, but it consists in the mysti- cal view of the world as the divided phenomenon of the one Divine Being. It is the feeling that we are one with the divine life, it is the immersion of our self in God. Fichte's moral idealism maintained itself even in this mystical God-union in so far as he does not permit this highest love of God to end in a mere inactive contemplation, but he takes it to be the source of a joyous and active love of men, out of which moral action flows as peacefully and as certainly as does the light from the sun. There- upon follows the close attachment to Christianity 281 The Development of Christianity according to John. For Fichte, the historical part expressly becomes the means and the way to that which is alone beatifying in religion, the meta- physical, the belief in the supersensible nature of God as the eternal principle of all light and life in the world, of all truth and goodness in men. For the kingdom of heaven is the kingdom of the free- dom of souls in God, and Christ was its first citizen. 282 CHAPTER XV . ROMANTICISM, SPECULATION, AND HISTORICAL CRITICISM At the beginning of the nineteenth century comes the movement which we usually designate as Romanticism. It is not easy to describe its nature in brief, because its Protean changes swerved from freest subjectivism to most slavish faith in author- ity, from unbridled phantastry to scientific histori- cal research. It is not even easy to mark its beginning. The roots reach back into that epoch of genius, the seventh decade of the eighteenth cen- tury, when the Sturm und Drang spirits rose against the despotism of a leveling understanding to defend the rights of individual feelings and fancy un- trammeled in creation. Thence came Herder, thence, too, the young Schiller. With these great men, however, the unclear ferment ripened in ma- ture age to the fragrant spirit of a noble humanitari- anism. Goethe found in the study of Spinoza and natural science the governing measure of his pas- sionate heart ; and Schiller learned from Kant that true freedom consists in devotion to the moral ideal. Both Goethe and Schiller found their ideal types of 283 The Development of Christianity beauty in the classical world of Greece. Thus there was a clarification and naturally, also, a limi- tation of the struggle for freedom on the part of the strong souls. But in the younger generation the struggle broke out anew, so that more passionately and more consciously than before, they struggled against Enlightenment and reason, rules, customs, and order. Thus arose what is usually called the Romantic School. It differs not only from En- lightenment but also from Classicism by raising the license of poetic fancy to the ruling law of thought and life; their prototypes were not in the clearness and perfection of form of the classic world, but in the marvelous fable world and moon-illumined magical nights of the middle ages. Romanticism leaned upon the idealistic philosophy of Fichte, wherein the construction of the world was the act of the free-creating power of imagination of the I (at bottom itself nothing more than a grandiose piece of concept poetry, the example of romantic intermingling of poetry-making and of thinking.) As we have seen, with Fichte this tendency swung back to a mystical pantheism, wherein the individual I is made to sink back into the all-Hfe of God. Romanticism, too, felt the need of filling the empty freedom of the I with objective content, of binding it to some generally valid power. Thus it was that the former turned to religion and the Church, while the latter took up the study of history, the past of their own people, and the de-velopment of civiliza- 284 Historical Criticism tion among men. The principal representatives of the religious movement are Novalis and Schleier- macher. With Novalis (real name Frederick von Harden- berg) the characteristically romantic intermingling of poetry, philosophy, and religion is peculiarly clear. Fichte's ethical idealism was transformed by him into a '' magical idealism." The genius / feels itself to be a part and image of the divine / and permits itself, like the other, to dispose of nature with unlimited freedom. According to Novalis, religion arises by the heart making itself its ideal object and feeling itself to be the organ of the di- vine. All phenomena of the world can become mediums of divine revelation and the Christian one mediator be supplemented by the ancient many mediators. The history of Christ, Novalis says, is just as certainly a poem as it is history, a world- historic, symbolical drama, full of tragedy and un- fathomable woe. Later he says not the Bible but the Holy Ghost ought to be our teacher, and every sermon ought to be an inspiration of genius. He esteemed the middle ages to be the golden age of Christianity; it was the cult of Mary which appealed to him particularly. At the same time he hoped for a future rejuvenation of religion at which time it would become united with the highest culture of the world. Romanticism with Novalis thus sways between reaction and progress. With Friedrich Schlegel, however, the uncontrolled striving for 285 The Development of Christianity emancipation from morals and discipline went to the other extreme. He sought rescue from moral ship- wreck in the safe harbor of the Catholic Church. Only with Schleiermacher did the excess of ro- mantic emotion unite with the clarity of scientific thinking and the earnestness of moral volition in such happy fashion that he could become the re- newer of Protestant theology. Schleiermacher was born in a pious minister's house. He was educated in the Herrnhut circle, completing his studies by the addition of the old and modern philosophers. As a young minister at Berlin, he put himself in touch with the Romantic group whose opposition to En- lightenment he shared without dropping into their fantastic excesses. In every way he was peculiarly fitted to be the attorney for religion before the cultured among those who despise it. In his speeches written for that purpose, he sought to find for religion a pecuhar place within our souls, inde- pendent of knowledge, as of moral action, namely in the immediate feeling for the infinite in the finite, or in the view of the universe in the sensa- tion of the world-spirit in its manifold revelations through the phenomena of the world. Schleier- macher speaks with reverence of Spinoza, who had been full of religion and full of the Holy Spirit, for it does not depend on the concept which one makes of God, theistic or pantheistic, but it depends upon feeling God in one's heart. So, too, the immortal- ity of religion is not a problematical future, but 286 Historical Criticism the inner experience of the union of the finite with the infinite, the being eternal in each moment. Al- together a system of teachable paragraphs does not make the character of a rehgion; its mode of feel- ing is decisive. Hence the difference between true and false is not applicable in judging a religion; each religion is true so far as it grows purely out of emotion and has not yet been formulated in con- cepts. Each, however, must suffer the other modes of pious feeling alongside itself. As a thing in- finite, religion has its being only in the multiplicity of individual appearances, thus, in the various posi- tive religions, not in any so-called natural religion, which after all is no reality but a mere abstraction. Each positive religion rests upon a fundamental idea which bears some close relation to a funda- mental fact. Both, idea and fact, are always at- tached but must never be regarded as identical. The fundamental idea of Christianity, according to Schleiermacher, is the abrogation of that de- struction which consists in separation from God, an abrogation brought about by mediatorial persons and institutions scattered broadcast among men ; by these mediators, the union of the finite with God, the reconciliation of those separated from God is brought about. Among these mediatorial figures belongs Jesus Christ, for in him the consciousness of the necessity of salvation and of his own power to impart it was present with special force and clearness. But in the last speech Schleiermacher 287 The Development of Christianity adds, Jesus himself had never declared that he was the only mediator, neither had his disciples sought to set bounds to the unlimited freedom of the reve- lations of the Holy Spirit, and the Bible does not forbid any other book also to become a Bible; al- together, Christianity did not wish to be the unique figure of religion, it scorned the limitation of sole rulership and would be glad to see another more powerful and more beautiful figure of religion grow up by its side. Schleiermacher wrote that way in his Speeches, 1799, but differently in his Dogmatics, 1821. In the latter he remained true to his idealism in so far as he did not represent the Christian faith to be a sum of traditional doctrine but a personal con- tent of our Christian consciousness with which the remaining content of our reasoning spirit had to harmonize. But in the two decades after the Speeches, Schleiermacher had passed through the changes which the time-consciousness had under- gone; he had sloughed off the one-sided subjec- tivism of the Romanticists, his entire mode of think- ing was more closely attuned to the historical faith common to the Christian Church. Hence, the form of his dogmatics was presented in a fashion border- ing more closely on the Church manner of expres- sion. As for content, it stood more decidedly on the ground of the positive Christian belief and sought to ally it in closest possible fashion with idealistic philosophy. Religion is therein no longer 288 Historical Criticism called feeling in general, but confined to the abso- lute feeling of dependence. The difference between God and the world is made more marked; God is the unity to the multiplicity of the finite world; He is eternal omnipresent causation, upon which all spiritual and temporal causes, in their condi- tioned activities, are unconditionally dependent, and which reveals itself through our pious feelings in various forms, expressed by us in symbolic con- ceptions of divine attributes. Perfection is es- pecially conceded to Christianity. It is no longer placed on the plane with other religions. He [Schleiermacher] no longer maintains that it will be surpassed by future better religions, but he ac- knowledges that it has a unique, unsurpassable value. This is based upon the supernaturalness of its origin in the person of Jesus Christ. The way in which Schleiermacher sought to harmonize his philosophic conviction with this concession to the Church supernaturalism (for that is what it is)] is just as full of genius as it is problematical. Schleiermacher begins that the Christian con- sciousness moves between the contradictories, sin and grace. The former consists in an obstacle to our higher self-consciousness or God-consciousness by the sense or world-consciousness. Grace is the release from that obstacle by strengthening and permitting the God-consciousness to rule. Natural- ly, these are the same two conditions which Spinoza described in his ethics as the opposition between 289 The Development of Christianity servitudo and libertas humana, and with Kant they reappear in the opposition between the faculty of desiring the lower, sensual as against the higher, reasoning things. But, inasmuch as these are mere- ly the two sides of human nature in general, the philosophers think of the transition from the first to the second condition as a natural turn-about, a transition from the lower to the higher plane of life, toward which our human nature had a tendency from the beginning and which, therefore, occurs in the individual by inner development, with psy- chological necessity. According to Schleiermacher, this change from a sinful to a saved consciousness is something which does not take place in isolated fashion for individual men, but is dependent upon the general turning of the whole human species, which did occur as a historical fact at a certain time in a certain place on the basis of a certain cause and that cause was Jesus Christ. Schleier- macher continues logically that if Christ is to be thought the adequate cause of the continuous salva- tion of Christianity, then he must have had an absolutely powerful and blessed consciousness of God: in other words, he must have become the re- ligious example for humanity in actual reality, and, in so far as his person was an entirely unique phenomenon, he must have been of miraculous or- igin. How such an ideal man, in whom idea and reality are completely identical, is possible, how one can harmonize his miraculous origin with " nat- 290 Historical Criticism ural development " which must have gone on with- out any deviation and without any inner struggle, — Schleiermacher cannot tell us. Here the roman- tic identification of ideal and reality, of poetry and reasoning thought, burst through the scientific logic of his system. Then, too, the concession to the Church supernaturalism is so strongly circumscribed that the approach to the Church mode of belief re- mains, after all, a mere semblance. Although Schleiermacher does not directly negate the super- natural birth, resurrection, ascension, and return of Christ, he pushes them aside as unessential. They are of no importance for the faith and can, there- fore, be offered up to historical criticism. So, too, Christ's work of salvation did not consist in the atonement by which suf^cient merit was gained and placed to the credit of sinful humanity, that is, not a vicarious satisfaction, as the Church dogma has it; but, according to Schleiermacher, the work of Christ consisted in imparting his higher con- sciousness of God. Psychologically expressed, that means that his work consisted in the impression of the ideal view in Jesus efifecting a similar life of community with God and blessedness in God for the faithful. And, in the universality of this higher self -consciousness, in this community with God, consists what the Church calls the Holy Spirit ; ac- cording to Schleiermacher, it is not one of the per- sons of the Trinity, but it is nothing other than the pious " common spirit of the Christian congrega- 291 [The Development of Christianity; tlon." In this important concept of the Christian common spirit as the universal divine human life, subjective idealism finds, in fact, a valuable comple- ment and expansion on the side of historical so- cial life. However, this justified and valuable progress beyond rationalism might have been ac- complished without the detour of the supernatural dogma of Christ ; it might have been simply reached by a logical continuation of the thought of the inner development of the human spirit through the various lower and higher steps of development nat- ural to our being. And therewith we move from Schleiermacher's dogmatics to Hegel's philosophy of religion. Herder had already applied the thought of de- velopment to the world of nature, and in so far he had prepared it for historical consideration, in that he directed attention to the natural origin and growth of language, custom, art, and religion, and inasmuch as he had a fine understanding for the peculiarities of the separate peoples in history and in their age. Thereafter, Schelling first applied the thought of development to history and found it to be a continuous incarnation of God. But with Hegel the whole of his philosophy hinged upon this thought; it was the key to the knowledge of God and of the world. According to Hegel, God is not merely the resting being, wrapped up in Himself, beyond, He is not the substance in which all differ- ences vanish, but He is the infinite spirit whose 292 Historical Criticism nature is thinking; such thinking He is as differ- entiates Himself from Himself and from others, which difference then resolves into a unity with it- self. God dismisses nature out of Himself and makes it the means of reproducing Himself in an infinite number of images, finite spirits. " Out of the chalice of the whole realm of spirits infinity foams for Him." History is the process by which the development of the Infinite Spirit completes it- self in the consciousness of finite spirits. It is the progressive revelation of the divine spirit and a lift- ing of man by himself, plane by plane, to the con- sciousness of his own real nature and his freedom in God. Hence history is never God-forsaken. It is never merely a play of license and irrationality. Everywhere, even in its by-paths and its mazes, in its struggles and its sufferings, it is permeated and governed by the teleological reason of God. In the sentence that the reasonable is real, and the real is reasonable, he expressed so optimistic a faith in the divine government of the world as had no other philosopher since Leibniz. In this optimism of a thoroughly teleological consideration of history, a struggle-weary generation found the much-sought reconciliation of its high-strung but one-sided ideal- ism, which had broken with reality, and the real powers of history. They learned to look upon the existing order and arrangement of society with new eyes ; that which Enlightenment, because of its purely subjective reasonable criticism, had thrown 295 The Development of Christianity aside as folly, as superstition and irrationality, was now discovered to have an inner reasonableness, a purpose fulness, a striving toward ideals which in their time were fully justified, even though they were found to be wanting later and had to yield to higher ideals. This loving understanding of his- torical life and striving stood in good stead, par- ticularly for the history of religion. The latter is the process of development of divine revelation in the human race and the elevation of humanity from its original sensual slavery to spiritual free- dom, from nature-humanity to God-humanity. The single steps in this process are the positive religions ; they had never been arbitrarily made nor were they ever merely expressions of the emotions of single pious souls, but they were ever the natural prod- ucts of the common spirit dwelling in individual peoples; each positive religion was a product like law and custom, art and science, with which it stood in closest organic connection. However, in Christianity it is not only the spirit of a single people, but the spirit of humanity in general, which becomes conscious of its essential unity with God, of its God-humanity. Hence Christianity is " the absolute religion " or " the revealed religion," be- cause in it the truth, which dwelt more or less in all religions, achieved full conscious revelation in the knowledge and the life of men. It is not as though this truth had been clearly understood by all, but even in Christianity this truth clothed itself 294 Historical Criticism in the forms of notions which, under the cloak of symbols, hid the truth which the symbol both con- cealed and revealed. Such symbols of religious truth are the Church doginas and forms of worship and, although not one of them taken literally can stand the test of reason, still they must not be shoved aside in such fashion as the superficial En- lightenment had shoved them; they are always the earthly vessels containing the heavenly treasure, which the pious spirit worships darkly and emo- tionally, whereas the mature reason knows them through thought. Emotion belongs to religion, ac- cording to Hegel, as the immediate form in which the religious content is acquired, experienced, and lived. But this form of immediate feeling is neith- er the peculiar nature nor the special value of re- ligion, for we have other feelings than those of religion and their value is dependent upon it, re- gardless of their content wdiether it be true and good or foolish and bad. Intensity of religious emotion cannot alone be taken as a standard of measure for religion, else the religion of the savages, with its wild, orgiastic ravings, would be the best religion. The objective value of a religion rests upon its true content, which can be grasped by reason; but the liveliness of a religion in a single individual depends upon the man's acquisition of the truth in his emotion and volition : " Would you have Him as your possession, then feel the God whom you think!" 395 The Development of Christianity Psychologically it may be well understood that the contemporaries of Hegel understood his philos- ophy to be a support of the conservative tendency toward restoration and made use of it as such. Its valuation of the historical, its proof of the inner reasonableness of its content not only led to valua- ble study of history, but misled into the na'ive illu- sion which makes past notions and forms of life seem capable of repetition and establishes them as standard authorities for an entirely different pres- ent. Thus the politicians misused Hegel's phil- osophy, employing it for governmental reaction as the theologians did for a Church reaction. Because Hegel looked upon the God-humanity, — that is, man's consciousness of his spiritual union with and freedom in God — as the indwelling principle of development of all the history of religion and, there- fore, of all revealed truth of Christianity, therefore some theologians believed that they might under- stand that to mean that the Church dogma of the unique, mythical God-humanity of the one individ- ual, Jesus of Nazareth, had been philosophically proved. This was such a crass misunderstanding of Hegel's philosophy of religion that it is scarcely conceivable how it could have been possible. In fact, this error made by so many can be understood only as the after-effect of the Romantic mood of the times, for which thinking and imagining were so mingled together that the difference between ideal truth and a tangible reality might be entirely 296 Historical Criticism forgotten and overlooked. This Romantic confu- sion could be met effectively only by a thorough and sober criticism of the Biblical documents of Christianity. It is the permanent merit of the Tübingen critics, Strauss and Bauer, that they per- formed this criticism with scientific earnestness and swept away the fog of Romanticism. The weakness of rationalistic Enlightenment did not show its lack of spirit and taste at any point so clearly as in the treatment of Gospel stories. In them they explained away the miracles by arbitrary interpretation in order to leave the rest standing as a trivial story. In the baptism of Christ, for exam- ple, they struck out the coming of the Spirit while they had the dove fly. On the other hand, Roman- ticists like Herder had a sense of the ideal content of the miracle stories, but in their joy thereat they were willing to accept the literal reahty of the story. That was the state of affairs until 1835. Then came the young Suabian, David Friedrich Strauss, who had read Hegel's philosophy understandingly and therefore knew^ that the idea did not like to pour out its entire fulness in one individual, in other words that the real and the ideal are two different things. As the little shepherd boy, David, once slew the Philistine with his sling, so David Strauss laid the whole theological Philistine set of rationalists and supernaturalists low with the simple weapon of his concept, " myth." While they were quarreling endlessly as to whether the Biblical mir- 297 The Development of Christianity acles should be explained as natural or supernatural, Strauss came and ended the whole nonsensical quar- rel by showing that they were neither natural nor supernatural stories, in fact that they were no stories at all, but myths, that is to say poems, le- gends, which were not arbitrarily made up or thought out, but which grew up in the folk-con- sciousness by an unconscious movement of fancy making poetry. According to Strauss, the Chris- tian myths found their material motives mainly in the Old Testament. Strauss made no answer to the question as to what historical kernel remained after such critical dissection of the Gospel stories. As a substitute, in the closing treatise of his Life of Jesus, he showed that the key to the whole miraculous picture was this: that humanity itself was the God who had become man; that the God- man was the child of the visible mother, nature, and the invisible father, the spirit; further, he was the wonder-worker by reason of his growing ruler- ship over nature. He was the dying and resur- rected one in so far as the natural passing of each individual ever gave rise to the higher spiritual life of the victorious whole. This ideal truth was con- ceived by the Christian spirit under the image of the single person, Jesus. By his personal life and death, the Jesus of history gave the opportunity thereto. On this ground, the consciousness of his congregation and their pious belief created from it the ideal Christ-image of faith. These thoughts 29S Historical Criticism of Strauss which, with all their spirited grandeur, need ethical deepening, rose far above their day and could not attain overpowering importance so long as the historical value of the Gospel sources had not been thoroughly investigated. That work was first performed by Christian Ferdinand Baur, the teacher of Strauss. He was the first one who applied the idea of development to the history of Christianity. In his fashion, he applied it seriously and that is rare with other the- ologians, even to-day. By thorough and keen crit- icism of the Pauline letters and the Gospel of John he arrived at this result: that the origin of Chris- tianity is not to be conceived as the effect of the single person, Jesus, but that it is the product of a powerful, many-sided development of the ancient world, in which many factors combined their ac- tivity, the combination and inner harmonization of which was gradual in the midst of struggle. There- with the scientific key to the historical understand- ing of the origin and the nature of Christianity as the religion of God-humanity had been found; it was that religion which had inner struggles between the active factors of the Jewish religion of law and the heathen religion of nature, through which it had to struggle toward the freedom of the children of God, toward a Protestant, autonomous self-con- sciousness of the spirit of its own truth and free- dom in God. This genuinely Protestant self-con- sciousness, Baur represented in his own personal 299 The Development of Christianity character — in the combination of reverence with freedom, of unselfish modesty, with fearless courage of truth, which never lowered its weapons to any authority, but sought the truth for its own sake, and expressed his conviction uncloaked, careless of the disfavor of his time, which pronounced him heretic and cast him among the dead and con- quered. Then did his justified dignity cry in the words of the Apostle, '' We seem as the dead, and behold we live ! " 300 CHAPTER XVI REACTION AND NEW STRUGGLES In the year 1799, Schleiermacher had written his Speeches on Religion to the Cultured among Her Despisers. In 182 1, he wrote in the preface to the third edition as follows : " The times have changed so remarkably that one would find it rather neces- sary to write addresses to hypocrites and slaves of the letter, to the ignorant and unlovingly damning superstitious and super-faithful." This swing round had various causes. First of all, Romanti- cism, as we have seen, had broken the terrorism of the government by reason and had helped the feel- ing heart to recover its rights. Then, too, as we have also seen, philosophy had humiliated the self- glorifying reason of the enlightened individual and opened to view the reason of history, the true and the beautiful in the customs and beliefs of the Fathers, the characteristics of national life, and of the popular Church. Thereto was added the seri- ousness of the time, the misfortunes of the father- land under Napoleonic pressure, followed by the en- thusiasm of the popular uprising and the grateful joy over the successful release from foreign ruler- 301 The Development of Christianity ship, which the pious mind regarded as divine inter- vention. In wide circles a new religious life awoke, one which was dissatisfied by the thin and cool re- ligion of reason of Enlightenment and the ration- alism of Kant; one which first held to the emo- tional religion of popular Pietism and to its BibHcal manner of belief without laying any special weight on specific Church confessional dogmas. Matters could not remain thus. The newly awakened re- ligious emotion needed fixed forms in order to maintain itself; naturally, it found these only in the historically molded articles of faith of the separate confessional Churches. Thus the newly awakened religious life soon became a restoration bringing with it a new valuation of dogmatic belief and Church community. That is a process which re- peats itself so often in history that one can perceive in it a psychological law. This new ecclesiasticism might have developed along healthy lines if it had found a field of activity for its energies and for its moral powers in political life, in the building up of a popular civic and social life. This, however, was denied to it. For the beautiful patriotic hopes of the wars for liberty were condemned to be set aside under the despicable political restoration. Natural- ly enough, the religious vigor exhausted Itself In the propaganda for the Pletistic Church faith, In opposition to the rationalists who defended them- selves for their life; and thus the Church and polit- ical struggles for power, in the reaction, led to an 302 Reaction and New Struggles election in which the means for the supposedly sacred purposes were anything but scrupulous. The first half of the nineteenth century is filled with this reaction ever growing in power and force, which naturally led to an emphasis of the opposi- tion which, in part at least, almost led to a break with the State Church. Let us examine the de- tails. From the beginning of the rule of King Frederick William III, he cherished the idea of a union of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches. The Ref- ormation Jubilee of 1817 gave him the occasion for a proclamation recommending the practical union of these two confessions into an evangelical Church, without, however, seeking to force it. The idea was generally applauded and successfully brought about in Prussia and other Protestant countries, Baden and Pfalz. Soon thereafter, the King wished to crown his work of union by the introduc- tion of a Church agcnde composed by himself. Against this there was general opposition which, in the circles of newly awakened Lutheranism, grew into an opposition to the union altogether. With the awakening of the Lutheran dogma, there awoke also the rude, intolerant dogmatism of the Lutheran theologians. The most zealous of the clerics of this movement declared the union a work of the anti-Christian, leveling, revolutionary spirit. The congregations behind them w^ould not be robbed of their Luther. A royal Cabinet order of 1834 at- 303 The Development of Christianity tempted to mollify them by the declaration that the validity of the confessions on both sides would not be abrogated by the union. Its only success was that the half-measure caused confusion in the ranks of the friends of union and rather strengthened than weakened the opposition. The forcible meas- ures employed by the government against the op- posing ministers and their congregations naturally spurred them on and on, and finally drove them to a declaration of freedom from the unionist State Church and the formation of their own Old- Lutheran sect. During this confusion, King Fred- erick William III died. With the ascent of his son, Frederick William IV, a Romanticist came to the Hohenzollern throne. Therewith, that is from 1840, the orthodox Pietistic party which, under the crown prince had been leading an influential side- government, achieved unlimited rulership in Prus- sia. Their theological leader Avas Hengstenberg, a professor in Berlin who, in his capacity of editor of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung, exercised a cruel government of terror by his denunciation and condemnation of all non-orthodox theologians. He was supported by the Gerlach brothers, von Stahl, Eichhorn, Raumer, who by reason of their official position and high connections were able to place the temporal means of power in the service of the Church reaction. Time does not permit me to explain in detail the way in which it was carried out. I recommend for more detail concerning this most 304 Reaction and New Struggles joyless period of recent Church history, Hausrath's excellent biography of Richard Rothe, second vol- ume. The climax of these disorders was reached in the fifties when, after the failure of the uprising of 1848, the strong pressure of political reaction was added to the ecclesiastical. At that time it hap- pened that orthodox counselors of the King praised the breaking of his oath of a state constitution as a deed pleasing to God ; that official careers were made dependent not upon thoroughness but upon attitude toward the Church; that the demand for the turn- about of sciences for faith was ordered without further explanation at the universities; that the Protestant dissidents were watched by the police and persecuted as political conspirators. Bunsen, who, despite his Romantic favoritism, had remained a German Protestant Christian, characterized this period as follows in his important book. The Signs of the Times: '' Distrust has been born, anxiety fills loyal spirits, the authorities are divided and confused, the faculties are paralyzed, and the the- ological candidates sink ever to a lower grade of culture even when compared with the Catholic. The object of Stahl's program can no longer be doubted: slavery under the hypocritical semblance of freedom." Such is the characterization by Bun- sen, unfortunately only too true. Pressure always produces counter-pressure. As in the former administration the forced zeal with 305 The Development of Christianity which the matter of union had been pushed roused the opposition of the old Lutherans, so now there began against the reaction of orthodoxy the move- ment of the so-called '' Friends of Light." At their head were rationalist preachers like Uhlich and Wislizenus; from 1841 they popularized their views in public assemblies and understood how to make their affair a party agitation by popular or- atory. One of Wislizenus's published lectures Writ or Spirit f caused great excitement. In effect, he presented Lessing's ideas. Scripture was declared to be a glorious witness of the faith of early times, but was not recognized to be a binding law for the spiritual freedom of the children of God, upon which rests the evangelical Church. At bottom, you see, they are entirely harmless and unassailable thoughts. Hengstenberg's Church paper, however, condemned it as a denial of the Protestant scriptural principle and a breaking away from Christianity; in consequence, the Prussian and Saxon police for- bade further meetings of the Friends of Light. In public announcements for and against Wislizenus, the dispute continued for a long time, particularly in the larger cities of the eastern provinces. In Breslau, a protest was drawn up in favor of the freethinkers against Hengstenberg and the whole re- action and it was signed by thousands. Between these two parties, publishing pronouncements for and against Wislizenus, the disciples of Schleier- macher's tendency under the leadership of the Prot- 306 Reaction and New Struggles estant bishops, Draesecke and Eylert, placed them- selves. The latter sent forth a declaration signed by eighty-seven notables of various ranks, wherein they deplored the threatened split in the Church, threw the blame for it on Hengstenberg's party, and, as a solution of the difficulties, demanded a free Church constitution on the basis of Schleiermacher's congregational principle. This declaration gave Hengstenberg the opportunity to bring to trial, in a public heresy court, the Schleiermacher theology which he hated so cordially — a coun- terpart of that posthumous heresy court which the court theologians of Justinian sought to hold over Origen, in the sixth century. Mag- istrates of Berlin, Breslau, and Königsberg mixed in the dispute. They forwarded an address to King Frederick William IV, begging protection for Protestant freedom of doctrine. They were most ungraciously received by the Romantic King v^ho held the orthodox parties to be the true sup- ports of throne and altar. The expulsion from of- fice of the preacher, Rupp, in Königsberg about the same time, caused the formation of " free con- gregations " which differed from the Friends of Light by their more radical tendency. They broke with everything ecclesiastical and their Christianity was essentially a moral humanitarianism. Despite the freedom of faith expressly guaranteed by the constitution, these free congregations were sup- pressed by the police in the fifties. 307 The Development of Christianity Restoration and reaction was the character not only of the Protestant but also of the Catholic Church after the beginning of the nineteenth cen- tury. When, after the fall of the Napoleonic rule, Pius VII was made ruler of the Church State, his first official action was to restore the Jesuit Order, which Clement XIV had done away with ; and Pius VII gave the Jesuits their old constitution with their old privileges. In Spain, the inquisition which Napoleon had done away with was reinstated. In Catholic countries, the Bible Societies were forbid- den, on the ground that they were a plague, that they shook the bases of religion, being the inventors of godless innovations. Among the theologians of the Church awoke a new zeal for sole authority on the part of clerics and Pope. Protestantism was called atheism and the cause of all revolution; such accusations met with success among passionate populaces, such as those of South France, and the echo was so strong that bloody persecution of the Protestants actually followed. In Switzerland, the work of the Jesuits in Catholic Cantons led to the War of the Separate League in 1847, and ended in their defeat. In an Encyclical of 1832, Pope Gregory XVI declared Protestantism, science, and the freedom of the press, the causes of all the evils of governments, while at the same time his own government was plunging the Church State into direst disturbances, and making his State an example of everything that 308 Reaction and New Struggles it ought not to be. His successor in 1846 was Count Mastai Fereti, as Pius IX. His pleasant personality and reforms in the government of the Church State won him great popularity. He passed for a liberal Pope — a white raven ! — some even expected that he would restore the unity of Italy. When, however, the revolution of 1848 made Rome a republic and Church possessions were forfeit, when the Pope had to fly from Rome and could not return until 185 1 under the protection of French arms, then those former illusions of a liberal Papacy were completely destroyed and Pio Nono became the representative of the old papal sys- tem throughout the remainder of his long term. He gave a new halo to that old system by sanction- ing two dogmas that the Jesuits long had wished, — that of the immaculate conception of the Holy Virgin Mary, and the still more important one, of the infallibility of the Pope in all his official ac- tions. That was an exceedingly important step by which a crown was placed on the papal system. Thus the whole Church, including the priesthood, was rendered speechless as against the one authori- tative will of the Pope. In his Encyclical and the Syllabus of 1864, Pio Nono, with unheard of im- pudence, cast his glove into the arena against all modern culture, against the freedom of nations and of souls, in order to uphold energetically the old claim of the Popes to unlimited world-rulership. The destruction of the Church State in consequence 309 The Development of Christianity of the Franco-German War, in September, 1870, altered nothing in the matter. On the contrary, the spiritual power of the Pope was freed from an im- pediment and it became a greater menace than ever to the freedom and culture of the nations. The extent of the profound opposition of princi- ples between this unchangeable nature of Roman Catholicism and the nature of the modern civilized state, is most clearly shown by the continuous con- flicts between Rome and the German Protestant states, which have continued from the thirties of the last century to the present. The well known quar- rel about mixed marriages was the beginning: tht Archbishops of Cologne and Posen brought this about by forbidding their priests, contrary to cus- tom and the laws of the state, to perform mixed marriages in cases where the Catholic education of the children was not expressly promised before- hand. After much palaver between the civic au- thorities and the Church princes, the obstinate arch- bishops were accused of perjury and disobedience and condemned to imprisonment. Scarcely had Frederick William IV ascended the throne when he released those same archbishops with all honors, and in the marriage question the matter remained as Rome willed! The same King who made loyal Protestant rationalists feel his disfavor on every occasion, had most delicate consideration for Ro- man clerics who opposed tlie State ! The fruits of 310 Reaction and New Struggles this Romantic policy did not fail to appear, and to this day, in part, we still feel them. The theology of Hermes gave occasion for an- other case of governmental v^^eakness. Hermes, the Catholic dogmatist of Bonn, following well known Scholastic models, sought to base Catholic dogma, regardless of its supernatural authority, on the natural basis of reason; his teachings met with success among many of the Catholic theologians. After his death, the Roman Inquisition declared that to be a dangerous innovation and the Arch- bishop of Cologne forbade Catholic students to listen to lectures by Hermesian professors. When these professors would not recognize as justified the con- demnation of their teacher, they were removed from their academic offices. The government simply sacrificed governmental teachers to the arbitrariness of Rome! That this hierarchical overbearing procedure called forth decided opposition on the part of the CathoHc lay world, upon which the State if it had so desired might have fallen back for support, was shown by the anti-Church movement brought about by Bishop Arnoldi of Treves. In 1844, this Church prince found it to liis purpose to rekindle the Cath- olic zeal of the populace of the Rhineland by an exposition of the cloak of Christ which had been preserved in Treves as a relic of doubtful origin. Millions of pilgrims streamed in solemn procession 311 The Development of Christianity to the place of grace and, as is always the case, the miraculous cures of the sick did not fail. Criti- cism was not lacking, either, but its strongest voice was the letter by the Catholic priest Ronge, who called the drama of Treves a feast of idolatry and declared it the parallel of Tetzel's sale of indul- gences. Naturally, he was excommunicated but he found many supporters among the Catholics, who followed him out of the Church and formed the sect of " German Catholics," 1845. ^^ was soon evident that Ronge was no reformer and that the " German Catholics " would not satisfy the large hopes which were centred upon them. (Just as little as a generation later, in the like schism of the " Old Catholics.") Perhaps the State favor in the period of the Culture War, which so strongly moved Catholic consciousness, had injured these latter quite as much as the disfavor of the conservative govern- ments had injured the " German Catholics." Be- sides, both of these movements were bound to fail because they occupied a doubtful and impossible middle position between heteronomous Catholicism and autonomous Protestantism, between two oppos- ing principles. Where higher stages of development are present, new formations not so far advanced have no inner justification and therefore no his- torical ability to live. That will ever repeat itself, just as to-day with " Reform Catholicism." That the claims of the Roman hierarchy can be effectually met only by energetic emphasis of the modern idea 312 Reaction and New Struggles of the State and of Protestant freedom of con- science, both of individuals and of congregations, was shown in exemplary fashion in the fifties, dur- ing the Church conflict in Baden. The higher clerics understood how to use the movement of 1848 in their interests; when everyone was crying for freedom, they thought : well, we, too, want freedom but we want the freedom that we believe, namely the permission to exercise an unconditional, unlim- ited rulership over the entire Church, the lower clerics, and the laymen. In order to realize this, their " freedom," the bishops of southern and west- ern Germany, under the leadership of the valorous Ketteler of Mainz, came to an agreement. Egged on by Ketteler, the Archbishop of Freiburg re- fused further obedience to the laws of the State and declared that he no longer desired to follow the existing laws of the State concerning the educa- tion and appointment of priests and the disposition of Church moneys. State officials who did not fol- low his will in the fulfilment of their official duties were excommunicated ; congregations were actually commanded to oppose the regulations of their au- thorities when they were counter to the orders of the Archbishop; priests loyal to the State were punished by the Church. In short, an actual revolt of the Catholic Church of Baden against the State was set in motion by the Archbishop with the ap- proval of the Pope ! So far did the solidarity of all and every reactionary tendency extend, that not 3^3 The Development of Christianity only the Catholic powers such as Austria, in particu- lar, but also the ruling party and even the minister of culture of Protestant Prussia — all ranged them- selves on the side of the law-opposing, refractory Archbishop of Freiburg! The government of Baden first struggled against him with absolutely blunt weapons. How could one government make energetic opposition to Rome when that govern- ment was at the same time forcing back liberal Protestant citizens in the attempt to impose a re- actionary Church order upon them? Against this attempt the storm arose in Baden. But when, final- ly, the Catholicizing ministry sought to close a treaty with Rome, 1859, by which the independence of the State as well as the freedom of science at the universities was handed over to Rome, such a howl of protest swept the whole land that the treaty- making ministry had to retire. Then the govern- ment of the new era, i860, agreeing with the repre- sentatives, arranged the affairs of both Churches by laws worthy of the State and by meeting the needs of the people of both confessions. That was the outcome of the Church quarrel in Baden, a proof that a government can only stand victoriously against the claims of Rome when it depends entirely upon the will of the people and the civilization of its time. The opposite example is furnished by the Prussian Culture War two decades later, which had a less happy and less praiseworthy ending. Among the men who were successful in building 314 Reaction and New Struggles up the freethinking Church order of Baden on the basis of the congregational principle, Richard Rothe, one of the most important theologians of the nineteenth century, was the chief. He was decid- edly less keen in scientific thinking than Schleier- macher and Biedermann, the Swiss philosopher of rehgion who came from the Hegelian school, while for Bauer's historical criticism he lacked all sense. The miracle world of Romanticism had caught him in his youth, and, in order to bring that world into a certain harmony with the real world, he thought out a curious theosophy which, like the ancient Gnosis, was more poetry than science. Rothe, how- ever, was more than a scientific scholar; he was a clairvoyant prophet, a prophet who could interpret the signs of the times in the past and the present and who understood from them how to foresee the line of development. With the intuition of a gen- ius, he recognized that the object of the historical development of Christianity is the bursting of Church limitations and the r-ealization of the Chris- tian ideal in all moral and earthly society, in tho achievement of all human culture activity with the Christian spirit of truth and freedom and love. He called it, somewhat erroneously, the merging of the Church into the State. With this conviction, he worked for a Protestant Church constitution on the ground of the congregational principle, employing laymen in Church affairs, not only exterior but in- terior. In order to give this principle greater ex- 315 The Development of Christianity tent in the Protestant German world, Rothe and men who thought as he did, theologians and lay- men, founded the Protestant Union whose program he formulated in various articles and addresses somewhat as follows: Modern culture must be- come conscious of its Christian origin, must, there- fore, become consciously religious and Christian. The Church, on the other hand, must give up its isolation from the world, must acknowledge all modern efforts for culture to be activities of the Christian moral spirit and must honorably further them. That the success of this undertaking re- mained far behind Rothe's ideal, was partly the re- sult of unfavorable external circumstances, the cen- tering of attention on purely political questions of power in the decades following 1864, and partly the blame lay with the Protestant Union, forced back by the passionate attacks of orthodoxy to its own defense, and thus never rising above constant pro- test against the pressure of Church and dogma, making it scarcely possible to perform positively fruitful work on the social tasks of the age. Various societies have divided up this work of active Protestant Christianity. The struggle for the self-maintenance of Protestantism, against Ro- man incursion and lust for power, has been carried on by the Gustav Adolph Society and the Evangeli- cal Band, each employing different means but each with equal sacrifice and courage. The societies for 316 Reaction and New Struggles home and foreign missions have also developed great activity. Naturally the form of their activ- ity until now has been mainly attached to the Pietis- tic orthodox mode of behef v^hich they received at their inception from the renewal of Pietism, and which might have been helpful for their early ac- tivity but which, as time rolled on, made itself felt as a limitation. Hence even in these circles, now and again, there is an insight that they must jour- ney to the mountain top in order to serve the Chris- tian ideal in larger fashion, more boldly and more successfully. Men like Buss, the Swiss, and Warneck, the German, subjected the old methods of foreign mis- sion to a critical examination and made the reforms required by the times. The home mission, especial- ly, which had been founded amid the storms of 1848 by Wichern, has learned through the needs of the present age that its goal must be made high- er and that it must become a popular social and ethical factor. What the theologians of the middle of the nineteenth century in England, men like Robertson, Maurice, and Kingsley, had striven for in order to check and to purify the social movement of the time by the Christian spirit, has now been set in motion among us by the social activities of men like Bodelschwingh, Stoecker, and Naumann, and by the propositions of Sulze for social congrega- tional activity. That is undoubtedly the carrying 317 The Development of Christianity out of the great program of " practical Christian- ity " as it was set up in the well known proclama- tion of Emperor WiUiam I and in the corresponding laws enacted by Bismarck, for which it served as the guiding norm, even for the inner poHcy of our government. It may be said that it is a joy to see how this ideal of a large featured, Christian and social, communal activity has been enthusiastically taken up by the younger generation of theologians, and with what self-sacrificing zeal they are labor- ing at its realization! They are no longer satisfied with specifically Church activity; in societies of all kinds, they are untiringly employed in the culture and the education of the people, in the alleviation of social distresses, in the reconciliation and har- monization of social classes; in short, in the Chris- tianization of all national life and the temporaliza- tion of Christianity in the sense of Rothe. This same younger generation, which has so far widened its field of practical labor and which is so courage- ous in its work, has lately begun, in matters theoret- ical, to shake off the blinkers of the narrow dog- matism of their school theology and, with a wider range of vision, is looking about the broad realm of the science of universal comparative religion, a movement of incalculable import! I think, therefore, that we may look forward to the future trustfully and live in the hope that the Christianity of the twentieth century will move a good stretch closer to the object for which it has 318 Reaction and New Struggles striven throughout its history from the beginning: the realization of God-humanity, the permeation of all moral human living with the forces of the divine spirit of truth, of freedom, of love. 319 Princeton Theological Seminary Libraries 1 1012 01252 5350 Date Due &Sia.^JL^ ^' i 1 i f PRINTED IN U. S. A. ! mmim mumnmmi