Nineteenth-Century Religious Thought in the West

NINETEENTH CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN THE WEST

NINETEENTH CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN THE WEST

VOLUME I Editorial introduction I

IMMANUEL KANT

Emil L. Fackenheim, The University of Toronto 2

J. G. F1CHTE AND F. W. J. SCHELLING

J. Hey wood Thomas, The University of Nottingham 3

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

Peter C. Hodgson, Vanderbilt University 4

FRIEDRICH SCHLEIERMACHER

B. A. Gerrish, The University of Chicago 5

ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

Richard Taylor, The University of Rochester 6

S0REN KIERKEGAARD

Alastair McKinnon, McGill University 7

DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS

Hans Frei, Yale University 8

FERDINAND CHRISTIAN BAUR

Robert Morgan, Linacre College, Oxford 9

LUDWIG FEUERBACH AND KARL MARX

Van A. Harvey, Stanford University VOLUME II I

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Claude Welch, The Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley RALPH WALDO EMERSON AND THE AMERICAN TRANSCENDENTALISTS

Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Yale University 3

JOHN HENRY NEWMAN AND THE TRACTARIAN MOVEMENT

4

DREY, MOHLER AND THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL OF TUBINGEN

J. M. Cameron, The University of Toronto James Tunstead Burtchaell, C.S.C., The University of Notre Dame 5

ROMAN CATHOLIC MODERNISM

Bernard M. G. Reardon, The University of Newcastle 6

RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

George L. Kline, Bryn Mawr College 7

BRITISH AGNOSTICISM

James C. Livingston, The College of William and Mary

8

THE BRITISH IDEALISTS

H. D. Lewis, Kings College, University of London 9

WILLIAM JAMES AND JOSIAH ROYCE

John E. Smith, Yale University VOLUME III I

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

John Kent, The University of Bristol 2

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Carl Heinz Ratschow, The University of Marburg 3

JEWISH THOUGHT

Nathan Rotenstreich, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 4

THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

R. E. Clements, King's College, University of London 5

THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

J. C. O'Neill, Westminster College, Cambridge FRIEDRICH MAX MULLER AND THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGION

Joseph M. Kitagawa and John S. Strong, The University of Chicago THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION: BRITISH AND FRENCH SCHOOLS

Sir Edmund Leach, F.B.A., Kings College, Cambridge 8

MAX WEBER AND GERMAN SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh 9

ERNST TROELTSCH

Trutz Rendtorff and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, The University of Munich

NINETEENTH CENTURY RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN THE

WEST VOLUME I I I Edited by

NINIAN SMART, JOHN CLAYTON STEVEN KATZ and PATRICK SHERRY

The right of the University of Cambridge to print and sell all manner of books was granted by Henry VIII in 1534. The University has printed and published continuously since 1584.

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge New York New Rochelle Melbourne Sydney

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521301145 © Cambridge University Press 1985 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1985 First paperback edition 1988 Re-issued in this digitally printed version 2008 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number: 84-14207 ISBN 978-0-521-22831-2 hardback (Volume I) ISBN 978-0-521-35964-1 paperback (Volume I) ISBN 978-0-521-22832-9 hardback (Volume II) ISBN 978-0-521-35965-8 paperback (Volume II) ISBN 978-0-521-30114-5 hardback (Volume III) ISBN 978-0-521-35966-5 paperback (Volume III) ISBN 978-0-521-32764-0 hardback (Set) ISBN 978-0-521-35967-2 paperback (Set)

CONTENTS

Preface 1

page ix

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

I

John Kent, The University of Bristol 2

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

37

Carl Heinz Ratschow, The University of Marburg 3

JEWISH THOUGHT

71

Nathan Rotenstreich, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem 4

THE STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT

IO9

R. E. Clements, Kings College, University of London 5

THE STUDY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

143

J. C. O'Neill, Westminster College, Cambridge 6

FRIEDRICH MAX MULLER AND THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGION

179

Joseph M. Kitagawa and John S. Strong, The University of Chicago 7

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION: BRITISH AND FRENCH SCHOOLS

215

Sir Edmund Leach, F.B.A., Kings College, Cambridge 8

MAX WEBER AND GERMAN SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

263

Roland Robertson, University of Pittsburgh 9

ERNST TROELTSCH

305

Trutz RendtorfF and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, The University of Munich INDEX

333

Vll

PREFACE

With the appearance of this volume, our survey of western religious thought in the nineteenth century is concluded. We take this opportunity to thank all who contributed to its successful completion. We thank especially the authors of individual articles for their co-operation, patience and support at every stage of production. We are grateful to colleagues at Lancaster and to former colleagues at Dartmouth in particular for helping to read and evaluate some manuscripts; for their assistance with matters bibliographical, we thank Paul Morris of the department of religious studies and R. M. Bliss of the department of history at the University of Lancaster. We also wish publicly to acknowledge our indebtedness to the more than sixty scholars from around the world who encouraged and advised us especially in the early stages of the project. We cannot list them all by name here, but we can record that their expert judgment proved invaluable in planning the shape and scope of the three volumes now published. Our delight in seeing the final volume appear is necessarily tempered by our deep sorrow that the distinguished American historian Sydney Ahlstrom did not live to see the publication of his last article in the field to which he contributed so much. His early enthusiasm for this project was much appreciated by the editors. By being able to include his essay on Emerson and the Transcendentalists in volume two of Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, we pay tribute to his memory as a respected scholar and as an influential teacher. Ninian Smart John Clayton Steven Katz Patrick Sherry

IX

I

Religion and Science

JOHN KENT

Introduction The relationship between religious thought and science changed steadily in the second half of the nineteenth century. By about i860 the accumulation of fresh information in such fields as archaeology, geology and biology was breaking down the widespread earlier nineteenth-century assumption that science and Christian orthodoxy confirmed one another on such matters as the age of the earth, thefixityof species and the special creation of man. The publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) crystallised this situation, but perhaps his later book, The Descent ofMan (1871), mattered as much, because there Darwin showed in his usual impressive detail that one could give at least a plausible biological, strictly non-supernaturalistic account of man's moral as well as physical development. As time went on, theologians grappled with these problems, and writers as distant from one another as the American Presbyterian, Charles Hodge of Princeton (17971878), the Anglican bishop, Frederick Temple (1821-1902), and the Roman Catholic lay scientist, St George Mivart (1827-1900), all maintained that the historical growth of man as rational, moral and religious required supernatural intervention, however natural might have been the formation of his body. This was perhaps the last stand of one kind of orthodoxy, for at this stage the argument for special creation still depended on the acceptance of the Christian claim to the possession of a unique, final, divine self-revelation in the Bible. There was no simple pattern in what followed, but many scientists, philosophers of religion and theologians moved towards less absolute positions, and might have agreed with Harold Hoffding, for example, when he wrote in 1914: 'there always remains the possibility that the great rational and causal web of interrelations which science is gradually exposing to view may be the framework or the foundation for the unfolding,

JOHN KENT

in accordance with the very laws and forms discovered by scientific inquiry, of a content of Value. The axiom of the conservation of Value need assert nothing more and nothing other than this.'1 Ideas of development It is sometimes said that the view that evolution and Christian doctrine were compatible had been generally accepted in British Protestantism by the mid1880s.2 The accuracy of the suggestion depends on definition. It remains doubtful, indeed, how far many Christian theologians have ever come to terms with Darwinism proper, a theory of biological evolution by means of natural selection, which accounted for local changes in organic populations by relating them to their adaptive advantages, and implied that history was neither uni-directional nor providentially directed.3 Vaguer, progressivist ideas of development, which could be traced back to Lamarck (1744-1829),4 and which were popularised in the United States and Britain by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903),5 proved more attractive to many religious writers, because they could more easily give this version of development a theistic interpretation. The concept of 'advance' from the simple to the more complex, which was central to Spencer's essay on 'Progress' which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1857, came from Lamarck.6 This underlying confidence in the future, shown by both Lamarck and Spencer, did not conflict as much as might have been expected with the western religious tradition. This was partly because both men assumed that the final perfection of nature and society which they saw as the goal of biological and social development lay far in the future, and this was in line with the gradualism of the dominant western post-millennialism, which envisaged a steady improvement of human life without dramatic supernatural interventions until Christian history culminated in a literal millennium.7 On the whole, what was being accepted as 'evolution' in Britain in the 1880s was the combination of an optimistic, speculative interpretation of the role of the human race in history with the admission, inevitable given the steady accumulation of evidence of various kinds, that physiologically man belonged to the natural order. Even in the 1880s, however, such acceptance might be qualified. Some theologians, for example, were not so much accepting evolution as evading the full consequences of such an acceptance. In 1885, for example, W. E. Gladstone criticised the French Liberal Protestant writer, Albert Reville (1826-1906), whose Prolegomenes de YHistoire des Religions (1881) had

recently been translated into English under the auspices of Max Miiller, for

Religion and Science

treating the creation narratives in Genesis as myth.8 Gladstone insisted on their essential veracity and claimed that natural science, by which he seemed to mean the work of Cuvier, who had died in 1832, had shown that fact 'supported what we have fondly believed to be His word'; 'evolution', he said, was an idea which had long been familiar to history, philosophy and theology, and had even been present to the mind of Paul: there was no conflict between Scripture and evolution. More professional theologians than Gladstone could be quite as unyielding. The publication of Lux Mundi, for example, in 1889, distressed Canon Liddon of St Paul's, because the young Anglo-Catholic writer, Charles Gore, seemed to him to have abandoned the absolute belief in the divine inspiration of the Bible which Liddon thought was essential to AngloCatholicism in the tradition of John Keble.9 Gore had actually argued that only the biblical record from Abraham onward was substantially historical in the strict sense, a view which relegated a story like that of the Flood to the level of myth. The watchful Darwinian, Thomas Huxley, commented that if the Noachian Flood did not happen much as it was described, it should not be used to illustrate God's way of dealing with sin. He continued: Our age is a day of compromise. The present and the near future seem given to those happily, if curiously, constituted people, who see as little difficulty in throwing aside any amount of /wtf-Abrahamic narrative, as the authors of Lux Mundi see in sacrificing the />r£-Abrahamic stories; and having distilled away every inconvenient matter of fact in Christian history, continue to pay divine honours to the residue.10

Huxley meant that there might in practice be no point at which the apparent acceptance of evolution entailed any serious theological revision at all, because what was being accepted as the scientific account of the creation of man was not interpreted as providing a new, and possibly destructive, context for the biblical material; even Darwinism, supposing that to be the form of evolution which was involved, was not to be understood as affecting the religious status of any part of the Bible. Writers like Charles Gore were not primarily concerned about accepting evolution; they did not intend to be trapped in a position of simple opposition to natural science as such. What they were defending was a concept of revelation, whether or not they attached the idea specifically to Genesis as an account of the origins of the human race. Christianity required some theory of revelation if its characteristic tenets - divine creation; fall of man; the birth, death, resurrection and ascension of the God-Man; and the supernatural essence of the ecclesia were to be preserved as knowledge. 'Religion' might make do with reasonable hypotheses; nineteenth-century orthodox Christianity, however, had to defend its claim to possession of revealed truth.

JOHN KENT

This explains why Liddon in 1889 was still defending the view that the Old Testament had to be treated as a 'Christian' document which had the status of divine revelation in all its parts because Christ had given it his personal, divine authority. As Thomas Huxley foresaw, even if Liddon's theological successors became moreflexible,this meant only that they would concede that the Genesis narratives did not give a 'scientific' description of the creation; they would continue to treat them as a divinely warranted description of the state of human psychology. On the whole, scientific inquiry and Christianity's traditional claim to the possession of the unique self-revelation of the divine simply parted company; it is significant that when a Catholic theologian like J. H. Newman (1801-90) used the idea of 'development', he was thinking of 'development' in the understanding of revelation.11 Of course, the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859 was not the beginning of a conflict between nineteenth-century science and Christian theology. In the twenty years before this, attacks in the name of science on Christianity and on religion in general had increased steadily in Europe. Ludwig Biichner's Kraft und Stoff {Force and Matter, English translation 1864) had appeared in 1855; Jakob Moleschott's Die Lehre der Nahrungsmittel (The Chemistry of Food and Diet, English translation 1855) was published in 1850, and contained the famous phrase, 'no thought without phosphorus'; Karl Vogt's Physiologische Briefe were written between 1845 and 1847, and established his reputation as a polemical materialist; and Feuerbach, whose review of Moleschott's book had contained another famous materialist epigram, 'man is what he eats', published The Essence of Christianity in 1841. Comte's Catechism of Popular Religion, which was translated into English by his disciple, Richard Congreve, in 1858, straddled the two positions uneasily, because Comte wanted to derive a social religion from his 'social physics'. The advent of Darwinism, therefore, reinforced the confidence of those for whom science was a liberating source of hope in the future of the human race and the future triumphs of the human reason. Biichner, Moleschott and Vogt all believed (like Herbert Spencer) that evolution must in the long run mean progressive improvement. Biichner, for example, wrote in his old age that if, as was demonstrated, the essential task of humanism, or of the future development of humanity in opposition to the brutal state of nature, rests in the war against the cruel struggle for existence, or in the replacement of the power of nature by the power of reason, then it is clear that this goal must be attained above all through our seeking to bring about the greatest possible equalisation of the means and conditions under which and with which every individual has to fight in his struggle for existence or in his competition for his standard of living.12

Religion and Science

And as late as 1913 Leonard Hobhouse, first professor of sociology at the London School of Economics, said that the aim of comparative sociology was to measure the actual achievement of social progress. He concluded that (a) social development was steadily becoming less a matter of mechanical necessity and more a matter of control by purposive intelligence; (b) that the development of what he called a social mind was the condition of increasing social harmony; and (c) that control of this social mind had gone far enough to show that the possibility of a harmonious development of human life was not a dream to be dissolved by the cold touch of physical science, but a reality to which the entire story of evolution, physical, biological, mental and social led up. Religion might exist in Hobhouse's ideal community, but only as a self-consciously binding element which would serve the development of humanity.13 These examples from Biichner and Hobhouse illustrate the kind of liberal/socialist use of a concept of evolution to reduce theology to a minor contributory factor in human growth and progress. Religion might either wither away, or become a technique, conscious and not inevitably supernaturalist, by which masses of men, knowing that they had only this life to live, nerved themselves for advance as well as survival. Here the war between science and religion14 had petered out because religion, understood as a sociological phenomenon, that is, as a method by which the community affirmed and perhaps attained socially desirable, secular but allegedly moral ends, was being firmly subordinated to human purposes, and subjected to new varieties of reductionist explanation. Not all scientific writers in the period went so far. Thomas Huxley, for example, certainly thought that nineteenth-century scientific advances had shown that the claims of traditional Christianity were false, but he equally came to reject the view that a properly scientific description of evolution could be made the basis of either an ethical or a religious system. By the 1890s, for instance, he was criticising the way in which Herbert Spencer himself used the concept of evolution to suggest a single, unitary system whose direction was built in, first, through a struggle for survival which Spencer thought of as sorting out and refining the primary material at the human level; and second, through a shift to a more cooperative, adaptatory process from which civilisation had gradually emerged. Huxley, on the other hand, considered that there was a break between a cosmic process which had produced man, and a social process which, although not altogether freed from its biological environment, depended for further advance on a positive human rejection of the kind of behaviour popularly associated with 'natural selection'. Huxley wanted to replace

JOHN KENT

Spencer's phrase, 'the survival of the fittest', with 'the fitting of as many as possible to survive'.15 At the social level, of course, Huxley did not differ as much from Spencer as this might seem to imply; he was no collectivism as the word was then used, and was capable of alarming himself with visions of William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, as a demagogic British dictator. Nevertheless, he believed that further development in civilisation depended on a moralised human will, not on a passive acceptance of a cosmic process. Spencer, however, rejected the idea that men had now to struggle against or to correct the process which had evolved them. This, he said, was to assume 'that there is something in us which is not a product of the cosmic process, and is practically a going back to the old theological notions, which put Man and Nature in antithesis'.16 He took evolution as a sociological premise, and then argued that the cosmic process itself would somehow discipline the human mind and check the unqualified struggle for existence; his own debt, not only to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment but also to the theological past came out in this clinging to the belief that the cosmic process must, as a completed whole, turn out to have been benevolent. Darwin and The Descent of Man Darwin's mature views on the place of man in history, as he set them out in The Descent of Man (1871), rejected traditional theological positions more ruthlessly than this, and much more ruthlessly than might be supposed from the number of religious writers who claimed to have accepted evolution. He subscribed to the common nineteenth-century opinion that the moral sense or conscience was the most important difference between man and the lower animals, but he advanced the proposition that 'any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man'.17 In other words, he tried to work out an empirical natural history of ethics, in which the most important creative elements were social feelings, which he regarded as instinctive or innate in the lower animals; mental growth, because this finally involved the individual's ability to compare past and future actions; habit, because this strengthened social feelings in the individual; and the formation of language, because this made possible common opinions about behaviour. He suggested the further hypothesis that 'moral views' had actually developed in terms of a 'general good' of the community, and he defined this as 'the means by which the greatest possible number of individuals can be reared in full vigour and health, with all their faculties perfect, under the 6

Religion and Science

conditions to which they are exposed'.18 Nevertheless, this natural discovery of'good' had its limits. Darwin emphasised that 'conscience' related to the tribe, and that murder, robbery, treachery and so forth were not regarded as crimes if committed against members of other tribes. Going further, he said: How so many absurd rules of conduct, as well as so many absurd religious beliefs, have originated we do not know, nor how it is that they have become, in all quarters of the world, so deeply impressed on the minds of men; but it is worthy of remark that a belief constantly inculcated in the early years of life, while the brain is impressible, appears to acquire almost the nature of an instinct.19

Darwin could see no evidence that man had been aboriginally endowed with belief in an omnipotent god. In any case, 'the difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind';20 and 'a difference in degree, however great, does not justify us in placing man in a distinct kingdom'.21 Above all, he tried at great length to show that intelligence, speech and a sense of beauty were present in animals. 'If man had not been his own classifier, he would never have thought of founding a separate order for his own reception.'22 When the Roman Catholic lay theologian, anatomist and zoologist, St George Mivart reviewed The Descent ofMan in the Westminster Review,2* he fiercely reasserted the orthodox position that man was separately created by God at least as far as his soul went, and said that the gulf between man and animals was no matter of degree but an abyss in kind. He argued, however, as though Darwin had supported his own thesis by saying that animals showed clear examples of rational behaviour and a moral sense which were comparable with human rationality and moral judgment, whereas Darwin only claimed that the social behaviour and inter-personal sympathy which seemed to occur among animals might be interpreted as an earlier stage of the social and moral capabilities of man. If what the animal kingdom lacked in general was intellectual development, by which Darwin meant above all the powers of reflection and speech, this did not mean that there were no traces of speech or reflection in the lower animals, and therefore (he said) one could not offer a decisive ground for making man into a separate order. Mivart replied that Darwin 'had set at nought the first principles of both philosophy and religion'. In fact, Darwin did not at all commit himself to atheism, but he did dismiss - by offering an alternative, more empirical account - the claim that man, thought of in terms of everything that was implied by 'conscience', was a special case in nature which required divine intervention. Neither logically nor emotionally was he persuaded by Mivart's statement that man differed far more from an elephant or a gorilla than these did from the dust of the earth on which they trod.

JOHN KENT

Critics of religious orthodoxy: Renan, Mill, Seeley, Arnold, Wallace, Haeckel A similar basic attitude to Darwin's to the relation of religion and science could be found in the work of such writers as Ernest Renan, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill and John Seeley. For all of them science meant rational, free inquiry without recourse to the concept of the supernatural. They did not despise the imagination, but they feared a tendency in the aesthetic as well as the religious temperament to evade rational challenge, to avoid self-examination, and to appeal to the past as in itself a sufficient ground for what seemed otherwise unsupported assertions. These critics often attacked the concept of miracle. Renan and Mill were both well aware of the importance which the Roman Catholic Church attached to contemporary claims for the miraculous, such as the alleged appearances of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes in 1858; such claims mattered, because they could be substantiated, they offered evidence of supernatural intervention in historical time and space. They were also well aware that the cultural situation of Christianity had changed, that, as Renan said, 'the miracles and messianic prophecies which were formerly the basis of Christian apologetic, have become an embarrassment to it; people seek to discard them'.24 Matthew Arnold echoed him: 'It is what we call the Time-Spirit which is sapping the proof from miracles - it is the Zeitgeist itself. Whether we attack them or whether we defend them does not much matter. The human mind, as its experience widens, is turning away from them.'25 Renan's use of the word 'science' always presupposed the existence of an wwscientific ecclesiastical historian whose fundamental concern was bound to be with propaganda: 'science alone is pure . . . propaganda takes no notice of it'.26 One rejected the concept of supernatural events, Renan wrote, for the same reason that one denied the existence of centaurs and unicorns: they had never been seen. Whereas the unscientific church historian accepted the idea of the supernatural as involved in the causation of historical events, for Renan it was axiomatic that 'one has only to admit the supernatural to have left science behind'.27 (Similarly, J. R. Seeley, himself a historian, dismissed the historical writing of his day - c. 1880 - as a medley of facts, unclassified and unverified, such as excited the ridicule of the man of science.)28 There was no question of an unexamined presupposition in Renan's mind; he considered that the historical evidence was not adequate to justify belief in supernatural intervention in any specific instance, such as the story of the resurrection of Jesus - 'for the historian the life of Jesus ends with his last breath'.29 One finds John Stuart Mill taking the same view, even in the

Religion and Science

sympathetic Three Essays on Religion of 1874: 'the supernatural character of the fact is always . . . matter of inference and speculation, and the mystery always admits the possibility of a solution not supernatural'.30 Indeed, it was crucial to Renan's position in La Vie de Jesus (1864) that a man as intelligent and spiritual as Jesus could not have believed that he had restored Lazarus to life. Renan regarded the wwscientific church historian as incompetent in his assessment of evidence, as well as over-committed to the support of Christian conclusions. Renan's approach led naturally from 'church history' to 'the history of religion'; in his life of Jesus he pressed the view, which was analogous to Darwin's, that human history must be regarded as a secular whole; the history of religion ought not to be divided into Christian history, which had its own, unique supernatural truth, and the history of the non-Christian religions, which were to be thought of as having no supernatural content or authority. 'The miracles of Mahomet have been written down as well as the miracles of Jesus ... Do we therefore accept Mahomet's miracles?'31 In fact, he said, the distinction between the two was arbitrary; and J. S. Mill agreed, instancing the way in which Protestants, who claimed that they believed in the miracles of the New Testament, refused to accept the accounts of nineteenth-century Roman Catholic miracles although (Mill said) the evidence for the truth of the nineteenth-century stories was better than that given in the New Testament.32 Mill added that scientific investigation had made it clear that if God existed he ruled the universe through secondary causes; a man who inquired into an event asked simply what was its cause, not, whether it had a natural cause. Science had left no general case for miracles, so that one had to fall back on the evidence available for any specific story. Mill dismissed the primitive Christian evidence for the biblical miracle stories as the uncross-examined evidence of extremely ignorant people, honourably credulous, but unaccustomed to draw the line between sense-perception and the imagination, and living in an age when it was commonly believed that miraculous events could be produced by both good and evil spirits. The New Testament stories, he concluded, had no standing as historical fact and were invalid as evidence for revelation.33 It should be remembered, of course, that Mill was drawing a distinction between Christianity and religion. In the Three Essays he left himself the option that the evidence might fit the hypothesis that the universe was the product of a less than omnipotent creator; he also idealised the human Jesus in a fashion strange to Renan, whose portrait of Jesus was more subtle, but less noble. One cause of the impact of science on the Victorian public as well as on the theological mind, was the constant discovery of fresh information about the

JOHN KENT

human past, and not the least influential aspect of Darwin's writing and his ability to handle a mass of observations. Educated people, Arnold wrote, no longer took the Bible on trust, but wanted verification, 'and certainly the fairy-tale of the three supernatural persons no man can verify'.34 Equally, of course, no verification could be offered, in Arnold's view, for the Christian attribution of personality to God; he poked fun at theologians who took for granted the existence of what he called the 'Great Personal First Cause', and who assumed that one could go straight on to discuss what such a being thought about church vestments or the use of the Athanasian Creed, both of them subjects of ecclesiastical controversy in the England of the 1870s. Nevertheless, it was Arnold who made a positive attempt to reconcile Christianity with scientific criticism. Neither Renan nor Mill thought that anything further could be done with the Christian theological tradition, as distinct from the personality of Jesus. As for Seeley, he tried to redefine Christianity in non-supernaturalistic terms, but was baffled by the centrality traditionally given to the resurrection of Jesus, an event which he thought that those most penetrated by the modern (scientific) spirit must reject. Yet a scientific outlook as he understood it did not offer immortality, and Seeley commented sadly: 'Life becomes more intolerable the more we know and discover, so long as everything widens and deepens except our duration, and that remains as pitiful as ever.'35 Arnold, however, claimed that he was giving 'a scientific account of God'.36 He substituted for the concept of the Great Personal First Cause the proposition that the universe was subject to an enduring power, not ourselves, which made for righteousness. This statement could be verified (he thought) in personal and historical experience. At no point in Arnold's writings, however, did it become entirely clear why talk about 'an enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness', should be more verifiable, and therefore more scientific (Arnold's own word) than talk about 'a magnified and non-natural man', another of Arnold's summary descriptions of the Christian doctrine of a personal God.37 The assertion that one's own personal moral history and that of the human race showed that the universe was on the side of righteousness was obviously more plausible to a nineteenth-century than to a twentieth-century European, but here Arnold was really exposing his own cautious version of the sense of a purposive creation which haunted so many of his contemporaries, whether they were theists or not. There were exceptions - Nietzsche, for example, who dismissed the idea of 'creation' as a survival from the ages of superstition: 'one can explain nothing with a mere word'.38 Arnold thought that his own position was 'scientific' because he based his argument for religious truth on 10

Religion and Science

what he took to be identifiable, analysable moral experience, whereas Christian theologians, he felt, began by assuming the existence of a personal, loving God, expounded this on trinitarian lines as a number of revealed, uncontestable, if mysterious dogmas, and finally expected virtue to flow from these not very promising premises. Arnold wanted to satisfy lay opinion for which science meant, among other things, the testing of hypotheses; he described systematic theology in the traditional Christian sense as the 'pseudo-science of Church dogma'.39 When, at the beginning of Literature and Dogma he said that the first step towards a right understanding of the Bible was to realise that its language wasflexibleand literary, not rigid,fixedand scientific^ he did not intend to elevate the literary above the scientific. He meant that the reader must use a sensitive understanding of the nature of the language to arrive at religious and biblical hypotheses which could be seriously tested in one's own human experience. He was not appealing to the literary (in a way to become familiar in the twentieth century) in order to reinstate the miraculous; belief in the miraculous was doomed, and the immediate danger was that it would take all versions of the supernatural with it. As for the surviving element in Arnold's argument, the enduring power which made for righteousness was not one which men could identify as personal, but it could be served personally, especially by following the indications left by Jesus, himself far from impersonal in Arnold's version, but portrayed as an attractive embodiment of morality touched with emotion. Once again, hesitation about the supernatural assertions of Christianity was partly solved by redrawing the character of Jesus. There was no inevitable conflict, therefore, between religion and science according to Arnold. Conflict began when Christian theologians retfed on authority - the Bible and Tradition - for the truth of the statements which they made, rather than on verifiability. They could not, in Arnold's opinion, offer any substantial grounds for belief in events like the Jewish crossing of the Red Sea or the resurrection of Jesus, or in doctrines like that of the Trinity. In fact, in Arnold's mature work the Judaeo-Christian tradition was virtually reduced to the assertion that Judaism founded religion on moral experience, not on metaphysics, and that Jesus taught men how to achieve a proper relationship with the eternal, objective power which guaranteed righteousness. Arnold's account of Judaism was not hostile; indeed, a more strictly 'scientific' attitude could produce a more hostile approach. From the 1840s the new European race of sociologists, Feuerbach, Marx, Sombart and Weber, all interpreted 'Judaism' as primarily an economic principle; symbolically, they destroyed it as a religious system.41 Moreover, in the 11

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second half of the nineteenth century Christian scholars began to interpret the Old Testament in terms of a vague (Spencerian) concept of progress (development), and the history of religion was identified with the evolution of religion. In this way, 'scientific' status was given to the 'preparatory' role of Judaism, as seen from the Christian world-historical perspective. 'For what is progressive is necessarily imperfect in its earlier stages', Jowett wrote of the inspiration of Scripture in Essays and Reviews in i860, 'and even erring to those who come after, whether it be the maxims of a half-civilized world which are compared with those .of a civilized one, or the Law with the Gospel. Scripture itself points the way to answer the moral objections to Scripture .'42 In the meantime, however, the changed civil status of the Jews in France (from the Revolution of 1789), England (from 1858), and in the United States, together with the continued oppression ofJews in the Russian Empire, transformed 'the Jewish question' and produced Zionism as a new religio-political solution. When Jowett applied the idea of 'progressive development' to the Old Testament, one can be sure that he did not have nineteenth-century Jews in mind. Indeed, the only important attempt to understand nineteenth-century Jewishness and the tensions at work within it in Europe came from no theologian, but from the humanist, George Eliot.43 Renan, Seeley and Arnold all became melancholy when they considered the future effect on religion of the fact that religious writers would increasingly have to dispense with appeals to authority (revelation), and work within the same rules of logic and evidence which applied to the work of scientists.44 The changing scientific picture did not always have such a depressing impact. Science had an exhilarating religious effect on some people, for example, on that remarkable scientist, Alfred Russell Wallace, and on the equally well-known German scientific writer, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), author of The Natural History of Creation (English translation 1868) and The Riddle of the Universe (English translation 1900).45 Scientific opinion, of course, had not been unanimous in its reception of The Origin of Species. On 21 April 1864, for example, Canon Christopher Wordsworth presented to the Anglican Convocation a Declaration of Students of the Natural and Physical Sciences which strongly asserted that it was impossible for the Word of God, as written in the Book of Nature, and God's Word, written in Holy Scripture, to contradict one another. The Declaration, published in 1865, attracted 717 signatures out of a scientific community which has been estimated at about 5,ooo.46 The elderly Reverend Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873) was the only well-known geologist to sign, and the failure to produce a more impressive list was widely 12

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interpreted as meaning that the majority of scientists thought that it was wrong that science should be fettered by religious dogma. This did not mean that those scientists who did not sign the Declaration were necessarily nonreligious, and Wallace, whose role in the history of biology was almost as remarkable as Darwin's, was an early explorer of the metaphysical consequences of natural selection. Wallace's ideas can be found in two essays, 'The Development of the Human Race under the Law of Natural Selection' (1864), and 'The Limits of Natural Selection as applied to Man' (1869).47 In the earlier essay Wallace argued that in the case of man 'there came into existence a being in whom that subtle force we term mind became of greater importance than his mere bodily structure'.48 The use of mind, and the power of men to act in concert, took them out of the simple category of natural selection, so that the human body no longer changed very much. Wallace, indeed, thought that in the later nineteenth century man's further mental development stood in danger, because the results of science had become available to societies intellectually and morally ill-equipped to use them. (One is reminded of Seeley's complaint, that 'supernatural religion, all must feel, has not done so much, has not reformed the world so much, as might have been expected'.)49 Among the civilised nations, natural selection was not (Wallace said) securing the permanent advance of morality and intelligence, because the mediocre in morality and intelligence succeeded best and multiplied fastest. Yet advance, he thought, was still taking place, in the influence of morality on public opinion and in the appetite for education. Since Wallace was unable to attribute this advance to 'the survival of the fittest', he argued that it must be due to the inherent progressive power of the qualities which raised men far above their fellow animals, 'and at the same time afford us the surest proof that there are other and higher existences than ourselves, from whom these qualities may have derived, and towards whom we may be ever tending'.50 This conclusion was heady, not very 'scientific', stuff, but the second essay, 'The Limits of Natural Selection as applied to Man', again attempted to move from natural selection, which Wallace never abandoned at the biological level, to God. He argued that natural selection could not account for all human characteristics, such, for example, as the moral sense; no doubt this could be explained as being useful for survival to a group, but such an idea did not explain the sanctity (Wallace's word) which often attached to moral, but not necessarily personally advantageous, behaviour. Wallace took the intuitional view that the capacity for moral feeling was in man from the start, though sometimes expressing itself through inappropriate actions;51 he 13

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regarded man's moral and aesthetic capacities as essential to his perfect spiritual development.52 Wallace concluded that a superior intelligence had guided the development of man in a definite direction.53 Then he attacked the problem of the origin of consciousness. He dismissed Thomas Huxley's suggestion that thought was the expression of molecular changes, saying that 'either all matter is conscious, or consciousness is something distinct from matter'.54 Once again, his own solution to the problem was to say that the universe was not only dependent on, but actually was, the will of higher intelligences or of a single supreme intelligence.55 Wallace, therefore, although still primarily interested in science in the 1860s, rejected any interpretation of the Darwinian understanding of evolution which included mind in the course of natural law. He did not believe that the same law - natural selection - which appeared adequate to explain the development of animals, also sufficed to explain man's superior mental nature.56 For him, consciousness was discontinuous in nature, and could not be entirely accounted for by its genesis from lower biological forms. Wallace shared this basic view of consciousness with later theological writers like Frederick Temple, and this overlap of scientific and theological speculation is important for any assessment of the period, and for any discussion of the extent to which science and religion (or Christianity, which has to be clearly distinguished from religion in a wider sense) came into conflict after i860. As far as Wallace (like Spencer) was concerned, the overriding commitment was to what was really an eighteenth-century belief in the purposive nature of the historical process. Theological writers, for that matter, were bound to assume that redemptive history - history interpreted as the divinely directed consequences of the atoning sacrifice of Christ - was unidirectional; some, like Jowett used the notion of'progressive revelation' in order to cope with the problems of the biblical text; but they also inherited, especially through the writings of Bishop Butler, the traditional view that 'ruin' was an essential concept in the Christian understanding of history, and they were not sure how they could reconcile 'ruin' with 'evolution'. If one compares Wallace with the popular German scientific writer, Ernst Haeckel, one realises the strength of this 'scientific' impulse to generate 'religious' positions. Wallace had retained his belief in natural selection, but on the speculative level he adopted the kind of optimistic, purposive supernaturalism for which Darwin himself found little use; later, he experimented with psychical research.57 Haeckel, who had been a disciple of Herbert Spencer, but who had converted to Darwinism in the 1860s, believed that Darwin had shown that the life-process worked purely through natural causes, without the influence of any external purposive or 14

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supernatural agency, but on this basis he set up a system of what he called 'pure monism', according to which matter, or infinitely extended substance, and spirit (energy) or sensitive and thinking substance, were the two fundamental attributes, or principal properties, of the all-embracing divine essence of the world, the universal substance. (He claimed the patronage of Spinoza and Goethe for these ideas, which did not owe overmuch to nineteenth-century science.) The cult of the ideal - what he called the real trinity of the nineteenth century; the true, the good and the beautiful - was to be pursued above all in the temple of nature. As for monist ethics, there he appealed to Spencer again, who had shown, he said, that the feeling of duty did not rest on an illusory, Kantian categorical imperative, but on the solid ground of social instinct: the highest aim of all morality was to re-establish what Christianity had wrecked - a sound harmony between self-love and love of one's neighbour. Belief in the immortality of the soul was a dogma in hopeless contradiction with the most solid empirical truths of modern science.58 In his old age, Haeckel liked to think of himself as the high-priest of a new, 'scientific' 'religion', but his Monist League, never more than a tiny sect, has been described as one of the sources of Nazi ideology.59 Haeckel, Wallace, Thomas Huxley and Matthew Arnold were all representatives of a widespread later nineteenth-century conviction that although men needed some kind of religion, Christianity no longer, in its traditional form, fitted the known facts about the universe and human history well enough to justify its dominant position in the religious culture of the West. At the turn of the century, however, it seemed, to the American psychologist and philosopher, William James, for example, that the scientific outlook wasfittingvery badly with any religious system. 'There is a notion in the air about us', he said, 'that religion is probably only an anachronism, a case of "survival", an atavistic relapse into a mode of thought which humanity in its more enlightened examples has outgrown.'60 And he added, in a comment that might have been aimed at Haeckel himself, that though the scientist might individually nourish a religion, and even be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days were over when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declared the glory of God and the firmament showed his handiwork. It was impossible, he said, in the existing temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the cosmic atoms, whether they worked on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but 'a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result'.61 The combined pressure of anthropology, physics and biology was, from James's point of view, weakening the scientist's will to believe. Of course, 15

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one can interpret the evidence in other ways. A Marxist historian of science, Dr Robert Young, for example, argued that many middle-class intellectuals and scientists produced 'rationalizations of a reconciling kind'. Darwin, for instance, arrived at the theory of natural selection under the pressure of a ruling-class need to justify the harshly competitive socio-economic conditions of industrialised England; if men could be persuaded that existing social conditions were part of a natural process, they might be willing to tolerate the existing distribution of power.62 Young argued that the history of nineteenth-century science should not be divorced from its social context and so reduced to a bland history of ideas. Whatever Darwin and his successors thought that they were doing, they were offering an apology for later nineteenth-century capitalism. They were replacing (or perhaps even reinforcing) religion as an opiate of the working-classes; they acted as substitute theologians. The view that Darwinism, rather than Christian theology, explained the patterns of social change, was already widespread at the time. Darwin himself, as Edward Manier reminds us, became increasingly aware of the social role of the scientist and to some extent suppressed his personal estimate of the cultural significance of his theory because he thought that it might weaken the accepted basis of society.63 Later nineteenth-century applications of biological theory had a destructive element: Anthony Smith, in his authoritative treatment of nationalism, found 'social darwinism' entwined in the worse excesses of both Fascism and Nazism.64 The actual social effect of'Darwinism' was often to reinforce the more violent side of the nationalism which was the most serious competitor which religion encountered at the mass level as the nineteenth century came to an end. The point is important, because it illustrates the fact that the relationship between religion and science was far from simple. Many mediating factors were involved, and organised religion may have been weakened more by a nationalism stimulated and ethically emboldened by 'social darwinism' than it was by the intellectually more significant exchanges of writers like Wallace, Huxley, Arnold and Temple.65 Christian theological restatements: Temple and Tennant The possible links between Herbert Spencer's doctrine of progress, Imperialism and Christianity were well illustrated in the case of Temple. He wrote to Lee Warner in 1886, for example, that Gladstone 'sees no advantage to humanity in the existence of the British Empire . . . it would not really shock him to contemplate the loss of Ireland from the British Empire. He does not feel with us when we talk of our Empire as a gift from God, to be used for the good of Mankind.'66 The last Anglican Archbishop of 16

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Canterbury in the Victorian period, Temple was regarded as a 'liberal' theologian who 'accepted evolution' in the 1880s, and he certainly believed that he had. It might be more accurate, nevertheless, to say that he did not entirely reject Darwin's views, but set out the minimum ground required for their acceptance by a sophisticated Protestant theology rooted in Butler's Analogy.67 Man had a power of recognising spiritual truth; this power (as in Butler) was called 'conscience', and it received and transmitted a spiritual voice. For Temple, as for J. H. Newman in A Grammar of Assent (1870) though in a rather different context - the voice of conscience conveyed a conviction of its own absolute authority. 'Science rests on phenomena observed by the senses; Religion on the voice that speaks directly from another world.'68 Therefore the origin of man had to be of such a kind as would make the presence of 'conscience' in a human being possible. This faculty for recognising spiritual truth also enabled men to accept the revelation contained in the New Testament, which was evidently unique, and which satisfied the problems of men beset by moral evil: the divine solution came above all through the death of Jesus Christ. Temple declined to separate the teaching and the miraculous events of the New Testament (as Arnold, for instance, had done), partly on the ground that the first Christian teachers believed that Jesus could and did do miraculous acts, and partly on the ground that Jesus himself evidently believed in his own supernatural powers. There was no sign here that Darwinism was compelling any change in Temple's theological position. Having established what he would not surrender, Temple argued that science, which he defined as the establishment of invariable laws from the observations of the senses, could not push the theory of evolution further than the bodily formation of man. He summed up his position: Science cannot yet assert, and it is tolerably certain never will assert, that the higher and added life, the spiritual faculty which is man's characteristic prerogative, was not given to man by a direct creative act as soon as the body which was to be the seat and instrument of that spiritual faculty had been sufficiently to receive it. That the body should have been first prepared, and that when it was prepared the soul should either have been then given, or then first made to live in the image of God - this is a supposition which is inconsistent neither with what the Bible tells nor with what Science has up to this time proved.

The argument simply ignored what Darwin had said in The Descent of Man.69

All that Temple had abandoned was the simple creation narratives and the time-span of the Old Testament book of Genesis. In their place he had combined some of the more indisputable facts of the new geology and 17

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biology with other, less easily examinable, traditional theological statements. The author of Genesis, Temple wrote, was not concerned with biological processes but with the formal structure of nature: he had to teach (that is, he was divinely prompted to teach), the supremacy of man among creatures, and the subordination in position but equality in nature of woman to man; he also taught the original declension of man's will from the divine path, and the dim and distant but sure hope of man's restoration. 'These are not, and cannot be, lessons of science.'70 Evolution in the scientific sense had completed its work in forming man as he was before this spiritual history began. On the philosophical level, however, Temple appealed to the theory of evolution in order to support the argument from design for the existence of God. On the basis of a general idea of development, he suggested that what seemed like imperfections in the universe might be like the imperfections in a half-painted picture. 'To the many partial designs which Paley's Natural Theology points out, and which still remain what they were, the doctrine of Evolution adds the design of perpetual progress . . . The very phrase which we use to sum up Darwin's teaching, the survival of the fittest, implies a perpetual diminution of pain and increase of enjoyment for all creatures that can feel.'71 Design was entertained from the beginning and impressed on every particle of living matter. Temple therefore defended the workmanship of the divine creator in post-millennial terms, claiming that 'beasts of prey are diminishing; life is easier for man and for all animals that are under his care; many species of animals perish as man fills and subjugates the globe, but those that remain have far greater happiness in their lives'.72 This passage almost amounted to the substitution of a traditional Christian idea of development, as movement towards the Second Coming, for the new, biological concept of development, to which the idea of a Second (Divine) Coming was irrelevant. Even in 1900 he still insisted to the doubtful young William Temple that 'the Life of Christ tells on man by slow degrees, and its effects can be traced and pointed out'.73 Temple had reconciled Christianity and science to his own satisfaction. What he really denied was that the fresh information which the biologists, geologists, chemists and physicists were collecting could make any moral difference to the affirmation of a benevolent creator. He knew that some professional scientists shared his opinion: Asa Gray, for example, the famous Harvard botanist, had, in Darwiniana (1876) and Natural Science and Religion (1882), asserted an evolutionary teleology. He wrote that 'so long as gradatory, orderly, and adapted forms in Nature argue design, and at least while the physical cause of variation is utterly unknown and mysterious, we should advise Mr Darwin to assume, in the philosophy of his hypothesis, 18

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that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines'.74 Temple thought of scientific information as descriptive of the divine creative act; the scientific material was to be interpreted according to the broad lines of the biblical revelation, which was no longer, however, to be used as a source of scientific 'facts'. Social facts, as in the case of the status of women, could still be located in the sacred text. There was no question, however, of scientific work itself justifying a scientific humanism. Even in Temple's moderate position one could see the questions which orthodox theologians, Protestant and Roman Catholic, steadily put to the 'liberal' theologians. How far could one modify the traditional account of Christian doctrine without calling in question one's use of the word 'Christian'? To what extent, if any, did the extension of scientific discovery oblige the theologian either to alter his doctrinal position, or the way in which he formulated what he already held? One can see the problem become more acute if one compares Temple, who died in 1902, with the much younger and more obviously 'liberal' F. R. Tennant, who tried in The Origin and Propagation of Sin (1902) to give more theological weight to the scientific version of the history of human development.75 Tennant was untypical of much Protestant theology at the turn of the century, to the extent that he believed that a theologian should study the methods and findings of the sciences as part of his own subject-matter. He was not likely to have made Temple's remark about the beasts of prey; nor did he share the view that Genesis contained absolute divine revelation about the status of women. Instead, Tennant used the historical-critical method to clear the ground for the introduction of a scientific description of human history, as far as this was available in his day. He regarded the Fall-story in the third chapter of Genesis as an obscure Jewish myth: it contained, he said, echoes of remotely prehistoric thought, elements borrowed from the lore of other nations, and human speculation on matters beyond the reach of human memory, the whole adapted to the spiritual and ethical standards of a much later writer. One would not turn to Genesis 'for truth offinaland permanent value on the historical, psychological and scientific questions involved'.76 Human history had therefore to be examined without presuppositions drawn from Genesis; instead, the theologian should accept what seemed to Tennant the obvious implications of the new biological science, that humanity had inherited the natural and essential instincts of his animal ancestors; these instincts were necessarily non-moral, nor was there any reason to ascribe to them any degree of abnormality. Voluntary action appeared in man before any consciousness of right and wrong. 'There has therefore been a period in the history of both race and individual, in which 19

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even volitional conduct has been innocent, however far such conduct differs from that later prescribed by moral sanctions and the conscience.'77 A period was reached at which a moral sentiment was gradually evoked and moral sanctions gradually constructed. Only then could one seriously talk about sin. It followed from Tennant's position that men had started out as impulsegoverned creatures, lawless in the strict sense, and not as 'innocents' who had then 'fallen' and so incurred the wrath of God. Consequently, man need no longer think of himself as struggling in vain to recover a lost status which only God could grant him as an act of grace; instead, man should seek to understand and fulfil the moral requirements of a God who, in his turn, understood, and had shown in Christ that he sympathised with, the finite limitations of being a particular historical individual who inherited, not sin and guilt, but pressures coming from an earlier stage of evolution. Tennant rejected the view put by his orthodox critics, that even if one accepted the broad results of nineteenth-century criticism of the Old Testament, the Fallstory still contained the basis for a divinely revealed doctrine of human nature. The hypothesis of a bias towards evil, he said, was gratuitous, and would perhaps never have occurred at all to men, but for the dominion over their minds of the doctrine of Original Righteousness. 'It is at least as legitimate', he wrote, 'to go out of our way in search for a bias towards good to explain the cases where the moral sanction is obeyed, as for a bias towards evil to explain the cases in which it is disobeyed.'78 In any case, how would one test the validity of a doctrine of human nature based on the Fall-story? A theory of the divine inspiration of the record simply would not cover the conflict between modern knowledge and what the story declared to be fact. Tennant had no doubt that in this area scientific discovery and hypothesis had theological consequences, and James Ward, his mentor, agreed, for he commented on this part of Tennant's argument, that we have gained something if we have found in the theory of evolution the means of divesting the problem of good and evil of two of the mysteries that have hitherto enshrouded it - the doctrine of a fall from a state of moral perfection and the doctrine of original sin; and we may hail it as a hopeful sign of the times that there are now theologians who have the courage to admit this.79

No more than Temple, however, or Wallace, did Tennant really envisage a human moral sense developing of itself; the gradual formation of human moral aspirations in the evolutionary process was a case of the divine prompting the human. The earliest self-manifestation of God was not, therefore, the result of a primitive once-for-all revelation from high, but was infused by the Supreme Reason (which Tennant, at this point in company 20

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with the Roman Catholic Modernists, believed to be immanent in man) into the natural activities of human thought and speculation. Tennant acknowledged, of course, that this moral sense, or conscience, was also in part a social phenomenon, a product of social heredity within a continuing society. He recognised the force of later nineteenth-century criticisms of theological claims for the supernatural origin and authority of conscience, criticisms which Nietzsche summed up in a characteristic aphorism: 'The content of our conscience is everything that during the years of our childhood was regularly demanded of us without reason by people we honoured or feared . . . The belief in authorities is the source of conscience: it is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man but the voice of some men in man.'80 Tennant did not think that this was the whole truth, but he did not believe that theologians could any longer expect to use the creation and fall stories in Genesis to dictate to modern psychologists like James Ward how they should interpret human nature. In a direct challenge to traditional theology he concluded that 'the fictitious importance assigned by theology, in its most scholastic and artificial periods, to the doctrine of the Fall and Original Sin, is an accident of history, not an outcome of the necessary development of the Faith'.81 If one was going to employ the concept of development, in other words, development had to be shown historically and scientifically, as well as asserted speculatively, and the historical account had to involve a more exacting use of historical method than say J. H. Newman's, whether in The Development of Christian Doctrine or A Grammar of Assent. Disengagement

Something of a disengagement had been taking place, in any case, between religion and science in the later nineteenth century. The older popular scientific imperialism, with its aggressively anti-Christian tone, of which Haeckel's Riddle ofthe Universe (1900) was a belated example, was declining. The French philosopher of religion, Emile Boutroux (1845-1922), rejected Haeckel's 'Evolutionary Monism' on the ground that Haeckel was attributing afinalityto the existing state of science to which philosophers of science laid no claim. 'Science', Boutroux wrote, 'consists of substituting for things, symbols which express a certain aspect of them - the aspect which can be denoted by relatively precise relations',82 but not more than that. The stability of even the most general laws could not be guaranteed, because nature itself evolved, 'perhaps even fundamentally'.83 Boutroux was reflecting a broad movement in the philosophy of science, associated with such thinkers as Ernst Mach, Heinrich Hertz, James Maxwell, Henri Poincare, Pierre Duhem and Edouard Le Roy. From their 21

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point of view, science was not a given system which imposed itself on the human mind from without; instead, the human mind, as intelligence, will and imagination, acted upon the environment to impose its own standards of intelligibility. For Hertz, the concepts of physics became patterns of possible experiences rather than copies of actual experience. James Ward, echoing Mach, wrote that 'scientific generalisations are an economic device necessitated by our own limitations'.84 'In vain', Boutroux wrote, does science claim to reduce the mind to the role of a mere instrument . . . the mind works on its own account, trying to discover if there is in nature order, simplicity and harmony distinctive marks that are clearly much more calculated to bring satisfaction to itself than to express the intrinsic properties of phenomena. And these notions, which direct the investigations of science, are not in truth purely intellectual notions: taken in their entirety they constitute feelings, aesthetic and moral needs. Thus, feeling itself is linked with the scientific spirit . . .8S

One could no longer distinguish so clearly between scientific certainty and religious speculation. As the philosophers of science became less dogmatic, there emerged the possibility that religion, as distinct from a particular Christian dogmatic system, might prove to be irreducible human experience. This was true at times in the new, would-be science of religion itself. Jane Harrison (18501928), the classical anthropologist, suggested that in the light of evolution one must think of religion as human process rather than divine revelation, and claimed that the result of an examination of primitive religion showed that 'religious phenomena resulted from two delusive processes - a delusion of the non-critical intellect, and a delusion of the over-confident will'.86 Nevertheless, she did not conclude that religion was entirely a delusion. Personal experiences of what was believed to be an immediate, nonintellectual revelation, of mystical oneness with all things, still took place. They were better lived (she thought) than analysed; they did not properly fall under the category of true or false; yet they might be highly advantageous to life. Altogether, she was much less confident of being able to dispose of this residual religious experience than was the sociologist, Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), who reduced subjective religious experience to an echo of social performances designed to protect and promote the solidarity, moral as well as political, of the community. Society became the object of its own existential cult: 'the believer bows down before his God, because it is from God that he believes that he holds his being, particularly his mental being, his soul. We have the same reasons for experiencing this feeling before the collective',87 that is, society. As a critic of religious institutions Durkheim was perceptive, but his attempt to account for religion itself by bestowing a 22

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kind of personal existence on the abstract notion of society often seemed naive. Alternatively, separatist theologians like the influential Lutheran, Albrecht Ritschl (i 822-1889), tried to make Christianity impregnable by cutting it off from all forms of scientific reductionism. In effect, Ritschl restated the traditional argument from revelation to reassert that Christianity possessed a unique, divinely-given knowledge of God which was independent of other forms of knowledge, metaphysical or scientific, and could not be judged by them. No conflict existed between Christianity and science proper, but in the nineteenth century a factitious conflict had broken out between Christianity and an aggressive blend of natural religion and the scientific investigation of nature.88 Ignoring the problems increasingly posed by biblical criticism, problems which showed no signs of final resolution, Ritschl said that the true knowledge of God was given clearly in the Christ of the Gospels, through whom God had established between himself and man a new relationship of faith which redeemed man from the contradiction in which he found himself, as being both a part of nature and also a spiritual being claiming to dominate nature.89 There could be no question of an appeal for authority to the religious 'experience' of the pietist or the mystic: Christianity began in the individual's self-conscious life, and the essential value-judgment which he made was that the Christian Gospel was worthy of belief.90 Ritschl's defence of the autonomy of Christianity, his confidence that faith lifted men out of mere impersonal process and set them to fulfilling the divine purpose of the Kingdom of God, seemed a sign to many that religion was itself again and that the Victorian nightmare had ended. The belief that religion and science could develop side by side without significant conflict came all the more naturally to theologians like Ernst Troeltsch (1865-1923), who taught at Heidelberg from 1894 to 1915, and Auguste Sabatier (18391901), of the Protestant Faculty at Paris, because they thought that Protestantism had committed itself to freedom in principle, and that this freedom included not only the freedom of the individual conscience but also the freedom of scientific inquiry.91 They did not regard this position as a betrayal of the original dogmatic essence of biblical Protestantism to the sceptical spirit of the Enlightenment - the kind of criticism which Karl Barth made later - but assumed that the Enlightenment's own emphasis on freedom of thought, publication and scientific inquiry corresponded to what had also become explicit in the historical development of Protestantism. Sabatier pointed out that whereas the Catholic Church felt itself obliged to have separate universities, Protestant theology had found a place in national 23

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universities by the same title as other humane disciplines, and had followed their evolution, exchanging the method of authority for the method of observation and experiment. The proper object of theology was the study of religious phenomena in general and the Christian religious phenomena in particular. Theological generalisations (or dogmas) were as necessary as scientific generalisations (or laws), but they (like their scientific equivalent) must be thought of as historical, provisional and changing. The religious facts which formed the basis for these religious generalisations belonged to the domain of consciousness, but they could be verified and described only by the observation of the psychologist of religion and by the historian's exegesis of the documents in which the religious consciousness of the past had left its imprint.92 Theologians like Sabatier were so confident of the scientific nature of their own methods, so unintimidated by a scientific world-view, that they gradually left the original self-sufficient laager and exposed themselves to fresh reductionist criticism. Indeed, the ablest of the group, Ernst Troeltsch, in The Absoluteness of Christianity (1901), rejected the claim of Christianity to possess the one unique revelation from God, and instead reduced Christianity to one of a system of world-religions, each related to its own distinct culture. This was not really a secular sociological conclusion, however. Troeltsch's study of the phenomena of religions led him to reject the Hegelian view that Christianity was the reconciliation and goal of all the forces of history: instead of the Divine Life within history tending towards unity or universality, it tended - according to Troeltsch - towards the individual fulfilment of a plurality of religions. This was in line with the passionate individualism of Edwardian personal idealism, which asserted the all-importance of the full development of individual human personality and which dominated the theology of many writers, including Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926), Hastings Rashdall (1858-1924), Clement Webb (1865-1954), and the American Borden Bowne (18471910).93 One detects the influence on religious thought, not only of scientific and historical method, but also of that self-satisfied pre-1914 middle- and upper-class European society where members often gave an extraordinary impression of believing in the unshakeable permanence and propriety of their personal wealth, social privilege and national power.94 Catholicism and science

In the Edwardian period, in fact, one finds the relationship between Christianity and science being settled in terms either of authority and objective revelation, or of personal religious experience. In the Roman 24

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Catholic Church the official emphasis fell on authority and revelation. The Christian religion had a supernatural origin, and therefore its historical existence was bound to be both revelatory and mysterious, absolute and limited. In the later nineteenth century, and especially after Leo XIII had issued Aeterni Patris (1879), which gave a new prestige to Thomism, official Catholic theologians held that theology derived its data from revelation, not from autonomous reason; the content of revelation was Scripture together with the documents of the ecclesiastical magisterium; what was required from the believer was an act of will in which he humbly adhered to what God had revealed because He had revealed it; interpretation came from the magisterium, which in certain fields enjoyed divine guidance through infallibility.95 There was no question, as far as official Catholic theologians were concerned, of personal religious experience playing a significant role, or of any serious conflict being admitted between science and religion. The Syllabus of Errors (1864), for example, had been conceived in terms of opposition to a general eighteenth- and nineteenth-century 'rationalism' and said little about science as such.96 The dogmatic constitution, Dei Filius (1870), drawn up at the First Vatican Council, was primarily intended to protect the rationality of faith as well as its supernatural origin and character; it was made clear that one might not make advances in scientific knowledge a ground for understanding a doctrine in a way different from the Church's understanding of it.97 Once the Modernist crisis had begun, however, official statements became more aggressive. Lamentabili (1907) condemned the view that 'progress in the sciences demands a reform of the concepts of the Christian doctrine of God, creation, revelation, the person of the Incarnate Word, and redemption'; also condemned was the contention that 'modern Catholicism can be reconciled with true science only if it is transformed into a non-dogmatic Christianity; that is to say, into a broad and liberal Protestantism'.98 (Positions like that of Sabatier were obviously involved.) The theological interpretation of evolution remained a problem, of course: for example, the decree of the Biblical Commission (1909) on the historical character of the first three chapters of Genesis laid down that a special creation (peculiaris creatio) of the first man was the literal historical sense intended by the second chapter of Genesis; it was sometimes argued that the phrasing allowed for the historical evolution of the body and the subsequent infusion of the soul by a special creative act; but the same decree seemed to require a 'literal' historical interpretation of the account of the formation of Eve from Adam.99 Such statements did little more than intellectually isolate those who made 25

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them. In the meantime, however, some Catholic writers were trying to shift the discussion away from areas like the historical origin of man, where revelation seemed to give much less direct information and theory than had once been supposed, tofieldslike religious experience, from which it might be possible to work back to a traditional theology without obviously sinning against scientific method. If science increasingly accepted religious behaviour as part of its subject-matter, but tried to give a secular account of it - and Darwin himself, as we have seen, offered this kind of history of religion theologians might legitimately examine human behaviour for evidence of the immanence of the supernatural in the natural. Maurice Blondel (18611949), the French Catholic philosopher of religion, for instance, argued that the human will, when fully conscious of itself, recognised the hidden action of a divine will within itself. The inner action of this divine will, as Blondel interpreted it, moved the soul towards orthodox theological actions and conclusions. Without there being any real continuity between the sphere of reason and that of faith, without in any way bringing within the determinism of human action the order of supernature, which is always beyond the capacity, the merits and the demands of our nature . . .it is legitimate to show that the development of the will constrains us to the avowal of our insufficiency, leads us to recognise the need of a further gift, gives us the aptitude not to produce or to define, but to recognise and receive it.100

Catholicism then completed the prompting of the immanent, exactly in Newman's style. Blondel granted that to settle one's life direction in this way would seem alien to the dominant scientific spirit of the time, because such an action seemed from the outside to have no compelling rational ground. For Blondel, of course, the vital, self-abandoning action rationalised itself in the further experience of grace. The appeal to experience meant an appeal to a total experience of one's self changing through time, not simply an appeal to a momentary epiphany. Blondel was not a pragmatist, nor did he appeal to the popular idea that theology must 'develop', the view that carried the more unambiguously Modernist Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) out of Catholicism altogether.101 Blondel turned inward in order to defend the substantial objectivity of Christian theology as something given which could not be 'developed' in any useful sense, because what was represented there was the action of the transcendent in and on the individual human life, an action which did not change or develop. This position he shared with Friedrich von Hiigel (18521925), whose study of Catholic mysticism, The Mystical Element in Religion (1908), offered experiential verification in terms of closely observed sanctity. Religious experience, von Hiigel said, necessarily occurred in relation to an 26

Religion and Science

intellectual framework already lodged in the mind, but was also associated with 'a real presence and operation of the Infinite and of God in all men'.102 In fact, one would not be able to apprehend Christ if one did not already have a real, however dim, sense of religion and of the presence of God within one to which Christ could appeal. The word 'dim' was characteristic of von Hiigel - 'the awakened soul ever possesses a dim but real experience of the Infinite'.103 He criticised John of the Cross's use of the via negativa, saying that incarnational theology, the heart of the Christian system implied a divine immanence. As for science and religion, von Hiigel said that once the ideas of Original Sin and Judgment had ceased to stimulate people to detachment and other worldliness, science was the best available way of purgation, a discipline of self-denying, disinterested, long-drawn-out inquiry. The study of biological evolution and biblical criticism would, for those who could stand the strain, work for purification.104 And yet, 'any poor laundry-girl who carefully studies and carries out the laws of successful washing, who moves, in alternation, away from the concentration on the Thing, to recollection and increasingly affective prayer and rudimentary contemplation', had, he thought, instinctively found the proper balance.105 To Blondel and von Hiigel, therefore, the tendency of anthropology, sociology and psychology to reduce religion to its social and institutional factors, seemed less than fully 'scientific' because it explained less than all the available evidence. Both shifted the discussion from the origins of religion to the case of Christianity in their own day; they thought that what mattered most was to trace the pattern of alleged divine action making for holiness in the individual soul. This explains why von Hiigel was not impressed by Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution (1907): 'there is absolutely no change or advance in the end striven for; and no wonder, for from first to last no end is striven for at all, except existence'.106 William James The same material which these Catholic writers pressed to orthodox conclusions served quite different purposes in the hands of the American philosopher and psychologist, William James, in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). James criticised the would-be impersonality of the dominant scientific attitude as shallow, 'because as long as we deal with the cosmic and the general we deal only with the symbols of reality, but as soon as we deal with private and personal phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the term'.107 The vast variety of religious experience seemed to James to disclose a central, positive content, which was 27

JOHN KENT

literally and objectively true as far as it went, and which could be summed up in the statement that the individual human consciousness was continuous with a wider - and in some sense more than natural - self through which saving experiences came. The true pragmatist, he said, should wager on this conclusion, instead of behaving with what scientific philosophers like Huxley and Clifford thought to be scientific propriety, and believing only what was backed by sufficient, verifiable and coercive evidence. In religious matters one could only act, adopting the religious hypothesis as an empirical possibility; one might in this way attain final truth, but of course one could not expect to know when one had attained it. Nevertheless, he wrote at the end of the Varieties, if one remained faithful to one's belief in the 'wider self, the evidence suggested that one kept more sane and true. As for the chance of being mistaken: 'our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for an empiricist philosopher.'108 Nothing could have been further from Ritschl's conviction that God had revealed himself fully only in the western religious tradition, or from the mood of the anti-Modernist Encyclical, Pascendi (1907), which attacked the untrustworthiness of 'feeling' as a guide in religion. The scientific approach had weakened the external authority of the Bible, the Church and the Creeds, but for the moment it had reinstated, in all its ambiguity, the religious consciousness.

Conclusion By 1914 the pressure of fresh scientific hypothesis and information had changed once and for all the context in which theologians discussed the doctrines of creation, of the formation and the fall of man, and therefore, indirectly, of the doctrine of redemption. Appeals to the supernatural authority of the Church, and to revelation as a supernaturally given source of unambiguous truth continued, but with a more restricted area of application and acceptance. A few Christian writers, and those as far apart as Sabatier and Le Roy agreed that dogma, if it was to survive at all, must no longer be seen as immutable, but as historical and changing. The influence here was not so much science itself, as the principle which supported science, and which had vindicated itself in the theoretical and technological triumphs of Victorian science, the view that thought begins with doubt, that authority always remains questionable. Of course, alternative religious and nonreligious systems of explanation had faced one another before the nineteenth 28

Religion and Science century, but the advance of science gave new force to these older disagreements. Religion as such, however, seemed less at risk than Christianity, because religion did not need a highly-wrought system of doctrine as a basis for survival, nor did it need to make a case for miracles. A non-Christian western theist, for example, might rest content with the belief that the universe was ultimately understandable and morally bearable; in 1914 scientists had not yet seriously encountered the possibility of a rationally inexplicable universe. Indeed, one recognises in Thomas Huxley's use of the idea of'agnosticism' a passionately sincere refusal to be driven into the extremes of either affirmation or denial in discussing religious possibilities. Meanwhile, the view that religion and science should co-exist in fruitful interaction slowly gained ground, as it became possible to think of both religious and scientific statements as hypothetical, as statements thrown out in constantly renewed attempts to master the universe and the living experience which it afforded. And against strikingly different cultural backgrounds - Maurice Blondel in a Catholic France and William James in a Protestant New England - one finds the same suggestion that the primary task of theology and religious thought was to give a non-reductive account of living religious experiences which would satisfy both the critical intelligence, the moralising impulse and the imagination. Unfortunately, the Great War and its aftermath halted that creative movement, giving, as far as Christianity was concerned, fresh life to separatist theologies which ignored scientific method and result as completely as possible.

Notes 1 H. Hoffding, The Philosophy of Religion (London, 1914), p. 239. Hoffding (1843-1931) was Danish; he called his views 'critical monism'. 2 See, e.g., O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Pt 11 (Cambridge, 1970), p. 24. 3 'The supposition that the historical record of evolution can by itself reveal universal criteria of evolutionary "advance". . . was in fact the crucial element in pre-Darwinian, progressivist ideas about evolution which Herbert Spencer inherited from Lamarck, but which Darwin rightly abandoned . . . [This] was a chief source of the fatal flaw in late 19th-century attempts at constructing evolutionistic theories of social, cultural and historical change, viz., the belief that History is not only irreversible but uni-directionaP; S. Toulmin, Human Understanding, vol. 1 (London, 1972) p. 324. 4 For Lamarck, see Richard W. Burkhardt, The Spirit of System, Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Harvard, 1977). 5 For Spencer, see J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer, The Evolution of a Sociologist (London,

6 Lamarck replaced the traditional idea of invariable forms with the idea that nature began with the most simple forms of life and worked toward the most complicated, which were also the most perfect. He did not reify nature, however, but thought that matter had been 29

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7 8 9

10 11

12 13

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

created with an order of things which, acting upon matter, produced the historical sequence of life. E. R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (Chicago, 1970) pp. 3-14. For criticism of Gladstone, who was writing in The Nineteenth Century, see T. Huxley, 'Genesis versus Nature', in Science and the Hebrew Tradition (London, 1895). In a sermon, 'The Worth of the Old Testament', preached in St Paul's in December 1889 and published in 1890, Liddon defended the position that 'Our Lord Jesus Christ set the seal of His infallible sanction on the whole of the Old Testament' (p. 23); 'The trustworthiness of the Old Testament is in fact inseparable from the trustworthiness of our Lord Jesus Christ' (p. 25). He had expounded this view in The Divinity of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus (London, 1867), the ablest English presentation of the orthodox christological position in the nineteenth century. T. Huxley, 'The Light of the Church and the Light of Science', in Science and the Hebrew Tradition (London, 1895, written in 1890). Newman's Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, 1845) argued that changes in Roman Catholic doctrine since the time of the Primitive Church had come about by organic development from the implicit to the explicit, and not, as Protestant critics said, by corruption of the original revelation. The scientific kinship, but not origin, was with the Lamarckian idea of development as proceeding from the simple to the more complex; Newman defended addition to the doctrinal system, but not subtraction. See J. Kent, 'Newman and Tyrrell', Newman Studien (Niirnberg, 1974), pp. 151-67. Quoted by F. Gregory in Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Dordrecht, 1977), p. 211. The date was 1890. L. T. Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory (New York, 1913), p. 165. The Great War made Hobhouse more pessimistic, but this passage typifies an Edwardian mood. For Hobhouse, see S. Collini, Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hobhouse and Political Argument in England 1880-1Q14 (Cambridge, 1979). J. W. Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, (London, 1875) interpreted western history as a war between religious obscurantism and scientific enlightenment. For criticism, see Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 161-88; and J. R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies (Cambridge, 1979), especially pp. 8-49. T. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London, 1894), p. 91. D. Duncan, Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer, (London, 1911), p. 336. C. Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York, 1873), pp. 68-9. Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 95. Ibid., p. 101. Ibid., p. 179. Ibid., p. 183. Mivart reprinted the review in Essays and Criticisms (London, 1892), vol. 11, pp. 1-59: my quotations come from this version. For Mivart, see J. W. Gruber, A Conscience in Conflict (New York, i960). Mivart could not consent to Darwin's view that natural selection was the decisive factor in evolution; for him the will of the creator was the overriding agent, which worked coherently to a conclusion set at the beginning; even so, man still required the divine insertion of a soul. In this form, Rome did not censure Mivart's teaching in the 1870s. Gruber concluded: 'Despite Mivart's frequent, often fervent avowals of allegiance to evolution, one can doubt whether he was really an evolutionist at all' (p. 63). Mivart was excommunicated in the year of his death (1900) by Cardinal Vaughan, because he refused to accept that as a layman he was not entitled to write

30

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24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46 47 48 49 50

articles in which he gave to doctrines propounded by the Church a sense different from that which the Church understood and taught. Ernest Renan, Vie de Jesus (13th edn, 1867; Paris, 1974), p. 46. Victorian science only reinforced a long-developing scepticism about miraculous events. M. Arnold, Literature and Dogma (London, 1873), pp. 168-9. Renan, Vie de Jesus, p. 56. Renan compared the orthodox theologian to a caged bird dogma inhibited natural movement of thought. Ibid., p. 36. J. R. Seeley, Natural Religion (London, 1882), p. 257. Renan, Vie de Jesus, p. 409. J. S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion (London, 1874), p. 234. Renan, Vie de Jesus, p. 37. Troeltsch used this argument effectively in The Absoluteness of Christianity (London, 1972). Mill, Three Essays, pp. 235-8. Renan said: 'One must not look for proportion between the fire and the cause which starts it. The devotion of La Sallette is one of the great religious events of the century' (Vie de Jesus, p. 51). In such cases, he wrote, no one deceives deliberately, everyone deceives innocently. Ibid., p. 239. Arnold, Literature and Dogma, p. 289. Arnold did not mean that this was true of all Christians, but that the number of doubters was increasing, and would not diminish. Seeley, Natural Religion, p. 262. Arnold, Literature and Dogma, p. 310. Ibid., p. 307. F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. W. Kaufman (New York, 1967), note 1066, dated March/June 1888. Arnold, Literature and Dogma, p. 368. Ibid., p. 15. This symbolic assault was not 'scientific', but reflected (as did Christian Old Testament scholarship), a strong desire to deny the existence of a living Jewish religion in western culture. Both science (sociology in this case) and religion were affected by such social factors, here a sophisticated anti-Jewishness. B. Jowett, in Essays and Reviews (10th edn, London, 1862), p. 421. George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, ed. B. Hardy (Harmondsworth, 1967). Hardy played down the Jewish element in the novel, but see 'George Eliot's Reading in 19th-century Jewish Historians', by W. Baker, Victorian Studies, xv, 4 (1972), 463-73. Baker shows the trouble Eliot took to study the Jewish nineteenth-century historians of assimilation, and of cultural revival, and their conflict with I. M. Jost's idea of Jewish cultural degeneracy. English readers ignored this side of the book. Compare with W. Pannenberg's unfavourable comments on Karl Barth's plea that Christian theology, because of its revelatory ground, can dispense with (scientific) rationality: Theology and the Philosophy of Science (London, 1976), pp. 265-75. For Haeckel, see D. Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (New York, 1971), who regarded him as an intellectual source of Nazism; for Wallace, see F. M. Turner, Between Science and Religion (Yale University Press, 1974) especially chapter 4. 'The Scientists' Declaration: Reflexion on Science and Belief in the wake of Essays and Reviews", by W. H. Brock and R. M. Macleod, British Journalfor the History of Science, IX (1976), 38-^66. Wallace reprinted both in 1875: references to 1875 edition. Wallace, p. 325. Seeley, Natural Religion, p. 254. Wallace, p. 331.

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JOHN KENT 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

59 60 61 62

63 64 65

(

66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74

75

Ibid., p. 354. Ibid., p. 359. Ibid., p. 359. Ibid., p. 365. Ibid., p. 368. Ibid., p. 370. Psychical research flourished in England and the United States from the 1880s at least until 1914; William James gave much time to it. The cumulative effect on scientific and religious thought was negative. E. Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (London, 1900), especially chapters 18 and 19. Reference to immortality, p. 214. Translated by Joseph McCabe, issued by the Rationalist Press Association, no doubt because of HaeckePs invective against Roman Catholicism. Haeckel supported eugenics, of course, the selective breeding of human beings. W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902), p. 490. Ibid., pp. 491-2. R. Young, T h e Historiographic and Ideological Contexts of the 19th-century Debate on Man's Place in Nature', in M. Teich (ed.), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (London, 1973), pp. 344-438. E. Manier, The Young Darwin and his Cultural Circle (Dordrecht-Boston, 1978), p. 193. A. D. S. Smith, Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1979), especially pp. 4 3 85For the Social Darwinists see, e.g., W. Bagehot, Physics and Politics (London, 1890), B. Kidd, Social Evolution (London, 1894). The Methodist, H. P. Hughes, welcomed Kidd's interpretation of history as a struggle for life between races: 'Neither Asia, nor Africa nor South America is really ripe for the democratic institutions which exist in this country. And those European races which rejected the Reformation and its higher ethical standard are visibly losing ground in the race and slowly perishing because the morality of the Middle Ages is not sufficiently exalted to fit men for political freedom'; Essential Christianity (London, 1894), pp. 281-2. For Hughes, see J. Kent, 'Hugh Price Hughes', in Essays in Modern Church History, ed. G. V. Bennett (London, 1966), pp. 181-205. E. G. Sandford (ed.), Memoirs of Archbishop Temple (London, 1906), vol. 11, pp. 640-1. F. Temple, The Relations between Religion and Science (London, 1885). Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., p. 186. Temple's failure seems symptomatic. Yet E. Boutroux, e.g., was clear that Darwin reduced 'natural morality' to the 'natural history' of moral ideas. To the extent that Christianity demanded a withdrawal from 'the world', a conflict followed between biology and religion. See Boutroux, Questions de Morale et D1 Education (7th edn, Paris, 1914), written in the 1890s. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 117. Ibid., p. 118. Sandford, Archbishop Temple, vol. 11, pp. 691-2. A. Gray, Darwiniana, ed. A. H. Dupree (Harvard, 1963), pp. 121-2. Gray (1810—88) was professor of Natural History at Harvard 1842-73. Darwin rejected Gray's theological interpretation of natural selection. For the wider problem of American reaction to Darwin, see H. Hoverkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800-1860 (Pennsylvania, 1978), and W. R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Harvard, 1976). Tennant (1866-1957) was a pupil of the philosopher James Ward (1843-1925). Ward shared the reconciling approach to the relations of religion and science found in the work

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76 77 78 79

80 81

82 83 84 85 86

87

88 89 90 91

of Lotze (1817-81), Boutroux (1845-1922), Eucken (1846-1926) and the American personalist, Bowne (1847-1910). They broadly shared an ethical theism which was critical of both naturalism and Hegelian idealism. F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1908), p. 146. Ibid., p. xxii. Ibid., p. xix. James Ward, The Realm of Ends, or Pluralism and Theism (Cambridge, 1911), pp. 368-9. The Catholic lay theologian, von Hiigel, also strongly influenced by Ward, thought that Tennant failed to explain adequately sins like pride of intellect, and self-adoration: see Eternal Life (Edinburgh, 1912), pp. 283-6. F. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow (1886), aph. 52, in Human, All-too-Human (New York, 1924). Tennant, Origin of Sin, p. 153. For the characteristic reply of the 'mainstream' theology of the period, cf. J. R. Illingworth, Reason and Revelation (London, 1906): 'But evolution . . . has also been combined with a Theistic view of the world's origin . . . What then has the theory of evolution, so understood, to say of man? Merely that his bodily organism was developed from an animal ancestry; and that, in consequence, when his mental and moral faculties were so enlarged as to become human, while the physical traits of his animality remained strong within him, he must inevitably fall into moral evil . . . But there is nothing in this incompatible with the Christian doctrine of the fall of man, which simply asserts that the first human beings sinned, and transmitted an hereditary tendency to sin to their offspring' (pp. 225-6). Illingworth, a Lux Mundi contributor, dismissed 'the Paradisaical state of innocence', and hereditary guilt, as unwarranted by Genesis, however, though Genesis 'as ideal history . . . is unapproachable in literature' (p. 227). E. Boutroux, Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy (London, 1909), p. 361. Ibid., p. 357. Ward, Realm of Ends, p. 16. Boutroux, Science and Religion, p. 363. Jane Harrison, 'The Influence of Darwinism on the Study of Religion', in A. C. Seward (ed.), Darwin and Modern Science (Cambridge, 1909), p. 510. 'It is by thinking of religion in the light of evolution, not as a revelation given, not as a realite faite, but as a process, and it is only so, I think, that we attain to a spirit of real patience and toleration' (p. 511). E. Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy (New York, 1974), p. 73. Durkheim did not believe that science (in the 1890s) could immediately provide a new moral system, though this would happen in the long run. In the meantime, as religion decayed in the industrialised West, society itself alone had the moral capacity to regulate appetites and organise economic order. He suggested a new, corporative form of society which might generate new moral beliefs spontaneously. See Socialism, ed. A. W. Gouldner (London, l 95%), PP- 2 35~44- The lectures published there were given in 1895/6 at Bordeaux. E. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation tr. H. R. Mackintosh (Edinburgh, 1900) p. 210. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 457, for mysticism; p. 579 for pietism. The idea of the value-judgment came from Lotze (Microcosmos, 1856—64; English translation 1885). See Auguste Sabatier, Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History, tr. T. A. Seed (London, 1897): 'Dogmatic revision is always alive, both in principle and in fact, in the Churches of the Reformation; in principle, because all Confessions of Faith are relative and subordinate to the Word of God: in practice, because the spirit of research, of criticism and free discussion has never ceased to breathe in Protestant Theology' (p. 256).

33

JOHN KENT 92 'A theory of religion, dogmatics can have no other starting-point than religious phenomena themselves. From this concrete and experimental principle, from this state of soul produced by the immediate feeling of a necessary relation to God, the entire system should spring and develop. What is not in religious experience should find no place in religious science, and should be banished from it' (A Philosophy of Religion, P- 273)93 For links between idealism and English theology, see T. Langford, In Search for Foundations, English Theology igoo-ig2O (New York, 1969). British idealism, nevertheless, developed over against Darwinism in defence of the rationality of the universe and man's place in it, rather than in defence of Christian theology. See, e.g., 'Hegel in Britain', by James Bradley, in Heythrop Journal, xx, 1 (1979), 1-24. 94 A sociological account of English Victorian theology, for example, would emphasise the integration of its exponents into the late Victorian ruling-class. 95 See, e.g., G. Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, A study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford, 1980), pp. 7-25. 96 The Syllabus implicitly denied that papal pronouncements impeded the free progress of science (Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 34th edn, Freiburg, 1967, prop. 12, p. 578): this passage quotes the Munich Brief (Dec. 21, 1863), pp. 571-3, which had reminded intellectuals that they could safely investigate natural truth, only if they venerated the infallible intellect of God as revealed in Christianity. Liberal Catholics saw the Munich Letter as the moment when the tide turned finally against them. 97 Enchiridion Symbolorum, p. 594, Dei Filius, Canons 4, Faith and Reason, no. 3. 98 Ibid., p. 674, Lamentabili, prop. 64, 65. 99 Ibid., pp. 684-5. 'On the Historical Character of the First Chapters of Genesis', Response of the Biblical Commission, 30 June 1909. See also H. W. Paul, The Edge of Contingency, French Catholic Reaction to Scientific Change from Darwin to Duhem (Gainesville, Florida, 1979), p. 107. 100 M. Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics (Paris, 1896; tr. I. Trethowan, London, 1964), p. 162. 101 For Loisy, as for Sabatier, who influenced him, and unlike Newman, 'development' meant the withering away of most dogmas, but his grounds were historical and religious rather than scientific. See further Bernard M. G. Reardon's contribution 'Roman Catholic Modernism', in vol. 11 of the present work. 102 F. von Hiigel, The Mystical Element in Religion (London, 1908), vol. 11, p. 332. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid., pp. 380-2. 105 Ibid., p. 379. 106 Von Hiigel, Eternal Life, p. 296. 107 W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 498. See further John E. Smith's contribution 'William James and Josiah Royce', in vol. 11 of the present work. 108 W. James, The Will to Believe (New York, 1897), pp. 14-15. James said that it was a mistake to hold any opinion as though it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible. But radical empiricism, as he named it, ought equally not to inhibit action. Hypotheses should be tested, as well as held.

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Religion and Science Bibliographical

essay

A full bibliography of this subject would have to mention most theological books written between i860 and 1914. Only a selection can be printed here, without prejudice to what is omitted. Primary sources: on the scientific side these include J. B. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy (Paris, 1809; tr. H. Elliot, New York, 1962); C. Lyell, The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (2nd edn, London, 1863); C. Darwin, The Origin of Species (London, 1859; ed. J. W. Burrow, 1958), The Descent of Man (London, 1871), and Autobiography, ed. N. Barlow (London, 1958); W. K. Clifford, Lectures and Essays, ed. L. Stephen (2 vols., London, 1879); T. H. Huxley, Collected Essays (9 vols., London, 1893-4); St G. Mivart, On the Genesis of Species (London, 1871), and Essays and Criticisms (2 vols., London, 1892); A. R. Wallace, Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection (London, 1871) and Darwinism (London 1889). Relevant modifications of the philosophy of science took place through the work of E. Mach, The Science of Mechanics (London, 1893); H. Hertz, The Principles ofMechanics (1894; English translation, London, 1899); H. Poincare, Science and Hypothesis (Paris, 1902; English translation, London, 1905); E. Le Roy, Dogme et Critique (Paris, 1907); P. Duhem, The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory (2nd edn, 1914; English translation, Princeton, 1954): these were commented on by writers like E. Boutroux, Science and Religion in Contemporary Philosophy (1908; English translation, London, 1909), and J. Ward, The Realm of Ends (Cambridge, 1911). For the point of view of the philosophy of religion, one should consult, e.g.: M. Arnold, Literature and Dogma (London, 1873); M. Blondel, Letter on Apologetics (Paris, 1896; English translation, London, 1964); R. Eucken, The Life of the Spirit (London, 1908); E. Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe (1899; English translation, London, 1900); H. Hoffding, The Philosophy of Religion (1901; English translation, London, 1906); W. James, The Will to Believe (New York, 1897) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York, 1902); J. S. Mill, Three Essays on Religion (London, 1874); F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Leipzig, 1886; tr. W. Kaufmann, New York, 1966); L. A. Sabatier, Outline of a Philosophy of Religion (Paris, 1896; English translation, London, 1897); L. Stephen, Essays on Freethinking and Plainspeaking (London, 1873); F. Temple, The Relations between Religion and Science (London, 1885) and F. R. Tennant, The Origin and Propagation of Sin (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1908). For a sense of the more theological climate consult: T. R. Birks, The Scripture Doctrine of Creation (London, 1872); H. Drummond, The Ascent of Man (London, 1894); A. Gray, Darwiniana, ed. A. H. Dupree (Harvard, 1963); C. Hodge, What is Darwinism? (New York, 1874); F. von Hiigel, The Mystical Element in Religion (London, 1908) and Eternal Life (Edinburgh, 1912); J. R. Illingworth, Reason and Revelation (London, 1906); F. H. Johnson, God in Evolution (New York, 1911); A. Moore, Science and the Faith (London, 1889); R. Otto, Naturalism and Religion (London, 1907); A. Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (1870-4; English translation, Edinburgh, 1900); E. Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity (1901; English translation, London, 1972); P. N. Waggett, The Scientific Temper in Religion (London, 1905), and G. F. Wright, Studies in Science and Religion (Andover, 1882). Secondary sources: there are very many historical studies of the period which bear on this subject, and this is a selection only. A. Aliotta, 'Science and Religion in the Nineteenth Century', in Science, Reality and Religion, ed. J. Needham (London, 1925); R. C. Bannister, Social Darwinism, Science and Myth in Anglo-American Social Thought (Philadelphia, 1979); S. Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society 1850-1Q6O (London, 1977); R. W. Burkhardt, The Spirit of System, Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology (Harvard, 1977); O. Chad wick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975); Y. Conry, Uintroduction du darwinisme en France au xixe siecle (Paris,

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JOHN KENT 1974); G. Daly, Transcendence and Immanence (Oxford, 1980) discusses Blondel and Le Roy; J. Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural Science(London, 1961); L. Eiseley, Darwin s Century (New York, 1958); A. Ellegard, Darwin and the General Reader: The Reception of Darwin s Theory of Evolution in the British Periodical Press 1859-72 (Gothenburg, 1958); D . Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism (New York, 1971); C. C. Gillispie, Genesis and Geology (New York, 1959); T. F. Glick (ed.), The Comparative Reception of Darwinism (Austin, Texas, 1974); J. C. Greene, The Death of Adam, Evolution and its Impact on Western Thought (Iowa, 1959); J. W. Gruber, A Conscience in Conflict; The Life ofSt G. Mivart (New York, i960); R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (2nd edn, Boston, 1955); R. Hooykaas, The Principle of Uniformity in Geology, Biology and Theology (Leyden, 1963); W. R. Hutchison, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Harvard, 1976); H. Hovercamp, Science and Religion in America 1800-1860 (Pennsylvania, 1978); G. Jones, Social Darwinism in English Thought (Sussex, 1980); A. Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, The Popularization ofDarwin in Germany 1860-1914 (Carolina, 1981); J. Kent, From Darwin to Blatchford (London, 1966); E. Lurie, Louis Agassiz (Chicago, i960); M. Mandelbaum, History, Mind and Reason (Baltimore, 1971); E. Manier, The Young Darwin and His Cultural Circle (Dordrecht/Boston, 1978); G. M. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience (Yale, 1970); H. L. McKinney, Wallace and Natural Selection (Yale, 1972); J. R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, A Study of the Protestant Struggle to come to terms with Darwin in Britain and America 1870—1900 (Cambridge, 1979); H. W. Paul, The Edge of Contingency, French Catholic Reaction to Scientific Change from Darwin to Duhem (Gainesville, Florida, 1979); J. D . Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer, The Evolution of a Sociologist (London, 1971); G. Rowell, Hell and the Victorians (Oxford, 1974); M. Rudwick, The Meaning of Fossils, Episodes in the History of Paleontology (London, 1972); E. R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism (Chicago, 1970); W. S. Smith, The London Heretics 1870-1914 (London, 1967); M. Teich and R. M. Young (eds.), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (London, 1973); F. M. Turner, Between Science and Religion, The Reaction to Scientific Naturalism in Late Victorian England (Yale, 1974); P. J. Vorzimmer, Charles Darwin, The Years of Controversy 1859-82 (London, 1972).

2

Friedrich Nietzsche CARL HEINZ RATSCHOW Translated by Christabel Winter

On interpreting Nietzsche Nietzsche's thought does not submit easily to conventional forms of exposition or appraisal. His was not an 'academic' philosophy, and he was adamant that it should not be treated as such. In form it is idiosyncratic and bewildering; in content it is radical, ruthless and very often offensive. So was it intended. Scholars and academic philosophers have been perplexed by this 'untimely thinker'. Some have dismissed his thought altogether as philosophically uninteresting; others have attempted to domesticate it, to bring it into the mainstream of western philosophical thought. Both approaches are misguided and are wholly unable to give a convincing account of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) or his significance as a philosophical and a religious thinker. To do him justice, we must treat him as both. For it is clear that the impetus for his philosophical quest lay in his violent opposition to Christianity and in his almost frantic attempt to replace it with a viable substitute. He remains, in this sense, a religious thinker even in his opposition to religion. One ought not speak of Nietzsche as philosopher without some qualification. He was a philologist, not a philosopher, by training. He lacked detailed or even accurate knowledge of any of the intellectual movements of his day - including those which he took up or with which he took issue in his writings. His insights into those movements, especially those insights which penetrate most deeply to the heart of the matter, are almost wholly intuitive and untutored. For the most part his 'arguments', not least those regarding religion, are sustained more by the strength of emotion than by the soundness of reasoning. Even though much that he says carries conviction, Nietzsche could never be more to the philosophical world than a dilettante and a curiosity. This unfortunate fact mars his philosophical endeavour from 37

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the outset. Any attempt to gloss it over is bound to come to grief. Yet, one has not dispensed with Nietzsche when one acknowledges this fact. There are at least two senses in which he remains philosophically interesting. First, Nietzsche embraces in himself and in his thought some of the most conflicting features of the nineteenth century. In his thought, as in his time, the European Enlightenment was both fulfilled and undermined; the influence of Romanticism was both extended and truncated; the reliability of 'science' was vaunted and almost simultaneously its foundations were eroded by the rise of historicism and 'perspectivism'. The contradictions of his time were not resolved in Nietzsche's thought, but they were allowed to come to full expression. It is the very conflicts and contradictions of his thought which make him so representative of his time and this in spite of his own consciousness of not belonging to his age, of having been born 'out of season'. This paradox makes it difficult to locate Nietzsche precisely within nineteenth-century thought or even to place him most appropriately within a set of volumes on western religious thought in the nineteenth century. To put the article on Nietzsche immediately after the one on 'Religion and Science' is not without justification. For, despite the conflicts within Nietzsche's thought, there is a dominant philosophical tendency which serves to give his thought more unity than one might have supposed. Nietzsche's thought - and this constitutes the second sense in which he remains philosophically interesting - can be loosely characterised as a variety of scientific materialism. He came to see every happening and all worldly phenomena as being governed by the purely material force of the 'will to power'. Written in the summer of 1885, the following fragment (later incorporated into the posthumously published collection called The Will to Power) forcefully illustrates the truly radical quality of Nietzsche's scientific materialism: And do you know what 'the world' is to me? Shall I show it to you in my mirror? This world: a monster of energy, without beginning, without end; a firm, iron magnitude of force that does not grow bigger or smaller, that does not expend itself but only transforms itself . . .; enclosed by nothingness as by a boundary . . .; a sea of forces flowing and rushing together, eternally changing, eternally flooding back . . ., with an ebb and a flood of its forms; out of the simplest forms striving toward the complex, out of the stillest, most rigid, coldest forms toward the hottest, most turbulent, most self-contradictory, and then again returning home to the simple out of this abundance, out of the play of contradictions back to the joy of concord, still affirming itself in this uniformity of its courses and its years, blessing itself as that which must return eternally, as a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness: this, my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying, this mystery world of the two-fold voluptuous delight, my 'beyond good and eviP, without goal, unless the joy of the circle is itself a goal; without will, unless a ring shows good will toward itself. Do you

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Friedrich Nietzsche want a name for this world? A solution for all its riddles? . . .This world is the mill to power and nothing besidesl And you yourselves are also this will to power - and nothing besides! (KGW, VII/3,

33M) 1

This belief in the supremacy of matter and of will superseded for Nietzsche the Christian faith which he discarded in boyhood. With its discovery, his whole outlook on human existence became Utopian and orientated toward the future. He became obsessed with the idea of the progress of the human race, in the form first of'the genius' and then of the Ubermensch, the one who is said to transcend humankind as humankind has transcended the lower animals. At the same time he regarded the force of matter as amounting to absolute necessity, and therefore as obviating all moral responsibility, thus providing the justification for the inhuman excesses associated with his vision of the Ubermensch. Nietzsche was not a 'speculative' philosopher, in the pejorative sense of that term. His philosophical thought gained its sense of urgency from his fierce opposition to Christianity and all it stood for. This opposition began, in accordance with the then-current vogue, as a general critique of religion as such. Like others of his day, however, it is quite clear that he did not wish simply to eradicate religion, but sought rather to replace it by something more appropriate. His single-minded search for a purely naturalistic explanation of reality gave Nietzsche's thought the character of a ReligionsErsatz, as it was termed fifty years later by Ernst Bloch. In this regard one sees that Nietzsche is simply following a common tendency within nineteenth-century thought, one represented also by figures such as Marx and Tolstoy. Such thinkers all sought to replace the old Christian superstitions and other-worldly hopes by new vitalistic hypotheses and by purely practical, this-worldly goals. All these attempts were motivated by a deep desire for the happiness and well-being of humankind. Whereas Christianity was judged to have debased man before God and to have impeded any real human advance by seeking salvation in the hereafter, these critical movements or 'religion-substitutes' always demanded salvation here and now, and recognition that man himself is the ultimate or highest being. Such features also illustrate the observation that every 'religion-substitute' is always itself modelled, whether or not consciously, on the existing religion(s) for which it is a substitute. One sort of 'ultimate being' is replaced by another. So, too, with Nietzsche. This feature of his thought allows us to treat him as a religious thinker. But it further causes us to marvel that he seems to have been unaware that his own strategy conformed closely to a trend widespread in nineteenth-century thought. Once again one is confronted with the paradox of a thinker participating in the main currents 39

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of his time whilst remaining personally convinced that he was born 'out of season'. How, then, do we approach so paradoxical a thinker as Nietzsche? A more conventional thinker could be approached thematically, treating in turn each of his several main ideas and their systematic connections with one another. But Nietzsche is not a conventional philosopher and this approach simply will not do. In his case, his thought is so intimately connected with his person that one has no choice but to approach his writings as he recommended they be approached, namely, biographically. Nietzsche frequently claimed that his writings were autobiographical in character and occasionally went so far as to claim that they were written for none but himself. 'And so I relate my life to myself, he announced in the preface to Ecce Homo. His thoughts and his personal life, or 'destiny', as he liked to think of it, are inseparable. He speaks only of what he himself experiences and, indeed, is. This means that for Nietzsche philosophy has an urgency to it. The horrors which he foretold for European civilisation - namely, the collapse of Christian faith; nihilism and the revaluation of values - he had already endured in his personal life. His thoughts articulated his own inner experiences of those horrors and his own personal means of surmounting them. So hardness of will, which he cultivated in defiance of his ever-weakening body, formed the heart of his vision of the future. The will to power is the will to overcome. And the crisis of modern civilisation is overcome, in Nietzsche's view, only through an extraordinary act of will. It is, therefore, impossible to separate Nietzsche's thought from Nietzsche's life-experiences. This has a number of significant consequences. First, his ideas are to be regarded more as personal confessions than as propositions to be held up for objective scrutiny. They can only ever be expressions of his own personal, conditioned existence. More than most would-be philosophers, Nietzsche bound himself to his own age, to its anxieties and to its hopes. He identified himself completely with that point in modern history at which nihilism was perceived to be gradually engulfing western civilisation: old values were thought to have collapsed but no new ones had replaced them. Nietzsche believed that in living out his own fate he would discover a means of 'writing new values on new tables'. This conviction accounts for his extraordinary self-esteem. How are we to estimate his success? Perhaps we should refrain from such judgment. Perhaps we should heed the advice Nietzsche himself once gave in a letter to Carl Fuchs: 'If you should ever come to write about me . . . describe me, characterise me by all means - but please have the sense not to try to appraise my work. You should instead adopt a refreshingly neutral attitude' (29 July 1888). He went on to add that he should be regarded with the sort of detached 40

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curiosity which would be shown toward a strange specimen in botany or zoology. We must learn diffidence in handling Nietzsche's thought. All we can say of his work, therefore, is that it addresses a particular phase of western European history. We must nonetheless persist in the endeavour to 'describe and characterise' Nietzsche's work, since the vitalistic materialism which he developed affords us insight into the waning nineteenth century and the dawning twentieth century, when Nietzsche's influence became imprinted in sometimes surprising ways. The second main consequence of the autobiographical character of Nietzsche's thought is that his insights - or, at least, his moods - change in accordance with changes in his personal circumstances. This means that it would be misguided to attempt to formulate a summary statement of his views on any particular subject - on God, for example, or even his notion of nihilism or his concept of will. We would be better advised simply to note what, in the light of key events in his personal life, he felt and wrote at any particular time or in any particular year. Equally important is the fact that he refused even to contemplate producing a complete 'system' of thought. Such a thought seems to have been personally repugnant to Nietzsche: 'I mistrust all systematisers and avoid them', he reported in the Twilight of the Idols, adding, 'The will to a system is a lack of integrity.' So, there is no single work of Nietzsche's to which one could turn as a comprehensive and unambiguous summary of his 'position'. In each work his position is marked out afresh; in each work he sets out on a new task, writing in a new 'mood'. This last suggestion requires qualification in two ways. First, one must not imagine that Nietzsche's thought underwent a series of violent metamorphoses in the course of the years. He remained remarkably faithful to certain intentions from his schooldays onwards, so that certain essential elements run right the way through his work. Second, there are nonetheless good grounds for distinguishing fairly specific periods in Nietzsche's creative life. Although such boundaries are never exact and there is considerable overlap from one to the other, three main phases can usefully be distinguished in Nietzsche's intellectual development. The completion of thefirstthree Untimely Meditations (toward the end of 1874) can be regarded as marking the close of the first phase; the second seems to extend from then roughly to the winter of 1881, when Nietzsche began work on The Gay Science', the third would then extend from the production of Thus Spoke Zarathustra to the end of his productive life. No periodisation of a continuous process is wholly satisfactory, but this rough-and-ready division will prove useful if it helps guide us through the labyrinth of Nietzsche's thought. The third important consequence of the largely autobiographical

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character of Nietzsche's thought is that his unpublished fragments gain greater significance. His method of literary production relied on the extensive use of notebooks, in which he would jot down ideas as they occurred to him. The importance of these jottings has been recognised to a certain extent from the beginning. Some of his late entries were selected, edited (occasionally 'improved' by his sister), and arranged topically for the posthumously published collection of aphorisms which we know as The Will to Power. Although not without value, this volume is particularly misleading in that the aphorisms are ordered topically, not chronologically, with only the slightest regard to the actual context in which the aphorisms appeared in the original notebooks. In recent years these notebooks have been made available to us in full in the new Kritische Gesamtausgabey so that scholars are now in a far better position than before to understand Nietzsche's thought. Although it will be several years before the full potential of these Nachlassvolumes can be exploited, they can for the time being at least encourage us to rethink our understanding of Nietzsche by analysing his thought developmentally. That will be our object here.

Nietzsche's childhood faith and its repudiation The hallmark of the first phase of Nietzsche's religious thought is his emancipation from the Christian faith in which he was brought up.2 The Nietzsche household was one in which reigned a strong and unquestioning devotion to God. The deaths, within a year of each other, of his father and only brother left the six-year-old Friedrich in a household which, but for him, was made up entirely of women. This seems to have had two likely consequences. First, there can be no doubt that the doting, over-indulgent treatment which, as the sole-surviving male of the family, he received from his mother, paternal grandmother, his two aunts and his sister laid an early foundation for that self-esteem which grew later into almost pure narcissism and which found increasingly unrestrained expression in his writings. Second, he was raised in an atmosphere of peculiarly feminine piety. This was highly exaggerated and effusive, a type of piety in which every eventuality was attributed directly to the beneficent hand of God, in which every daily situation called forth a prayer and a host of godly sentiments, and in which an excessive humility was fostered. This is betrayed by the letters written to Nietzsche during his time at boarding school. And just how well Nietzsche himself imbibed this attitude and became well-versed in its overpious rhetoric is equally apparent from his own letters and poems of this time. 42

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Although it would be a mistake to underestimate the radically antiChristian nature of his later thought, it is clear that what he came to write against 'Christianity' seems most effective when viewed as a response to the rather extraordinary brand of self-conscious, highly emotional piety in which he had been nurtured as a child in an upper-middle-class home in mid-nineteenth-century Germany. It is rarely if ever possible entirely to erase the influences and impressions of childhood, and this Christian piety certainly left a deep mark on Nietzsche. It is probable that he never entirely escaped its smothering grasp. Even so, his earliest philosophical experiments show that by at least the age of eighteen Nietzsche was moving intellectually far beyond the Christian faith to an unashamed materialism. Two short philosophical essays from this period will serve our purposes here: 'Fate and History' and 'Free Will and Fate', both dating from Easter 1862, while Nietzsche was still at school.3 We find in them already the sort of incisive attack upon Christianity which would remain highly characteristic of his entire work. 'The whole of Christendom', we are told, 'is founded upon no more than supposition', the recognition of which is the great new fact of the most modern period of human history.4 These essays exhibit as well an already developed contempt for the Christian attitudes of humility and subservience to the will of God attitudes which are said merely to foster irresolution of will and weakness of character. Quiescent acceptance of all that happens as being ordained by God is singled out as a particularly dangerous form of illusion. The belief is dangerous because it conceals a cowardly inability resolutely to face up to the true nature of fate. Christianity, it is said, fosters self-deception, rather than healthy fatalism. This more 'healthy' fatalism is one in which natural happenings are given natural explanations. Having even at this stage repudiated any sort of spirit-matter dualism, Nietzsche insists that this entails naturalistic or materialistic explanations. But an antagonism arises for the youthful Nietzsche at just this point. There is seen to be a fundamental conflict between fate and the apparent free will of the individual. This conflict is said to constitute the driving force of the whole historical process. Fate ensures that the individual is inescapably drawn along in a stream of events over which he has no obvious control. Over against this is the struggle of the individual to impose his own will on events around him, and thereby to free himself from the onward march of world history. History, we are told, travels forward by means of a dialectical oscillation between these two poles. However, their opposition can be overcome for the individual, providing he allows himself to become united with his own fate. In other words, Nietzsche recommends acceptance both of the view that all things are directed by fate 43

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('all events are determined by other interrelated events') and at the same time of the almost karmic view that 'through his own actions, [man himself] is the agent of all that befalls him'.5 It should be obvious to all who know Nietzsche's mature thought that even as a young man he was already heading in the direction towards his famous doctrine of'willing one's own fate'. It is equally obvious that, in both cases, he was struggling to discover an entirely naturalistic explanation of cosmic and historical events alike. At this point Nietzsche seems to have been aware of the consequences of his 'new' views: in a letter accompanying the two essays in question he observed that his new insights into fate would in fact constitute a denial of any effective Higher Power or controlling deity. It is not entirely clear at this stage, however, that young Friedrich was fully ready to embrace these consequences. Even so, Nietzsche the critic of Christianity was well on his way. And Nietzsche the critic of 'scholarly oxen' was not far behind. For the inner conflict he experienced with his Christian-all-too-Christian up-bringing was not the only disharmony in his personal life which affected his work as a writer. Nietzsche's first steps in his career as an academic were precociously sure-footed. Most exceptionally for a German academic, Nietzsche was appointed to a professorial chair without even the qualification of a doctoral degree, not to mention the higher 'habilitating' degree normally required for a university lectureship. He was appointed professor of classical languages at the University of Basel at the remarkable age of twenty-four. Almost immediately, however, a struggle developed within him between the scholarly demands of his university appointment and the contempt which he increasingly felt for scholarship in general and for classical philology in particular. This insidious feeling resulted in his inwardly distancing himself from his academic discipline long before he was actually enabled by progressively ill health to abandon it and devote himself wholly to working out his own philosophy. Lying behind his growing hostility towards scholarship and towards all intellectual activity pursued for its own sake was the belief that such activities were the product of and, in turn, themselves merely fostered dullness of wit and pettiness of mind. On precisely the same grounds he began increasingly to despise all that was characteristic of the German middle class, especially its values of orderliness, conformity and - above all its unswerving Christian piety. Against the narrow, worm-like 'digging about' of the scholar, as against the complacent respectability of the Christian bourgeoisie, Nietzsche exalted the heroic search for truth in which he now regarded himself as vitally engaged. His quest was fortified further by his discovery of the works of 44

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Schopenhauer and by his association with Wagner, whom he had long idolised. The discovery of Schopenhauer's philosophy in November 1865 has often been likened to a religious conversion, in that it opened the doors for Nietzsche to a whole new world of thought in which he immersed himself enthusiastically. And, though the enthusiasm was short-lived, Schopenhauer's influence on Nietzsche's subsequent thought cannot be disputed. His almost filial devotion to Wagner, too, waned within a few years. Precipitated in part by Wagner's decision to move to Bayreuth, Nietzsche's disillusionment was complete by the time Wagner had written Parsifal, the 'sacred music drama' of redemption which Nietzsche regarded as a betrayal of all they held in common. Just as his rebellion against both was inevitable,6 Nietzsche's attraction to Schopenhauer and Wagner at this time in his life was understandable. He most likely found in the works of each an inspired, visionary quality - a vitality and immediacy which was wholly lacking in his own dull, painstaking work as a philologist. Together they presented a holistic view of the world, a disillusionment with prevailing conditions, and a drive toward new ideals. Nietzsche's ambivalence and increasing alienation from his academic discipline are clearly exhibited in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, a volume taken more seriously today than when it was published in 1872. It would appear to have been intended by Nietzsche himself as a serious contribution to classical philology. His professional colleagues regarded it as speculative and incomprehensible. Being almost universally dismissed at the time as fundamentally unsound from a philological point of view, it did much to destroy his early reputation as an outstanding classical scholar. In style, it was thoroughly non-professional and unacademic; in content, it was bold but inadequately argued. In some ways it remains a highly suggestive book; but a competent contribution to academic scholarship it is not. There is another way to view matters, however. Rather than as merely a failed contribution to classical philology, it could be viewed as a first (though not altogether successful) attempt by Nietzsche to break out of the narrow confines of a discipline which he had found to be increasingly restrictive. Nietzsche's imagination needed more space in which to expand. The Birth of Tragedy is perhaps more accurately seen as a speculative-philosophical, than as a scientific-philological, project. In it Nietzsche paints an imaginary world and offers his vision of yearned-after innocence. Nietzsche himself, absorbed as he was in his new-found creative pursuits, seems not to have been aware of what he had done in The Birth of Tragedy and was genuinely astonished by the harsh handling it received within the academic community. 45

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Whilst his implied critique of traditional academic pursuits in The Birth of Tragedy seems to have been almost wholly unconscious, the fully explicit critique offered later that same year infivepublic lectures 'On the Future of Our Educational Institutions' (KGWy 111/2, 133-244) can be said to represent an open and bitter attack on his discipline, as on scholarship generally. And in the Untimely Meditations which were to follow, he abandoned philological subject-matter altogether, devoting himself wholly to his new interests. Suggestive though they are, these works give no fully reliable indication of Nietzsche's philosophical intentions. Indeed, it may well be that at this stage in his intellectual development Nietzsche himself had no definite plan or goal. But, by examining carefully his personal notebooks from the winter of 1874-5, w e a r e able to form a much clearer picture of his implied goals than would be possible by concentrating on his published writings alone. The winter of 1874-5 was a decisive turning-point for Nietzsche. His notes from the time focus on three inter-related subjects: namely, antiquity, Christianity and education. The doctrine of man - his nature and his potential - binds these three themes together and in the process emerges as the true centre of Nietzsche's thought. His interest in Greek antiquity, for instance, is focused on 'the quality of humanity which the ancient world exhibits' (KGW, VI/I, 93Q. The Greeks are said to have fostered an ideal of the 'natural man', of which they were themselves the embodiment, at least until it was attacked and destroyed by Christianity. Christianity, according to Nietzsche's interpretation, has always been opposed to the 'natural' in man, substituting humanitarianism (die Humanitdt) for pure humanity (das Menschliche). The Greek ideal of humanity is held to be characterised by a sort of naivete which encourages true individualism and mhumane-ness qualities which are stifled by Christian humanitarianism. Christianity by its own nature necessarily seeks to suppress all man's natural instincts, especially those which express what Nietzsche had termed 'the brutal element in man's nature'. Such un-naturalness can only be deplored and countered at every opportunity. Nietzsche assigns to 'education' the task of reversing the unhealthy effects of Christianity and of restoring man's lost naivete. Clearly, his vision of the future role of education does not leave room for the sort of dry academic pursuits which he knew in the schools and universities of his own day. They were far from his ideal, as his lectures 'On the Future of Our Educational Institutions' made clear. He envisaged instead, albeit dimly, a type of education whose object would be to promote a passion for life and all its possibilities. It would have as its aim the creation of a new type of man: the 46

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'genius', as he called it at this stage. Education, it would seem, came to be regarded by Nietzsche as the moulder of human destiny, the means whereby the next stage of the evolutionary process would be attained, and whose practice became a sort of religion. The cultivation of the genius had formed the theme of his third Untimely Meditation, but it came to haunt him almost continuously until it became his all-consuming concern. 'My religion', he confessed to himself in his notebook, 'consists in the work of creating the genius' (KGW, IV/I, 122). When examined in the light of day, however, this is seen to be no more than a Utopian dream. And in common with most Utopian dreams, it has no real content. Nietzsche offers no practical details whatever as to how this cultivation of the 'genius' is to be effected. All that we are able to gather about the genius or 'bearer of the future' is that he will have the anti-Christian qualities of inhumane-ness, individualism and self-love. Such geniuses, we are told, will be called 'annihilators' and will ruthlessly criticise present conditions and root out evil and error wherever it may be found. But we are left in the dark as to what would constitute such evil and error or how it would be eradicated. Nor is it revealed to his reader (or yet known to Nietzsche himself) to which higher truth these evil and false ideas will sacrifice themselves. All seems to lie somewhere in the mists of the future. Indeed, Nietzsche's 'religion' at this point is pure futurism which makes no direct contact with the present world. One is tempted to link Nietzsche's preoccupation with the future with the more general tendency in the second half of the nineteenth century to exalt the idea of progress and to place faith in its future promises. Be that as it may, for present purposes it is more important to point out that in Nietzsche's case the longing for the future and its fulfilled promises went hand-in-hand with his growing despair about the past and his loss of interest in the ancient world. The reception given his Birth of Tragedy seems to have made clear to Nietzsche that the imagination has freer rein when orientated toward the future than when orientated toward the past. From this time on, his interest in the past was highly selective: Nietzsche thought the ancient past to be worthwhile only to the extent that it could provide an inspiration toward a purer humanity, toward a more immediate involvement in life and its possibilities. This was the only possible way in which Greek antiquity could continue to have any value for him. In every other respect, it is no less obsolescent than is Christianity, itself a product of the ancient world. Greek antiquity and Christianity alike are said to have their 'foundation in superstition, the cultus and a similar view of the world' (KGW, IV/I, 159). Antiquity and Christianity are both increasingly irrelevant and for much the same reasons. 'This would be a worthwhile task', Nietzsche muses to 47

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himself, 'to show that antiquity is irretrievable, and with it Christianity and the whole foundation hitherto of our society and political life'.7 Both classical wisdom and traditional Christianity have been superseded by modern science and learning {KGW, IV/I, 145). This suggests to Nietzsche that 'the death of antique culture' is inevitable (KGWy IV/I, 159). He goes on to demand that classical studies be removed from the school curriculum, since it is no longer useful to the young, and that it be replaced by 'the science of the future' (KGWy IV/I, 160). Only then will 'our educational institutions' be equipped properly to cultivate and to equip the man of the future, 'the genius'. Education cannot create the new man ex nihilo. Indeed, the genius is a kind of evolutionary sport: 'through an aberration of nature . . . the genius suddenly comes to life' {KGW, IV/I, 171). But, education is entrusted with his training and cultivation when he appears. Even at this stage, Nietzsche's views are fiercely elitist. Yet 'the genius' is cultivated not for his own sake, but for the sake of the future of humankind. And in that future, neither Christianity nor classical culture has any role to play. By focusing not so much on his published works as on his unpublished notebooks from the period, we have gained a clearer impression of the direction being taken by Nietzsche. From the two preoccupations of his youth, namely Christianity and the classical world, his interest was gradually but certainly shifting toward scientific processes and the necessities of the natural world. These new interests wholly preoccupy him during the next phase of his thought. The shift meant, among other things, that he could no longer operate within the basically Idealist outlook of Schopenhauer, and he was forced finally to confess - to himself as well as to others - that he had in fact become a thoroughgoing materialist. We shall see, however, that Nietzsche's brand of'materialism' was tempered - and complicated - by his 'perspectivism'.

'Chemistry of concepts and sensations' Nietzsche's anti-humanistic, scientific materialism finds expression initially in Human, All-too-Human, the first volume of which appeared in 1878. This book punctuated the second phase in Nietzsche's development, a phase which lasted from his discovery in late 1875 of Paul Ree's Psychological Reflections until the winter of 1881, when he arrived at the doctrine of 'eternal recurrence'.8 Human, All-too-Human also introduced for the first time publicly Nietzsche's new aphoristic style of communication, a style which persisted until the very end of his productive life as a writer. After The Birth of Tragedy and the four Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche 48

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wrote few books which were not almost wholly aphoristic in style. It is a style which can cause enormous difficulties to anyone wishing to comprehend Nietzsche's thought. Walter Kaufmann overstated matters no more than marginally when he observed, 'Nietzsche's books are easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker.'9 Nietzsche's use of aphorism is the main culprit. Why did he choose such a style? It is arguable whether he adopted the aphorism because - as he sometimes suggested - he believed it to be the most appropriate form in which to express his thoughts, or whether he adopted it because - as he sometimes revealed in unguarded remarks - he had no real choice. By comparing his published books with his private notebooks one sees clearly how he went about his work as author: he would scribble down thoughts impulsively as they occurred to him and gradually perfect their formulation until he was ready to arrange them into more thematic groupings suitable for publication. It thus suited Nietzsche's temperament to write in the form of short, disjointed maxims. More significantly, however, it was virtually all that his precarious health would allow. His constantly recurring headaches and painfully over-sensitive eyes made sustained concentration impossible. He once admitted in a letter to Peter Gast that bad health necessitated his brief, 'telegram style', as he called it, adding that he hoped better for his friend, so that he need never himself become an 'aphorism-man' (August 1881). On the other hand, Nietzsche's evident admiration for the French aphorists in particular should not be forgotten. And it must also be allowed that not only his perspectivism, but also the peculiar style of'intellectual impressionism' which he cultivated, may well have found in the aphorism their ideal medium. It is by no means impossible that the emergence of the aphoristic form for the first time in Human, All-too-Human was occasioned by the change of theme that occurs there, a change which signifies Nietzsche's emancipation from classical philology and from the influence of Wagner. Whatever the reason - or combination of reasons - which led to its adoption, there is no question that the aphoristic style was used by Nietzsche to good advantage. Schopenhauer's falling from favour, followed by a personal quarrel with Wagner, marked the end of the first phase in Nietzsche's creative life. By now, art was no longer esteemed and had been relegated to the same level as religion - as a 'narcotic' and an enemy of reason. Disillusioned already with his childhood faith, with his academic discipline, and now with his more recent heroes, Nietzsche was clearly ripe for a change in direction and for a new intellectual stimulus. It came in the autumn of 1875, during a period of sick leave from the University of Basel. At that time Nietzsche read Paul 49

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Ree's only recently published Psychological Reflections and then, shortly afterwards, discovered the works of Voltaire. These two together provided the inspiration for the scientific materialism which came to fruition with the publication of Human, All-too-Human in May 1878.10 Nietzsche dedicated volume one of that work to the memory of Voltaire, whom he hailed as 'one of the greatest liberators of the spirit'. The idea of'the free spirit', together with what Nietzsche called 'pure knowledge', became the dominant motifs of this middle period in his development. Nietzsche's new programme is outlined in the very first aphorism of Human, All-too-Human: namely, 'Chemistry of Concepts and Sensations'. Building on the distinction drawn there between the older metaphysical philosophy, which presupposes the underived character of 'things in themselves', and the newer historical philosophy, 'which can no longer be separated from natural science', Nietzsche goes on to recommend, What we now require, and what is possible only now in virtue of the present level of the individual sciences, is a chemistry of moral, religious, and aesthetic conceptions and sensations, as well as of all the impulses we experience in every cultural and social relation and, indeed, even when we are alone . . . (KGW, iv/2, 20, § 1)

This sort of chemical analysis, which yields the purest form of cognition of which we are capable, shows with certainty that man and all he experiences or does or is is radically transient and historical. Indeed, it shows that everything is transient and historical. Nothing is; everything becomes. There simply are no 'things in themselves': everything is subject to a continual process of becoming. There are no 'eternal truths': all beliefs and values have evolved and continue to evolve in human history. To think otherwise is metaphysical illusion and betrays the family failing of all philosophers hitherto. 'Lack of historical sense is the failing of all philosophers' (§ 2). Not only metaphysical or religious beliefs and values come within the range of historical philosophy. Science itself is subject to Nietzsche's newstyle 'chemical analysis'. Science's most basic concepts - including number, causality, space and time - are treated as mere 'perspectival forms', the result of our seeing and interpreting things from a certain limited perspective. So, our common-sense and even 'scientific' views of the world, no less than our metaphysical and theological views, are without firm or 'objective' grounding. They are a sort of prejudice, arising out of persistent habits of thinking governed by the grammar of our language. In one sense they are not even interpretations of the world, since that would suggest there is something objective of which they could be an interpretation. They are mere perspectives. And, although one may set this 50

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perspective against that perspective, one cannot set any perspective against the world 'in itself. 'World in itself is an empty concept, worthy only of a Homeric laugh. Is there then no reason to prefer one perspective to another? In a sense there is. One perspective may be preferred, not because it is more nearly 'true', but because it is more useful. All perspectives might be 'false'; but we would never know this, since there is no extra-perspectival position from which it could be determined. We can determine nonetheless that some perspectives are useful. This is the justification of science over against, say, metaphysics. But science, too, is caught in the labyrinth of language; it, too, is a function of grammar. We form our perspectives and build our worlds, not so much through observing patterns, as through creating patterns by means of our language. As Nietzsche put it much later, in his Nachlass from 1888, 'the world appears logical to us, because we made it logical in the first place' (KGW, vin/2, 82). This is entirely continuous with the 'perspectivism' enunciated already in Human, All-too-Human (cf. §§11,19). There Nietzsche argued that man's mistake was to think that in having language he had knowledge of the 'real' world, when in fact no 'real' world corresponds to our language. Just as the concept of the 'thing in itself is an error, so the concept of 'the real world' is the sum of all our errors. To understand this is to have the sort of 'pure' cognition which Nietzsche commends. Although science is subject to Nietzschean perspectivism, metaphysics and morality are its chief victims. For, if we take him seriously, we see that life has no meaning, hidden or open, which is lying there - so to speak waiting to be discovered. To be sure, this is not a comforting outlook. Nietzsche himself acknowledges as much. In the aphorism entitled 'An Erroneous View of Life Necessary for Life' (§ 33), he suggests that most of us survive only by deceiving ourselves with metaphysical fantasies; by seeing in the world only what we want to see, and by persuading ourselves that life is worthwhile. This 'impurity' of vision shields from us the ultimate futility of existence. True or 'pure' understanding, however, forces upon us the recognition that life is ultimately pointless and without meaning, that humankind is without purpose and that all its knowledge and activity are therefore futile. Life itself is an intrinsically senseless torrent of happening, ruled by an arbitrary and inconquerable Fate. Every aspect of life is governed by absolute necessity. In such a world there can be no grounds for praise or blame; no 'guilt', 'shame' or 'sin'. All moral and religious striving must be pointless, for in the face of such necessity no man can be held responsible for

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any of his actions. (§ 133). Religion, Nietzsche emphasises, is primarily a narcotic for which we must learn to do without. He sees it as originating amongst primitive man from the need to impose some kind of law upon the cruel and arbitrary world of nature. Unnerved by the randomness of natural occurrences, primitive man attributed all that befell him to irrational, magical forces; these he attempted by means of sacrifice, prayer and other cultic practices to placate and influence. The rise of modern science has obviated this need. Nietzsche opposed utterly the view fostered by the Romantics, and kept alive by Schopenhauer, that the religions contained valuable truths, expressed in allegorical form, which could be extracted and reformulated in 'demythologised' terms; in other words, that the wisdom of religion could be translated into the language of science. This enterprise was regarded as resting on an entirely false conception of the relation of religion to science. In Nietzsche's^view, 'never yet has a religion . . . either in the form of dogma or in the form of imagery, contained a single truth' (§ no). Religion was born out of fear, and has survived as long as it has by nurturing the same sense of fear experienced by humankind in its infancy. Since we no longer share the primitive conception of nature and its workings, we no longer have any use for the religious life. Indeed, 'its doors are forever closed to us' (§ 111). To be sure, there remain in our day 'after-pains' of the religious mentality, but these testify all the more to its loss (§§ 130, 131). Thus, according to Nietzsche, his 'pure' form of cognition unmasks morality, religion and all philosophy hitherto as spurious attempts to assign value and meaning to life and its contingencies. They are all three shown to rest upon the false belief that by attaching labels to things and by setting up scales of values they can tie life down and control it, rather than being controlled by it. The 'scientific' viewpoint destroys all such illusions, revealing all labels and all classifications - including science's own labels - to be fictitious. Good and evil, truth and falsehood, egoism and altruism and other such values which we attach to things are merely perspectival forms which we ourselves create and impose. Behind these labels there is no 'thing in itself to give them substance, no God to give them authority. Where does this leave us? Does this type of philosophy not rob us ofall hope and comfort in this world, and leave us to despair of the futility of all that we do and strive for? 'Will not our philosophy lead to tragedy? Will it not make us hostile towards life and towards better things?' (§ 34). Nietzsche knew well the cheerlessness and anguish that his own way of thinking brings; he even allowed that it was possible to regard it as a 'philosophy of destruction'. He also believed it possible, nevertheless, to rejoice in the new situation: 'to soar freely and fearlessly above men, morals, laws and conventional values'. This 52

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is the privilege of the truly free spirit, depicted as the 'Wanderer' in the final aphorism of the first volume of Human, All-too-Human. His experience is two-fold. He knows on the one hand the deep despair which follows upon loss of faith in the world of illusion. On the other hand, the sweeping away of all old constraints and values introduces hitherto unknown freedom, an unclouded vision and unlimited creative possibilities. So the 'Wanderer' delights in a new morning, 'in which truly good and bright things appear': 'these are the reward of all free spirits, of those who are at home in the forest, mountain and in solitude and who, in their happy, contemplative way, are both wanderers and philosophers' (§ 638). This paradoxical double consequence - of hope even in despair - was borne out in Nietzsche's own experience. Here, as always, he lived out his insights, suffering their full consequences in his own person. For the time being his ideas fostered gloom and nihilistic despair; yet already he anticipated the joy and exhilaration of a new beginning, a new dawn, an open sea. Thus out of seeming fruitlessness there emerged his Gay Science and the ecstatic vision of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The eternal recurrence of the same In the summer of 1881, at Sils Maria, 'six thousand feet above man and time', Nietzsche hit upon the doctrine of 'eternal recurrence'. This thought transformed his outlook and dominated the remaining years of his creative life.11 It came to him suddenly, as if by inspiration, after a spell of great unrest and immediately became the pivot of his whole existence. It is the insight of Nietzsche's life. 'When you imbibe the thought of thoughts it will transform you', we find in his notebooks from the period. 'To ask of everything you would do: is it such that I would do it innumerable times over? That is the weightiest question' {KGW, v/2, 394). Herein is measured the extent of a person's will to live. For all its obvious importance, however, Nietzsche remained highly secretive about the idea of recurrence, speaking openly of it on only rare occasions, and then most often in riddles and imagery. This tendency compounds the already difficult task of interpreting aright Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. It is easier to determine its place in his thought than it is to determine its meaning. The outstanding importance of the idea of eternal recurrence for Nietzsche lies in the fact that it corroborates his view, reached in volume one of Human, All-too-Human, about the absolute necessity of all life's happenings, and of man's consequent lack of responsibility for his own actions. Man, despite his intellectual freedom, is carried along in the restless, 53

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repetitive stream of happening. To accept life as it is, in its transience and senselessness; to want it as it is and in no other way - that is the greatest test. That is what Nietzsche signifies by the term 'yea-saying'. Nietzsche contrasts this insight with the teachings of the religions: 'This thought contains more than all the religions, which have taught us to despise this life as a fleeting thing and to look forward to an unknown other life' {KGW, v/2, 401). These notes, written in mid-1881, bring out quite clearly the rank Nietzsche accorded his idea. He was highly conscious of its religious significance, and consequently of his own importance as its sole guardian. From this time he thinks of himself increasingly as 'bearer of the greatest secret' and as the 'teacher of humankind', whose unique prophetic vocation it is to declare what lies in store for the human race. But some preparation is required: nature must first be stripped of all the metaphysical, moral and religious conceptions which have hitherto been imposed upon her. Then, and only then, will humankind - being itself'fully naturalised' (KGW, v/2, 423) - learn to live at one with the world as it is. Thus, as commended already in Human, All-too-Human, the necessity and purposelessness of nature must be fully acknowledged. These ideas, adumbrated in Human, All-too-Human but drawn from the notebooks of 1881-2, are strengthened in The Gay Science and then allowed to mature fully in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Other thoughts which are popularly regarded as typically Nietzschean receive their classic expression in The Gay Science. For instance, for thefirsttime in his writings onefindsin this volume the idea that 'God is dead' and that 'we are his murderers' (§ 125). He had, of course, already for a long time proclaimed religion to be a thing of the past. In the parable of'The Madman', however, the idea finds definitive form. Again, it is in The Gay Science that Nietzsche introduced his idea oi amor fati or 'the love of one's fate' (§ 276), the idea which carries us beyond toleration to glad acceptance of our already certain fates. In the section called 'Long Live Physics', Nietzsche enjoins us to become 'learners and discoverers of all things lawful and necessary in the world' (§ 335). For Nietzsche this means our becoming scientists, and more particularly physicists, for he understands his insights to be physical laws relating to the material processes governing the life of the world and of humankind. The Gay Science contains, too, the first public reference to the doctrine of eternal recurrence (§ 341). So, it is a book with which to reckon. But, its primary significance for us is that it prepares the way for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche's masterwork, his 'gift to humankind'. The preparatory role of The Gay Science is underscored by the first edition's concluding with the passage entitled 'Incipit Tragoedia' (§ 342), which reappears as the beginning of the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra (KGW, VI/I, sf). 54

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The message of Zarathustra is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, which is gradually unfolded in the book's several parts. The book shows just how the despondency which dominated Human, All-too-Human had been transformed into hopeful 'yea-saying' by the discovery of the doctrine of recurrence. In a sense, of course, nothing is changed. Life remains in Zarathustra as it had been in Human, All-too-Human. And yet everything is changed. In the face of the absolutely arbitrary, irresponsible and purposeless life-process, the certainty of eternal recurrence saves us from renouncing all hope, by conferring value on life and lending its every single aspect the utmost consequence. When endowed with eternal significance, every moment of life demands total commitment. It has to be lived in such a way that we are able to desire it 'once again and innumerable times more', indeed, for all eternity. Those who are strong enough categorically to will their own fate cease in Nietzsche's view to be men amongst men; they are transformed and become the first-fruits of the future. This forward thrust we have seen before in Nietzsche's works, but never quite as it is found in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the book he was convinced would supplant the holy books of all man's religions. It is, in a sense, a truly inspired work; and it differs in character from virtually everything Nietzsche had previously produced. The whole tenor of the book - or, at least, of its first three parts12 - is urgent, expectant, driving forward. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra Nietzsche's attitude is no longer primarily negative or destructive. Here he does not seek first and foremost to condemn or to destroy, as he had done in his earlier works. Rather, on the basis of deep and overpowering convictions he creates, fashioning new ideals, new hopes, a new humankind. Therein lies the power of this work above all other works by Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a book of complexity and subtlety. Clearly, it will not be possible here to summarise the whole; nor will it be possible even to enter the debate about whether the book constitutes a unified whole.13 It will have to suffice for our purposes here to concentrate attention on only two sections of Thus Spoke Zarathustra: namely, 'On the Blissful Islands', taken from Part II, and 'On the Vision and the Riddle', taken from Part III. Nietzsche's concern in the section 'On the Blissful Islands' (KGW, VI/I, 105-8) is to clear away our old religious conception of God, in order to make room for his new conception of man: man as truly free and creative. Nietzsche begins to call this man of the future 'the superman' (der Ubermensch), a term he employed for only a short time but, in spite of this, the one for which Nietzsche is generally remembered. The term 'Superman' is potentially misleading in several respects. In particular, however, one should not regard it as suggesting, in quasi-Darwinian fashion, an evolutionary development beyond man. That is clearly not what Nietzsche 55

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has in mind, though his rhetoric sometimes misleads readers in this direction. His much earlier thoughts about the development of'the genius' may well have implied this, but not his thoughts on the Ubermensch. Progressive, upward historical development is now ruled out by the idea of eternal recurrence of the same. By 'the superman' Nietzsche signifies a new quality of awareness, free from illusion and metaphysical supposition; in short, what he has referred to as the 'naturalisation' of man. So conceived, this new type man of the future assumes the position of highest value; he replaces the dead God. 'Once man said "God" when he gazed upon distant seas.' God was that in which man put his trust, that to which he turned for support when confronted with the awful greatness of the seas; God the creator and our strength. But now, Nietzsche teaches (through Zarathustra), we must learn instead to say 'Man'. God can no longer be relied upon, having been exposed as no more than the product of conjecture. We can rely only upon that which we ourselves are: namely, 'creative will'. This alone is our strength and this alone deserves our ultimate commitment. Henceforth we ourselves become creator - of a new world in our own image and of a new man. 'And you yourselves should create what you have hitherto called the world. The world should be formed in your image, by your reason, your will and your love.' It should include only those things which are 'within the limits of conceivability'. This rules out God and all metaphysical fictions. The 'will-to-truth' should dominate and one should be true to one's senses 'to the end'. Hope, then, must be found in the present, the transitory, the humanly-sensible world, and in our creative commitment to it. Our whole outlook on the world hitherto has been determined, according to Nietzsche, by religious Idealism and its teaching that only the ^transient, the faultfcss, the wwmoved and the ^conditioned is real. Nietzsche, speaking through his prophet Zarathustra, teaches the opposite; he inverts Goethe's famous line to read, 'All that is mtransitory is but a shadow.' This Nietzsche believes to be the most difficult idea to grasp and, once grasped, to accept. The grandeur and awesomeness of the world lure us into supposing that there is a God, something transcendent, immutable, eternal. But this supposition is 'evil and misanthropic'. To acknowledge the transitoriness of life; to affirm 'the most difficult truth' that all things, even our own thoughts and our own will, must pass away, and in the face of this knowledge to create and to will - therein lies for Nietzsche perfect freedom. 'Willing liberates: that is the true doctrine of will and freedom.' This freedom would be dashed to pieces, however, if there were gods. The notion of divine creative activity is incompatible with Nietzsche's doctrine of human creativity. Either we affirm a god, who created this world out of permanence, with the result that 56

Friedrich Nietzsche there is no room left for human will; or we affirm man, existing alone as supreme creative will, rejoicing in impermanence, even to the point of willing his own destruction. 'On the Blissful Islands' ends with a restatement of the central issue, namely the emergence of the new man. Nietzsche here employs to good effect the picture of an artist hewing an image from rock. In the hard stone of human existence, says Zarathustra, 'I see an image sleeping . . .the image of my visions'. He is frantic to chisel it out, to free it, and if in the process much else is damaged or destroyed by his hammer, 'what is that to me?' All that matters is 'the beauty of the superman': 'What are gods to me now?' The concept of the creative will lies behind the second selection, 'On the Vision and the Riddle', in which the doctrine of eternal recurrence is presented in the form of an allegory (KGW, VI/I, 193-8). The discourse is divided into two parts. In the first part, Zarathustra is pictured ascending a mountain path. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the image of 'going upwards' is critical. On his shoulder sits the 'spirit of gravity', a curious demonic creature, 'half dwarf, half mole'. He represents the forces which govern the material world: not only the force of gravity in the literal sense, but also the principle of impermanence and decay to which man and all else is subject. This creature tries to convince Zarathustra that 'all your striving is in vain. Your ascent is merely an illusion. Decline alone is real.' Zarathustra, however, is defiant, summoning courage: 'courage that attacks, for in every attack there is a triumphant shout'. Zarathustra's courage overcomes the despair and the fear which beset man when he contemplates the fact that he must perish. Courage conquers even death, 'for it says: "was that life? Very well! The same again!"' This courage, in other words, is amorfati. Courageous acceptance of our fate enables us to ascend despite the force of gravity and decay. This 'ascent', to the summit of humanity, or to the new man, is Nietzsche's equivalent of the Christian doctrines of salvation and redemption. According to Christian teaching, salvation occurs 'in spite of everything. The same is true of Zarathustra's 'triumphant shout', representing the triumph of the human will. This triumph occurs in spite 0/the world and its transience; in spite of its certain decay. In the second half of the discourse, Zarathustra goes on to tell the dwarf of his 'abysmal thought'; that is, of eternal recurrence. His explanation makes use of the place where they are standing: 'There was a gateway just where we had stopped.' This gateway signifies the meeting of two paths, one leading backwards, the other forwards, but each for an eternity. An eternity lies behind, and an eternity ahead. The name of the gateway is 'Moment' 57

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(Augenblick). In the Moment, past and future meet. Everything that has been, and everything that is not yet, come together here. The Moment draws all things together; all things exist in it, and therefore must exist again and again. In it, past becomes future, and future past: 'And you and I at this gateway, whispering together . . . must we not have been here before? . . . and must we not return eternally?' Zarathustra's reflections are superficially reminiscent of the Hindu doctrine of karma, according to which the effects of a person's life live on to haunt him for evermore. Nietzsche's meaning, however, is quite different from this. Behind the doctrine ofkarma lies a purely cyclical view of time and existence. Although he is sometimes misinterpreted in this way, this is not true of Nietzsche's notion of recurrence. The dwarf interpreted time as a circle: 'Everything straight is a lie. All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.' Zarathustra rebukes him, however, for he has missed the point. Eternal recurrence is not a matter of time running a circular course, returning again and again to the same happening. This is precluded by the importance Nietzsche attaches to the Moment. Eternal recurrence happens in the Moment: 'the infinitely small moment . . . a lightning image from the eternal river' (KGW, v/2, 400). Existence is conceived by Nietzsche as an eternal river, as a torrent of necessary, purposeless, physical occurrences. The Moment is a lightning flash which interrupts its flow, drawing all existence into itself - the eternity behind and the eternity ahead. One infinitely brief, but glorious, moment in which a courageous individual summons up the whole of existence, 'crams it into one single feeling' and utters the great affirmation: 'Is that life? Very well! The same again!' That moment is the ground of all possibility and of the 'humanness of the future'. This takes us back to § 337 of The Gay Science, in which Nietzsche spoke of the man of the future as 'a man whose horizon encompasses thousands of years, past, present and future; . . . old things, new things, all the losses, hopes, conquests and victories humankind has ever known'. He continues, If only one could possess all this in one's own soul, and feel it all in a single, all-encompassing feeling - this must surely produce a happiness that humankind has never yet known; the happiness of a god, full of power and love, full of tears and laughter.

Such an individual embodies eternal recurrence. He is the gateway called 'Moment'; in him the paths of past and future meet. 'On the Vision and the Riddle' concludes with the vivid but repulsive story of a young shepherd boy, into whose mouth a heavy black snake has crawled. The snake cannot be tugged from the shepherd's throat. On Zarathustra's instruction, the boy conquers his revulsion and bites off its 58

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head, and in so doing is transformed: 'No longer a shepherd, no longer a man - a transformed being, surrounded by light, and laughing.' The riddle is explained in a later discourse entitled 'The Convalescent' (KGW, VI/I, 26673). The snake is used to represent the knowledge that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves with them. Even the most contemptible man is with us forever. This thought engenders disgust: 'the great disgust at man it choked me and had crawled into my throat' (270). The overcoming of this loathing - the moment of affirmation, of wanting all things exactly as they are - is represented by the biting off of the snake's head. The result is utter transformation, or 'great health', as Nietzsche refers to it. In this moment of redemption ends Zarathustra's decline or 'down-going'. In this moment, the Spirit of Gravity is defied, and ascent becomes possible (273). Nietzsche regarded this as his 'most abysmal thought' and his greatest contribution. He was confident that it would eventually be accepted and welcomed by humankind; but he saw himself, much like the Madman of The Gay Science, as one who had come too early: it takes light-years for news of such magnitude to reach the ears of man. Christianity, which has determined our thinking hitherto, will continue to prevail for a time longer. But, repressive though it is, not even Christianity will be strong enough to silence the 'triumphant shout' when its time has come. The coming 'revaluation of values' he saw as inevitable. Toward that end Nietzsche now devoted himself entirely.14

Prelude to a philosophy of the future The 'revaluation of all values' was the central concern of Beyond Good and Evil, which appeared in 1886 with the subtitle 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future'. At the outset I remarked that Nietzsche was in no sense a systematic thinker. Nevertheless, it does seem that following the completion of Thus Spoke Zarathustra he toyed for a while with the idea of producing a large systematic work. His notebooks from 1885 are filled with draft outlines. What emerged from this was Beyond Good and Evil, although this was probably not the great complete work he had contemplated. It remains nonetheless a reasonably successful systematic presentation of his basic outlook in this third period of his intellectual development. It is not necessary here to work through the nine parts into which the volume is divided. Our purposes will be served by focusing on the first three parts alone: 'On the Prejudices of the Philosophers', 'The Free Spirit', and 'The Religious Nature'. Nietzsche is concerned in part one to expose the misapprehensions of all 59

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previous philosophy and to introduce the manner of thinking which will characterise the philosophy of the future. He develops in this section a view of language which anticipates in key respects much that we tend to associate with twentieth-century philosophy. In particular, he warns against the power of language to mislead us through 'the seduction of words' (§ 16). Much that we think of as corresponding to the way things go in the world including cause and effect or 'free will' - is no more than 'conventional fiction' (§ 21) reflecting certain 'habits of grammar' (§ 17). The fact that similar fictions occur in various philosophies - eastern as well as western, ancient as well as modern - simply confirms that 'family resemblance' in such habits of thought arises from the 'common philosophy of grammar' in say - Indian, Greek and Germanic languages (§ 20). Languages which do not share in that common grammar are likely to picture the world differently and, consequently, to produce different sorts of philosophies. Our view of the world is a function of our language; our philosophy is a function of our grammar. The 'perspectivism', introduced in Human, All-too-Human, reasserts itself and is extended further in Beyond Good and Evil. Extending the scope of perspectivism has a number of consequences. For instance, Nietzsche now says that the fundamental mistake of philosophers hitherto has been to ascribe value to truth, supposing it to be derived from some hidden, higher realm beyond this world, from the intransitory, from God or from the 'thing in itself (§§ 1-4). He suggests that, in fact, 'truth' may be of less value than 'untruth'. He proposes as his essential criterion of value whether a judgment is 'life-enhancing . . . species-preserving, perhaps even species-cultivating'. Any judgment becomes worthwhile, therefore, which promotes life. And it is certainly the case, reminds Nietzsche, that many socalled 'false' judgments satisfy this condition. Any 'untruth' which can be shown to be useful for the preservation of life is accordingly justified. With this step, Nietzsche destroys the traditional antithesis between 'truth' and 'untruth', and places himself beyond all customarily antithetical values, including 'good and evil'. This viewpoint has its roots in the vitalistic thesis that Nietzsche had been developing for years: namely, that life alone is decisive. By now, however, it had become central to his outlook that 'life itself is the will to power' (§ 13). Customary value-labels — such as good and evil, true and false — are now regarded as meaningless precisely because they bear no relation to will. Strong and weak, on the other hand, imply a degree of will. This antithesis, consequently, is still allowed. Weakness - or lack of will - is clearly a negative value, since it cannot promote life or its cultivation. 'Evil' and 'falsehood', however, cannot be dismissed in the same way: given certain conditions, they 60

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may both well serve to protect or enhance life. In this way, Nietzsche shows that these traditional pairings are linguistically improper; in fact, meaningless. Another consequence of Nietzsche's outlook is that all of life - all thought, desire, judgment and so on - is reducible without remainder to physiological processes or impulses. If life is pure will, then behind all thought - and behind all philosophy - there lies not a voluntary thinking subject, as all philosophers hitherto have been inclined to believe, but merely blind, selfseeking will. Philosophy, as interpreted by Nietzsche, becomes nothing more than 'the most spiritual form of the will to power', merely a 'tyrannical drive', thought seeking to fashion the world in its own image. More radically, Nietzsche draws the consequence that it is fundamentally misguided even to say ' / think' or ' / will'. Living, thinking and willing take place of their own accord: 'a thought comes when it wants to, not when /want it to' (§ 17). The idea that we are free thinking and willing individuals is simply an illusion. Our individual egos are no more than clothing for a bundle of physiological drives and impulses, which alone are real. That being the case, we are driven along in the raging stream of physiological, self-willing occurrence which constitutes existence. Existence is itself absolutely arbitrary, purposeless, irresponsible will to power. This insight, as Nietzsche proudly acknowledged, 'tramples over conventional morality and moves on beyond it' (§ 23). It leads us beyond good and evil. The first part of Beyond Good and Evil serves as virtually a summary of Nietzsche's fundamental philosophy. All judgments and categories are 'perspectival appearances', the products of our limited sense-perception as filtered through language, and do not properly correspond to reality. There is, indeed, no 'reality' to which they could correspond. This means that it would be vain to search for a 'thing in itself behind appearances. But it does not mean for Nietzsche that the world exists only in our perception. Our senses do not bring the world into being. The world and life exist of themselves as will to power. It is we who are imaginary, pretending that we are free thinking 'IV. This viewpoint Nietzsche now terms 'psychology' (§ 23) not, however, in the sense of being a theory of the self as individual subject. It is rather to be regarded as a sort of 'world psychology': a theory of the development of the will to power as that which lies behind and is expressed in all that happens in the world. The concept of the 'free spirit', which figured importantly in Human, Alltoo-Human, is taken up and developed in the second part of Beyond Good and Evil, where it is used as the distinguishing mark of the 'new philosophers' (§ 44). The whole of part two centres on and revolves around aphorism thirty61

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six. Nietzsche starts from the assumption that nothing is real but desires, passions and physiological drives, all of which can be subsumed under the 'will to power'. To this even the material world can ultimately be reduced, as 'a more primitive form of the world of emotions'. The will to power is posited as the cause of all actions and occurrences, 'the only kind of causality that is actual'. It becomes evident that what Nietzsche did in thefirstpart of Beyond Good and Evil with respect to thought, he does here in the second part in relation to action. The will to power is put forward as the only way to account for either thought or action. It is the only effective motivating force. It governs all causes and all effects. In short, it is the material world and everything that happens in it. Aphorisms thirty-two to thirty-four lead up to this position. Our morality, like our thought, consists in 'perspectival' judgments, or interpretations imposed upon the world, which we mistake for reality. From our point of view, Nietzsche acknowledges, there can be no life at all except on the basis of these 'perspectival' appearances (§ 34). We are held captive by them. The fact that our moral values neither bear any correspondence to external reality nor contain any absolute, timeless truth, however, does not mean that they are worthless. As already seen, they can serve a practical end, if they are in any way life-enhancing. Nietzsche issues a warning, nevertheless, to all 'philosophers and friends of knowledge' not to martyr themselves for the sake of their so-called truths. Neither truth nor moral values are worth suffering for, since neither has any reality. To 'fight for the truth' simply compromises your innocence and the neutrality of your conscience (§25). The whole of this part of Beyond Good and Evil bears an unmistakeably autobiographical character. Throughout run the motifs of solitude and of 'masking'. The philosophers of the future will love solitude: 'the good . . . free, wanton, easy solitude'. They consider it their privilege to be isolated and misunderstood by all others, even by their friends. They delight, therefore, in masking and obscuring their thoughts, in order not to be understood. Existence beyond good and evil, beyond all conventional values, is for the very few. Only the strong and independent dare enter upon it (§ 29). This 'new species of philosopher', whose appearance Nietzsche claims to herald, will be called 'attempters' or Versucher (§ 42).I5 Their whole existence will be experimental, for they will obey only their own truth and not the truth of the masses. What is good for the many will not be good for them. They will be cut off forever from the rest of humankind. But this almost exactly describes Nietzsche's own existence. His vision of the 'new philosopher' is simply his vision of himself writ large, his own fate projected onto the future of humanity. Just as Nietzsche seems to have thrived on his 62

Friedrich Nietzsche own sense of isolation, so will the philosopher of the future. The 'new philosopher', in his solitude, embodies the creative will, which defies the stream of arbitrary physical happening by willing 'the same again!'. This moment of courageous self-assertion saves him from being engulfed and dissolving into unreality. So is his salvation secured. What then can be said of the place of religion in the new order? That is the theme of the third part of Beyond Good and Evil. The new philosopher will want to make use of religion, just as he will want to make use of social and political structures, in 'cultivating and educating' persons fit for the future (§ 61). But just how is religion to be exploited? To be sure, it provides a ready means of subduing the masses, enabling the strong and independent, 'who are destined to command', to enforce their will to power without evoking resistance and resentment. The great value of religion lies in the peace of heart and contentment with their earthly lot which it offers to the great mass of ordinary people, born perhaps for no other purpose than to serve and to obey: 'an ennobling of obedience . . . a sort of justification of the whole everyday round, of the lowliness of it all'. But, secondly and more importantly, the higher forms of religion, namely asceticism and puritanism, are said by Nietzsche to offer a path to a 'higher spirituality', a way of ennobling a people, training them for 'self-overcoming . . . for silence and solitude'. These last remarks in particular should not be taken to suggest that Nietzsche's attitude toward religion has in any way softened. The very next aphorism makes it abundantly clear that he still regards religion in general and Christianity in particular as a degenerating force, fostering weakness, sickness and all that is base in mankind: I want to make clear that Christianity is the most feeble form of self-presumption ever to have appeared. Men, not noble or hard enough to be up to refashioning humankind; men, not strong and far-sighted enough to be able, with lofty self-constraint, to allow precedence to the law of countless failure and ruin; men, not aristocratic enough to perceive the inviolable disparity of class and distinctness of rank between one individual and another: it is just such men as these who, with their 'equal before God', have up to now governed the destiny of Europe, with the result that the European of today has degenerated into a dwarfish, almost ludicrous species, a herd animal, something full of good-will, sickliness and mediocrity. (§ 62)

In other words, the Christian religion cannot be counted upon to produce a humankind worthy of the future which Nietzsche has envisaged for us. But, the history of religions leads, in his view, eventually to just such a future. And this in three stages (§ 55). In the first stage, represented by prehistoric and ancient pagan religions, human beings were sacrificed to a god. This was superseded by Christianity, which sacrificed instead human nature, passions 63

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and instincts to God. In the third phase, just now dawning, God himself will be sacrificed to nothingness or Fate. Thus nihilism marks the end of the history of religions. But this stage, too, will pass. It will be sublated by knowledge of the doctrine of the eternal recurrence of the same. Only this new ideal, 'the ideal of the most exuberant, most alive and most worldaffirming human being', can surmount pessimism. This new human being 'wants it all again - all that has been and all that is - for all eternity, insatiably calling "da capo", not only to himself, but to the whole pageant of existence' (§ 56). This new man affirms not God but himself, Man, creative will, who, in the face of decay and decline, wills his own existence again and again for all eternity. This man is to take the place of God. Indeed, he is what we have hitherto mistakenly called 'God'. The day will come, Nietzsche proclaimed, when human beings will look back on such concerns as 'God' and 'sin' as merely a child's game or a child's worry. Then will humankind have come of age; and for this its whole history will have been but preparation. This new man will shout triumphantly in the face of his fate: 'Very well! The same again!' These were not Nietzsche's last thoughts on religion; but they are the last thoughts to be covered here. Following the publication of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche continued his extravagant polemic against Christianity. These writings from Nietzsche's remaining years, however, do not belong in the same class as those singled out for attention in this article. In these later volumes - of which only Twilight of the Idols and On the Genealogy ofMorals appeared in his lifetime - no new ideas of note are to be found. And, when taken together with the more intemperate, posthumously published The Anti-Christ, they serve to remind us to what extent Nietzsche's vitriolic attack on Christian thought and values was directed narrowly at the sort of exaggerated piety encountered and fostered in his childhood home. There Christianity was little more than fear of sin and a weak effort to be good. To judge from his last writings, it would seem that Nietzsche never managed entirely to separate himself from its stifling and morbid hold. For it was quite clearly this Christianity which in The Anti-Christ he indicted as 'the one great curse, the one intrinsic depravity . . . the one immortal blemish upon humankind' (§ 62).

Friedrich Nietzsche Notes 1 This form of abbreviation, which will be used throughout the essay, refers to the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin, 19676°), volume vn/3, pp. 338-9. Trans. Walter Kaufmann, The Will to Power (New York, 1968), §1067. For more details about this and other main editions of Nietzsche's works, see the 'Bibliographical essay' printed below at the end of this chapter. 2 The most important events for each of the three main phases of Nietzsche's intellectual development will be given in notes at the beginning of each section. The following biographical details are pertinent to the first period of his intellectual formation: 15 October 1844, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche born in Rocken (Prussia) as first son of Carl Ludwig (1813-49), a Lutheran pastor, and Franziska Oehler Nietzsche (1826-97), herself a daughter of a Lutheran pastor; 1846, birth of Friedrich's only sister, Elisabeth (d. 1935); 1849, birth of Friedrich's only brother, Ludwig Joseph (d. 1850); 1849, death of Friedrich's father; 1850, the remaining family move to Naumburg; 1852-64, Friedrich attends school, finishing his ^Abitur* at the famous Schulpforta, where he received a classical education; 1864-5, studies theology and philosophy at the University of Bonn; 1865, transfers to the University of Leipzig, where he studies classics; 1867-8, military service in a cavalry company - cut short by chest injuries sustained from falling off his horse; 1869, appointed associate professor (Extraordinarius) of classical philology at the University of Basel, even though he had no doctor's degree (Leipzig thereupon awarded him one without requiring a dissertation); 1870, promoted to full professor (Ordinarius) at Basel; 1870-1, serves as voluntary medical orderly in Franco-Prussian War; 1872, publishes The Birth of Tragedy and gives five public lectures at Basel 'On the Future of Our Educational Institutions'; 1873-4, publishes first three (of four) Untimely Meditations', during this time establishes friendships with Basel colleagues Jakob Burckhardt (1818-97) and Franz Overbeck (1837-1905). 3 Werke, 'Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe', VOL. II: jfugendschriften, 1861-1864 (Munich, 1934), pp. 54-62. 4 Ibid., p. 55. 5 Ibid., pp. 60-1. 6 On this point, see Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (Oxford, 1983), p. 268f; cf. pp. 264-76. 7 A similar link is forged between Christianity and antiquity in the only slightly later Human, All-too-Human: 'The Christian religion is most surely an antiquity hurled forward from the remote past, and that it is believed at all . . . is perhaps the most ancient piece of this legacy' (1, § 113). 8 The following additional events from the second period of Nietzsche's intellectual development should be noted: autumn 1875, prolonged illness, during which time he reads Ree's Psychologische Betrachtungen; 1876, 'Richard Wagner in Bayreuth' appears as fourth Untimely Meditation; 1876-7, sick leave from the University of Basel, which is spent mainly in Sorrento; 1878, publishes volume one of Human, All-too-Human; 1878-9, health deteriorates to the extent that Nietzsche receives medical pension from the University of Basel in June 1879; 1880, publishes 'The Wanderer and His Shadow', the final section of Human, All-too-Human; 1881, publishes The Dawn and visits Sils Maria for first time, where he 'discovers' the doctrine of eternal recurrence and 'meets' his alterego, Zarathustra. 9 Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (3rd edn, New York, 1968), p. 72. 10 Nietzsche, who occasionally referred to himself as a 'Reelist' in other respects, was surprisingly reluctant to acknowledge Ree's impact on Human, All-too-Human. In response to Erwin Rohde's having remarked on Ree's evident influence on that volume,

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11

12

13

14

15

Nietzsche reacted violently. He insisted that Ree had not had the slightest impact on the ideas developed there: 'these were already worked out and in large part on paper before I even met him' (June 1878, letter to Rohde). This third and most productive stage of Nietzsche's development will be discussed in two parts. In this section, we will concentrate mainly on Thus Spoke Zarathustra', in the next, on Beyond Good and Evil. The following biographical information is pertinent to material discussed in the present section: 1881, Daybreak appears; winter 1881-2, work on The Gay Science, which appears in August 1882; April to November 1882, affair with Louise von Salome, the unhappy conclusion of which left him bitter, with a sense of having been betrayed and even more aware of his solitude; winter 1882-3, almost continuous work on Thus Spoke Zarathustra, part one of which was written in January and appeared later that spring; September 1883, part II of Zarathustra appears, followed by part III in 1884; October 1883, vows never to live in Germany again - spends time mainly in Nice and Venice or in Sils Maria. Parts one to three form a unity of vision and inspiration; in them the doctrine of eternal recurrence is gradually unfolded. (See KGW, vn/i, 153.) With the completion of part three, however, Nietzsche's inspiration dries up. The fourth and final part was slow and tiresome work, and has quite a different character from the rest. The most extreme view on the disunity of Zarathustra is that expressed by Arthur Danto, who adjudges the volume - including its first three parts - to be rambling and disjointed, capable of being entered at any point. Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York, 1968), pp. 1920. John Clayton argues for the book's unity in 'Zarathustra and the Stages on Life's Way', Nietzsche-Studien, xiv (1985), 179-200. The most important events relating to material covered in the next section can be briefly enumerated: 1885, the final part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is published privately in an edition of forty copies, which were distributed mainly to friends; summer 1885, letters show signs of increased anxiety and continued health problems; 1886, publishes Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense, and buys back the copyright on his previous books; winter 1886-7, while living at Nice, prepares new editions of his earlier books; 1887, publishes Genealogy of Morals; 1887-8, corresponds with the Danish critic Georg Brandes, an early admirer and interpreter of Nietzsche's works; 1888, health deteriorates steadily, his letters become more desperate and his behaviour increasingly bizarre; September 1888, The Case of Wagner appears and manuscripts for Twilight ofthe Idols and The Anti-Christ are completed; 3 January 1889, overcome with compassion for a carthorse which was being beaten in a square in Turin, Nietzsche embraces the horse and, sobbing, collapses on the street; Overbeck travels from Basel to collect him and to arrange for his care; Nietzsche's mother and then his sister care for him in Naumburg and, finally, Weimar, where he died on 25 August 1900. The term Versucher can mean 'attempted or 'experimenter', but it can also mean 'tempter' or 'seducer', and is in fact a common term for the Devil. Nietzsche is likely to have been exploiting this ambiguity when he referred to the new breed of philosopher as Versucher.

Bibliographical essay The first one having been begun by his sister even before his death, several 'complete' editions of Nietzsche's writings have been proffered. Some are more complete than others, and this in two senses. Not everything was available to all editors, so that lacunae especially within the Nachlass limit the value of some editions. And one 'complete' edition was never completed. The ambitious but ill-fated Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke und Briefe ceased

production in 1942, after only five volumes of works (to 1869) and four volumes of correspondence (to 1877) had appeared. Until recently, scholars have had to choose between

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Friedrich Nietzsche either the nineteen-volume Gesamtausgabe im Grossoktav (Leipzig, Naumann/Kroner, 18941913) or the more widely-cited but less complete Musarion edition of Gesammelte Werke which appeared in twenty-three volumes between 1920 and 1929. It would seem almost certain, however, that the only recently completed Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin, de Gruyter, i967ff) will establish itself as the standard edition of Nietzsche's writings. At the time of writing, the new critical edition of Nietzsche's correspondence, also published by de Gruyter (i975ff), is not yet complete. For more than a generation students and other interested readers have used the still-available three-volume selected Werke edited by Karl Schlechta (Munich, Carl Hanser, 1954-6), an edition which was made even more useful by the appearance in 1965 of a separate index volume. The hegemony of the Schlechta edition will have been challenged, if not altogether broken, however, by the recent publication of a paperback edition of Nietzsche's writings which, although somewhat differently arranged, is based on and contains everything from the Kritische Gesamtausgabe. This modestly priced fifteen-volume set was published jointly by de Gruyter and the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag under the titled Sdmtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin, 1980). Volume fourteen of this set features an invaluable chronicle of the main events in Nietzsche's life (pp. 7-210), together with extensive critical and textual notes; volume fifteen contains an impressively complete index to the first thirteen volumes. Especially in recent years, Nietzsche's writings have been extensively translated into English. The older, eighteen-volume Complete Works of Nietzsche (New York, Macmillan, 1909-11) is best avoided altogether. Although edited by Oscar Levy, none of the volumes was actually translated by him. Mistakes in the translation are all too common and the style adopted is embarrassingly archaic. It was the Levy edition of Thus Spake Zarathustra which prompted Crane Brinton's only partially intemperate complaint that it reads like 'the King James Version gone wrong'. By contrast, Marianne Cowan's translations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and of Beyond Good and Evil can be commended. However, the generally most readable and consistently most faithful translations of Nietzsche into English are those which have been undertaken, both singly and jointly, by R. J. Hollingdale and the late Walter Kaufmann. Their joint efforts produced On the Genealogy of Morals (New York, Vintage, 1969) and The Will to Power (New York, Vintage, 1968); Kaufmann translated Thus Spoke Zarathustra (New York, Viking, 1966; U.S. Penguin, 1978), Beyond Good and Evil (New York, Vintage, 1966), The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (New York, Vintage, 1967), The Gay Science (New York, Vintage, 1974); Hollingdale has published separate translations of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1961; 2nd edn, 1969), Beyond Good and Evil (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1973), Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-

Christ (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968), Daybreak (Cambridge University Press, 1982) and Untimely Meditations (Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hollingdale and Kaufmann have also each produced one-volume collections of extracts from Nietzsche's writings. To be shunned by any who would understand Nietzsche aright is Hollingdale's A Nietzsche Reader (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977). One can only express astonishment that anyone of his stature would agree to be associated with a volume in which almost random excerpts from Nietzsche's writings are arranged topically with so little regard for their original context or for their place in the development of Nietzsche's thought. By way of contrast, both of Kaufmann's one-volume collections can be wholeheartedly recommended. The reader whose primary interest is religious thought would be advised to begin with The Portable Nietzsche (New York, Viking, 1954; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976), which contains complete Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Twilight of the Idols, The Anti-Christ and Nietzsche contra Wagner,

together with carefully selected letters and extracts from other writings, including The Gay Science. This collection is supplemented by a second volume edited by Kaufmann and published as Basic Writings ofNietzsche (New York, Random House, 1966). The later volume included complete translations of The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil, The Genealogy of Morals, The Case of Wagner and Ecce Homo.

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CARL HEINZ RATSCHOW Despite its flaws, Curt Paul Janz's recently completed three-volume Friedrich Nietzsche (Munich, Carl Hanser, 1978-9) is the most persuasive biography available. Nietzsche is on this front much less well served in English. There are biographies, of course. But they are generally an undistinguished lot. Perhaps the least inadequate recent biography in English is Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (London, Weidenfeld, 1980). There is little to choose between the briefer biographical studies, but R. J. Hollingdale's Nietzsche (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) and the English translation of Ivo Frenzel's Friedrich Nietzsche: An Illustrated Biography (Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1967) can be mentioned. With a few notable exceptions, almost all the secondary literature in English is of the introductory survey variety. The main exceptions are Joan Stambough's fine study of Nietzsche's Thought of Eternal Return (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), Werner J. Dannhauser's careful appraisal of Nietzsche's View of Socrates (Cornell University Press, 1974), and Bernd Magnus's interesting account of Nietzsche's Existential Imperative (Indiana University Press, 1978). For a competent brief introduction to Nietzsche, one could do worse than begin with J. P. Stern's A Study of Nietzsche (Cambridge University Press, 1979). One can safely ignore Frederick Copleston's period piece, Friedrich Nietzsche: Philosopher ofCulture, which was first published in 1942 and was reissued without revision in 1975. Albeit more responsibly than some, Copleston's book reflects the perspective on Nietzsche which was not uncommon within the English-speaking world during the Second World War. More than anyone else, the Jewish scholar Walter Kaufmann helped to rehabilitate Nietzsche in the post-war years. Having appeared initially in 1950, his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (4th edn, New York, Vintage, 1975) did much to shatter the popular image of Nietzsche which during the war years had been projected (for different reasons, of course) by the propagandists on both sides. For instance, he demonstrated clearly that Nietzsche himself was neither an anti-semitic racialist nor a German nationalist (preferring instead to be called a 'European'). Kaufmann also succeeded in placing Nietzsche more centrally in the mainstream of European thought. In this last regard, he was perhaps too successful. Kaufmann's Nietzsche is almost too acceptable, too domesticated. When one feels Nietzsche himself would have been inclined to roar like a lion, Kaufmann's Nietzsche is content to purr like a house-cat. The more radical, the more dangerous dimensions of Nietzsche's thought are skilfully tamed by Kaufmann. But Nietzsche is not so easily tamed. There is much in his thought which is wild and undisciplined. Brinton was perhaps more profoundly right than he had realised when he complained that Nietzsche was not properly house-broken. For all its scholarly limitations, Arthur Danto's Nietzsche as Philosopher (New York, Macmillan, 1965) has at least the merit of giving greater stress to the more radical consequences of certain aspects of Nietzschean thought, not least the doctrine of 'perspectivism'. It is perhaps peculiarly apt for a writer who advocated 'perspectivism' himself to have been among its victims. Nietzsche has been credited or blamed with having anticipated almost every philosophical and literary movement in the twentieth-century, including the currently fashionable 'deconstructionism'. Regarding this latest attempt posthumously to decorate Nietzsche with the colours of yet another order, see Jacques Derrida, Eperons: Les styles de Nietzsche (Paris, Flammarion, 1978), and also Mark Taylor, Deconstructing Theology (Chico, Calif., Scholars Press, 1982). Regarding numerous earlier attempts to credit or discredit Nietzsche with every imaginable 'ism', see Alfredo Guzzoni (ed.), go Jfahre philosophische Nietzsche-Rezeption (Konigstein/Taunus, Meisenheim, 1979), Wolfgang Miiller-Lauter and Volker Gerhardt (eds.), Aufnahme und Auseinandersetzung: Friedrich

Nietzsche im 20. jfahrhundert (Berlin, de Gruyter, 1982). For Nietzsche's early and mainly literary influence in Britain and North America, see Patrick Bridgewater, Nietzsche in Anglosaxony (Leicester University Press, 1972), and David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England (Toronto University Press, 1970). The last-mentioned volumes remind us that Nietzsche's intellectual legacy has been both literary and philosophical. With this in mind, two important collections of critical essays - the

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Friedrich Nietzsche one more literary and the other more philosophical - can be commended to interested students: Malcolm Pasley (ed.), Nietzsche: Imagery and Thought (London, Methuen, 1978), and Robert C. Solomon (ed.), Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays (New York, Anchor, 1973; Notre Dame University Press, 1980). Despite their different accents, these two fine collections overlap and complement each other nicely. The single most important resource for keeping abreast of new directions and developments in the interpretation and critique of all aspects of Nietzsche's thought is without doubt Nietzsche-Studien, which is published annually by de Gruyter. Although most of its contributions appear in German, each issue normally contains several articles in English. Among the contributions to de Gruyter's companion series of 'Monographien und Texte zur Nietzsche-Forschung' which are pertinent to his philosophical and religious thought can be mentioned Ruediger Herrmann Grimm, Nietzsche's Theory of Knowledge (Berlin, 1977), and Freny Mistry, Nietzsche and Buddhism (Berlin, 1981). Finally, attention should be drawn to the International Nietzsche Bibliography, edited by H. W. Reichert and Karl Schlechta (2nd edn, University of North Carolina Press, 1969). Although selective and now quite dated, it contains several thousand entries.

3

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Background I In this chapter we shall attempt to present a typological analysis of the philosophical interpretations of Judaism which arose over the course of the nineteenth century. We do not refer here to the interpretation of Judaism given in the great non-Jewish philosophical systems of this period, as is indeed the case in the systems of Kant and Hegel, or of Schopenhauer. Instead, we confine ourselves to the philosophical interpretations conceived by philosophers of Judaism who, as Jews, tried in their own way to justify Judaism or to present it as a viable religious and systematic structure vis-avis other religions and within the context of the modern world. From the latter point of view, systematic philosophical interpretations of Judaism, prompted by and conceived within the modern context are to be viewed not only within the framework of the history of philosophical systems but also, in part, under the aspect of what is called the history of ideas or intellectual history - in German Geistesgeschichte.

We emphasize the last point because it will become clear that problems inherent in the modern situation have their impact on the formulation of systems of Jewish philosophy in two major directions: there were modern systems whose consequences, in terms of both tools of interpretation and thematic shifts, had a major influence on the interpretation of Judaism. We refer here again, of course, to the impact of Kant and Hegel upon the formulation of philosophical views with their respective immanent emphases: the emphasis on morality in Kant and the emphasis on an ultimate synthesis in Hegel. Modern Jewish thought absorbed these influences and can be approached and classified according to the point of view reflected in these major philosophical undertakings.

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There is also a second aspect under which the broader intellectual component comes to the fore: this is the overall aspect of modernity conceived as future-oriented culture, which any tradition or interpretation of tradition is bound to face, since tradition is, by definition, a past-oriented concept and attitude. In addition, modernity opened the gates - to what exact degree is a subject of debate - for the participation of the Jews in the life of the larger surrounding culture as well as in the political and economic life of their host countries. Hence a modern philosophical interpretation of Judaism faces, of necessity, the involvement of the Jews in the culture of their contemporary world. Yet at the same time it is concerned to interpret the particular teachings of Judaism in such a way as to defend its continued value and viability in these significantly altered circumstances. Thus, whatever the particular formulation it is clear that the historical scene has its impact on the interpretation(s) offered.

Our emphasis in this study is the influence of broad modern intellectual contexts upon philosophical interpretation. However, it is important first to discuss the essential structure of a philosophic analysis of Judaism, disregarding for the moment the peculiarities of any specific historical period. A comparison with the trends of the medieval philosophy of Judaism is instructive, and can serve as a legitimate point of departure for the analysis which follows. Several features of the medieval philosophic enterprise have relevance structurally, as well as because, in retrospect, we can see their transformations in the various modern reformulations. We mentionfirstthe problem of revelation within the medieval systems, and the attempts made in those systems - whether in Judaism, Christianity or Islam - to put forward an objective justification for the fact of revelation - revelation being an event, a message, encompassed within the particular set of religious beliefs. In addition, revelation is a heteronomous event by definition - it is divine, it is given by God. Hence the continuous attempt of philosophies grounded in a rational approach to come to grips with something that is beyond reason, because it is a non-rational event, yet which still must be open to rational justification. At this point the questions of occurrence and of the content implied in the occurrence - e.g., the moral or ethical content - become the most prominent issues for medieval thinkers. There are two additional aspects of the medieval problem: on the one hand it uses the structure and tools provided by Greek philosophy, and at the same time it faces, from the Jewish point of view, two parallel or competing monotheistic religions 72

Jewish Thought Christianity and Islam - involved in the same perplexity as Judaism, and applying to themselves the same philosophical tools which Jewish philosophers applied to Judaism. Then again, as has been rightly observed by Julius Guttmann,1 medieval philosophy lacked both the concept of a universal religious truth, and the concept of a religious consciousness as such. These two parallel concepts emerged in the framework of modern philosophy, and have had a considerable impact on the course of modern Jewish thought.

Jewish philosophy appears as the philosophical interpretation of Jewish sources, 'sources' being understood to include both literary documents and modes of actual life. Philosophy makes explicit that which is only implicit in literary documents, or presupposed as an underlying principle of behaviour. A philosophical explication of the biblical creation narrative would, for example, refer to questions such as the nature of creation, i.e., whether creation took place ex nihilo, or was only a process of giving form to amorphous matter, or again what is the causal relationship between the creator and the created world. The biblical narrative contains all these aspects but only the philosophical discourse makes them explicit. One can even go a step further by saying that the narrative does not contain them at all, but that the philosophical explication states presuppositions in the framework of which the narrative is meaningful. In both cases the philosophical exploration, applied to literary sources, introduces concepts which do not appear in the narrative, because of the nature of the narrative and also because these concepts belong to a different sphere of discourse. They are what we call theoretical or ontological discourses. The interaction between the text and the explication is by no means limited to the Genesis story. One can ask what we would call anthropological questions, for instance, about the fundamental view of man as addressed in the biblical presentation, that is, man as the recipient of divine revelation or commandments. What is the relationship between man as a thinking being and man as the recipient of a divine commandment? Or what is the relationship betweenfinitudeand reception on the one hand, and infinity and revelation on the other? It is evident that the Bible does not raise these questions, though the Bible may take advantage of certain metaphors when referring to man: for instance, that man is dust and ashes; or it may formulate the question: where were you when I established the earth? It could be argued that some philosophical conceptions are indeed implied in these metaphors or statements. Hence a philosophical interpretation can be 73

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conceived as reading the text by applying a certain code which is not present in the text, but is still congenial to it. Or, alternatively, it might be argued that the code is different and extraneous to the text in question. Beyond texts, philosophy also serves to explicate human behaviour, spelling out the principles guiding the mode of existence and perhaps, on a higher plane, the basic rules governing all those principles. In the Jewish context one could point, for example, to Yir'at Shamayim (Fear of Heaven) as an underlying principle of behaviour. This is not limited to ceremonies, prayers, hymns, but informs every level of human existence. Auxiliary tools or sacraments are thus not the only manifestation of man's attitude towards God. Having pointed to these examples, we can now amplify the function of the philosophical interpretation qua explication. This function, to a very large extent, is of the nature of a commentary, a commentary either directed towards texts or meant to be of a holistic character, bringing into prominence ideas illustrated by texts or modes of life but not essentially centering around them. Sometimes it is presupposed that the interpreter may interpret the text even when the author of the text lacks awareness as to its hidden philosophical meaning. Again one of the examples of such an idea, which refers to texts but deliberately gives them a broader interpretation than can be directly warranted by the texts, is the notion of man as having been created in the image of God. This doctrine, though formulated in the Bible, became a fundamental notion in various religious and philosophical writings, whether or not they are actually referred to the Bible. IV We have made these preliminary comments on the profile of Jewish thought and its involvement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century currents in order to lay down the outline of our more detailed examination of certain trends of Jewish philosophical reflection and their most prominent presentation. We shall select several themes, e.g., monotheism, and look into their formulations, and at individual philosophers who reflect on these themes within the structures of their own individual systems. Hence we shall not present a resume of one system or another, but rather place the individual philosopher in a thematic context and thus refer to an individual philosopher more than once. Furthermore, in addition to the topics or problems which preoccupied medieval Jewish philosophers, we shall have to identify and explore certain topics emerging in the modern context. Here one thinks of such issues as the attitude towards religions beyond Judaism, mainly Christianity, but also to some extent Islam, and to one of the most basic themes of modernity, namely 74

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history. Indeed it is precisely because of this emphasis on history, that space has to be provided for consideration of a new dimension in Jewish thought, that concerned with the socio-historical existence of the Jewish people. One more observation is appropriate at this juncture: the systems of modern Jewish philosophies belong mainly to the German-speaking orbit. Historically American Jewry in the nineteenth century was unable, because of external circumstances, to give birth to systematic Jewish thinking. Alternatively, German philosophers were very much concerned with the problem of religion, including Judaism, on which they commented rather unfavourably. By the same token these philosophers set an example for Jewish philosophers in the German environment of what a philosophical interpretation of a religion, including Judaism, ought to be like. There are certain exceptions to this dominant model in the French-speaking and Italian-speaking communities, but these exceptions confirm rather than disprove the rule. Lastly, to speak of our chronological parameters, the period with which we are concerned is, broadly speaking, the nineteenth century. To be sure, we go beyond that period chronologically, since time and again we refer to Hermann Cohen who died in 1918 and whose major work interpreting Judaism appeared posthumously. Yet it is obvious that Cohen, from the point of view of the sources of his thinking and its general thrust, belongs to the nineteenth century. That is to say, he placed ethics at the centre of his interpretation of Judaism and at the same time preceded the existentialist crisis or ethos which emerged in the twenties of the current century. Hence, though we step beyond the nineteenth century while dealing with Hermann Cohen - and mentioning Franz Rosenzweig - thematically, we remain within the limits of that time-frame. It should also be noted that in regard to the interpretation of Judaism the nineteenth century does not only connote a certain period in time. A major change or crisis in the self-perception of the Jews occurred in that century. That crisis is related to the Jewish aspiration to strike roots in the surrounding cultures, societies and political structures - that aspiration which goes by the name of emancipation. The Jews and Jewish philosophers absorbed deliberately and programmatically trends of thought prevailing in the wider culture and wrote their major works in the languages of that cultural milieu. To be sure, this was the case also in the Middle Ages, where for instance Arabic served as a kind of philosophical lingua franca for the major philosophers of Judaism. But this phenomenon is still more prominent in the nineteenth century. With the exception of Krochmal, who wrote his major philosophical work in Hebrew, all Jewish philosophers 75

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wrote in German, French or Italian. Thus their ideas, though addressed to a Jewish audience, are by the same token part and parcel of the climate of opinion of the world in which they lived. In this sense our concern is with the period in which we find a conjunction of the chronological and thematic component; as such this is indeed a pivotal period in the history of Jewish thought.

Monotheism I Let us put into relief some of the issues already dealt with. One of the characteristic features of every philosophical interpretation of a traditional religion is - as we have seen - the articulation of the essence of that religion in terms of its characteristic features, which can be rendered through concepts and ideas. Thus in the case of Judaism the emphasis placed on monotheism becomes prominent from the philosophical vantage point. With this in mind, let us consider the diverse presentations of the position of God and the nature of monotheism in modern Jewish thought.2 Let us begin our analysis with a review of a philosophical trend initiated by the German Jewish philosopher Solomon Formstecher (1808-89).3 Formstecher, following Hegel, applies the concept of spirit to the essence of God and his position vis-a-vis the world. However, whereas Hegel emphasized this concept in connection with Christianity which he saw as the quintessential religion of spirit, Formstecher sought to apply this understanding to Judaism. God is conceived by Formstecher as a spiritual entity without whom there would be no world, but who would still exist in himself if there were no creation. That is to say, God's position is independent vis-avis the world. Conversely, the created order is understood as not only referring to one God but as also referring to a being whose essence is fundamentally different from any other being, including the totality of the cosmos. Hence though God is the creator, and the world depends for its existence on Him, His position does not depend upon his manifestation in creation. Monotheism is therefore the theistic religion par excellence. In addition - and this is already implied in the previous characterization of God - God is free. His decisions are voluntary and, therefore, He is free to create or to refrain from creating. From this philosophical perspective the major theological antithesis that one must confront is that between paganism and Judaism.4 It is a characteristic quality of paganism to deify nature, a consequence of the presupposition that God dwells within nature and not above it. Paganism 76

Jewish Thought finds its philosophical expression in pantheism,5 since pantheism, which identifies God with the world, is essentially a philosophical rendering of paganism. By comparison, Judaism as the religion of spirit appears to be the implicit and explicit denial of paganism, since the concept of spirit implies the freedom of God, His consciousness as a creator, and ultimately His omnipotence and sovereignty vis-a-vis the world. Then again, Judaism understood as the religion of spirit also has consequences for its adherents in that the fundamental object of human knowledge is not nature but spirit and its manifestations: logic on the one hand and ethics on the other.6 The ethical character of Judaism especially is central to Formstecher and his heirs because morality is grounded in spirit. That is to say Judaism is an ethical religion, because it is a religion of spirit. To be sure, this is not the only interpretation of Judaism in modern Jewish thought which emphasizes the essentially ethical character of Judaism, and we shall examine, in due course, a different, i.e., neo-Kantian, approach to the ethical component of Judaism. But in terms of the religion of spirit we have to recognize the line leading from spirit to ethics, and thence to the knowing subject. At the same time we also have to recognize that this conception ofJudaism as the religion of spirit, in which spirit underlies ethics leads to an emphasis on self-consciousness and freedom of decision7 rather than to an emphasis on thematic commandments as the central components of ethics. That is to say, it leads precisely to the two ingredients of spirituality which are the distinguishing features of spirit as over against nature.

The second significant thinker who interprets monotheism as the religion of spirit is Samuel Hirsch (1815-89).8 According to Hirsch there is a primary identity between spirit and freedom.9 Spirit is decision, and thus it is never given to us completely in itsfinishedform. Afinishedstructure is to be found only in nature; but within the realm of spirit the emphasis is on promise and on an assurance of things to come. Spirit requires continuous training and preparation. When spirit is applied to God qua pure spirit, we move to a qualitatively different sphere. God is spiritually enclosed in Himself and in His dealings with humankind the emphasis is on choice and decision. Man's spiritual nature is to be viewed as a developing essence or, put differently, it is man's duty to free himself from nature and to become spirit. God as an ideal is not addressed to man transcending himself in order to become identical with God, but rather points towards man's goal of becoming a spiritual entity within the boundaries of the human. Hence God's spirituality intends to enhance and encourage man's striving for spirituality 77

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while human activity and aspiration are to be seen as a form of imitation of the divine essence.10 At this juncture the ethical character of human existence manifests itself as grounded in the spiritual nature of God. Again, human spirituality is possible because God is the Lord of Nature. Thus God, serving as a model or archetype of human conduct, also inspires and inclines man in the direction of making his decision for the telos of spirit. There is, to be sure, within the human situation the possibility of sin but the imperative of human spirituality is to lead man in the direction of confining sin to a mere possibility. Here again spirit or spirituality within the human sphere does not connote an actual identity between man and spirit, but a potential identification made possible by the spiritual character of monotheism in terms of the essence of God qua spirit, an essence which represents man's Urbild as well. Summing up this approach to monotheism, which employs the concept of spirit without necessarily adopting the major interpretations of that concept as presented for instance by Schelling or Hegel, it can be said that spirit is taken in the first place as creativity or spontaneity. In this sense the notion of spirit is applied to God. And it is this notion that makes it initially possible, according to the interpretation before us, to apply spirituality to human nature as well - thus establishing the link between spirituality and ethical behaviour. Still, it is imperative to note at this point that ethical behaviour is by and large interpreted by Hirsch in the Kantian sense as presupposing or referring to freedom. Freedom leads not so much to an ethical system of commandments as to an ethical system which emphasizes decisions - and it is evident that the weight placed on spirit and spirituality leads to that consequence as well. We shall now move foreward several decades to consider Hermann Cohen's (1842-1918) interpretation of monotheism. Cohen's contribution to our topic can be described as a radical interpretation of monotheism in the sense that Judaism is monotheism strictly understood.11 The emphasis is placed not only on the unity of God, but also on the uniqueness (die Einzigkeit) of God.12 This characteristic feature of God's uniqueness gives still greater prominence to the distinction between God and world, which we have already seen was important to Formstecher and Hirsch. Cohen does not attempt to explore the origins of monotheism - on the contrary, he says, the origins can be explained neither historically nor systematically. This is not only a methodological comment but also another aspect of the fact that monotheism is understood as a basic approach to the universe and to reality, and thus, in a sense, carries in itself its own origin and therefore also its own 78

Jewish Thought explanation. This unique character of monotheism and part passu its conception of God, are related, as already noted, to the distinction between unity and uniqueness: unity connotes only the opposite of plurality, while uniqueness connotes the separation from the world and its structure. Therefore uniqueness can only be understood as the logical and ontological presupposition for the creation of the world and for the revelation of God in it. As a consequence, it is not enough to juxtapose the idea of God in the Judaic monotheistic interpretation to the pagan assertion of a plurality of gods. Rather it is also necessary to juxtapose it to pantheism which claims an identity between nature and God. It should also be noted here, while it will be discussed in detail later, that Cohen's exception to Christianity is grounded in its implicitly pantheistic tenor which, Cohen argues, leads to the blurring of the lines of demarcation between man and world on the one hand and God on the other.13 One ethical consequence which Cohen draws from his emphasis on the uniqueness of God is the love of God. It can be said that this love is an attitude of closeness and simultaneously an attitude of distance.14 To put it differently, without literally following Cohen's own terminology and description, love is not identical with extasis. It remains within the boundaries of the reciprocal correlation between man and God. Therefore, the uniqueness of God, both as a loving being and as a loved one, is implied in the attitude of love as a characteristic religious attitude, which, by the same token, is an ethical attitude. In his description of the unique character of God, Cohen adopts some of the traditional concepts, including those developed and elaborated in medieval philosophy. Thus, for instance, he describes the notion of the unity of God as a negative notion or expression, in order to bring into relief the difference between monotheism and polytheism. The notion of the unity of God is nothing but a means of establishing the unity of the world, whereas the notion of uniqueness has a positive connotation, i.e., it is a religious rendering of the philosophical concept that God is the only true being. Furthermore, the contraposition between the unique God and the gods of paganism is not confined to the quantitative or numerical aspect but takes on additional meaning in the context of the difference between the invisible idea on the one hand and the to-be-perceived image on the other. There can be no image of God, once God is understood as an Urbild (archetype). The images of God can only be images of objects of nature, and never of God himself.15 Here again Cohen takes advantage of traditional concepts or terminological tools, when he says that the position of God as an archetype or Urbild has its manifestation in his attributes of deeds (Attribute der 79

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Handlung). That is to say, God's qualities are actually exemplary patterns of man's actions: His qualities are essentially norms. God, who is separated from the world because of His uniqueness, is revealed not in His essence but only in His workings (Wirkungen). It is only a further step in the same direction when holiness, which primarily connotes separateness, takes on an ethical meaning and when the interpretation of holiness as morality is asserted. Here again the quality of God is an exemplary pattern for man in the sense of 'thou shalt be holy because I am holy'; that is to say, in philosophical terms, for human beings holiness is a task, whereas for God it is His very essence.16 We have already noted to what extent the three systems of understanding Judaism as monotheism, which we have presented in resume, presuppose the ethical component in the ontology of monotheism. But here again, as we shall now see, the ethics of Judaism can be differently interpreted; moreover, and this is one of the pivotal points in the development of modern Jewish thought, there have been attempts in the modern era to interpret the ethics of Judaism without grounding them in an ontological system. However, before analysing this issue in more detail we have to consider one additional analysis of Jewish monotheism, namely, that account which seeks to interpret Judaism in terms of the modern notion of the Absolute. The application of the concept of the Absolute to religious discourse in general and to the description of God as conceived in Judaism in particular is a clear echo of philosophical systems that arose in modern thought, especially in post-Hegelian philosophy. It is well known that the concept of Absolute was coined by Cusanus, and it was intended to connote, among other qualities, the identity or unity of being and thinking. A unity of that sort was understood as self-enclosed, and thus unconditioned and was eventually interpreted as totality in nineteenth-century philosophy, since only totality could be seen as comprehensive and thus unconditioned. We find that Nachman Krochmal (i 785-1840) consciously applies the concept of Absolute to God, as he understood and interpreted it in Judaism, by describing God as the absolute spiritual entity or being, or in a literal translation of the Hebrew term employed by him: 'the absolute spiritual'.17 The emphasis is therefore on comprehensiveness rather than on creativity or freedom, as in the other systems already reviewed. Therefore one can say that an absolute being is indeed one being but not a separated or singular being - the way, for example, Hermann Cohen had described God in Judaism. We disregard here of course the chronological sequence, in order to emphasize that the interpretation of God as 'the absolute spiritual' implies, perhaps even explicitly denotes, the absence of any personal quality or characteristic feature in the divine being. Put in categorial terms, one could 80

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say that the absolute spiritual, qua totality, cannot be seen as a personal God with all the consequences of that implicit or explicit denial of personality. As a consequence of this understanding of God Krochmal may be said to be perhaps the most radical thinker in modern Jewish thought in as much as he, by the logic of his philosophizing, is led to a pantheistic interpretation of God, whereas both polemically and positively, many a Jewish philosopher saw the monotheistic interpretation of God as an explicit negation of paganism and an implicit confrontation with pantheism. There are two major considerations underlying Krochmal's thrust toward totality. Thefirstrelates to what can be described as the logic of monotheism, namely, that since there is only one God, the guarantee or warranty for his unity is the identification of God with the totality of the universe. This reasoning is to a large extent parallel to Spinoza's reasoning vis-a-vis the concept of substance: if substance as a substrate is the independent component of reality, the way to safeguard its position is to construe substance as the totality of the universe. The same idea can be expressed within the context of the previously discussed modern interpretations of Judaism in general and of monotheism in particular. The trend toward interpreting God as spirit or as a unique entity remains within certain frames of reference having different correlations: God versus man, God versus nature, etc. The emphasis is placed on the separateness of God, but not on his essence as a being fundamentally different from any other being, since such a being cannot be conceived within a context of correlations. Only totality can be the proper categorial rendering of the position and the essence of such a being. At this point a second consideration enters the discussion, and this is obviously due to the absorption, whether direct or indirect, of certain Hegelian motifs into the fabric of modern Jewish thought. Spirit or the spiritual being are equivalents of the German term Geist. But Geist in the Hegelian context is not only a creative entity, but also Volksgeist. This at least was Krochmal's understanding. In his totalistic thrust he considers the absolute spiritual entity as the Volksgeist of the Jewish people and its involvement in the historical process. His assumption is that the Jewish people is not only related to an absolute God qua totality, but that totality is the wellspring of Jewish creativity as manifest in history and time. Thus there is no separation of Jewish history from the absolute being. The Jewish people is imbued with God and, conversely, God is immersed in Jewish history. His presence becomes manifest in the fact that Jewish historical creativity is inexhaustible, unlike the creativity of all other peoples which reaches its historical end within the historical process. Jewish history is characterized by a cyclical pattern: after a decline of creativity a resurgence 81

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comes about. In this sense we are confronted here by a paradoxical conclusion, namely, that God as an absolute being or a total entity is not extramundane, nor is He extra- or trans-historical. He is both God and Volksgeist, and thus preserves the continuing presence of the Jews in history. Hence both the universal validity of Judaism as well as the continuing presence of the Jews in history is defended.18 With this systematic interpretation we reach one of the paradoxical summits of modern Jewish thought where God, as monotheistically conceived, is at the same time rendered through a pantheistic understanding, though perhaps the appropriate formula for describing this pantheism would not be deus sive natura but deus sive historia. We have seen that in the previous interpretations of monotheism there is a very close relationship between the position and conception of God and morality - a relationship due to the affinity between spirit, spontaneity and freedom. That relationship is to some extent replaced in KrochmaPs interpretation of monotheism by the shift to history. The centrality of ethics i

One of the characteristic features of the modern interpretation of religion is the emphasis placed on ethical attitudes or imperatives within the structure of religious consciousness and behaviour. To be sure, the modern interpretation of religion is not exclusively ethical as witnessed to by the fact that the philosophy of religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stresses at the same time a phenomenology of religious consciousness, i.e., absolute dependence in Schleiermacher's sense, the awareness of the numinous in Otto's sense, and the like. Yet it is fair to say that modern philosophers have favoured attempts that emphasize the centrality of ethics or morality within historical religions justifying this perspective on the grounds that the great historical religions were indeed imbued with ethical commandments and attitudes. Yet it is precisely at this point of affinity between the historical religions and their modern philosophical interpretations that we encounter a difficulty which stems from the meaning and systematic position of ethics in modern philosophy. A case in point is obviously Kant's position on the issue and his statement that religion is, subjectively regarded, the recognition of all duties as divine commands. Yet immediately after stating this - and that statement amounts not to affirming the authority of the commands, but to giving an additional dimension of duties to commands — Kant goes on to note 82

Jewish Thought 'that Religion in which I must know in advance that something is a divine command, in order to recognize that it is my duty, is a religion grounded in revelation. As against this, a religion, in which I must know in the first place that something is my duty before accepting it as a divine command, is a natural religion.' Thus we are placed in a dilemma: do we, by virtue of an ethical interpretation of religion, adhere to revelation as the demanding or commanding authority? Or do we adhere to the intrinsic authority of the commands themselves, which are then interpreted as related to divine commands, with divine commands themselves being treated as a kind of divine approval of that which is prescribed by reason, that which is morally necessary and therefore, in Kant's wording, rational?19 We have mentioned Kant's statement, not only because of his influence on the development of modern religious thought - including his on Jewish thought - but because of the systematic significance of the distinctions contained in his statement. It is clear that the central position granted to ethical codes within religions in general, and within Judaism in particular, poses questions related not to the historical or textual presence of the ethical code in traditional texts, but to the structural meaning of ethics on the one hand and to religion on the other. To be sure, no textual reference to the sources of Judaism can ignore the fact that ethical concepts are central in these texts - as evident even in the very first chapter of the Book of Genesis, where God's approval of His own work is expressed in moral terms: 'and He saw that it was good'. Moreover, the notion of the commandments in the biblical as well as in the post-biblical, i.e., Halakhic, sense, as implying norms and codes of behaviour, places praxis or practice in a central position in traditional Judaism. Yet precisely that centrality poses the question as to .he grounding of practice. Is religious practice self-validating, or is the code of practice eventually to be subsumed under an a-religious or even rationalistic grounding and authority? II

Insofar as modern Jewish thought is understood as originating with the work of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), it is worth beginning our review with a consideration of his account of the relation of ethics and Judaism. Mendelssohn's position on ethics on the one hand and on Judaism on the other is both anachronistic and renders the modern Jewish situation perplexing. For Mendelssohn ethical judgments can be perceived by the ordinary intellect; they do not need any proof. In this sense Mendelssohn establishes the rationality of ethical judgments, even, in his view, their geometric exactitude and certainty. In addition, on Mendelssohn's account, the good, as viewed from the ethical perspective, relates to intentions; the 83

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good is an attribute of good intentions, which in turn prompt the performance of acts and deeds. Here we find an anticipation of Kant's emphasis on what is called Gesinnung.20 Then again, according to Mendelssohn, God is not a religious but a metaphysical concept. Unlike ethical concepts and judgments, metaphysical concepts and judgments require proofs which can in due course be established by reason. As a consequence of these presuppositions it can be seen that religion or Judaism has been preempted by Mendelssohn from both ends: from the ethical side as well as from the metaphysical one. Thus, Mendelssohn is prompted to suggest what may be termed a third view, namely one within the sphere of practice, in which Judaism is interpreted as a system of legal commandments and not of ethical prescriptions. Further, Judaism as a system of legal prescriptions cannot be identical with those commands which as such are binding, and being binding are understood as divine - that is to say, Judaism can neither be interpreted as a natural religion nor as a rationalist one. It is to be interpreted as a revealed religion, and indeed Judaism as the sum-total of legal commandments is a religion based solely on divine revelation.21 Interestingly enough, here the intervention of the divine being comes back in through the doors of legality; and that intervention has a particularistic character, because only Jews are the recipients of the divine commandments qua legislation, whilst all other ethical imperatives are grounded within the immanent boundaries of recta ratio or bon sens.22 Hence, Mendelssohn's 'solution' is at the same time a problem which poses for subsequent philosophies of Judaism the question: how is it possible to extend the meaning of ethical practice beyond legality and its authority in revelation? We shall now examine two attempts at a solution to this conundrum. We shall come back to Mendelssohn in our subsequent analysis of revelation and tradition. in Strictly speaking, Solomon Formstecher does not present a system of ethics which we could characterize as a system of Judaism, nor does he suggest a full identity between Judaism and a detailed ethical code. The issue which in all likelihood guided Formstecher's analysis - and precisely the reason why we suggest that his is a second type in the spectrum of approaches - is his essential concentration on the establishment of the conditio sine qua non of any ethical system or of any possibility of formulating an ethical code. That is to say, he was intent on emphasizing that the exploration of the premises of the ethical precedes the specific formulation of ethical norms. His fundamental idea, already noted above, is that Judaism is a religion of spirit in contrast to paganism which is a religion of nature and, moreover,

Jewish Thought that Judaism's God is the God who is spirit; therefore, notwithstanding the distance between man and God, there is an affinity between the two. By the same token the ethical ideal grounded in spirit has a religious meaning, because it pertains to the relationship between man and spirit and thus part passu to man and God.23 Incidentally, Christianity, unlike Judaism, is seen by Formstecher as closer to the religions of nature, because Christianity looks at man as basically implicated in natural urges.24 Thus in Christianity there is a continuing need for divine grace or, to characterize it from an ethical perspective, the natural environment in which man is involved is seen to equal original sin. As such the significance of this type of interpretation lies not in the ethical code but in paving the ground for the very possibility of interpreting Judaism as an essentially ethical religion. If Formstecher's thought represents a second kind of ethical interpretation of Judaism, a third type is epitomized by Hermann Cohen, who, for obvious reasons, plays a predominant role in this context. Our assumption that the positive aspect of Kant's position as well as his negative or critical, anti-Judaic, perspective, were significant even for Formstecher is central to any attempt to understand Cohen's interpretation of Judaism. Cohen was a distinguished interpreter of Kant's system; he was a founder of that branch of neo-Kantianism which goes by the name of'the Marburg School'. Hence Cohen's preoccupation with the problem of the adjustment between a religious world view and an ethical system is well understood. When in the course of his life Cohen moved to a closer adherence to Judaism on philosophical grounds he had to come to terms with the twofold question: (a) Does a religious ethical system differ from other ethical systems which lack the religious dimension, or from a system which goes beyond Kant's statement that religion is essentially an interpretation of ethical commandments or of duties as divine commandments? (b) What is the characteristic feature of Judaism in terms of its position within the scope of religious attitudes in general? With regard to the first question, that is to the religious role of the ethical code, the following can be said. Kant in his ethical system, refers to man as man. His position can be interpreted as being concerned with man only from the universal or universalistic point of view. Man is a man since the human essence is embodied in him, or he is a man since he belongs to mankind which is a universal species or community. Furthermore man is to be considered as an end and not as a mere means because the universal human essence inheres in him and in respect of this no human being can be said to be ethically superior to another human being and cannot therefore take advantage of him qua means. Going beyond this view Cohen's neo-Kantian revision emphasizes that religion adds to the Kantian universalistic ethical a complementary attitude which focuses on the 85

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individual as such. That is to say, on the individual who, in addition to being a member of the universal community participating in the human essence, is an individual by virtue of his biography, his position here and now, his social standing, and the fact of his own death. Moreover, as an individual, he is a sinner concerned with his own shortcomings and sense of guilt and limitation, i.e., he is aware that his behaviour deviates from the norm. It was on the basis of this analysis that Cohen saw the prophet Ezekiel as representing the turning point in the development of Judaism. For it was Ezekiel who prophesied that: 'a person will die in his own sin' in contrast to the older idea of collective or inherited responsibility in which a man is said to carry the sins of his forefathers. In this connection, Cohen pointed to the biblical discovery of the individual human being even in the stranger, who himself epitomizes a particular, i.e., individual, human condition.25 One can correctly suggest that this special concern for the individual, which Cohen takes to be characteristic of religion in general and of Judaism as the religion from which this concern originates in particular, is presented by Cohen as an attempt to supplement as it were the legitimate direction of ethical universalism (Kant) in order to enhance the ethical attitude by focusing it on individuals. Speaking in religious terms, one can see in this new focus a transformation of the qualities of the divine being, such as grace, benevolence, etc. into human terms such as generosity, charity etc. Accordingly, and in this sense, Judaism, is to be recognized as the fount of the religion of reason, as the true originator of that ethical attitude which accepts the role of the individual as that of another human being and which emphasizes the equality of all human agents. The understanding originating in this classical Jewish attitude has not only a cognitive character but expresses itself in acts of benevolence and mercy as well. A further aspect, crucial to Cohen's thought, is the position of the Messianic idea, which he viewed as a consequence of monotheism ethically understood, since Messianism amounts to the dominance of the good on earth. Messianism refers to human history which in turn is directed towards the future of universal history. Yet humanity, which is the objective, the focus and the scene of the realization of Messianism, is, for Cohen, primarily discovered in the love of men - and here again we can trace the sources of Messianism in its ethical meaning and its connection with an ethical interpretation of Jewish monotheism. This is the case because in monotheism God is essentially the God of love and of goodness. The goodness of God is not confined to scattered individuals or to an ethnic entity, but refers to all people and to all peoples. Thus it can be said that the universal dimension of Messianism is but the consequence of monotheism, but by the same token that dimension is ethical in the first place, since in human terms the cosmic 86

Jewish Thought universality implied in monotheism vis-a-vis creation is universality as applied to all human beings. To be sure, Messianism in this sense has a strongly positive connotation and it is the strength of Messianism that it became the mainstay of the psyche of optimism. The emphasis placed on the future of mankind removes from Messianism, according to Cohen, the popular stress on the immortality of the soul. It also removes eudaimonism, since Messianism is not concerned with the material or economic welfare of humanity: those conditions are significant only as the background or infrastructure of the ethical principles which are to dominate the orbit of mankind. It is only within the scope of the infinite development of the human species that the individual psyche can attain immortality. Cohen goes so far as to call the ethical individual the individual of totality (Allheitsindividuum). To be sure, the reference to Messianism so conceived mitigates to a considerable extent the individuality or personality of the Messiah as a human being; indeed, Cohen explicitly uses the description of the ideality of the Messiah or his meaning as an idea. Clearly these are Kantian terms, transplanted by Cohen into the scope of his interpretation of the Messianic idea.26 Summing up this part of our exploration we may say, as hinted at already, that modern Jewish philosophical systems, emphasizing the primary affinity between Judaism and an ethical attitude, do not present a comprehensive system of ethical imperatives. This is why the Halakha hardly underwent any philosophical transformation - if such a transformation were even possible. The above-mentioned philosophical systems are more concerned with the articulation of the principles underlying the traditional commandments, whether or not they adhere to all the particularities and details of those commandments. Cohen, for example, is concerned with the philosophical interpretation of the law in the ethical sense, emphasizing that the ethical formation of man, which is the only objective of the law, amounts to man's listening to God - in man's position as man, who cannot be God and remains always only man. Thus despite the philosophical interpretations of Judaism as an ethical system, the traditional approach to the commandments qua mitzvoth has been maintained - either disregarding the philosophical explication, or as an additional dimension of those explications.

The attitude towards Christianity I

We begin this section of our exploration by pointing to the particular social, political and cultural circumstances of modern Jewry, since the philosophical systems espoused were in direct response to this cultural and historical

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situation. The philosophers under review, as is already clear from our exploration up to this point, were trained and immersed in modern philosophical systems. They were profoundly influenced by the surrounding world, mainly in Germany, but also to some extent in France and Italy. Some of them participated in the various modern or modernistic (Reform) movements in Judaism, each of them responded to the attempt and aspiration of the Jews to strike roots in the surrounding contemporary culture and to become fully fledged citizens of the contemporary world. Some of them - Cohen perhaps epitomizes to an exaggerated degree the attitude with which we are concerned - consider the surrounding world, in Cohen's case, German culture, as humanistic, humane and even imbued with Messianic overtones. Yet insofar as Christianity as a living faith inherent in the culture of the surrounding world was concerned, Jewish philosophers assumed a critical stance. There are probably two major reasons for this attitude and for the concomitant negative evaluation of Christianity. First, Jewish thinkers wanted to erect a barrier of protection around Jews who became acculturated or, as Jewish parlance has it, assimilated, to the surrounding world. Secondly, philosophically or systematically, Christianity was viewed as a popular, i.e., less pure, version of monotheism, while Judaism was considered monotheism in the more strict, i.e., more pure, form. From this basic evaluation certain important ethical consequences flowed. Let us consider several of these critical evaluations of Christianity. Formstecher understood Christianity and Islam mainly as apostles of Judaism to the pagan world.27 In order to make it acceptable the Gentile world required the integration of some elements of paganism into the infrastructure of the pure monotheistic religion, i.e., Judaism. This absorption of pagan elements precludes regarding the subsequent stages of Christianity's religious development as superior forms of religion. In a sense, these absorbed elements have a tactical significance, in as much as Judaism adjusted itself to the non-Jewish world in order to make its teachings understood and then accepted. Samuel Hirsch stresses again the doctrine of original sin characteristic of the Pauline version of Christianity. According to this doctrine all men are inevitably parties of Adam's transgression and therefore, according to Christian doctrine, man cannot liberate himself from this fall. As a consequence Christianity cannot be viewed as the religion of freedom or of spirit, and thus cannot be seen as a pure religion germane to the philosophy of spirit and freedom. Kant, of course, had already struggled with the notion of radical evil,28 and had tried to show that precisely because there is an element of radical evil in man, he ought to be free in order to overcome the 88

Jewish Thought temptations of evil. Freedom is sovereign, as it were, because it clashes with, and attempts to overcome, evil. Original sin for Kant is thus treated as a species of radical evil. For Hirsch, on the other hand, man cannot become a free being as long as there are forces of evil to which he is necessarily attracted and which are symbolically represented by Adam's fall. Let us not forget at this juncture that Kant did not refer to Adam's fall, but to the evil urges in man, or again to man's evil decisions. Thus Kant presented a philosophical interpretation of the Christian doctrine and not the Christian doctrine itself. Hirsch, by comparison, returns to the Christian doctrine, disregarding its philosophical interpretation, though the principle of freedom as interpreted by Kant is central to the whole discussion. The essential and necessary role played by Jesus in Christianity is an additional source of disagreement between Judaism and Christianity since, according to Christian dogma, only Jesus as a consequence of his unique ontological status could redeem himself from original sin, which is the heritage of all mankind. According to Judaism, however, self-redemption is the attribute of every human being: the elevation from the constraints of nature and from sin is but a manifestation of freedom. Hence a religion of freedom, i.e. Judaism, is bound to deny the superior or super-human character of any individual who, by virtue of that position, is viewed as the redeemer of mankind or as the son of God. We should also mention in this context not only the basic antithesis between nature and freedom, but also the aspect of universality, which is traditionally attributed to Christianity and which is present in Kant's philosophy of religion as a religion within the boundaries of reason. Universality is usually understood as an extension of a religious belief insofar as that belief is not held to be confined to a particular historical entity but rather available to mankind in general. Judaism, on this definition, has been viewed as a particularistic religion because of its confinement to the Jewish people and the special position bestowed on the people of Israel as a consequence. Christianity, by contrast, has generally been viewed as a universalistic religion since ab initio it addressed itself to all mankind. Hirsch, however, attempts to undermine this putative universalistic superiority of Christianity. Every human being, as he puts it sharply, might attain the spiritual and religious level of Jesus, since every human being is a free being. Hence there is justification neither for the separation of Jesus from the common framework of mankind, nor the elevation of Jesus to the super-human level, and thus there is no need and no justification for the reliance of human beings on Jesus. Moreover, according to the logic of this argument the universalistic application of the Christian message is unnecessary.

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II

As we have already noted in passing, one of the leitmotifs in the criticism of Christianity is the thesis that Christianity is not a pure monotheistic religion, but, to put it typologically and historically, that it had absorbed elements of paganism into its fundamental outlook and structure. Salomon Steinheim (1789-1866), one of the most interesting nineteenth-century philosophers of Judaism, emphasizes this argument and it comes to the fore again in Hermann Cohen who added to this criticism his own special touch. Christianity, Cohen argued, blurs the distinction between man and God, and thus contains an element of pantheism which, in this context, supersedes the previous characterization referring to the element of paganism. Let us here mention two other critics of Christianity, namely Joseph Salvador and Eli Benamozegh. Salvador (1796-1873) attacks not only the basic dogmas of Christianity, but the Catholic Church as it developed dogmatically and historically. For him, the realization of principles and norms, and not only their formulation, was of fundamental significance. And in this respect Salvador found historic Christianity wanting. Salvador also responds to those who suggest that, in spite of the historical dependence of Christianity on Judaism in terms of essence and substance, Christianity is a new beginning and is essentially independent from Judaism. He insists that we do not find in the New Testament any new principle which was not known before in the Judaic context. Taking into consideration both the origins and the expansion of Christianity, the merit of Christianity lies in the spreading of two ideas, namely the unity of God and the Messianic ideal. Yet, at the same time, Christianity became corrupted by its passage through history, especially its rise to pre-eminent political power and its virtual monopoly on culture. Christianity, however, never came to grips with the meaning of this new historical reality nor with the position of the law in this socio-historic constellation because it denied the significance of the law as Judaism understood it while not providing any new significance to the law within its own conceptual parameters. Thus it was bound malgre sot to adjust itself inadequately to the new historic reality. While its over-emphasis on spiritual principles and values became a pretext for the opportunistic acceptance of the facts of political reality, a type of Realpolitik.29 Lastly, Elijah Benamozegh's (1822-1900) view needs to be considered because it is reflective of a certain broad trend present in modern Jewish thought. The major issue for Benamozegh is the shift of emphasis from deeds to faith, as this is understood in the basic Christian sources and developed in various Christian trends. That shift, as is well known, was 90

Jewish Thought accompanied by the deprecation of the centrality of the legal aspect in Judaism. Though Benamozegh takes exception to Mendelssohn's interpretation of Judaism in terms of divine legislation, he emphasizes the significance of the law, a significance which combines the legal aspect narrowly defined with the Torah's more general concern with morality. The significance of the law for human life is grounded in the fact that legal precepts make for the stability and predictability of human behaviour and facilitate inter-human contacts, whereas the emphasis on faith leads to reliance on feelings, unpredictable and volatile as they are. In addition - and we come back time and again to this motif- the negation of real life has to be mentioned since the negation leads to an over-emphasis on evil in human life which in turn leads to an attitude which vitiates any attempt to amend or to remedy the human situation. Furthermore, we find in Christianity a certain vacillation between a negation of human reality and a universalism which is unable to come to grips with fundamental factors of this human reality, including the position of peoplehood and statehood within the framework of human behaviour and historical existence.30 We may sum up the various criticisms of Christianity found in nineteenth-century Jewish thought as follows: despite the specific differences between them, all attempt to safeguard the superiority of Judaism visa-vis Christianity either in terms of the ontological ground of Judaism or in terms of its thematic content.

Constitutive norms: Torah & tradition I

It is an inherent feature of a philosophical interpretation of religion to art' ulate not only the particular concepts implied in religions but also the grounding norms on which religions are based. To take an example, medieval Jewish philosophy from its very beginning was concerned with the question of the authority of revelation as well as with the question of the authority of tradition or what has been called historical truths, that is to say, statements or commandments transmitted from generation to generation. Again, modern Jewish philosophy relates to the component of revelation as well as to that of tradition, sometimes trying to bind the two together, and sometimes separating them. In this section we shall review and analyse some of the representative systems of thought which are to be placed in the problematic context of these two issues. We start with a brief description of the meaning of revelation and that of tradition in order to realize the difference between the two, at least as

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recognized from the ontological point of view. Revelation in the broad sense amounts to disclosure or to communication. But revelation in the religious sense amounts to the self-revelation of God: God discloses himself to human beings by an appearance or by an event. To be sure, a distinction between revelation from the divine vantage point and that from the human vantage point is called for by the very understanding of revelation as a self-disclosure of God to human beings. As to tradition it is by definition a handing over or transmitting of 'content' within the human context, from generation to generation. Tradition in the Jewish context appeared as an interpretation or exegesis of the Bible which has been considered either as a word of God or as grounded in the event of revelation in the strict sense of the term, that is to say, the revelation at Mount Sinai. The concern with tradition and revelation has been a major issue from the beginning of modern Jewish philosophy, that is to say, the philosophy of Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn begins with the well-known statement: I believe Judaism knows nothing of revealed religion in the sense in which Christians define this term. The Israelites possess a divine legislation - laws, commandments, statutes, rules of conduct, instruction in God's will and in what they are to do to attain temporal and eternal salvation. Moses, in a miraculous and supernatural way, revealed to them these laws and commandments, but not dogmas, propositions concerning salvation, or self-evident principles of reason . . . Supernatural legislation has been mistaken for a supernatural revelation of religions . . .

One may question whether this juxtaposition between revealed religion and divine legislation is as strict as it appears to be in Mendelssohn's presentation, since even he speaks in this context of laws revealed to the Israelites through Moses. Divine legislation is still a revealed legislation. Yet Mendelssohn was anxious to draw a line of demarcation between propositions which he held had been established through philosophical reasoning and thus are emancipated from both revelation and tradition and those which are so grounded. At the same time he attempted to draw a line of demarcation between the binding laws of the state to which Jews are entitled to belong and the Jewish legal system which is rooted in the divine appearance and thus, as it were, of a different order from, while not in conflict with, the law of the state which has its basis in a human covenant. Leaving aside these considerations we are bound to come to the conclusion that the concept of divine law or legislation is for Mendelssohn an attempt to bind together both the aspect of revelation proper, and tradition proper, the last understood mainly in the Halakhic, that is to say, legal sense of the term. Divine legislation would connote henceforth that the Halakhic system is grounded in the divine realm and by the same token is understood 92

Jewish Thought thematically the way it has been understood over the ages, i.e., mainly as a legal system or as a code of behaviour. Yet, we must ask at this juncture the obvious question: why did Mendelssohn separate the legal aspect from the aspects entertained by reason or rationality? Was he motivated only by an apologetic concern, that is to say, the concern not to let Judaism become totally immersed in the rational system or in what he, following the language of the generation, called eternal truth? Perhaps Mendelssohn thought that the realm of doing and will as a motivating factor, underneath doing, cannot be made a component in the domain of rationality once reason is seen primarily as an intellectual capacity. Indeed, he made a distinction between 'reasoned conviction' and 'All commandments of the divine law are addressed to man's will, to his capacity to act.' In this statement we notice that the will as man's capacity to act is not subsumed under the general heading of reason or conviction. Mendelssohn agrees with the established distinction between reason and will and separates the component of will to such an extent that he makes it the major factor on the human end referring to the divine law. To be sure, in what follows he is not totally consistent, since he interprets faith as trust or confidence, that is to say, as firm reliance on pledge and promise. We can wonder whether confidence or reliance can be seen as related unequivocally to will or to capacity to act. Here again we may encounter one of the ambiguities of Mendelssohn's presentation of Judaism in spite of his programmatic statement. Again, he is not satisfied solely with the performance of the ritual law; he is concerned to endow it with genuine and real meaning. Thus we can ask what is the genuine and the real meaning of ceremonies in addition to being manifestations of the divine revelation. Apparently Mendelssohn did not want to reach the point of a total identification between the divine laws and what had been called in medieval philosophy commandments based on obedience or on hearing only. In any case, we find in Mendelssohn an attempt to bring together the components of revelation and tradition which he believed would resolve the dilemmas of Judaism in the modern era.31 ii

Samson Raphael Hirsch, the prominent neo-orthodox thinker, followed, to some extent, the line which started with Mendelssohn, though at one point — which is by no means a peripheral one — he says: 'God no longer wills the destruction of mankind, but its education.' This statement has to be compared with what Mendelssohn writes referring to his friend, Lessing: 'He conceives of mankind not as a collectivity but as an individual whom Providence, as it were, has sent to school here on earth in order to raise him 93

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from childhood to manhood. . . . "Progress" is a term that applies only to the individual, destined by Providence to spend part of his eternity here on earth.'32 Yet in terms of the position of the law, Hirsch follows the line of Mendelssohn when he identifies Torah with law, either with the written law or with the oral law. To be sure he refers to the philosophical or intellectual attempts expressed in speculations upon the essence of deity but he is inclined, at least a good part of the time, to argue that God's will found its manifestation in the Torah and the fulfilment of the law has thus become the fundamental principle of Judaism. He specifically mentions Moses Mendelssohn's attempt, critically, to mediate modernity in the context of this discussion. Yet he himself emphasizes that Scripture should be the book of law for life for the modern Jew as it has been in the tradition and that the modern Jew should be able to understand life through the Torah. Hirsch attempts to elevate the Torah or the Law to the position of being revealed manifestation, and to some extent, he presents a view that argues that there are two parallel divine manifestations, nature on the one hand and Torah as commandments on the other. To be sure he cannot follow Mendelssohn's view that the divine manifestation is restricted only to the commandments and he certainly does not make the clear-cut Mendelssohnian distinction between divine legislation and divine revelation. But what is common to both Hirsch and Mendelssohn is the attempt to present laws and commandments as being the characteristic features of Judaism, and at the same time the attempt to bestow on them an objective position, which because of its objectivity cannot be erased nor even altered. The emphasis on the divine aspect of the law is not only a reading of the tradition but also a type of defensive strategy in which the two modern Jewish thinkers are engaged in order to prevent the possibility of introducing into the scope of Judaism any attempt at modifying the legal system by exposing it to the modern era characterized as it is by the atmosphere of change.33 in When we turn now to the third thinker whose work deserves careful scrutiny, Salomon Steinheim, we encounter a new emphasis with regard to revelation which explicitly and implicitly criticizes Mendelssohn's position and all those who share it. Steinheim characterizes Mendelssohn's view, that is to say, the view which places the exclusive emphasis on the revealed commandments as one which leaves Judaism only a wig and a beard. To be sure, this is an interpretation of the legal system which sees only the ritual aspects of the laws. At the same time, however, Steinheim also criticizes Mendelssohn for having placed his emphasis on the connection between 94

Jewish Thought divine revelation and legislation. Thus Mendelssohn in Steinheim's view, has left aside the whole problem of the existence of the living God designating that concern a philosophical one in the universal sense of that term. Here, Steinheim interprets Mendelssohn, and not without good reason, as holding a position which removes a concern with God from the realm of Judaism. This, according to Steinheim, leads to the consequence that a fundamental shift occurs from faith to a system of laws. As overagainst Mendelssohn the central feature of Steinheim's system is his emphasis on revelation which leads him to the conclusion that revelation is an anti-rational phenomenon. Let us consider his presentation of this argument. At this point again juxtaposition with Mendelssohn's view is called for. Mendelssohn attempted to remove the aspect of revelation from the scope of Judaism mainly because revelation as such cannot be consonant with rationality and secondly, on the positive side, because some of the thematic aspects of revelation, like the assertion of the existence of God, became part and parcel of rational philosophy. At this point Steinheim intrudes into the discussion by stressing that revelation implies that all is created out of nothing. Thus, the principle of revelation defies any rational discourse which is inclined in the direction of a continuous chain of events which, as such, does not call for the beginning of the chain which lies outside the chain itself, i.e. implies the creation out of nothing. This approach inherent in the acceptance of revelation finds its additional interpretation in Steinheim who assumes that rationalism amounts to a position which holds that there is no effect without an adequate cause. Revelation presupposes the will of God which is the ultimate cause and as such cannot be placed within the chain of causes and effects. Any attempt to translate the religious notions grounded in revelation is basically 'bad' monotheism. In this sense Steinheim wants, as it were, to save 'good' monotheism from the danger of 'bad' monotheism which amounts to a translation, that is to say, a pseudo-translation of religion proper into the vocabulary of rational philosophy. Summing up we may say that Steinheim does not assign to revelation the position of some basic articles ofJudaism in the sense present, for instance, in Maimonides, thirteen articles, but rather transforms revelation into a kind of a presupposition of Judaism.34 IV

Having said this we have to be aware of the fact that the principle which is parallel to revelation, i.e. the principle of tradition, is not established by the emphasis on the aspect of revelation. Tradition, as we have mentioned 95

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before, amounts to a transfer from generation to generation. Thus, it is a historical concept and in this sense cannot be seen as symmetrical to the super-historical as well as super-natural notion of revelation. The modern historical awareness had a far-reaching impact on the position of tradition in Jewish consciousness, and along with that, on the importance of tradition in Jewish philosophical interpretation. We may put it briefly in the following way: the historical aspect of tradition may lead to the emphasis being laid not primarily on the permanent aspects within the historical process but on the changes which occur within the process. Along with that, even then the changes are eventually absorbed and their changing character or their novelties do not remain prominent any more. A case in point is the emergence of that which goes by the name of the 'Science of Judaism' which is a manifestation of the twentieth or the nineteenth century - and to which we have already referred above. Even when we take the view that the 'Science of Judaism' qua science appears to be 'value-free', it is still clear that any approach to ancient texts which is not based on an interpretation which understands itself as a continuation of tradition but rather as an approach grounded in a philological or an historical reading of the text - any such approach amounts to a novelty in terms of the involvement of the present age vis-a-vis the treasures of the past. This implication has to be noted even when we assume that the 'Science of Judaism' did not wish to have an impact on the normative relationship to the treasures of the past or, to put it positively, adhered only to the methodical prescriptions grounded in a value-free approach to the past. But, as a matter of fact, both from the point of view of the principles as well as from the point of view of the practical consequences, the 'Science of Judaism' can be seen as a turning point in terms of the approach to tradition. The aspect of revelation does not fall at all within this scope of a scientific interpretation. But historical continuity can be questioned at least, post factum, and changes in the past once discerned can serve as a model for changes introduced, or to be introduced, deliberately in the present with the perspective of the future. This indeed happened in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish thought and the outcome can be formulated as amounting to the view that tradition is not an unambiguous continuity and therefore not everything present in the tradition is of a binding authority. Along with that, an additional consequence has been drawn, namely, that once changes are identified in the past, changes can be introduced deliberately in the present. This aspect of the attitude to tradition, which amounts to an attitude to the past, has been reinforced by what can be called practical, that is to say sociopolitical considerations related to the Jewish aspirations to gain equality in

Jewish Thought

the political systems in which Jews lived in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There is here a kind of a scale of approaches which, in turn, find their expression in the attitude to tradition. The very fact that the Jews want to strike roots as equal citizens within the framework of the modern state is already a change, or at least can be viewed as a change in terms of the selfenclosed character of the traditional code of behaviour. Once the door is open for one sort of change, many other changes may follow and here the adherence to revelation as such is certainly not a guarantee for the preservation of tradition. This applies also to Steinheim who was active in the political attempts in northern Germany to gain full civil rights for Jews within the political framework. Yet there is here an interesting circular attitude: the non-Jewish world demanded from the Jews that they change their mode of behaviour in order to be accepted into the political framework of the modern state and this is a well-known feature of the encounter between the Jews and the modern world already present in the Napoleonic era. The Jews in turn, tried to make a distinction between their belonging to the state and the 'four cubits' of their existence - as is the case, as we have seen, with Mendelssohn. But subsequently, the Jews tried to persuade the non-Jewish world that the changes had already occurred, that is to say, that the traditional norm had already undergone change. And at the same time they tried to convince the Jews themselves that they needed to change, that is to say, that the traditional norm is not that unambiguous as it appears or appeared over the centuries. Here one can rightly note that not only do individual Jewish philosophical and theological systems have their basic motivation in this problematic political and historical situation but also trends of a communal character, e.g., the Jewish Reform Movement, or the emergence of the Conservative Movement, are ultimately a product of this problematic situation and the atmosphere which surrounds it. v Yet, overstepping, in a sense, the boundaries of nineteenth-century philosophy, we have to point to the fact that the aspect of revelation is prominent in the systems of both Hermann Cohen and Franz Rosenzweig. Let us consider first the aspect of revelation in Hermann Cohen, not only because of the significance of his system in general but also because of the particular interpretation which Cohen gave to revelation. In order to shed some light on Cohen's interpretation, the following remark is apposite. Revelation has been rejected or criticized because it runs counter the autonomous character of reason. One could not envisage the clash between revelation and rationality unless one refers to reason as being natural or 97

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autonomous - to use in this context the Kantian idiom. Cohen, who was a Kantian and a prominent interpreter of Kant's system, tried to resolve the dilemma by accepting the fact that reason might be autonomous in its activity, but is not autonomous in its very position. Hence, Cohen said that God endowed man with reason - and negatively, man himself could not have attained reason. Reason is the hallmark of divine creation and this is expressed in the traditional terms that through reason man becomes the image of God. If reason is the characteristic quality of man then from this point of view man's essence is by definition a divine essence. To put it differently, Cohen establishes the relationship between creation and revelation. Creation is a universal activity of God, applicable to the universe and to nature at large. Revelation is the creation of man and in this sense the same function of God which applies to the universe applies also to man. Such a view leads to a very radical conclusion that any interpretation activized by the unfolding of reason in man amounts to an unfolding of the divine reason in man. Thus, tradition itself, though it occurs and persists on the historical level, cannot be uprooted from the level or position of revelation. We started our analysis by pointing to the duality of revelation and tradition because of the difference in terms of their ontological respective positions. Cohen's philosophy leads to a kind of continuity between revelation and tradition, but as such, does not resolve the dilemmas of continuity of tradition as such. This is so because the question can be asked whether any interpretation motivated or brought about by reason, which is divine reason by definition, can be questioned as to its legitimacy. Hence, instead of having two constitutive norms in revelation and in tradition we encounter one norm only, that of revelation which philosophically can be viewed as a very stringent norm but which, historically or practically, becomes more open and tolerant of various innovations.35 To some extent we find an echo of that view even in its more radical expression in Franz Rosenzweig's letter to Martin Buber of June 1925 where he asserts that revelation is certainly not law-giving - and we mention Rosenzweig here because to some extent Mendelssohn's position comes full circle in that letter. For Rosenzweig revelation is only revelation. The primary concept is revelation itself. He writes to Buber as follows: 'He came down . . . this already concludes the revelation; "he spoke" is the beginning of interpretation and certainly "I am" but where does this interpretation stop being legitimate? I would never dare to state this in a general sentence.' At this point Rosenzweig goes on to suggest: 'Or could it be that revelation must never become legislation, because then the original self-interpretation or revelation would have to give way to human interpretation? This I would 98

Jewish Thought admit, just as I am convinced that revelation cannot be identified with the human person.'36 VI

Without attempting to show that there is a ready-made solution to the dilemma we may conclude our analysis by quoting Gershom Scholem's statement on revelation and tradition as the two religious categories in Judaism. Scholem says: 'Judaism, as it has constituted itself in distinct historical forms . . . is properly recognized in the history of religions as a classical example of religious traditionalism.' In considering the problem of tradition, we must distinguish between two questions. The first is historical: how did a tradition endowed with religious dignity come to be formed? The other question is: how was this tradition understood once it was accepted as a religious phenomenon? Eventually Scholem says: 'In Judaism, tradition becomes the reflective impulse that intervenes between the absoluteness of the divine word - revelation - and its receiver.' And eventually Scholem leads us to the conclusion that in the Jewish conception genuine tradition, like everything that is creative, is not the achievement of human productivity alone.37 Historicity I

Our review so far has been concerned with elements essential to the articulation of the inner content of Judaism. Now we turn to what might be termed an extrinsic consideration: historicity. It should be noted at the outset that historicity is perhaps more of an attitude than a theme, though it does possess a thematic aspect as well. Moreover, in dealing with historicity, we cannot confine ourselves to philosophical systems alone, but must by the nature of the subject, broaden the frame of reference and consider sociohistoric as well as intellectual trends which go beyond systematic exposition. Historicity is understood here as the involvement of human beings in the sequence of time and their awareness of that involvement. To this broad definition we have to add two clarifications: (a) time is understood here not as astronomic or biological time, but as the span of human generations, (b) The term 'involvement' is deliberately chosen because it is broader than, for instance, dependence or allegiance, though obviously one's involvement in time qua historical time, and one's awareness of it, can mean specifically one's dependence upon past generations, their legacies etc. Judaism as a religion is obviously a religion of and in history. It is a religion 99

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of tradition and thus carries within itself the legacy of the past, either of the past in which the divine revelation manifested itself, or the past as the accumulated interpretations of that revelation. In other words, it is an historical religion whose historicity amounts largely to an awareness of the continuity between generations. Against this background and historic infrastructure it needs to be appreciated that modern Jewish thought is characterized by a profound shift from the awareness of continuity to the awareness of change. Indeed, historicity within the modern context appears to a large extent as the introduction or affirmation of change which is one of the individuating features of modernity. It can be presupposed that such a shift towards affirmation of change did not occur suddenly within the historical consciousness, but germinated gradually within the traditional view. Let us mention again Krochmal's system in this connection. Krochmal placed in the foreground the reality of historical time; but the alterations which occurred in that time are understood as reinforcing eternity and thus cannot be separated from the suprahistorical and meta-temporal aspects of human reality. In contradistinction, the modern shift towards a more dynamic picture of history amounts in large measure to a seeming separation of historical and human changes from their position as direct manifestations of the divine, i.e., supratemporal, essence.38 II

Let us now schematically outline several of the developments which became prominent in the nineteenth-century conception of historicity. With regard to the interpretation of Judaism, the awareness of the growth which had taken place in the past becomes prominent: Judaism has a history, it is not only a tradition absorbing innovations and alterations. It is a series of changes, the exploration of which becomes essential both for the selfunderstanding of the present generation as well as a guiding light for initiatives to be undertaken and instituted. Against this background what goes by the name of the 'Science of Judaism' (Wissenschaft des jfudentums) emerges as a deliberate scholarly approach or discipline which, of course, absorbed the very presuppositions of modern historiography.39 It is not by chance that wefindamong the most prominent manifestations of this tendency, of this school, within modern Judaism the emergence of major studies dealing with the history of the Jewish people. Paradigmatic in this respect is Heinrich Graetz's (1817-91) opus which is consciously indebted to philosophical trends, as Graetz himself noted in his 'Construction of Jewish History'.40 Moreover, now we do not have to confine ourselves 100

Jewish Thought to a recognition of changes in terms of successive periods or epochs within the course of history, rather we now find beyond that approach that there is an awareness of the plurality of trends within given periods ofJewish history, and part passu within Judaism and Jewish religiosity. Those modern thinkers who would deliberately attempt to introduce changes in the contemporary behaviour of the Jews especially in religious matters would, from this juncture on, argue that the possibility and legitimacy of such transformations derived from the discernment of changes in the past. They presented as their credentials a continuing line of development — a kind of formal or nominal continuity, as against the substantive and real continuity claimed by their predecessors. It is almost certainly no biographical accident that some of the major figures of the first generation of Wissenschaft scholars were active in the Jewish Reform Movement. Reform Jews recognized the need for formulating an account of an 'essence' of Judaism, which is preserved within and despite the changes deliberately introduced and called for. As against the permanence of accumulation, a new kind of permanence emerges which requires formulation. In this sense the various types of interpretations of Judaism dealt with above in terms of monotheism or systems of ethics, were presented precisely as formulations of that essential core which could be exposed to changes and whose validity, because of its inner persuasiveness, would still be preserved. At this point the philosophical systems and the currents of a religious and intellectual character either meet or are at least intended to reinforce each other. in Modern Jewish nationalism and its culmination in Zionism have to be understood in this same context. As a political-religious current, this has to be seen as an attempt towards a revitalization or renaissance of certain basic elements within the Jewish reality, namely land, language, and political organization qua statehood. The revitalization of those factors is an attempt to meet the unprecedented historical circumstances which, through its dynamics, brought about the atomization of the Jewish people. Parallel to this, the Jewish renaissance is understood as a response both to the atomization and to the emergence of national consciousness in European historical reality in the nineteenth century. That is to say, what applied to the non-Jewish world was now also considered relevant to the Jews. Yet this revitalization, placing the emphasis on the 're', returns in the modern context to features of Jewish existence which occupy a determinative position in traditional Judaism: the land as the promised land, the Hebrew IOI

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language as the holy language, and the political entity as a modern interpretation of the redemptive or Messianic aspect of traditional faith. This modern reinterpretation of course gives rise to the question of whether it was intended to replace the traditional attitude with a new secularism or to reinforce the traditional understanding. To answer this question, however, requires that we go beyond intellectual currents and face certain historical realities in all their dialectical fluctuations. Indeed, the emergence of Zionism and its character has to be set amidst the modern landscape. And yet by the nature of the Zionist enterprise it cannot be listed with systematic attempts which aimed to reinterpret Judaism and the Jewish heritage in the light of current philosophical trends. Moreover, Zionism, by definition, is a collective phenomenon, while the various philosophical and religious interpretations ofJudaism entertained in this essay have been the inspiration of individuals, even when they have had an impact on one's fellow-thinkers or the larger lay Jewish community. This distinction applies even when we take into account the fact that individual thinkers obviously did contribute to the shaping of the Zionist analysis and ideology.41 Yet, what is even more significant, is that Zionism represents a shift from the interpretation of Judaism to an attempt to place the centre of gravity in the actual and factual historical existence of the Jews, and the attributes which go along with the existence of a people in the circumstances of modernity. To be sure, the question of the nature of Judaism returns within the context of Zionism in the sense that Zionism attempts to revitalize the various modes of Jewish existence and creativity, which in turn sharpens the problem of the relationship between a continuous creativity and the given legacy of the past. Yet the shift in emphasis from the formulated legacy to the texture of life and the actual locus of the various manifestations of creativity cannot be overlooked. Thus, even when we assume that the legacy looms large, it has to be seen from a perspective which objectively and subjectively i.e., in the eyes of the opponents of Zionism - changes its position in the total structure of Jewish concern. Here again we move beyond a typological presentation of interpretations of Judaism to a possible analysis of factual changes which occurred in the living and existential horizon of the Jews.

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Jewish Thought Notes 1 Religion und Wissenschaft im mittellalterlichen und modernen Denken (Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Berlin, 1922). 2 Faithful to our methodology, we shall advance certain types of interpretation without attempting to give a detailed chronological survey of the various positions. 3 Formstecher's major work is Die Religion des Geistes, eine wissenschaftliche Dartstellung des jfudenthums nach seinem Charakter, Entwiklungsgange und Berufe in der Menscheit (Frankfurt am Main, 1841). Reprinted in S. Katz (ed.), Jewish Philosophy, Mysticism and the History of Ideas, Judaica Reprint Series (New York, 1980). 4 Ibid., p. 100. 5 Ibid., p. i n . 6 Ibid., p. 360. 7 Ibid., pp. 69, 116. 8 The major book is Das System der religiosen Auschauungen derjuden und sein Verhdltniss zum Heidentum, Christentum und zur absoluten Philosophic /, Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden (Leipzig, 1842). This is the only volume published, though Hirsch was a prolific author. It has to be observed that the context in which Judaism is dealt with is 'absolute philosophy', i.e., Hegel's concept of philosophy. 9 Ibid., p. xxxviii. That identification in turn has its origin in Hegel and is parallel to Kant's identification of reason and freedom. Hirsch takes that line which is close to that of Formstecher in spite of his tendency to criticize Formstecher. 10 Ibid., pp. 25-8, 621. 11 Hermann Cohen's major work on Judaism is Die Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Leipzig, 1919). All references will be to the English translation of the work, Religion of Reason from the Sources ofJudaism, transl. with an Introduction by Simon Kaplan, Introductory Essay by Leo Strauss (New York, 1972). It should also be noted that an English translation of a selection of Cohen's writings on Judaism also exists: Reason and Hope, Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, tr. Eva Jospe (New York, 1971). 12 Religion of Reason, pp. 356°. The chapter (chapter 1 of the book) deals with God's uniqueness. 13 Ibid., pp. 98, 243. 14 Ibid., pp. 132, 19, 76-9. 15 'The transcendence of God: archetype of morality', in Reason and Hope, pp. 576°. 16 'The Holy Spirit', in Reason and Hope, pp. i33ff. 17 The references are to Kitvei Renak (in Hebrew), ed. Shimon Rawidowicz (BerlinCharlottenburg, 1924). (The German title of the edition reads: Nachman Krochmals Werke.) See pp. 11, 13. 18 Ibid., pp. 4off. 19 Kant's Religion in den Grenzen der blossen Vernunft is available in an English translation under the title Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, tr. with an Introduction and notes by Theodore M. Green and Hoyt Hudson, with a new essay, 'The ethical significance of Kant's "Religion"1, by John R. Silber (New York and Evanston, i960). 20 Mendelssohn's central work in which he presents his interpretation of Judaism is Jerusalem: Oder u'ber religiose Macht des Judenthums, which first appeared in 1783. A new English translation is that by Alfred Jospe, Jerusalem and other Jewish Writings (New York, 1969). 21 Gegenbetrachtungen u'ber Bonnets Palingenesie, Gesammelte Schriften, (Berlin, 1929-32), vol. VII, p. 89. 22 Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11, p. 492. 103

NATHAN ROTENSTREICH 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33

34

35 36 37

38 39

40

41

Die Religion des Geistes, p. 63. See ibid., pp. 48, 49, 52. Cohen, Religion of Reason, pp. 6ff, 22-3. / t o . , pp. 236ff. The chapter is called 'The idea of the Messiah and mankind'. The topic of the chosen people is dealt with on pp. 148-9. Formstecher, Die Religion des Geistes, p. 364. Hirsch, Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden, p. 745. We refer here mainly to the work Paris, Rome, Jerusalem, ou la question religieuse au XIXe siecles, Caiman Levy edition (Paris, 1880), vol. 11, pp. 2306°. On the attitude to Christianity as expressed in modern Jewish philosophy consult Eugene Fleischmann Le christianisme 'mis a nu, (Paris, 1970). See also the present author's 'Die Verschiedenheit der Religionen. Judentum und Christentum in den Systemen Kants, Cohens und Rosenzweigs', in Die Krise des Liberalismus zwischen den Weltkriegen, ed. Rudolf von Thadden (Gottingen, 1978), pp. 1716°. The major source is E. Benamozegh, Morale juive et morale chretienne, new edition (Neuchatel, 1946), pp. 85ff. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem and other Jewish Writings, pp. 61, 71. Ibid., p. 67. The Nineteen Letters on Judaism by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch prepared by Jacob Brener (Ben Uziel) in a new edition based on the translation by Rabbi Dr Bernard Drachman (New York, i960), pp. 67, 117, 122, 1, 8. Steinheim's opus magnum is a book containing four volumes; we shall mention only two of them: Die Offenbarung nach dem Lehrbegriffe der Synagoge, ein Schiboleth (Frankfurt am Main, 1835) and Die Glaubenslehre der Synagoge als exacte Wissenschaft (Leipzig, 1856). See vol. 1, pp. 56°, 706°; vol. 11, pp. 38,17,205,254,285 etc. Steinheim published a book on Mendelssohn: Moses Mendelssohn und seine Schule in ihrer Beziehungfur Aufgabe des neuen Jahrhunderts der alten Zeitrechnung (Hamburg, 1840). Chapter 4 of Cohen's Religion of Reason deals with the notion of revelation. On Jewish Learning, ed. N. N. Glazer (New York, 1965), p. 118. Gershom Scholem, 'Revelation and tradition as religious categories in Judaism', in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York, 1971), pp. 282, 283, 292, 303. Krochmal, Kitvei Renak, pp. 4iff. On the programme of the 'Science of Judaism', see J. Wolff, 'Uber den Begriffeiner Wissenschaft des Judenthums', Zeitschrift fur die Wissenschaft des Judenthums, ed. L. Zunz (1822), 1, no. 1,15ft Abraham Geiger's articles related to the issue are now collected in his Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. L. Geiger (Berlin and London, 1875-8). (Reprinted in Katz (ed.), Jewish Philosophy, Mysticism and the History ofIdeas.) Eduard Gans, a disciple of Hegel's and one of the editors of his collected works as well as a convert to Christianity, formulated some of the leading principles of the enterprise of the 'Science ofJudaism'. His statement has been published under the title Erstlinge der Entjudung, by the late President of the State of Israel Zalman Rubasoff (Shazar), in Der Judische Wille I (1918-19), pp. 3off, io8ff, i93fT. There is now available an English translation of that treatise, 'The Structure of Jewish History', in The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, tr., edited and with an Introduction by Ismar Schorch (The Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, 1975), pp. 638*. Graetz's great History of the Jews is also available in an English translation (Philadelphia, 1900). The anthology edited by Arthur Hertzberg contains articles throwing light on the various trends within Zionism: The Zionist Idea, A Historical Analysis and Reader (New York, 1959). The present author's 'Reflections on modern Jewish national thought', The Jerusalem Quarterly, 7 (Spring 1978), 36°, is concerned with types of Jewish national ideology. 104

Jewish Thought Bibliographical

essay

Jewish religious thought in the nineteenth century developed against the background of increasing emancipation, assimilation, anti-semitism and the establishment of non-orthodox forms of Judaism. The above chapter has concentrated on major German-Jewish philosophical interpretations of Judaism. Although the bibliography, too, reflects this emphasis, other developments in Jewish religious thought are also indicated by reference to the main studies available in English. An analysis of the Jewish responses to emancipation and its challenges is provided by J. Katz in his Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish emancipation, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973). A number of recent books investigate the relationship of Jews to their German environment. M. Meyer's The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749-1824 (Detroit, 1967) and J. Reinharz's Fatherland or Promised Land: The Dilemma of the German Jew, 1833-1914 (Ann Arbor, 1975) are both useful and, taken together, cover the entire century. See also D. Bronson's collection on Jews and Germans from 1860-1933: The Problematic Symbiosis (Heidelberg, 1979). For books concentrating on more specifically philosophical aspects of Jewish religious thought in the nineteenth century, see part three ofJ. Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism: The History of Jewish Philosophy from Biblical Times to Franz Rosenzweig (New York, 1964), as well as my own Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times: From Mendelssohn to Rosenzweig (New York, 1968). Other introductions to the period are provided by S. Bergman, Faith and Reason: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (New York, 1963), and from an orthodox Jewish perspective, S. Berkovits, Major Themes in the Modern Philosophies of Judaism (New York, 1974). The Yearbook ofthe Leo Baeck Institute (1956- ) is also a valuable resource for articles on mainly German-Jewish thinkers in the modern period. See, too, the important reprint series edited by S. T . Katz, Jewish Philosophy, Mysticism and the History of Ideas (New York, 1980). Publication of the critical edition of Moses Mendelssohn's (1729-86) collected works was forcibly stopped in 1938, but has been resumed and is presently under the editorship of A. Altmann (Stuttgart, 1971- ). Mendelssohn's major works dealing with Judaism are now available in English in A. Jospe's collection, Jerusalem and Other Jewish Writings of Moses Mendelssohn (New York, 1969). For a thorough account of Mendelssohn's life and works, see Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London, 1973) by A. Altmann, some of whose leading essays on Mendelssohn are reprinted in his Essays in Jewish Intellectual History (London, 1981). For bibliographical guidance, see H. Meyer's standard, but now somewhat dated, Moses Mendelssohn Bibliographic (Berlin, 1965). The collected writings of Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), the first modern Jewish philosopher of history, have been edited by S. Rawidowicz (Hebrew; Berlin, 1924). There are a number of important studies available in English. An examination of Krochmal's thought and influence is contained in my Tradition and Reality: The Impact of History on Modern Jewish Thought (New York, 1972). On the question of Krochmal's relationship to Hegel, see S. Rawidowicz, 'Was Nachman Krochmal an Hegelian?', in Studies in Jewish Thought, edited by N. N. Glatzer (Philadelphia, 1974). J. Taubes's 'Nachman Krochmal and Modern Historicism', Judaism, 12 (1963), is an attempt to define Krochmal's relationship to that complex movement. S. Schechter's older essay, 'Nachman Krochmal and the Perplexities of the Times' (1896), remains a valuable introduction to his thought, and is now readily available in Studies in Judaism (New York, 1970). Solomon Ludwig Steinheim (1789-1886) elaborated his system of thought in the fourvolume Die Offenbarung nach dem Lehrbegriff der Synagoge (1835-65), which has recently been reprinted in full (New York, 1980). M. J. Schoeps has edited selections from Steinheim's writings, together with a number of essays on aspects of his thought, and published them as Solomon Ludwig Steinheim zum Gedenken (Leiden, 1966). A central theme in Steinheim's

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NATHAN ROTENSTREICH system is examined by J. Haberman in 'Solomon Ludwig Steinheim's Doctrine of Revelation', Judaism, 17 (1968); see also my own, somewhat earlier essay, 'L. S. Steinheim: Philosopher of Revelation', Judaism, 2 (1953). Steinheim's philosophical debt to Kant and his critique of Kant's conception of God are treated in M. Graupe, 'Steinheim and Kant', Yearbook ofthe Leo Baeck Institute, 5 (i960). Die Religionsphilosophie der Juden (1842; repr. New York, 1980) is the major work of Samuel Hirsch (1815-89). Expositions of Hirsch's thought can be found both in Guttmann and in chapter five of my Jewish Philosophy in Modern Times. Of more specialised interest, see my essay dealing with Hirsch's part in the controversy occasioned by Bruno Bauer's The Jewish Question (1843): 'For and against Emancipation - the Bruno Bauer Controversy', in Publications of the Leo Baeck Institute (1959). Regarding his relationship to Hegel, see E. Fackenheim's 'Samuel Hirsch and Hegel: A Study of Hirsch's Religionsphilosophie derjuden\ in A. Altmann (ed.), Studies in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Intellectual History (Cambridge, Mass., 1964). Another major influence on Hirsch's thinking is highlighted in J. Katz, 'Samuel Hirsch: Rabbi, Philosopher and Freemason', Revue des Etudes Juives Historia Judaic a (1966). A useful introduction to developments in Reform Judaism is provided in Joseph Blau's Modern Varieties of Judaism (New York, 1966). The standard history up to 1930 is D. Philipson, The Reform Movement in Judaism (New York, 1967). See also M. Wiener's study of Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism: The Challenge of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1962). Two more recent studies dealing with Geiger (1810-74) can be mentioned: M. Meyer, 'Universalism and Jewish Unity in the Thought of Abraham Geiger', in J. Katz (ed.), The Role ofReligion in Modern Jewish History (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), and J. Petuchowski (ed.), New Perspectives on Abraham Geiger (Cincinnati, 1975). The major essays of Heinrich Graetz (1817-91) are available in translation in I. Schorsch (ed.), The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays (New York, 1975). Another significant essay on 'The Construction of Jewish History' can be found in M. Meyer (ed.), Ideas of Jewish History (New York, 1964). His major work, the six-volume History of the Jews (Philadelphia, 1891-2) was reprinted in 1949. An appraisal of Graetz's contribution to the study of Jewish history has been offered by S. Baron in History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses (Philadelphia, 1964). Samson Raphael Hirsch's (1808-88) basic position on Judaism and the challenges of modernity is given in The Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel, being a Spiritual Presentation of the Principles of Judaism (1899; repr. New York, 1969). See also Horeb: A Philosophy ofJewish Laws and Observations (London, 1967) and Judaism Eternal: Selected Essaysfrom the Writings ofSamson Raphael Hirsch (2 vols., London, 1956). N. Rosenbloom's major study, Tradition in the Age of Reform: The Religious Philosophy ofS. R. Hirsch (Philadelphia, 1976), contains an extensive bibliography of both primary sources and secondary studies. See also I. Gruenfeld, Three Generations: The Influence of Samson Raphael Hirsch on Jewish Life and Thought (London, 1958), and S. Heilman, 'The Many Faces of Orthodoxy', Modern Judaism, 2 (1982), the latter being an instructive analysis of the principle figures in the development of modern orthodoxy. Religion of Reason from the Sources of Judaism (New York, 1972) is the translation of Hermann Cohen's (1842—1918) major work on the philosophy of Judaism, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen desjudentums (1919-29). Cohen's collected Jewish writings, Jiidische Schriften (3 vols.) have never been translated in full, but the German edition has recently been reprinted (New York, 1980). This edition contains Franz Rosenzweig's introductory essay, which makes the claim that Religion der Vernunft represents a radical departure from Cohen's earlier neo-Kantian position on the question of religion. On this issue, see also A. Altmann's essay, 'Hermann Cohens BegrifTder Korrelation', in In zwei Welten: Siegfried Moses, ed. by H. Tramer (Tel Aviv, 1962). A number of the most significant essays fromjudische Schriften have been translated by E. Jospe and published as Reason and Hope: Selectionsfrom the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (New York, 1971). 106

Jewish Thought In Hermann Cohen s Philosophy of Judaism (New York, 1968), J. Melber focuses on the use of classical Jewish sources and the interpretation of Judaism in Religion der Vernunft. E. Berkovits provides another critical account, also from the orthodox Jewish point of view, in Major Themes in the Modern Philosophies of Judaism. Among the many other available analyses of aspects of Cohen's thought, see the following: S. Schwarzschild, 'Germanism and Judaism in Hermann Cohen's Normative Paradigm of the German-Jewish Symbiosis', in Jews and Germans from 1860-igjj, ed. Bronson; H. Liebeschiitz, 'Hermann Cohen and His Historical Background', Yearbook ofthe Leo Baeck Institute, 13 (1968); D. Novak, 'Universal Moral Law in the Theology of Hermann Cohen', Modern Judaism, 1 (1981); E. Fackenheim, 'Hermann Cohen - After Fifty Years', Leo Baeck Institute Memorial Lecture (1969). Finally, the reader's attention is called to W. Kluback, Hermann Cohen: The Challenge ofa Religion of Reason (Ann Arbor, 1983), the most recent analysis of Cohen's understanding of religion. Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) wrote the major part of his great work, Der Stern der Erlosung, whilst serving on the Balkan front during World War One; it was completed in 1919 and published in 1921. This difficult work was translated into English by W. Hallo, and appeared in 1971 as The Star of Redemption. Rosenzweig was asked to write a more accessible account of his philosophical-religious position in 1921; he then refused to allow it to be published, but the manuscript survived nonetheless. It was later edited and translated by N. N. Glatzer as Understanding the Sick and the Healthy: A View of World, Man, and God (New York, 1953) - the sick patient being German philosophical idealism. The best short introduction to Rosenzweig's thought is his 1925 essay 'Das neue Denken', a short commentary on The Star of Redemption. The greater part of this essay, together with other selected writings, is included in translation in N. N. Glatzer's volume, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought (New York, 1953). Additional essays by Rosenzweig are included in N. N. Glatzer, On Jewish Learning (New York, 1955). Rosenzweig's correspondence, including his famous exchange with E. Rosenstock, was published in Berlin in 1935 as Franz Rosenzweig Briefe. The Rosenzweig/Rosenstock correspondence was edited and translated by Rosenstock, who published them as Judaism despite Christianity: Letters on Christianity and Judaism (University of Alabama Press, 1969). Turning to secondary literature, E. Fackenheim offers a recent study of Rosenzweig's philosophy in To Mend the World: Foundations ofFuture Jewish Thought (New York, 1982); the influence of Schelling on Rosenzweig is highlighted in E. Freund, Franz Rosenzweig s Philosophy of Existence: An Analysis of the Star of Redemption (1933; repr. The Hague, 1979); a comparison of two thinkers is made in P. Mendes-Flohr, 'Rosenzweig and Kant: Two Views of Ritual and Religion', in Mystics, Philosophers and Politicians, ed. J. Reinharz and D. Swetschinski (Durham, N.C., 1982); and, for an impression of the contemporary interest, P. Mendes-Flohr (ed.), The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig: The Proceedings of the Fourth Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter (forthcoming). Two recent books deserve mention: The Jew in the Modern World: a Documentary History, edited by Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York, 1980); and Jews and German Philosophy, by Nathan Rotenstreich (New York, 1984).

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4 The Study of the Old Testament R. E. C L E M E N T S

The nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable transformation in the study of the Old Testament both on account of what was discovered about this literature and even more especially in connection with the context of religion and research in which its writings were investigated. Until the close of the preceding century the writings of the Old Testament had been studied and commented upon without any serious break since the basic form of the canon had been established. Yet this had been undertaken almost exclusively within the framework either of Christianity or of Judaism, and within surprisingly firmly set lines of interpretation. It is now clear in retrospect that these main lines of interpretation had largely established themselves within the first three centuries of the Christian era, those of the Christian Church being outlined and given authority by the New Testament, and those of Judaism finding their classical expression, first in the Mishnah and then in the Talmud. In spite of some significant epochs of debate and dialogue between these two traditions, which had both been built upon the Old Testament, the differing hermeneutical principles and assumptions which each had adopted precluded any very extensive cross-fertilization between them. Only rarely, as in the writings and work of J. J. Reuchlin (1455-1522) and Hugo Grotius (1583-1645), were significant efforts made by major Christian scholars to draw upon the interpretative traditions of Judaism in regard to the Old Testament. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century a new scientific goal of inquiry concerning the origins and religious significance of the Old Testament had emerged, which aimed decisively to break free from these Christian theological and Jewish exegetical patterns. The Old Testament became a major subject of examination for a knowledge of oriental antiquity, of the history and origins of religion generally, and not least for a knowledge of a formative epoch in the history of human culture. The greatest advances, and certainly the best known names, in this new 109

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scientific field of inquiry into the Old Testament were Christian. However, although slower to move atfirst,comparable changes also began to transform Jewish attitudes to this sacred literature and its interpretation.1 Such a change, as we have outlined, could scarcely be expected to have taken place solely under the influence of one man, or of one movement, and we rightly expect to find a variety of interests and questionings giving rise to this transformation of a subject. Hence it is necessary to note how most of the questions which came to occupy the greatest concern of nineteenth-century scholars in regard to the Old Testament had first been posed, even though only in broad fashion, by the last quarter of the preceding century. We may, therefore, single out three main areas of thought and inquiry which had such a profound impact upon the study of the Old Testament. These may be broadly classified as philosophical, theological and literary, although in reality it is evident that they shared a great deal of overlap. Certainly the major philosophical influence in this movement was that of the German Enlightenment, and the leading figure from this who pointed his finger so directly and emphatically to the Old Testament was J. G. Herder (17441803). His great work Vom Geist der hebrdischen Poesie, appeared in 1782-3 and an English translation by H. G. Marsh was published in 1833.2 Already before Herder's time the torch of philosophical inquiry into the nature of religion had largely passed from England, where it had burned brightly with the rationalist theories and explanations of the Deists, to Germany. In the many impulses of the Aufkldrung the interest in history: the history of ideas, of institutions, and of religious rites and practices, all came under a new scrutiny.3 In the end the impact of Historism became all too dominant, but the recovery of the historical dimension was felt as a new discovery in the second half of the eighteenth century. That historical movements and changes were subject to cause and effect, and that the human aspect of these changes could be examined and understood came to be applied to the Christian Church, to the origins of religious beliefs and ideas, and to the origin of writings which tradition regarded as divinely inspired. Such convictions had a bearing on the Old Testament, although the most immediate effects of this concern did little to shake Christian orthodoxy when it applied them primarily to the text and translation of the Bible, as took place with such scholars as J. A. Ernesti (1707-81) and J. D. Michaelis (1717-91). However, it intruded more directly into the theological realm with the work of J. S. Semler (1725-91), who has been acclaimed as the 'founder' of the historical-critical movement in the study of theology, and more particularly of the Bible.4 It would no doubt be more just to recognize that such a movement follows almost inevitably from the aims and principles of no

The Study of the Old Testament the Aufkldrung. Semler's major work entitled Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Kanons (4 vols., Halle, 1771-5) looked at the Bible, and particularly at its division into two Testaments, with a new critical eye. Having affirmed a distinction between 'religion' and 'theology', he argued that, whereas the latter could be studied through a metaphysical-dogmatic approach, the former required an empirical-critical one. The Bible witnessed primarily to such 'religion' in a wide sense, whereas the orthodox creeds and traditions of the Church, and especially the Lutheran Church, treated it as a book of'theology'. Accordingly Semler recognized the 'Jewish' nature of the Old Testament, leading to a new attempt on his part to make a distinction between the Old and the New Testaments. The 'Jewish' character of the New Testament writings which arose from this was, therefore, to be treated as no more than a necessary historical 'clothing'. More important from the point of view of the subsequent development of Old Testament studies was Semler's effort to show that the sensus literalis, which earlier Protestant theologians had affirmed to be the true sense of Scripture, could only be reached by a historical-critical methodology. For the inspiration of Scripture we must look behind its given text to the re alia of events, personalities and historical institutions by a process of historical scientific inquiry. It is in line with Semler's methodology that J. P. Gabler in his Altdorf inaugural lecture of 1787, argued for a clear and decisive distinction between a dogmatic theology and a biblical one.5 The latter was to be based on the literal sense of Scripture, attained by historical-critical investigation, and was to be scientifically controllable. With Gabler, however, we already move into the third area of questioning, which we have called the literary one, since his teacher was the great orientalist and historian of literature J. G. Eichhorn (1752-1827). Gabler had studied under Eichhorn in Jena, and like him, had come to attach a profound importance to mythology as the natural language and form of intellectual expression which belongs to the childhood of the human race. This goes back to the influence and work of the German classicist C. G. Heyne (1729-1812).6 Gabler edited and re-issued a work by his teacher J. G. Eichhorn on the Primeval History of Genesis 1-11 in which this mythological nature of the stories and language of the biblical book was accepted.7 Such stories, therefore, could not appropriately be used to formulate dogmas, for they must first be understood in their own historical and intellectual context. The book of Genesis was an oriental book, and must be read as such, with all the awe and simplicity which properly belongs to such an ancient writing. J. G. Eichhorn has earned the reputation as the pioneer of the literary-critical approach to the Old Testament. His major in

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book Einleitung ins Alte Testament, which was first published in 1780-3 in three volumes,8 laid down the aims and principles upon which a scientific literary and historical criticism of the biblical writings could be built. It is from these years that his friendship with J. G. Herder began, and the influence of the more famous writer becomes increasingly apparent.9 The two figures were in entire agreement upon one basic essential: the Old Testament was a 'human' literature which had been written by men, each of whom had his own world of thought and ideas, his own style and idiom, as well as his own time and place. With Eichhorn, therefore, it became important to consider the sources of the great biblical compositions and the character of the individual writings. Whilst not challenging such traditional assumptions as the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, Eichhorn endeavoured to trace within this great literary work more than one source, and also to note, for example, that a book like that of the prophet Isaiah contained sayings from more than one author and period. Eichhorn did not set out primarily to be a theologian, nor to challenge the orthodox dogmas of the Church, but to awaken a new literary awareness with regard to the Old Testament. It was to be seen as a remarkable collection of writings of quite extraordinary antiquity, which can lead us, when properly interpreted, into an understanding of the beauty and simplicity of mankind's age of childhood. By the end of the eighteenth century, therefore, a whole new range of interests and questions had emerged which found in the Old Testament a collection of writings about which so much remained to be learned. Having set aside the traditional reasons and motives which had prompted Christians and Jews to be preoccupied with its writings, new answers were waiting to be discovered to new questions. The history of the religion in which it had originated and the antecedents and background to this, had all yet to be traced. So also had the situations and interests which had prompted its authors to write, and the needs and problems with which they had sought to deal. Even what it meant to read the Old Testament, not as a nineteenthcentury Christian or Jew, but as an oriental living in a remote antiquity, had all to be pursued as a new venture. There was something akin to a romantic voyage of discovery awaiting the scholar who was prepared to lift aside the layers of interpretative tradition which had been imposed upon the Old Testament by Jews and Christians and to learn to read it as its original authors had intended it to be understood. In retrospect we can undoubtedly see now a measure of over-ambition in this quest, and a degree of undervaluing of the interpretative tradition of which it became so critical. Yet it is difficult also not to sense something of the freshness which 112

The Study of the Old Testament surrounded this rediscovery of the Old Testament. In the intellectual realm it was an adventure very much akin to the startling rediscoveries of more than one ancient library, long ago buried and hidden from the gaze of human eyes, which were to stimulate further interest in antiquity in the nineteenth century and later still in the twentieth. We may follow out our examination of the nineteenth-century research into the Old Testament with afigurewhose name still dominates one side of its research as few others have done. This is that of Wilhelm Gesenius (17861842) who studied in Gottingen under J. G. Eichhorn and the orientalist Th. Ch. Tychsen.10 Gesenius made his own the field of research into Hebrew grammar and lexicography so that all modern grammars and dictionaries of the language are in varying degrees indebted to him. His first important work was a short textbook on the grammar of the Hebrew language, but his two major publications were the Hebrdisch-Deutsche Handworterbuch iiber die Schriften des Alt en Testaments of 1810 and the Ausfurliches grammatisches-historisches Lehrgebdude der hebrdischen Sprache of 1817.

Between the years of 1769 and 1786 J. D. Michaelis had earlier begun to show the problems of establishing, with the aid of available resources, the precise literal meaning of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament by an extensively annotated translation which ran into thirteen volumes. So also during those same years the Oxford scholar Benjamin Kennicott (171883),11 had shown, by a careful collation of the manuscript evidence, that there was almost nothing to be gained towards the exact critical restoration of the true Hebrew text of the Old Testament from within the surviving manuscript tradition. Scholarship had therefore to probe behind this. Building upon the work of these earlier orientalists Gesenius opened up for the scientific study of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament two main areas of research. Out of the recognition that the Hebrew language must be understood historically, Gesenius proceeded to establish the place within the family of Semitic languages which Hebrew enjoyed. His predecessors had already shown the importance of the priority of Arabic within this family, but no one had so fully built up a picture of the comparative grammar of these languages as Gesenius now attempted. Similarly in the field of vocabulary he established the scientific principles by which the range of meanings of a Hebrew word could be established through the resources of comparative lexicography. No longer was the interpreter to be dependent upon the uncertainties of a received tradition, which could only be traced back very imperfectly beyond the work of the great Jewish grammarians and commentators of the Middle Ages. Gesenius sought to replace this by a more critically historical and inductive approach in which the evidence supplied

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by cognate languages, could be explored. By plotting the way in which wordforms and word-meanings developed and changed across the whole range of Semitic languages Gesenius set the study of Hebrew within a new context of scholarship. Whilst the main insights on which his work was based had been adumbrated earlier, no one had explored and developed them to the extent and in the way which he now attempted. Most of his teaching life was spent in Halle, and to him came students of the Old Testament, not only from Germany but also from England and the U.S.A. With him the foundation principle which Herder and Eichhorn had laid down for a proper understanding of the Old Testament came nearer to being realized. This was that this literature should be read in its original language so that the pristine beauty and immediacy with which its ideas were matched to words could be grasped. Through its Hebrew, one of the languages of mankind's childhood, as they conceived it, the true impressions of the world, and of man's experience of its reality, could be appreciated. It is not surprising to find that, in his attitude to Church orthodoxy, Gesenius showed the same kind of sharp and incisive criticism which he displayed to the study of ancient Hebrew. Attempts were made therefore by more conservative circles of the German Church to restrict his teaching activities so as to prevent any direct involvement with the teaching of theology. Some were offended at his attitude, but in large measure even the most pious and orthodox recognized that they had much to gain from the new scientific method in the study of Hebrew which he taught. A whole new generation of Hebraists emerged and the Hebrew historical grammar and lexicon which Gesenius produced became foundation textbooks which could in turn facilitate the pursuit of other disciplines pertaining to the Old Testament. Although he failed to complete the project, he also outlined a programme for a scientific work on Hebrdisches Archaeologie in which the same historical-critical approach could be employed in the study of the historical background and realia to which the Old Testament witnessed.12 Of the great number of students who came under the new German influence we may single out two on account of the particular interest which they possess for the further development of Old Testament studies in the nineteenth century. In the years 1826-30 the American Edward Robinson (1794-1863) studied in Germany at Gottingen, Halle and Berlin. From Gesenius he acquired a new critical interest in Hebrew, which he supplemented with a new interest in geography learned from Carl Ritter in Berlin. In the years 1838-9 Robinson, accompanied by the American missionary Eli Smith undertook a journey through Palestine. The result of this survey was a critical-historical geography of the Holy Land in which the 114

The Study of the Old Testament older ecclesiastical traditions concerning sacred sites and the identification of biblical place names were subjected to a new critical scrutiny.13 Others had preceded Robinson in describing travels and adventures in Palestine, and the changing political situation opened up new possibilities for further researches by later travellers and scholars. Nevertheless Robinson's journey marked an important landmark in the study of the Old Testament since it drew attention in a startling fashion to the fact that a whole new subject area existed which had immense potential for the study of this literature. In the very land of the Bible there existed a great wealth of evidence for a knowledge of the people and events of which it told. More than this, however, it was quickly realized that in custom, manner of life, and even in idiom and manner of speech, there was a great deal in the oriental life of Palestine that had changed little over the centuries from the end of the biblical period. Orientalists and biblical scholars discovered that the language and culture of biblical times possessed a new source of illumination and illustration in the land of the Bible itself. Within the second half of the nineteenth century an increasing number of scholars were to follow in Robinson's paths, and the scientific observations he made regarding the identification of biblical sites became a basis for a more critical understanding of biblical history. Soon important research institutes and academic foundations were set up in Palestine through which European scholars could acquire a fuller understanding of the land and people of the Bible. Although it was not until the twentieth century that the pursuit of the archaeology of the Holy Land acquired sufficient depth and range of comparative material to establish securely its own scientific credentials, the work of Robinson marked an important beginning. Certainly by the end of the nineteenth century Christian scholars such as Rudolf Kittel and G. Dalman had come to recognize the greatness of the contribution that the land of the Bible still had to offer towards the realization of another of the aims set out by J. G. Eichhorn. This was that the Old Testament should be read as an oriental book, and that the language and thoughts of the East should be discerned in all its pages. From the Jewish side too, the rediscovery of the land of Israel was to bring about a most profound change of understanding regarding the nature of Judaism. In spite of the most rigorous scientific discipline in his historical and geographical researches, Robinson never abandoned his own conservative and orthodox Christian position in regard to the Bible. This was also true of another student of the new German critical approach to the Old Testament whose work calls for special mention. This was E. B. Pusey (1800-82), an English scholar who spent time in Germany in 1825 in Gottingen and

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Berlin.14 Destined to spend much of his long life as the Regius Professor of Hebrew in Oxford (from 1828 till his death in 1882), Pusey had already been warned by his mentors of the dangers of the new German critical movement. Alarmed by all that he learnt and found in Germany Pusey spent his academic teaching years in very different directions from those which were preoccupying the younger German scholars. Within the English Church the critical movement in the study of the Old Testament was, in the following years, sometimes criticized and opposed, but largely ignored save for a few isolated voices. Among these we may place that of H. H. Milman (17911868), whose History of the Jews was first published anonymously in 1829.15 Milman was familiar with the more critical approach to the study of the Old Testament writings advocated by J. G. Eichhorn and the younger scholar W. M. L. de Wette, whom we shall consider more fully shortly. Milman's work is of interest, however, because of its reflection of fresh English religious thought in respect of the study of the Old Testament. Only modestly critical in its approach to the problems of the historicity of the biblical narratives, Milman's work was important on account of its relative popularity, and its treatment of the biblical history as a human experience. More significantly too it sought to carry over to the biblical literature an approach to the study of history which acquired great popularity in England when applied to the classical history of Greece and Rome.16 Whereas such men as Thomas Arnold and J. Connop Thirl wall had been willing to apply a critical methodology to the study of classical history, as learnt from B. G. Niebuhr, they had studiously avoided treating the Old Testament in the same way. Milman, however, sought to do so, and to find in the history of the Jews in biblical times profound lessons about the rise and fall of nations and the education of the human race. In this way it has been rightly compared with the work of A. P. Stanley.17 Whilst falling far short of the rigorous critical scrutiny that German scholarship was applying to the Old Testament during the first half of the nineteenth century it prepared the ground in England for the reception of this by showing that such concerns were not necessarily negative or unedifying. On the contrary Milman was concerned to combine his critical historical approach with a profoundly edifying objective. It was in Germany, however, that the real advances in a critical understanding of the Old Testament continued to make great strides. Alongside the name of Wilhelm Gesenius one other stands out in the very forefront of further research at this time. W. M. L. de Wette was born in 1780 in Ulla near Weimar, and studied in Jena with J. J. Griesbach, a student of J. J. Semler's, and also for a period under J. P. Gabler.18 From them de Wette learnt the aims and methods of the new critical approach to the Bible 116

The Study of the Old Testament which he subsequently pursued with extraordinary skill and vigour. His dissertation of 1805 on the origin of the book of Deuteronomy provided a kind of fixed datum point from which scholarship could thereafter take its bearings. Whereas Eichhorn had pointed to the presence in the Pentateuch of more than one literary source, as had J. Astruc and R. Simon much earlier still, this had not been coupled by him with any serious questioning of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. Now de Wette produced powerful arguments to show that the book of Deuteronomy must be related closely and directly to the book discovered in the temple of Jerusalem in Josiah's reign in 621 B.C.19 Furthermore it was evident that it had not been used or circulated before this time, since the practice of Israel's religion conflicted with some of its basic demands. As a source of the Pentateuch therefore it cannot be shown to have existed before the seventh century B.C., and its origin from Moses was to be ruled out. De Wette planned to follow up this initial study of Deuteronomy with a more wide-ranging critique of the problem of the sources of the Pentateuch. However he was anticipated in this by a study by J. S. Vater,20 and turned to a related issue, that of the credibility of the picture of early Israelite religion given in 1 and 11 Chronicles.21 In this he demonstrated decisively the unhistorical character of the portrayal of the religious institutions and cultus of the early monarchic age given by these two books. By doing this he removed out of the way one of the strong buttresses by which the traditional view of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch had been supported. The extensive cultic rules and legislation contained in this great compendium could not be shown to have been operative in the earlier pre-exilic period. It is only fair to point out that the recognition that the Pentateuch had been composed from more than one 'source', began to be questioned more seriously than hitherto by a number of scholars at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Various hypotheses were canvassed to explain the obvious variety of materials contained within it. Whether a basic document had been built up by a process of supplementation, or whether a miscellany of fragments had been put together, or whether a series of documents had been woven into a unity all appeared to be possible explanations. The problem, however, was not just a literary one, but an issue that depended on the way in which the religion could actually be shown to have developed historically. It is here that we encounter one of the peculiarly perplexing features of the Old Testament that required more than half a century of posing and testing of hypotheses before a satisfactory solution became established. There was an in-built element of circularity in tracing the development of Israel's religion, since the major source, and virtually the 117

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only effective one, was provided by the writings of the Old Testament. Yet these did not preserve any record, or decisive evidence, of the sequence and chronology of their own composition. Most especially was this true of the Pentateuch, where the only hope of achieving such a literary chronology was by establishing a convincing outline of the way in which the religion had moved from less elaborate to more elaborate cultic forms, and had developed in particular directions. It is in this regard that G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy of history is of direct relevance to the way in which Old Testament study progressed. In de Wette's writings there is no overall attempt to apply Hegelian theories and terminology directly to the Old Testament, but one of his contemporaries shared no such reluctance. This is Wilhelm Vatke (1806-82), whose major work, published in 1835, the year of Strauss's critical Life of Jesus, was entitled Die biblische Theologie Bd. I.22 This is a work full of Hegelian terminology and concepts which sought to present a picture of the historical development of Israel's religion in accordance with Hegel's philosophy of spirit. Since Vatke was a friend of D. F. Strauss and became closely associated with F. C. Baur and the Tubingen school, this is not surprising. Vatke sought to demonstrate that, according to the Old Testament, God was 'pure subjectivity' who contained within himself the distinction between the general and the particular. Thus cultus was treated by Vatke purely as a system of symbols, but one point in regard to this gave to Vatke's writing a lasting significance. He argued that the Israelite system of cultus had developed only late in the history of the Old Testament period. His Hegelian tracing of three stages of the development of Israel's religion had led him, by a somewhat insecure route, to a position which became one of the major tenets of criticism as the nineteenth century progressed. If we return to de Wette, who was incomparably the greater scholar and researcher, we find that he also had developed quite fresh and significant ideas about the way in which Israel's religion had developed.23 His introduction to the literature of the Old Testament, followed by an introduction to the New Testament writings and then by an introduction to the Bible as a whole, set him in the very forefront of nineteenth-century literary criticism of the Bible.24 With him we find not only new, and carefully worked out, hypotheses about the date of origin of the various parts of the Bible, but a careful delineation of the differing types, or genres, of literature. Hence it is with him that the first main insights were set out which have led subsequently to the form-criticism and redaction-criticism of the twentieth century. In particular de Wette applied this approach to the Psalter, noting the various types of psalm, and especially the preponderance of psalms of 118

The Study of the Old Testament misfortune (laments), and noting the situations which they reflected. Hence almost two millennia of historicising and 'autobiographical' attempts at psalm interpretation were set aside in a more fruitful line of investigation. De Wette shared with his teacher J. P. Gabler, and with such close contemporary writers as G. L. Bauer (1755-1806) and J. S. Vater (17711826), the recognition that much that was preserved in the Old Testament should be classed as myth. This was, of course, 'myth' understood in accordance with the very positive estimate of its cultural and religious value as understood by the mythological school emanating from C. G. Heyne. De Wette, however, was opposed to the attempt to strip away the mythological clothing of the Old Testament narratives in order to get at the underlying kernel of historical events and personalities. To do this was effectively to destroy an essential part of the nature of the biblical material, and to this extent to empty it of its true meaning and significance. It is for this reason that de Wette was deeply sceptical about the possibility and value of attempting to write a critical history of Israel, as G. L. Bauer had done. This would simply lead us away from understanding the Bible, not bring us closer to it. Whilst de Wette's work has remained best known and remembered for his literary theories and introductions to biblical literature, it is clear that of all the major Old Testament scholars of the nineteenth century he was most of all at heart a theologian. At one time a colleague of F. D. Schleiermacher in Berlin, until his dismissal from there following a political scandal, de Wette developed far-reaching theories about the nature of revealed truth in the Bible. In his Biblische Dogmatik he set out a picture of the development of religious ideas in the Old Testament which was subsequently to exercise a continuing influence. The basic Old Testament idea of God was that of one holy will. This came to full maturity and conscious expression only slowly, but supremely through the teaching of the prophets. Israel as a chosen nation and a state represented the Kingdom of God on earth because it was a particular example which symbolically expressed the truth about God's relationship to all mankind. Israel was, therefore, a particular example of a universal truth, which Judaism had misunderstood by its adherence to a belief in the particularism of its own divine election. Here de Wette saw a decline in the later, post-exilic, period of Israel's development in the direction of this particularism, so that it could be compared unfavourably with the period of development before the exile. This was to be a continuing theme in much nineteenth-century critical study of the Old Testament which tended increasingly to sever a reconstruction of the history and ideas that lay behind these writings from the teachings of Judaism. Increasingly 119

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the major achievements of Old Testament religion were contrasted with Judaism, so that the latter could be viewed as a kind of illegitimate child of the Old Testament. That there were clear and unmistakeable connections between Judaism and the Old Testament was fully conceded, but these latter were ascribed to the later, declining, era of Old Testament revelation.25 It is appropriate to mention at this point the far-reaching changes in Jewish life and thought which were taking place at the beginning of the nineteenth century. With the progressive emancipation of many Jews in western Europe in the wake of the Napoleonic Empire, a new challenge presented itself to Judaism. This was the threat of assimilation and the jeopardising of a distinctive Jewish identity which this threatened to carry with it. However, already in the wake of the German Enlightenment, some significant intellectual challenges had manifested themselves in German Jewry which impinged directly upon the study and interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. A century earlier the Dutch Jewish philosopher B. Spinoza (1632-77) had raised certain critical issues regarding the authorship of certain of the biblical books. More significant and more influential, however, was the translation of the Pentateuch into German, albeit initially with the use of Hebrew letters, by Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86). This began to appear with the book of Genesis in 1780, and, in spite of an inevitable measure of controversy surrounding its publication, it served to link the study and interpretation of the Bible directly with the philosophical and literary impact of the Enlightenment. Mendelssohn was himself a friend and contemporary of G. E. Lessing, and so, by the turn of the century, the interest and resources were current within Judaism for a fresh approach to the Bible, and for a re-appraisal of the continuing relationship between this literature and the life of Judaism. These new intellectual currents crystallized in the movement for Wissenschaft - the scientific study of Judaism through a critical approach to its sources. Whilst the most popular and influential feature to this came to manifest itself in a critical study ofJewish history, and in a new philosophical understanding of the essence of Judaism, it also brought about an involvement of Jewish scholarship in a critical study of the Hebrew Bible which employed techniques which were in all respects comparable to those which were beginning to have such a powerful effect upon the Christian understanding of the New Testament. From the Jewish side three figures may be particularly mentioned: the philosopher N. Krochmal (1785-1840), who had been profoundly influenced by the idealistic philosophies of Schelling and Hegel, and the Jewish historians L. Zunz (1794-1886) and A. Geiger (1810-74). Although the movement may be considered more fully 120

The Study of the Old Testament later in connection with the development of the attempt to present a fully developed and critical history of Judaism, it deserves some attention at this point. L. Zunz studied in Berlin during the years 1815-19, where his teacher in biblical studies was de Wette. Coupled with the influence of the classical historian F. A. Wolf, these two scholars aroused in Zunz a fresh critical approach to the culture and traditions of Judaism. The beginnings of the Wissenschaft movement may therefore be traced to the founding in 1819, of the Verein fur die Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden. From the religious perspective there grew out of this a desire for a 'Reformed' Judaism, which gained strength through such men as A. Geiger who was an influential rabbi, and the founding of rabbinic academies, of which special note should be taken of that in Breslau. Whilst the nineteenth century was to see only very limited progress towards the discovery of a new common ground between Jews and Christians through the critical study of the Old Testament, the foundations for such began to be laid. Eventually Christian scholarship was able to shake off some of its negative assumptions about the value of Judaism for the study of the biblical tradition, and to recognize more deeply the importance of the study of early Jewish texts and sources for an understanding of the New Testament. When this took place the existence of the critical-historical movement within Judaism, with its resources of a rich understanding of the life and thought of Judaism in the period between the two biblical Testaments, was to provide a major contribution. What is especially significant about the work of such scholars as J. G. Eichhorn, W. Gesenius and W. M. L. de Wette, when seen in retrospect, is that they posed questions about the nature of the Old Testament literature which had not previously been asked. By doing so they established goals for scholarship to pursue which ranged far beyond their own individual accomplishments, or those of a few influential scholars. In this way they produced pupils and colleagues who could continue to explore the methods which they had learnt, and could thus move further in the direction of achieving a broad goal. As Eichhorn would have understood it, this was to read the Old Testament as its authors intended it to be read, and to gain from it the ideas and impressions which had moulded their own religious life. However, with the historical-critical approach which had been inaugurated so effectively by J. S. Semler and his pupils, a more complex goal had also been discerned. This resulted from the shift away from the conviction that the nature of divine revelation could be uncovered by the study of the preserved canonical text, and a concern to probe behind this text to the men, events and ideas which formed its subject-matter. It was believed that it was at this deeper level, which lay partly hidden behind the preserved text, that 121

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God had chosen to reveal himself to his ancient people. Since a considerable part of the Old Testament literature is presented in the form of historical narrative it was natural that considerable interest should attach to the actual course of events which lay behind its narrative records. It was virtually inevitable therefore, given the immense stimulus towards the critical reconstruction of history that had been engendered by the Aufklarung, that this same historical approach should be directed towards the Old Testament. We have already pointed out de Wette's own critical assessment of the wisdom and possibility of achieving this. Yet in the sphere of Greek and Roman history an enormously rich, and potentially fruitful, area had been established which set such classical history in the very forefront of the new learning at the beginning of the nineteenth century. We may turn now to consider one of the most remarkable and influential of the many figures who devoted their labours to the study of the Old Testament in the nineteenth century. This was Heinrich Ewald (1803-75), the son of a Gottingen weaver whosefieryand angular personality left a great mark on German oriental and biblical studies.26 To a less extent he made an impact in the political realm, becoming afirmopponent of Prussian aims and dominance at the time of the growth of the union of German states. Eventually his vigorously canvassed liberal views, his intemperate criticism of his opponents, both theological and political, and his deep sense of having been unjustly treated by those in higher authority, brought him into an undeserved isolation. Yet he was capable of evoking immense respect and admiration among his students and of setting them along academic paths which he himself could no longer tread. He had himself studied in Gottingen in the later years of J. G. Eichhorn's days there, and learnt from him a deep critical devotion to the study of oriental literature and the Old Testament. His early writings were primarily in the field of language study, and in particular his Hebrew Grammar, designed for the use of students, became a standard textbook which ran through many editions. Almost everything that he wrote he dealt with at considerable length, in several volumes, so that his studies of the poetical books of the old Testament, and of the Prophets, take the form of extensively annotated translations, rather than being more limited critiques of particular problems. The methodology that he employed was throughout that which he had learnt from Eichhorn, with extensive attention to grammatical and philological problems of interpretation. In his regard for the importance of the poetic and prophetic literature of the Old Testament there is discernible the legacy of J. G. Herder, and the increasing desire to treat these as human writings, full of spiritual insight, rather than as collections of texts to be used as theological proofs. 122

The Study of the Old Testament Ewald's first brush with political authority came with his dismissal from his chair in Gottingen in 1837, when the accession of Ernestus Augustus, George Ill's fifth son and the Duke of Cumberland, led to a revoking of the liberal constitution of the Province of Hanover. Along with six other leading younger and liberal minded professors he was dismissed from the university leaving it to a brief period of academic retrenchment and isolation. In his later political activities he became increasingly intemperate and outspoken in manner and outlook. From Gottingen he went to Tubingen, where the theology faculty had set itself in the very forefront of radical and critical biblical studies, through the presence there of F. C. Baur (1792-1860).27 However, Ewald quickly crossed swords with Baur, and the whole Tubingen school which looked to his leadership, so that his own brand of critical and progressive thought dissociated itself sharply and totally from the Hegelianism of Baur. In fact it is hard to categorize Ewald's views as either creating, or following, any one particular school of thought. They were idiosyncratic and eclectic, so that in many questions he adopted moderate, and even conservative positions in regard to matters of literary and historical interpretation in the Old Testament. Moreover he regarded himself as a theologian, and as competent to pronounce on a wide range of theological issues. His most notable students came to adopt far more critical positions than he himself had held. Yet at the same time he was able to attract to Gottingen students from Germany, Britain and America, who looked to him as a relatively conservative teacher commanding immense respect, who had held back from the conclusions of the more radical critics which were quickly gaining currency. Before his death there had emerged in Germany itself through F. C. Baur, in France at the younger University of Strasbourg through E. Reuss, and in Holland at the University of Leiden through A. Kuenen, teachers whose views about the Old Testament and its religious significance brought them into the very forefront of rationalist and highly critical theological discussion. By the time of his death in 1875, therefore, Ewald had come to be regarded as a rather isolated figure, conservative in his critical views, and better known as an orientalist than as a fundamental exponent of contemporary biblical science. Yet, for all this extraordinary variety and colour in Ewald's life and work, one of his books stands out as a piece of historical and theological writing which occupies a position of considerable distinction among nineteenthcentury Old Testament studies. This was his Geschichte des Volkes Israel, which extended tofivevolumes (seven in the fourth edition, and eight in the English translation), and which ran through several editions.28 In a number of ways it marks the full triumphant acceptance of the historical approach, 123

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which had been so strongly stimulated by the German Enlightenment, and it set the literary task of writing 'The History of Israel' in the very forefront of scientific biblical study. With the great international popularity of this work, the discipline of writing such a history became a fully accepted part of the modern critical approach to the Bible. Even more than this, it is not excessive to claim that, as Ewald conceived the task, the writing of such a history was to be the crowning theological achievement of the new critical approach to the Old Testament. Not only were literary and historical aims to be served by such an undertaking, but a profoundly religious and theological one. This was a striking reversal of the attitude to such a goal adopted by de Wette, but it fully accorded with the historical aims of the Aufkldrung. It marked the deep intrusion into the sphere of Old Testament studies of the outlook of Historismus, which was to characterise so much of the theological, philosophical and literary aims of the second half of the nineteenth century.29 Many as are the imperfections to be seen in retrospect in Ewald's work, it set a clear goal, it established clear reasons why this goal should be sought after, and it outlined, even though rather impressionistically and sketchily, the questions that had to be resolved before this task could be satisfactorily undertaken. It is no longer possible to read Ewald's history without recognizing in it the work which so caught the imagination and interest of the greatest of his pupils - Julius Wellhausen. The reasons why the writing of a history of Israel was to be regarded as a task which belonged in the very forefront of all critical biblical science are best set out in Ewald's own words: 'The history of this ancient people is in reality the history of the growth of true religion, rising through all stages to perfection, pressing on through all conflicts to the highest victory, and finally revealing itself in full glory and power, in order to spread irresistibly from this centre, never again to be lost, but to become the eternal possession and blessing of all nations.'30 Two things of far-reaching theological import are regarded as virtually axiomatic in Ewald's approach, and colour its execution as a whole. The first is that it is in the history itself, as critically reconstructed by the modern historian, that the 'events and ideas' which form the basis of the revelation of the 'true religion', are to be brought into clearer light. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are simply 'tradition' (German Sage)y which narrate the story of the revelation in the language, idiom and outlook of the ancient time. These must be treated critically and sympathetically, but the historian's task is to probe behind them to bring to light the underlying events and ideas which constitute the revelation itself. Hence the historian can perform a theological task by enabling us to get closer to the very basis of the divine revealing activity.31 In 124

The Study of the Old Testament such language we can recognize the legacy of the earlier distinction made by J. S. Semler between Wortinspiration and Realinspiration. It marked a step further along the way of probing beyond the canonical form of the Old Testament, and its preserved textual and literary structure, to find an anterior basis in which its religious worth would be more clearly evident. For Ewald therefore, the kind of problem which had led de Wette to challenge the inevitably reductionist and rationalist attempts of G. L. Baur to set out a critical history of Israel, was swept aside.32 Through his achievement the modern historian would be able to attain a truly religious goal, by bringing into the clear light of the nineteenth century the religious import of the spiritual gifts and attainments of the ancient people of Israel. A second point in Ewald's approach has a comparable theological importance, and again must be regarded as an assumption, rather than a clearly demonstrated historical necessity. This is the claim that the history of the Old Testament period of Israel's existence 'came to its close with Christ'.33 In this way Ewald was able to write a history which effectively covered the entire biblical period of both the Old and New Testaments and to see in the latter period the natural historical goal of the former. The birth of Jesus, the Messiah, in Ewald's understanding, marked the point at which the national and particularist character of the earlier history of Israel passed into universal history. By this type of distinction between a 'national' and a 'universal' history, once again taking up a fundamental interest of the Aufklarung, Ewald was able to transform the traditional understanding of the relationship of the unity between the two biblical Testaments into a historical formula. With the New Testament the revelation to ancient Israel became 'the eternal possession and blessing of all nations'. There could be no point therefore in continuing the history of Judaism beyond this point, except as evidence of the fate of those who had turned their faces against the light. It is not difficult to trace in this a new form of Christian 'Messianism' through which Ewald intruded a theological dimension into the task of writing the history of Israel. The difference from the older prophetic Messianism which had survived with little challenge in Christian tradition until the eighteenth century was that the proofs were to be those of historical science, rather than the utterances of prophets. We may note two other points about Ewald's approach which reflect upon persistent questions and interests of nineteenth-century biblical scholarship. The first is that he took it for granted that the national dimension of Israel's existence in the central - 'Israelite' - period of Old Testament history was a necessary aspect of both tradition and divine revelation. In this we find the biblical development of the notion of national history, inherited 125

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from the philosophy of the Enlightenment, and taken to be an essential part of Old Testament tradition. The bond between nation, tradition and culture was taken to be complete and axiomatic, until the advent of 'universal history'. We may cite Ewald's own words for the assumed perspective: 'When therefore, in the remote past, nation was very sharply separated from nation, each had its peculiar traditions . . ,'34 This link between nation and tradition, and the contrast between a 'national' and a 'universal' history was to provide the new scientific approach to the history of Israel with its basic interpretative standpoints. It justified a Christian, rather than a Jewish, interpretation of that history, and it also allowed many of the Romantic and Hegelian concepts of national history to intrude themselves into biblical scholarship. We have already pointed to H. H. Milman's earlier essay in this direction. Before leaving consideration of Ewald's work it is appropriate to mention the work of two scholars who sought to develop the older Christian Messianic ideas about the Old Testament in very different directions. The first must be considered largely in a negative fashion as a reaction against the new criticism of the Old Testament. This was E. W. von Hengstenberg (1802-69) whose major work Christologie des Alten Testaments endeavoured to reaffirm the traditional Messianic view of that literature.35 In retrospect it may be felt that von Hengstenberg's powerful ecclesiastical and political influence more deeply affected the attitudes of the Christian Church towards the new Old Testament science, than did his own writings. More original and constructive was the theological work of J. C. K. von Hofmann (181077), whose great work Weissagung und Erfullung attempted a synthesis of fresh theological insight with a critical approach to the Bible.36 In it may be discerned elements drawn from Hegelian philosophy, from traditional Christian Messianism, and much from the new critical approach to history as a fundamental mode of theological expression. In very many ways von Hofmann's approach was idiosyncratic and expressive of no one school or philosophy. Yet it was to become remarkably influential and to establish within the circle of biblical scholarship a new concept: that of Heilsgeschichte - a 'History of Salvation'.37 By means of this concept the extensive range of historical writings in the Old Testament could be read as theological documents, and history and theology brought into a new synthesis. This was certainly something very different from the exact scientific history which had been the goal sought after by Ewald, in the manner of the developing Historismus, but it was eventually to acquire a new interest and prestige once the limitations of the more rigidly historicist approach began to reveal themselves. 126

The Study of the Old Testament We may now turn to consider the work of one who was incomparably the greatest of the nineteenth-century Old Testament scholars - Julius Wellhausen - whose name came to be given to the new critical approach to the study of the Old Testament in the form of 'Wellhausenism'.38 Before doing this, however, it is of value to reflect upon the work of other scholars who had already before him begun to ask more searching questions and to arrive at more radical solutions than either de Wette or Ewald had done. We have already mentioned Wilhelm Vatke, who had in 1835, published a markedly Hegelian interpretation of the Old Testament in which the ceremonial and cultic legislation contained in the Pentateuch had been ascribed to a late, post-exilic, period. The conception of a grand cultic theocracy, which the extant form of the Pentateuch affirms as the distinctive introduction and creation of Moses, was seen instead to be an end-stage of a long development. Vatke's work must be judged as a piece of philosophicaltheological writing, rather than as a fresh effort at careful literary-critical and historical analysis of the text of the Old Testament. Others, however, were working along more detailed literary-critical lines to resolve some of the outstanding problems of the date and structure of the Pentateuch. We may single out the work of two significant scholars, neither of them German, where up till this time the critical approach to the Old Testament had been almost exclusively undertaken. The first, the Frenchman Eduard Reuss (1804-91), taught in the new University of Strasbourg, and already as early as 1833, had argued in public lectures that the cultic legislation of the Old Testament, which was at that time largely ascribed to one major literary strand of the Pentateuch, came at the very end of the growth of this great literary corpus. Reuss himself did not set out such a view in writing until much later,39 by which time one of his own pupils, K. H. Graf, as well as other scholars elsewhere, had already overtaken his position.40 Yet Reuss and his work were of the greatest importance, not only for the broad critical range of his own teaching, but also because he produced pupils who were eager to inquire into the new learning about the Bible, and who were ready to learn from Germany when the time was ripe. They were to contribute extensively to the development of critical biblical scholarship in France, even though the prevailing political and ecclesiastical attitudes were strongly opposed to the acceptance of such criticism until the end of the nineteenth century.41 One of the noteworthy consequences of this was the way in which the critical approach to the Old Testament came to associate itself very closely with the development of the younger sciences of sociology and anthropology in France. In Holland, however, a great change in the prevailing ecclesiastical 127

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attitudes to the study of the Bible and of theology emerged much earlier than was the case in France, and gave opportunity for the talents of a most outstanding scholar in the person of Abraham Kuenen (1828-91).42 Kuenen came to the University of Leiden in 1846, where the older, highly conservative, positions in theology had come to be challenged and questioned by Dutch modernism. Kuenen gave himself wholeheartedly to this modern approach to the study of the Bible, and quickly learnt from German scholars the aims and methods of the new biblical science. In 1861, he published a work of introduction to the Old Testament in which he adopted a more critical approach to its problems than had hitherto prevailed in Holland.43 He took his inspiration regarding method from Germany and from the earlier Dutch scholar and theologian Hugo Grotius. In this work he went further than Ewald had gone in the direction of ascribing much of the legislation contained in the Pentateuch to a late post-exilic period. Adopting a strongly rationalist and anti-supernatural stance on critical issues, Kuenen took it as axiomatic that how revelation had occurred in ancient Israel could not be explained by resort to theories of supernatural divine intervention. Later, in the years 1869-70, he set forth in a work on the religion of Israel the view that all the cultic legislation of the Pentateuch (or more precisely the Hexateuch, which had now become the primary unit of literary study) was to be ascribed to the post-exilic age.44 Thus by 1870, Kuenen had arrived at a position which represented, with only minor modifications, the classical expression of what soon came to be called the Graf-Wellhausen position. In many ways, therefore, we can see that, by the time of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war, the questionings and hypotheses about the structure and religious origin of the Pentateuch were ripe for maturity. The time was opportune for a major new resolution of the difficulties which had beset scholars for almost seventy years since de Wette had established a base line with his ascription of the book of Deuteronomy to the time of Josiah's reform in the seventh century B.C. Julius Wellhausen was born in Hamelin in 1844, as the son of a German pastor. He went to Gottingen to study theology with a view to an ecclesiastical career, but quickly became enamoured with the new German studies, which the brothers Grimm had done much to encourage. At one time thinking of abandoning the study of theology Wellhausen came under the powerful influence of Heinrich Ewald, whose volumes on the history of Israel fascinated him and set him his life's task. Thus Wellhausen was first and foremost a historian, well worthy of comparison with the giantfiguresof the Historismus movement in L. von Ranke, T. Mommsen and the earlier B. G. Niebuhr. After publishing a series of major new explanations of the date, 128

The Study of the Old Testament origin and literary structure of the Hexateuch,45 he produced in 1878 his most epoch-making work. Originally entitled Geschichte Israels /, and intended as the first of a two-volume work, it was reprinted in 1883, as Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels.46 It marked both the beginning of a new

era of Old Testament scholarship, as well as the end of an earlier one, for in it Wellhausen set out a major reconstruction of the development of the religious institutions of ancient Israel. It was not, therefore, primarily a literary-critical work, although it was based upon his earlier studies of the Hexateuchal problem. Rather it set out a kind of definitive reconstruction, showing with great clarity and attention to detail the way in which the literary structure of the Pentateuch, and the ages of its different strata, reflected the actual course of Israel's historical development. It affirmed to the point of carrying conviction the view that the great mass of cultic legislation in the Pentateuch was of a late post-exilic origin, and that the earlier period of Israel under the monarchy had displayed a much freer type of piety and religious life which knew nothing of the 'Law' in the sense that that term had come to acquire for later Judaism. This became the hingepoint of what came to be called the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, and constituted the centrepiece of what was rather misleadingly dubbed 'Wellhausenism'. The details of the argument, and the validity or otherwise of the great wealth of careful analysis by which Wellhausen sought to substantiate the position have been so fully and frequently noted since that it is superfluous to reiterate them here.47 Within a decade, the position which had earlier been adumbrated by Vatke and Reuss, and which had never been wholly set aside, swept all opposition before it in Germany. In Holland, through the work of A. Kuenen, in Britain through the work of such men as W. Robertson Smith and S. R. Driver, and eventually in France, Sweden and America it came to be adopted as the orthodox critical explanation for the growth and origin of the Pentateuch. By the turn of the century the solution of the Pentateuch problem had come to be celebrated as the best known, if not necessarily the most important, of all the achievements of nineteenthcentury Old Testament criticism. This was no doubt to over-inflate the prominence of one particular question, important as it was in the course of pursuing the new historical-critical approach to the origin of that literature. In relation to the underlying patterns of religious thought and conviction which this particular solution was intended to advance we may note a more deeply embedded feature of Wellhausen's approach to the problems of Israel's religious history. The course of Wellhausen's labours shows a remarkable consistency of aim and methodology, for, from the field of examining the course of 129

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Israelite-Jewish religious history, he proceeded to a major new study of the origins of Islam in which he also achieved great success, though never quite matching that which belonged to his first endeavours. He also pursued with the same critical acumen the early history of the Christian faith, and especially its origins as revealed in the Synoptic Gospels of the New Testament. Here his achievements were less remarkable, which is hardly surprising in view of the immense labours that others had expended in this field since the publication of D. F. Strauss's Life of Jesus in 1835. The areas studied by Wellhausen show fully enough his claim to be judged as a historian, rather than as a theologian or biblical critic, and the way in which he endeavoured to use the new critical approach to history as a means of illuminating the problems of religious origins. In many features of their character and evaluations such histories possessed a theological quality, for they sought to bring to light underlying truths about the relationships between religion, morality and culture. They set the form of a critical work of historical reconstruction in the very centre of theological writing, just as earlier the age of the Reformation had used the commentary format for this purpose. What is singularly important about Wellhausen's approach to Old Testament history is the way in which he was able to use assumptions and ideas drawn from the Romantic legacy of the Enlightenment to explain the course of Israel's history. In particular it enabled him to stress the importance of the national dimension of Israel's existence in the period of its creative development.48 The post-exilic period was seen to mark the loss of this national reality and aspiration, and its substitution by a concept of a legalistically controlled theocracy. It was this dimension of'the Law' which characterized Judaism, and which separated Judaism from its creative roots in ancient Israel. Hence Wellhausen found no difficulty in asserting that the early Christian Church was the true spiritual heir of the Old Testament, and that Judaism was a product of a decline and aberration from the true genius of Israel.49 Historical necessity had determined that the early Church should at first have taken the form of an eclectic community, as a substitute for the nation which was wanting. Only after it had overcome the challenge of the heathen world power could it repossess its national heritage and express itself through a national spirit and will. Judaism, however, was to be judged as 'an irregular product of history'. Here we encounter one of the features which increasingly beset the nineteenth-century Christian approach to the study of the Old Testament. On the one hand there remained the strong desire to claim this literature for the Christian Church by adopting a view of Israelite history imbued with many features of earlier Messianic doctrine.50 130

The Study of the Old Testament On the other there was a growing consciousness that the Old Testament was also a Jewish literature. The tension between the two encouraged the view that its central teachings and ideas should be separated from Judaism with its notion of'the Law'. This latter was no longer to be seen as the presupposition of Israel's religious development, as the extant canonical form of its writings affirmed, but as an aberration. In line with this 'Messianic' view of Israelite history there went a deep consciousness of the theological significance of the contrast between universalism and particularism for which the new critical perspective was used to strengthen a historical justification. There were clearly limitations of outlook and perspective to be found in Wellhausen's reconstruction of Israel's history, unpalatable also as some of his conclusions were from a religious and theological point of view. Yet it was an outstanding achievement, a triumph for the historical movement in biblical studies, and an influential expression of a new approach to the Bible which completely circumvented the older distinctions between 'biblical' and 'dogmatic' theology. It made the discipline of studying the history of Israel a foundation exercise in biblical research. Its popularity, and the widespread support which it aroused abroad as well as in Germany, sufficiently explain its importance to the religious thinking of the nineteenth century. It made the critical approach to history a fresh weapon in the armoury of theological apologetic, and a justification for its claim to be scientific. Its validity has frequently been challenged in historical retrospect, as too dependent on a Hegelian philosophy of history, as consciously anti-semitic, or even as deliberately anti-theological. All such criticisms certainly go too far, and do little to undermine the worth of Wellhausen's achievement. Yet there is evidently within it a broad basis of assumption which cannot pass unremarked. It clearly owed much to the contemporary impact of HistorismuSy with its belief that fundamental aspects of culture and spiritual ethos could quite readily be brought to light by historical research. It assumed that such spirituality and cultural attainment were naturally to be found closely bound to nationality and race, and it openly used the idea of universal history in defence of the traditional Christian claim that the New Testament naturally superseded the Old. In this respect it bears interesting comparison with the work of the Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz (181791).51 Graetz was an early product of the Wissenschaft movement in Judaism, of which he remained both a critic and an heir. Born in Xions, Posen, he secured a Ph.D. in Jena, taught for a period in the Jewish Theological Seminary in Breslau, and produced the most influential of all the writings of the nineteenth-century Science ofJudaism. This was an extensive Geschichte

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derjuden von der dltesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart (i i volumes, 1853-76).52 Although not the first to appear, it is volumes 1-3 that are of most interest in comparison with Wellhausen's work because of their coverage of the biblical period. Like Wellhausen, Graetz accepted the paramount importance of a national theory of history, of the necessity for a rigorous application of the philological-critical method developed in the classical sphere by B. G. Niebuhr, and of a careful source-criticism. As Wellhausen had had a predecessor in the work of Heinrich Ewald, so Graetz had been anticipated in the earlier work of I. M. Jost.53 There are similarities also to be found between the work of the two scholars in that both shared the assumption that such a national history could be written by a proper understanding of the internal factors that had affected its development, with virtually no attention to external influences. Similarly both scholars placed the greatest weight upon the importance of the history of ideas and the influence of great personalities, externalizing themselves in the development of the great religious institutions. Yet there the comparison begins to weaken, for Wellhausen's was so obviously and uncompromisingly the work of a Christian scholar and that of Graetz the work of a Jewish one. The antiJewish polemic of the one can be compared with the anti-Christian polemic of the other. Yet it is not at this relatively superficial level that the differences are important. It reaches to a more fundamental layer, in the assumptions that each scholar had adopted. Where Wellhausen had taken it as readily demonstrable that the Old Testament found its natural continuation in the New, with the birth of Christianity, Graetz could show with equal conviction that there was no such break in the history and development of Judaism. The Old Testament period passed naturally over into that of the Rabbinic Age and into the story of Judaism in Diaspora. It was not postbiblical Judaism that was an historical aberration, but the Christian Church, which could be dismissed as an unorthodox offshoot of the later Jewish sectarian movements. For both scholars the national dimension of Israel's past was important, but the implications of this were quite differently interpreted. For Graetz it made him an early, if conservative and even critical, supporter of the proto-Zionist movement of the time. For Wellhausen it led to an assumption that the truly Christian Church must be a national one, and that even in the nineteenth century the nation must assume the spiritual mantle that had belonged to the early Church. Certainly Graetz's work was important on account of the way in which it enabled emancipated Jews to recover an interest in their own past and their distinctive culture. Undoubtedly also it showed the positive gains and insights that were to be obtained from the new scientific approach to 132

The Study of the Old Testament Judaism, which enabled Jewish learning to share fully and uninhibitedly in the philosophical and historical researches which dominated the intellectual life of Germany. More than this, however, it disclosed to those who would consider the matter, the hidden assumptions of a traditional Christian Messianism which so easily intruded themselves in the guise of ideas of historical development, or progress, in Christian reconstructions of Old Testament history. For other reasons also the question of the nature and existence of Judaism had come to exercise a special interest among Christian scholars as a consequence of Jewish civil emancipation in Germany. The development of a Christian Judenmission, and the efforts of such Christian scholars as Franz Delitzsch to understand Judaism more fully and to present a commendable Christian apologetic to the Jews had reflected this interest. From the more directly historical side, however, it was also increasingly clear that a major period of religious life, thought and movement lay between the Old Testament and the New. The rise of the Jewish sectarian parties had early on (1874) attracted the attention of Julius Wellhausen,54 and it was becoming increasingly apparent that a full and critical understanding of the sources, ideas, and historical development of Judaism in the two centuries preceding the birth of Jesus of Nazareth were of the utmost importance for an understanding of the New Testament and the setting of the Synoptic Gospels. Hence it was the Christian scholar Emil Schiirer (1844-1910) who published in 1874, the first full-scale attempt to summarize and evaluate the events and ideas of this period in his work Lehrbuch der neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte.55 A little later, under the influence of the 'History of Religions' movement, such scholars as Hermann Gunkel and Hugo Gressmann were to stimulate further interest in the need for the study of the Judaism in the New Testament era for a proper understanding of the origins of the Christian faith. By the end of the nineteenth century the work of Gustav Dalman (1855-1941), was pioneering newfieldsof research into the language of the Synoptic Gospels, and Jewish scholars such as Claude Montefiore (1858-1938) and Israel Abrahams (1858-1925), were contributing in a fresh way to the study of the New Testament from the vast resources of the Talmud and Mishnah. The 'History of Religions' movement went through a most intriguing cycle of development of its own, beginning with some pertinent and challenging questions directed at current critical orthodoxy in biblical study, it eventually passed over into the defence of one-sidedly dogmatic and entrenched positions. It included among its early supporters important Old Testament scholars such as Hermann Gunkel (1862-1932) and Hugo Gressmann (1877-1927), and the great dogmatician Ernst Troeltsch (1865— 133

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1923). Yet its initiating genius was Albert Eichhorn (1856-1926), who published singularly little.56 Its effect was most dramatically to be seen in respect of the New Testament, where it has been extensively documented and surveyed, but its importance for Old Testament studies should not be overlooked. Its conviction that a genetic relationship existed between religions in their various forms and developments raised a fresh perspective upon the triangle of connections existing between the Old Testament, Judaism and Christianity. In many respects the more outstanding of the problems that it posed, and the way in which it highlighted the difficulty in obtaining a clear theological evaluation of the way in which religious developments occur, have remained as persistent problems for theology in the twentieth century.57 The unexpected way in which its leading New Testament advocates forsook the study of the relationship between nascent Christianity and Judaism in favour of an emphasis upon the role of the Hellenistic Mystery Religions and of Gnostic movements drew attention away from the Christian concern with the Old Testament.58 Yet there were other areas in which the historical relationships which can be seen to exist between different religions, and the presence of similarities between various religious practices and customs, were being highlighted from a new direction so far as the Old Testament was concerned. The Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt at the beginning of the nineteenth century had carried in their wake considerable numbers of scholars, travellers and historians of human culture. The towering monuments of the Pyramids focused attention upon ancient Egyptian religion and by 1837, through the brilliance of J. P. Champollion (1790-1832), the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs had been deciphered and a new area of ancient literature and religious life brought to light.59 Similarly in Mesopotamia, through the digging of the Frenchman P. E. Botta (1802-70) and the Englishman A. H. Layard (181794) in the early 1840s the remains of ancient Assyrian culture began to be uncovered and brought to Paris and London.60 Once Babylonian cuneiform had been deciphered a whole new library of ancient literature was revealed which self-evidently had a very direct bearing on the study of the Old Testament. Most spectacular was the presentation in a lecture in 1872 of what the translator, George Smith, termed The Chaldean Account of the Deluge?1 now better known as part of The Epic of Gilgamesh. This was followed in 1876 by his translation of The Chaldean Account ofGenesis, which is now better known by its opening words Enuma Elish. This recounts the Babylonian myth of creation, and so clearly does a genetic relationship of some kind exist between it and the first chapter of Genesis that its importance for the study of the latter cannot be ignored. Initially such 134

The Study of the Old Testament relationships were too easily explained in terms of direct 'borrowing', or denied in defence of a traditional Christian view of the divine, and hence unique, origin of the literature of the Old Testament. Today it is easier to recognize the complexity of the developments of ideas, images and language which such similarities reflect. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century, in 1901, that the Bibel-Babel controversy broke out in all its sharpness, but the materials which it called upon had been known and discussed in scholarly circles for thirty years. Hermann Gunkel and Hugo Gressmann were early enthusiasts in the maximum utilization of this comparative Mesopotamian material for the further study of the Old Testament. They held it as incontrovertible that a whole wealth of connections existed between it and the literature and religious ideas of the Old Testament. In its extreme form this developed into what came to be characterized as pan-Babylonism, but in the hands of less incautious scholars it became an important source of new knowledge about the world from which the Old Testament had sprung. It challenged in a powerful way assumptions that had all too readily been adopted about progress in religion, about the uniqueness of the ideas and religious institutions portrayed in the Old Testament and about the passage of religion from lower to higher forms. Hence the historical development of animism, through polytheism to monotheism, which some scholars were purporting to find reflected in the Old Testament, found itself opposed by evidence of a far more complex character than such theories had previously had to cope with. It has been in large measure a legacy of this for the twentieth century to require it to marshall its evidence more circumspectly, to propound its theories more tentatively, and to frame its questions more pointedly. In consequence of this vast new world of knowledge which the latter half of the nineteenth century brought to light a new perspective on the Old Testament had emerged. Never again could a scholar hope to write a convincing history of Israel as though this people had lived on a cultural island, cut off from any continuing contact with the religious and intellectual life of its ancient Near Eastern neighbours. The very concepts of historical causation and development with which scholars like Wellhausen and Graetz had worked were set in need of re-examination. Israel had so evidently participated fully in the historical and cultural life of the ancient Orient. The material that was found was at once spectacular to the researcher and more than a little disconcerting to the layman, as the sharpness of the Bibel-BabelControversy shows. Yet in its way it opened up vast new possibilities towards the realization of the aim ofJ. G. Eichhorn - that the Old Testament should be read with the spirit and understanding which had belonged to those who had written it. The new 135

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areas of knowledge provided a new dimension of understanding for the realization of this goal. In another direction also we can see that these ancient Near Eastern discoveries of literature and artefacts confirmed the soundness of much that scholars had been pursuing. The decipherment of the Babylonian, Phoenician and other ancient languages revealed the soundness of the principles of grammatical and philological work which Gesenius had adopted and developed so richly. The very language of the Bible could now be understood on the basis of a far greater wealth of comparative material than had been available to the father of modern Hebrew studies. By the turn of the century the critical study of the Old Testament seemed set for an even larger share in uncovering the nature of mankind's religious past, and the relationship of this to the Jewish and Christian traditions, than it had held in the nineteenth century. How far it has succeeded in realizing these possibilities must be left for others to judge. There is no doubt, however, that the questions which had been directed towards the Old Testament by scholars such as J. G. Eichhorn and W. M. L. de Wette had carried the thinking of the nineteenth century into some unexpected paths. Not the least important of these was that which took it away from the traditional fields of theology into the wider areas of religious and cultural history. The Hebrew Bible itself had been emancipated from the traditional confines of its use and interpretation in Christian church and Jewish synagogue.

Notes 1 The classic work on the history of Christian interpretation of the Old Testament is that by L. Diestel, Geschichte des Alten Testaments in der christlichen Kirche (Jena, 1869), which summarizes developments up to the middle of the nineteenth century. The course of historical-critical research into the origins of the Old Testament is covered by H.-J. Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritische Erforschung des Alten Testaments von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Neukirchen, 1956; 3rd expanded edn, 1982). Important additional material is to be found in H.-J. Kraus, Die Biblische Theologie. Ihre Geschichte und Problematik (Neukirchen, 1970). 2 J. G. Herder Vom Geist der hebrdischen Poesie (3 vols., Leipzig, 1782-3; 3rd edn, 1825) and The Spirit ofHebrew Poetry, Eng. tr. by H. G. Marsh (2 vols., Burlington (Vt.), 1833; rep. in one vol. Naperville, 1971). 3 This development is now fully examined in the major work by H. Graf Reventlow, Bibelautoritdt und Geist der Moderne (Gottingen, 1980; English tr., London, 1985). 4 Cf. especially G. Hornig, Die Anfdnge der historisch-kritischen Theologie. jfohann Salomo Semlers Schriftverstdndnis und seine Stellung zu Luther, Forschungen zur systematischen Theologie und Religionsphilosophie Bd.8 (Lund-Gottingen, 1961). Further material is to be found in L. Zscharnack, Lessing und Semler. Ein Beitrag zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Rationalismus und der kritischen Theologie (Giessen, 1905).

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The Study of the Old Testament 5 J. P. Gabler, Dejusto discrimine theologiae biblicae et dogmaticae regundisque recte utriusque finibus (Altdorf, 1787; rep. in Opuscula academica /, 1831). A translation of part of this address is given in W. G. Kiimmel, The New Testament. The History ofthe Investigation of Its Problems, Eng. tr. by S. McLean Gilmour and H. C. Kee (London, 1973), pp. 98-100. Cf. further R. Morgan, The Nature of New Testament Theology, Studies in Biblical Theology: Second Series 25 (London, 1973). 6 For the concept of myth cf. C. H. Hartlich and W. Sachs, Der Ursprung des Mythosbegriffes in der modernen Bibelwissenschaft (Tubingen, 1952) and J. W. Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London, 1984). 7 J. G. Eichhorn, Forschungen zur biblischen Urgeschichte, ed. with introduction and notes by J. P. Gabler (3 vols., Altdorf, 1790-3). 8 J. G. Eichhorn, Einleitung ins Alte Testament (3 vols., Leipzig, 1780-3). 9 For the influence of J. G. Herder on biblical studies of T. Willi, Herders Beitrag zum Verstehen des Alten Testaments, Beitrage zur Geschichte der biblischen Hermeneutik 8 (Tubingen, 1971), and K. Scholder, 'Herder und die Anfange der historischen Theologie', Evangelische Theologie, 22 (1962), 425-40. 10 For the work of W. Gesenius see O. Eissfeldt, 'Wilhelm Gesenius 1786-1842', Kleine Schriften 11 (Stuttgart, 1965), pp. 441-2. 11 For the significance of B. Kennicott's work see W. McKane, 'Benjamin Kennicott: An Eighteenth Century Researcher', Journal of Theological Studies (New Series), 28 (1977), 12 Cf. O. Eissfeldt, 'Wilhelm Gesenius als Archaologe', Kleine Schriften 11, pp. 430-34, and 'Wilhelm Gesenius und die Palastinawissenschaft', Kleine Schriften 11, pp. 435-40. 13 E. Robinson, Biblical Researches in Palestine, Mount Sinai and Arabia Petraea. A Journal of Travels in the Year 1838(2 vols., London, 1841). Robinson's work and its background are discussed by J. W. Brown, The Rise of Biblical Criticism in America 1800-1870. The New England Scholars (Connecticut, 1969), pp. 111-24. The work of Carl Ritter, who had himself undertaken important geographical researches in the Sinai Peninsula, is described in R. E. Dickinson, The Makers of Modern Geography (London, 1969), pp. 34-48. 14 Pusey's two periods of study in Germany are described in H. P. Liddon, The Life ofE. B. Pusey, vol. 1 (London, 1893), pp. 70-114. After his return to Oxford, Pusey published two volumes sharply repudiating the modern German approach to biblical criticism. The relationship of German Old Testament scholarship to that in England is discussed fully in Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism. 15 H. H. Milman, The History of the Jews from the Earliest Period down to Modern Times (3 vols., originally published anonymously in 1829, 3rd edn thoroughly revised and extended, London, 1863). The preface to the third edition is of special interest for its disclosures of the critical work which Milman had used for the original edition. 16 For the philosophical and historiographical background to this presentation of Jewish history see D. Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952). 17 Cf. Forbes, ibid., pp. 4off. 18 For a critical appreciation of de Wette's biblical work cf. R. Smend, Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Arbeit am Alten und am Neuen Testament (Basel, 1957). 19 W. M. L. de Wette, Dissertatio Critica-exegetica que Deuteronomium a prioribus Pentateuchi libris diversum, alius cuiusdam recentionis auctoris opus esse monstratur (Jena, 1805). 20 J. S. Vater, Abhandlung u'ber Moses und die Verfasser des Pentateuchs (3 vols., Halle, 18025), in part 3 of his commentary on the Pentateuch. Cf. Smend, de Wettes Arbeit, p. 37 note. 21 W. M. L. de Wette, Kritischer Versuch iiber die Glaubwurdigkheit der Bucherder Chronik mit Hinsicht auf die Geschichte der Mosdischen Bticher und Gesetzgebung (Halle, 1806). Cf. Smend, de Wettes Arbiet, pp. 4ofF. 22 W. Vatke, Die biblische Theologie wissenschaftlieh dargestellt. Bd.I Die Religion des Alten

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23 24

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36

37 38

39

40 41

42 43

Testaments (Berlin, 1835). For Vatke's work cf. especially L. Perlitt, Vatke und Wellhausen. Geschichtsphilosophische Voraussetzungen und hist origraphische Motive fur die Darstellung der Religion und Geschichte Israels durch Wilhelm Vatke und Julius Wellhausen (BZAW 94) (Berlin, 1965), pp. 86-152. It is of interest that Vatke later withdrew this claim to a late date for the cultic legislation of the Old Testament in Historische-Kritische Einleitung in des A.T. (1886), pp. 2i5fF. W. M. L. de Wette, Biblische Dogmatik des Alten und Neuen Testaments, (3rd edn, Berlin, 1831). A full bibliography of de Wette's extensive writings is to be found in DeWettiana. Forschungen und Texte zu Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Leben und Werk, ed. E. Staehelin (Basel, 1956), supplemented by Smend, de Wettes Arbeit 1, pp. 189-93. Cf. Smend, de Wettes Arbeit, pp. 72-85. A short memoir and outline of Ewald's life is provided in English by T. Witton Davies, Heinrich Ewald. Orientalist and Theologian. 1803-1go3. A Centenary Appreciation (London, 1903). Cf. H. Harris, The Tubingen School (Oxford, 1975), pp. 43-8. H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel (3rd edn, vols. 1-5, Gottingen, 1864-7; Eng. tr. ed. by R. Martineau, 4th edn in 8 vols., London, 1883). For the origins of the Historismus movement of F. Meinecke, Historism. The Rise of a New Historical Outlook. Eng. tr. by J. E. Anderson (London, 1972). Ewald, History of Israel, vol. 1, p. 5. Ewald, History of Israel, p. 3 1 . G. L. Bauer's volume entitled Handbuch der Geschichte der hebrdischen Nation was published in 1800-4. Ewald, History of Israel, p. 10. Ewald, History of Israel, p. 14. E. W. von Hengstenberg, Christologie des Alten Testaments und Commentar u'ber die messianischen Weissagungen (Berlin 1829-35; Eng. tr. by R. Keith, Christology of the Old Testament, Alexandria, 1836-9; rep. Grand Rapids, 1956). J. C. K. von Hofmann, Weissagung undErfullung im Alten und Neuen Testaments, 1841-4. The significance of von Hofmann's work is discussed by E. Hiibner, Schrift und Theologie. Eine Untersuehung zur TheologieJfoh.Chr. von Hofmann, Forschungen zur Geschichte und Lehre des Protestantismus, series 10, vol. 8, (Munich, 1956). For the concept of Heilsgeschichte and its origin in nineteenth-century biblical theology cf. K. G. Steck, Die Idee der Heilsgeschichte, Theologische Studien 56 (Basel, 1959). Beside the work of L. Perlitt, Vatke und Wellhausen, mentioned above cf. also F. Boschwitz, Julius Wellhausen. Motive und Masstdbe seiner Geschichtsschreibung (Diss. Marburg, 1938; rep. Darmstadt, 1968). See also D. A. Knight (ed.), Julius Wellhausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel, Semeia 25 (Chico, California, 1982). E. Reuss, La Bible. Pt. 3, UHistoire sainte et la loi (1879). Die Geschichte der Heiligen Schriften Alten Testaments (Braunschweig, 1881). Reuss' work and its importance to French biblical scholarship are discussed by A. Causse, Edouard Reuss et la renaissance des etudes de I'histoire religieuse en France (Paris, 1929). K. H. Graf, Die geschichtlichen Biicher des Alten Testaments (Leipzig, 1866). Cf. A. Causse, 'Notes sur le developpement des etudes d'Ancien Testament en France et dans les pays de langue francaise depuis un demi-siecle', Revue d'histoire et de philosophie religeuses, 20 (1940), 47-76. Cf. S. J. De Vries, 'The Hexateuchal Criticism of Abraham Kuenen', Journal of Biblical Literature, 82 (1963), 31-57. A. Kuenen, Historisch-kritisch onderzoek naar het ontstaan en de verzameling van de boeken des Ouden Verbonds (Leiden, 1861-5; 2nd edn completely revised, 1887-93).

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44 A. Kuenen, De godsdienst van Israel tot den ondergang van den Joodschen staat (Leiden, 1869-70; Eng. tr. by A. H. May as The Religion ofIsrael to the Fall ofthe Jewish State, vols. 1-3, London, 1874-5). 45 Originally published in Jahrbucher fur Deutsche Theologie, 21 (1876), 392-450, 531-602; 22 (1877), 4°7~479- ReP- a s Skizzen und Vorarbeiten II. Die Composition der Hexateuchs (Berlin, 1885). 46 Eng. tr. by A. Menzies and J. Sutherland Black as History of Israel, 1 (1885), reprinted as Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (New York, 1957). The English translation includes the article 'Israel' originally published in Encyclopedia Brittanica (9th edn), vol. 13 (London, 1882), pp. 396-432. 47 The question of the structure of the Pentateuch and its literary sources is fully discussed, with detailed bibliography, in R. J. Thompson, Moses and the Law in a Century of Criticism Since Graf Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 19 (Leiden, 1970). 48 This aspect is fully discussed in Boschwitz, Julius Wellhausen, pp. 41 ff. 49 Cf. art. 'Israel' (in Prolegomena), pp. 5o8ff. 'The Gospel develops hidden impulses of the Old Testament, but it is a protest against the ruling tendency of Judaism.' 50 It is in line with this conviction that in his book Israelitische-jiidische Geschichte (Berlin, 1894), Wellhausen was able to present the emergence of Christianity and the Christian Church as a natural culmination of the Old Testament development, in the manner already noted of H. Ewald's treatment. 51 Cf. S. W. Baron, History and Jewish Historians. Essays and Addresses (Philadelphia, 1964), PP- 263-75. 52 H . Graetz, Geschichte derjuden von den dltesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart, (11 vols., 1853— 76; Eng. tr. by B. Lowy, History of the Jews, 5 vols., London, 1891-2). For Heinrich Graetz's work on the biblical period cf. my study 'Heinrich Graetz as Biblical Historian and Religious Apologist', in Interpreting the Hebrew Bible: Essays in Honour of E. I. J. Rosenthal (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 35-55. 53 For I. M. Jost see Baron, History and Jewish Historians, pp. 240—62. 54 J. Wellhausen, Die Pharisder und die Sadducder (Greifswald, 1874). 55 E. Schiirer, Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte (1874; 2nd edn as Geschichte desjiidischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, Leipzig, 1886-90; Eng. tr. A History of the Jewish People in the Time ofJesus Christ, Edinburgh, 1885-91). 56 Cf. H. Gressmann, Albert Eichhorn und die religionsgeschichtliche Schule (Gottingen, 57 Cf. H. Ringgren, 'The Impact of the Ancient Near East on Israelite Tradition', Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, ed. D. A. Knight (London, 1977), pp. 31-46. 58 Cf. Kummel, The New Testament. The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, pp. 24580. 59 Cf. M. Pope, The Story of Decipherment. From Egyptian Hieroglyphic to Linear B (London, 1975), pp. 436°. 60 Cf. E. A. Wallis Budge, The Rise and Progress of Assyriology (London, 1925). H. V. Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands (Edinburgh, 1903). 61 Published in Transactions of the Society for Biblical Archaeology, II (1873), pp. 213-34.

Bibliographical essay There are a number of works dealing with the history of the critical study of the Old Testament in the nineteenth century, each of which has its particular usefulness, but also its own limitations. The oldest work giving a broad coverage of the religious and theological stimuli towards a critical approach to the literature is that of L. Diestel, Geschichte des Alt en 139

R. E. CLEMENTS Testaments in der christlichen Kirche (Jena, 1869), which, however only covers the period up till the middle of the nineteenth century. The later period is dealt with by H.-J. Kraus, Geschichte der historisch-kritisch Erforschung des Alten Testaments von der Reformation bis zur

Gegenwart (Neukirchen, 1956), which is devoted almost entirely to German Protestant work. The wider theological background of such criticism is discussed by the same author in Die Biblische Theologie. Ihre Geschichte und Problematik (Neukirchen, 1970). From the side of a

concern with the philosophical and broad theological basis of biblical criticism three important studies may be noted: Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative. A Study of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven and London, 1974), D. H.

Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in Recent Theology (London, 1975) and the general historical survey of major German theological developments in the nineteenth century by H. Stephan, Geschichte der Deutschen evangelischen Theologie seit dem Deutschen Idealismus (2nd edn ed. M.

Schmidt, Berlin, i960). Although it is devoted to the New Testament, a number of points of considerable relevance to the study of the Old Testament are to be found in W. Kiimmel, The New Testament. A History of the Investigation of Its Problems (Eng. tr. S. McLean Gilmour

and H. C. Kee, London, 1973). The German scholarship of the first half of the nineteenth century, particularly that of W. M. L. de Wette, is fully discussed in J. W. Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London, 1984). A valuable survey of the attempts to present a new type of critically responsive Old Testament theology is offered by the two volumes of H. Graf Reventlow, where full bibliographical references are given: Hauptprobleme der alttestamentliche Theologie im 20. Jahrhundert and Hauptprobleme der Biblischen Theologie im

20. Jahrhundert, vols. 173 and 203 in the series Ertrage der Forschung (Darmstadt, 1982 and 1983). Surprisingly no major comprehensive treatments are available of several of the outstanding nineteenth-century Old Testament scholars, a fact which lends all the greater significance to those essays in this field which have appeared. The impact of J. G. Eichhorn's work on the study of prophecy is well covered by E. Sehmsdorf, Die Prophetenauslegung beijf. G. Eichhorn (Gottingen, 1971), which contains an extensive bibliography and examines closely the relationship between J. G. Eichhorn and J. G. Herder. The latter writer's impact on Old Testament studies is examined in T. Willi, Herders Beitrag zum Verstehen des Alten Testaments, Beitrage zur Geschichte der biblischen Hermeneutik 8 (Tubingen, 1971). The work of W. M. L. de Wette is veryfinelydealt with by R. Smend in Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wettes Arbeit am Alten und am Neuen Testament (Basel, 1957). No comparable treatment of

either the work of Heinrich Ewald or Julius Wellhausen has appeared so that it is necessary to work from much briefer sketches of the contributions of these scholars. Ewald is dealt with by T. Witton Davies in a centenary essay entitled Heinrich Ewald. Orientalist and Theologian (London, 1903), which does contain a short bibliography of Ewald's major works. F. Boschwitz, Julius Wellhausen. Motive und Masstdbe seiner Geschichteschreibung (Diss.

Marburg, 1938; rep. Darmstadt, 1968) introduces into the consideration of this scholar's work some reflections concerning the historiographical factors relating to it. These are more fully explored, particularly in their relationships to the Historismus movement in Germany and to the philosophical influences of G. W. F. Hegel upon nineteenth-century history-writing, by L. Perlitt in Vatke und Wellhausen. Geschichtsphilosophische Voraussetzungen und historiographische Motive fur die Darstellung der Religion und Geschichte Israels durch Wilhelm

Vatke und Julius Wellhausen (BZAW 94, Berlin, 1965). Since the most celebrated and controversial feature of Wellhausen's work on the history of Israelite-Jewish religion was his resolution of the problems concerning the sources, and their respective dates, of the Pentateuch, this problem is well worthy of separate consideration. For this an excellent survey, furnished with a full bibliography, is provided by R. J. Thompson, Moses and the Law in a Century of Criticism Since Graf Supplements to Vetus Testamentum 19 (Leiden, 1970). 140

The Study of the Old Testament The work of Wellhausen's great Dutch contemporary Abraham Kuenen is examined in an essay by S. J. De Vries, 'The Hexateuchal Criticism of Abraham Kuenen\JBL, 82 (1963), 31-57. The work of the great Scottish scholar W. Robertson Smith is noted in the biography by J. S. Black and G. W. Chrystal, William Robertson Smith (London, 1912), although this pays most attention to his life and his relationships to the Church. An appreciation of his academic significance, with a full bibliography, is offered by T. O. Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion (Chicago and London, 1974).

On specific issues which had a far-reaching influence upon Old Testament studies a number of independent surveys are available. The rise and work of the 'History of Religions' School is discussed by H. Gressmann in Albert Eichhorn unddie Religionsgeschichtliche Schule

(Gottingen, 1914), and also with particular reference to the labours of Hermann Gunkel in W. Klatt, Hermann Gunkel. Zu seiner Theologie der Religionsgeschichte und zur Entstehung der

formgeschichtlichen Methode (FRLANT 100, Gottingen, 1969). Further material of importance is to be found in A. F. Verheule, Wilhelm Bousset. Leben und Werk. Ein theologiegeschichtliche Versuch (Amsterdam, 1973).

Two volumes contain useful bibliographies of some of the most prominent themes of debate in Old Testament research. That by C. A. Briggs, Biblical Study. Its Principles, Methods and History (New York, 1883) sketches the general development, and the volume by G. S. Goodspeed, Israel's Messianic Hope to the Time of Jesus. A Study in the Historical Development of the Foreshadowings of the Christ in the Old Testament and Beyond (New York,

1900), contains an annotated bibliography of the major books on this particular subject. The more general survey by T. K. Cheyne, Founders ofOld Testament Criticism (London, 1893), is a readable general guide, but is, in retrospect, so apologetic for the acceptance of a critical approach to the Bible in the Church as to ignore the wider influences which have affected it. The work of the distinguished German scholar Franz Delitzsch, who concerned himself preeminently with Jewish-Christian relations, is fully outlined in S. Wagner, Franz Delitzsch. Leben und Werk, Beitrage zur evangelischen Theologie 80 (Munich, 1978). For the rise of the Wissenschaft movement in Judaism no single work exists discussing its impact on the study of the Old Testament directly, which would be eminently desirable. However the volume by S. W. Baron, History and Jewish Historians. Essays and Addresses

(Philadelphia, 1964) contains important material relating to the work of I. M. Jost and H. Graetz, and the Studies in Judaism. Third Series by Solomon Schechter (Philadelphia, 1924) contains important essays on Abraham Geiger and Leopold Zunz. The work of Heinrich Graetz in its relationship to nineteenth-century biblical historiography is dealt with in my essay 'H. Graetz as Biblical Historian', in Interpreting the Hebrew Bible. Essays in Honour ofE.

I. J. Rosenthal, ed. J. A. Emerton and S. C. Reif (Cambridge, 1979). Some of the theological aspects of Old Testament historiography, which have become widely explored and developed since the middle of the nineteenth century are dealt with in K. G. Steck, Die Idee der Heilsgeschichtes, Theologische Studien 56 (Basel, 1959). Some of the theological features which affected the new approach to biblical historiography are examined in my essay 'Messianic Prophecy or Messianic History?', in Horizons in Biblical Theology, ed. U. Mauser (Pittsburgh, 1979). Finally mention may be made of two major studies recounting the rediscovery of the ancient Mesopotamian world, which so profoundly affected the perspective from which the Old Testament was interpreted. These are H. V. Hilprecht, Explorations in Bible Lands during the Nineteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1903) and E. A. Wallis Budge, The Rise and Progress of Assyriology (London, 1925).

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5 The Study of the New Testament J. C. O'NEILL

Nineteenth-century critics of the New Testament worked as they did because of one simple idea: the idea that Catholic Christianity was a late synthesis which more or less seriously misrepresented the historical process that produced it. This simple idea sparked offa series of startling and original hypotheses about the date, authorship, unity, purpose, and meaning of every single book in the New Testament. I shall mention the more important moves in the game, and try to show how each move related to the leading idea that Catholic Christianity was a huge deception. This leading idea had been imported from England to Germany, and in Germany it was made the basis of a complete scholarly discipline. In 1793 Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752-1827) put the position beautifully in a short review of a German translation of Conyers Middleton's miscellaneous essays. This book has taken the reviewer back very pleasantly to the times at first light, just before the dawning of the present day in German theology, when the few bright ideas our compatriots had were gathered from British theologians. Thanks be to the courage and to the German diligence of the immediate past theological generation! Now the sons of the Britons' grateful German pupils can give back to the Britons the light which was kindled for their fathers - and give it back stronger, purified and clarified.1

The Britons, with a few notable exceptions, were by 1793 not interested in the scholarly working-out of their own ideas, and the history of the criticism of the New Testament in the nineteenth century is, to all intents and purposes, the history of German criticism. The boldness and diligence of German scholars, from the very moment they translated and commented on the English works they chose to put into German, immediately lifted the study of the New Testament to a new technical plane. New Testament criticism did not become a university discipline in England or Scotland or Ireland until the 1860s, and was then 143

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pursued at a handful of centres; it had been a university discipline at a host of universities in the German-speaking world since at least the time when Johann David Michaelis (1717-91) was appointed to Gottingen in 1746. However, the very competence and technical proficiency and multiplication of hypotheses is in danger of obscuring the simple central idea on which the German New Testament critics were working. The idea came to them with the combined authority of English intellectual freedom and the patronage of the most enlightened German royal house, the house of Hanover. The centre and symbol of this authority was Caroline of Ansbach, at first Princess of Wales and then George IPs Queen, whose weekly philosophical and theological salons were dominated by the leading English philosopher and biblical scholar, Dr Samuel Clarke (1675-1729) who was famous for his dialogue with Caroline's old teacher, Leibniz, and whose thorough and learned The Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity (London, 1712; 3rd edn, 1738) was to be translated into German by Johann Salomo Semler (1725--91).2 The latitudinarian divines who belonged to Caroline's circle maintained, as good Protestants, that the New Testament religion was their religion. They differed from their Protestant forebears, however, in arguing that the Church's creeds were metaphysical speculations that at least went further in speculation than the New Testament evidence warranted, and even distorted the primitive simplicity of the Gospel. They were defending New Testament religion against ecclesiastical speculative developments, not at first criticising the New Testament for misrepresenting the true course of the history of early Christianity. The New Testament should simply be read without ecclesiastical presuppositions: the assumption that all Men will own the Verity I defend if they read the sacred Writings with that Equity and Attention that is due to meer Humane Works: Nor is there any different Rule to be followed in the Interpretation of Scripture from what is common to all other Books

was a commonplace - derived from Spinoza and thoroughly domesticated in England.3 It was true that this principle did involve some criticism of the received sacred text, such as the excision of the trinitarian formula inserted into some Latin manuscripts of 1 John 5.7^ and forged in Greek as recently as the sixteenth century, but the religious strength of the latitudinarians was their stout defence of New Testament religion. Once it seemed to be established that the Church had misunderstood and corrupted New Testament religion, a new possibility suggested itself. Perhaps the New Testament itself provided evidence that Jesus was misunderstood by the New Testament; perhaps the New Testament itself 144

The Study of the New Testament had a history which, like the history of thefirstfour centuries of the Church's life, was a history of simplicity corrupted. Again, the two crucial ideas were floated in England, and worked out in Germany; and these two ideas were sufficiently powerful to keep New Testament criticism busy for the next two hundred years. The first was proposed by an earnest and pious dissenting preacher, Hugh Farmer (1714-87), two of whose books Semler had made into German, An Essay on the Demoniacs of the New Testament (London, 1775) and his Letters to Dr Worthington concerning the Demonic in the Gospels (London, 1778).

Farmer argued that 'the disorders imputed to supernatural possessions, proceed from natural causes, not from the agency of any evil spirits'; Christ and the Apostles knew this, but, since their commission was not to reveal the natural causes of diseases, they very properly, even necessarily, described diseases 'in the manner that other persons did'.4 This is the famous principle of accommodation, the principle that Christ accommodated himself to the false beliefs of his contemporaries in order to accomplish his principal mission of teaching the essential truths of religion. In the historian's armoury this principle enabled him to separate the essential from the accidental in New Testament documents. Far more important than the principle of accommodation, however, was the idea that the New Testament as a whole had misrepresented Jesus' teaching. This idea was thoroughly worked out by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century critics, but they were able to appeal to a venerable church tradition, the tradition that all scripture was to be interpreted spiritually rather than 'carnally', even if the original intention of parts of scripture seemed to be 'carnal'.5 Clement of Alexandria offered this as the reason for the distinction between St John's Gospel and the other three Gospels: Clement said 'that John, last of all, conscious that the bodily things had been displayed in the [other three] Gospels, urged on by his disciples, divinely moved by the Spirit, made a spiritual Gospel'.6 This and thousands of other patristic testimonies to the New Testament were for the first time collected and annotated by an eighteenth-century English dissenter to defend the traditional authorship and date and circumstances of the New Testament writings, and his work was translated into German under the auspices of Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten, Semler's patron (1706-57),7 but the very defensiveness of the enterprise showed that more-critical spirits were already at work attacking the tradition. The English collection became a convenient source for men to use who were less respectful of the force of tradition. Lessing was stating a commonplace when he subtly twisted tradition to produce this judgment of John: H5

J. C. O NEILL If . . . Christianity was not to die down again and to disappear among the Jews as a mere Jewish sect, and if it was to endure among the Gentiles as a separate, independent religion, John must come forward and write his Gospel. It was only his Gospel which gave the Christian religion its true consistency . . . That we accordingly have only two Gospels, Matthew and John, the Gospel of the flesh and the Gospel of the spirit, was long ago recognized by the early Church Fathers, and is actually denied by no modern orthodox theologian.8

In short, the New Testament could not be trusted historically about Jesus, however it was judged religiously. The view took two forms: either the form that Jesus' essentially Jewish teaching was eventually distorted by the Gentile church, or the form that Jesus' essentially spiritual teaching was distorted by his materialistic Jewish followers. We are accustomed to these two theories as separate and rival explanations (Jesus taught the coming Kingdom of God on earth, a thoroughly Jewish idea which the church later spiritualized versus Jesus taught the present Kingdom of God within, which the Church later made worldly), but originally the two ideas were cunningly combined: John Toland (i670-1722) used to argue both that the Nazarenes, the earliest Christians, had 'a gross and worldly notion of the person and spiritual kingdom of Christ' and that the Church had falsely come to believe that Jesus had abolished the Law of Moses.9 The most sophisticated and potent form of this second idea, found in Thomas Morgan (P-I743), was as follows. The Jewish Apostles loaded onto Jesus' original simple teaching a host of worldly Jewish ideas; in this they were opposed by Paul; and eventually, under the stress of persecution, these two opposing parts of the Church drew together and created Catholic Christianity. Jesus died renouncing Jewish Messianic notions; Peter, James and John preached the old Jewish superstition, most clearly seen in the Book of Revelation, which the clergy (Judaizers at heart) still defend; Paul preached a common saviour to the Gentiles without any regard to the Law; although these two forms of Christianity were 'as opposite and inconsistent as Light and Darkness, Truth and Falsehood', persecution under Nero and his successors drove them together 'to unite into one Catholick, Christian Church'.10 This scheme became Semler's leading principle with which to plot the history of Christianity in the New Testament and beyond,11 and it was worked out by the nineteenth-century scholars, whose self-appointed spokesman was Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792—1860). This scheme of early Christian history corresponded pretty well to that first proposed by Marcion (d. c. A.D. 160), and those who first propounded it in the eighteenth century, Matthew Tindal and, more fully, Thomas 146

The Study of the New Testament Morgan, knew it did, although they were careful not to cite a heretic in their own support, relying rather on more orthodox writers like Origen, who gave them enough for their purpose. Tindal remarked that Origen 'objects to Marcion the Here tick, that he was against the allegorical Way of interpreting Scripture' - but Tindal's long-term aim is to draw attention to Marcion's view of history, the view that Jesus' true message has been misunderstood by all his Apostles bar Paul, for they all took 'spiritual' truths literally, in a Jewish sense.12 By the end of the nineteenth century, Adolf Harnack (1851-1930) was able to own Marcion openly as the one who provided the key to the true history of Christianity. Through the work he did on Marcion for the prize essay for the Theological Faculty of Dorpat in 1870 he says 'I was initiated into New Testament textual criticism, into early Church History, into the conception of history of the school of Baur, and into the problems of Systematic Theology: there could have been no better introduction!'13 Harnack rightly mentions Tindal and Morgan as the modern revivers of the view, which 'Schleiermacher, Hegel, and the mass of thinkers whose roots were in Pietism' corrected, developed, and refined.14 Armed, then, with the principle of accommodation and the settled conviction that the primitive Gospel had been judaized and catholicized, the nineteenth-century New Testament critics carried out an enormous labour of sifting and weighing the entire literature of the New Testament, testing received opinions at every point. The standard Greek text was completely changed; the traditional date and authorship of every book was questioned; the literary history of the documents was reassessed; every doctrine based on the New Testament was re-examined; and the question of the religious setting of the New Testament, once assumed to be simply the Old Testament, was re-opened. I shall deal in turn with (I) textual criticism; (II) criticism of the writings bearing the name of John; (III) criticism of the Synoptic Gospels; and (IV) criticism of the Catholic Epistles, of the Acts of the Apostles, and of the writings bearing the name of Paul.

/ Critical study of the history of the Greek text of the New Testament In 1707, two weeks before he died, John Mill (1645-1707), Principal of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, published an edition of the New Testament in Greek, with footnotes showing those readings in the known Greek manuscripts which differed from the usual printed text of the Paris printer 147

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Robert Stephanus's third edition of 1550. Mill's thirty thousand variant readings were seized on with glee by critics of orthodoxy as showing that the text of the New Testament, on which all the doctrinal disputes were supposed to turn, was precarious and uncertain.15 Mill's friend Richard Bentley (1662-1742), Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, sprang to Mill's defence and ridiculed the ignorance of the Free-thinker in imagining that thirty thousand variants were a sign of a precarious and uncertain text; on the contrary, T i s a good providence and a great blessing, that so many Manuscripts of the New Testament are still amongst us; some procured from Egypt, others from Asia, others found in the Western Churches. For the very distances of places as well as numbers of books demonstrate, that there could be no collusion, no altering nor interpolating One Copy by another, nor All by any of them . . . [It] has been the common sense of men of letters, that numbers of Manuscripts do not make a text precarious, but are useful nay necessary to its establishment and certainty.16

Bentley, with characteristic optimism, proposed the publication of a parallel Greek and Latin text of the New Testament which would restore the text as it stood in the fourth century. By taking two thousand errors out of the Pope's Vulgate [the Clementine edition] and as many out of the Protestant Pope Stephen's [the Textus Receptus], I can set out an edition of each in columns, without using any book under nine hundred years old, that shall so exactly agree word for word, and, what at first amazed me, order for order, that no two tallies, nor two indentures, can agree better.17

Men could still suffer for their questioning of the received text - Whiston lost his chair at Cambridge in part for denying the authenticity of the explicit trinitarian reference in 1 John 5.7^, and Wetstein was removed from office as a Protestant minister in part for denying that the true text of 1 Timothy 3.16 read 'God was manifest in theflesh'- but textual criticism soon became a safe area in which hard exacting work promised assured results. Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687-1752), a pietist commentator on the New Testament, distinguished two 'nations' of manuscripts, one from Asia Minor, and the other from Africa. Semler at first followed this two-fold division, and attributed the Eastern recension to Lucian of Antioch and the African recension to Origen. In 1767 he elaborated this division, naming three recensions: the Eastern, the Alexandrian, and the Western. This grouping of manuscripts became standard, and was adopted and worked out more fully by Semler's pupil Johann Jakob Griesbach (1745-1812) who divided the early manuscripts into witnesses to three recensions: the Alexandrian, the text of Clement and Origen; the Western, which was not only the recension of Tertullian adopted in the West, but also a text found 148

The Study of the New Testament in the East in the Palestinian Syriac and the Sahidic; and the Constantinopolitan recension (usually known now as the Byzantine recension). Griesbach published a cautious revision of the Textus Receptus in 1775-7, w ^ h further editions in 1796-1806 (Halle and London) and 1803-7 (Leipzig); his revisions were decided on grounds of internal probability, not on whether or not a reading belonged to a particular recension. The great weakness of all these divisions of the manuscripts was to regard the Western group as a recension comparable to the Alexandrian recension or the Byzantine recension. Michaelis in the later editions of his Introduction to the New Testament partly recognized this failing by his attempt to subdivide the Western group into two.18 The truer solution seems to have been that proposed by the Swiss Roman Catholic biblical scholar, Johann Leonhard Hug (1765-1846), who argued that the Western group of manuscripts was not a recension but simply a group of manuscripts exhibiting the ancient text as it had been altered and corrupted in the second and early third century by the private judgment of every reader and copyist. The recensions became necessary in the third century, to introduce order into the text and to put a limit to private copies. Three men took this task in hand: Hesychius in Egypt; Lucian the Martyr in Antioch in Syria, whose recension spread to Asia Minor and the Byzantine Empire; and Origen in Palestine (but at the very end of his life, for otherwise he used the old Western text).19 Hug concluded from observation that 'Hesychius usually favoured the shortest readings; Lucian the longest.'20 The trouble with Hug's suggestion was that there was no one obvious text of the New Testament that could be put in place of the Textus Receptus; all he offered was a mass of corrupt manuscripts and three later editions, each with strengths and weaknesses. It was left to the great simplifier, the classical scholar Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) to suggest a way out: let us suppose that there existed one text of the New Testament current in Eastern Christendom at the end of the fourth century, and let us decide that a few early uncial manuscripts and the Old Latin are reliable witnesses to this text; and then let us print that as the text of the New Testament. The aim was to exclude arbitrary choice, to let early evidence decide the matter. But choice was not eliminated; instead, the element of choice and discrimination was removed from the decision about individual readings and attached to the choice of documents as a whole. The advantage of this shift of interest from individual readings to documents was that if scholars could settle on the special merit of a few documents which agreed fairly closely in text, that agreed text could be 149

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printed as a standard substitute for the discredited Textus Receptus. Constantin von Tischendorf (1815-74) now provided the necessary evidence for such a decision about documents: by his tireless labour of discovering, transcribing, editing, and re-editing manuscripts he gave documentary backing for making the Alexandrian group of manuscripts the basis of a new received text. Griesbach had assigned the Codex Vaticanus 1209 to this recension, but he only knew it in very defective collations. The first edition by Cardinal Mai was issued in 1857 and even that proved unreliable. At last Tischendorf was able to gain access to the manuscript for fourteen days in all, between 28 February and 20 March 1866, and as a result produced a far superior edition in 1867. Five years previously, in 1862, Tischendorf had succeeded in having the text of the Codex Sinaiticus published, which he had discovered in the library of the monastery of St Catharine at Mount Sinai. These two manuscripts were early (probably fourth century); they agreed fairly closely with each other; and they offered a text which was in general shorter than either the text of the Western group or of the Byzantine recension. Brooke Foss Westcott (1825-1901) as an earnest undergraduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, shortly after his twenty-first birthday conceived the idea of preparing a new edition of the Greek New Testament. In 1853 he enlisted the help of his pupil and friend Fenton John Anthony Hort (182892) in the project. They always favoured the approach of Bentley and Lachmann, the attempt to discover the fourth-century text; they wanted the authority of manuscripts and feared above all the arbitrary choice of readings.21 The work of making a new text proved far more arduous than they had expected, but fortunately the years that elapsed saw the publication of continuous texts of some of the most important manuscripts.22 Westcott and Hort's aim was to discover the history of the documents. They first eliminated the Byzantine recension as a late combination of Alexandrian and Western readings. They then considered the character of the Alexandrian and Western manuscripts, and discovered systematic corruption in each of them. Finally, they decided that the text of two manuscripts, the Codex Vaticanus (B) and the Codex Sinaiticus (K), although Alexandrian in provenance, lacked the characteristic corruptions of either the Western text or the rest of the Alexandrian manuscripts; and they concluded that the texts of B and X were 'neutral' and went back independently, with relatively little corruption, to a text of the second or early third century: The textual phenomena which we find when we compare [B and X ] singly and jointly with other documents are throughout precisely those which would present themselves in 150

The Study of the New Testament representatives of two separate lines diverging from a point near the autographs, and not coming into contact subsequently.23

The supporters of the Textus Receptus were outraged, but Westcott and Hort's text formed the basis of the Revised Version, and soon a text based on theirs became completely standard when Eberhard Nestle (1851-1913) prepared a conflation of von Tischendorf's eighth edition, Westcott and Hort, Weymouth, and later Bernhard Weiss for the Wurttemburg Bible Society and, in 1904, for the British and Foreign Bible Society. Westcott and Hort finally succeeded in dethroning the Textus Receptus of Stephanus, but their claim to have published the New Testament in the original Greek seems to have been too grand a claim, and the work of textual critics in the last twenty-five years of the century suggested that Westcott and Hort had not so much established the original text as established the text of an early recension, the result of editorial activity. Towards the end of the century two discoveries raised once more the problem of the Western group of manuscripts; perhaps here was to be found evidence for the wild and varied texts upon which the early recensionists exercised their art. First, William Hugh Ferrar (1834/5-71) of Trinity College, Dublin, showed that four late manuscripts of the Gospels, the minuscules 13, 69, 124, and 346, formed a 'family' that derived from a common archetype, an archetype offering a text as good as that of three or four of the most ancient uncials.24 Kirsopp Lake (1872-1946) made a further discovery of another 'family' of minuscules, 1,118,131, and 209, and he went on to suggest that these two families, family 1 and family 13, together with some other minuscules, perhaps represented the text used by Origen in Caesarea.25 The second great discovery was of an older Syriac translation of the Gospels, the Codex Syriac Sinaiticus, discovered in the monastery of St Catharine on Mount Sinai by Mrs Agnes Smith Lewis (1843-1926) and her twin sister Mrs Margaret Dunlop Gibson (1843-1920) in 1892 (with supplementary discoveries on later visits in 1893, 1895, 1897, 1902 and 1906). This version agreed well with the Alexandrian and Western Greek manuscripts in omitting passages to be found in the Byzantine text, but its text was in general Western rather than Alexandrian. In the early years of the twentieth century Hermann Freiherr von Soden (1852-1914) made a bold attempt to throw together into one group all the manuscripts that were not either Alexandrian or Byzantine (he called these two recensions Hesychian, the Egyptian second century text, siglum H, Eta; and Koine, the text established by Lucian of Antioch, who died in A.D. 312,

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siglum K, Kappa). This third group he called the Jerusalem group, the Palestinian text established by Pamphilus of Caesarea who died in A.D. 309 (siglum I, Iota, standing for Jerusalem). More important, he assigned the more narrowly 'Western' manuscripts of the Gospels (D, W, 0,700) to this group as la; the rest of the group in the Gospels comprised I77 (family 1, discovered by Lake), It (family 13, discovered by Ferrar), I (itself divided into four subdivisions), Ij3 (in two subdivisions), Io, 177, la, IK (in four subdivisions) and a miscellaneous collection of separate I manuscripts.26 This analysis has found little favour, and yet it remains true that a great number of late minuscules do fall into families and do offer readings that are early and sometimes original. Bentley and Lachmann set themselves a simple problem, the discovery of a text that existed in the fourth century. The discovery and publication of two fourth century uncial manuscripts, X and B, which contained a good short text, was not accepted simply as an answer to Bentley and Lachmann's problem; von Tischendorf and Hort were so intoxicated by the discoveries that they began to claim that they were in touch with the apostolic autographs. We now know through the recent discovery of third-century papyri, with a text close to that of B and K, that this recension is at least third century, but the fact that Western and Byzantine readings are also found in the writings of early Church Fathers shows us that the Alexandrian text is more likely to be a deliberately edited recension which systematically adopted shorter readings than a set of manuscripts in direct succession from the 'apostolic autographs', as Hort thought. Hug's hypothesis, that the manuscripts von Soden has labelled I (Jerusalem) are really witnesses to the state of the text of the New Testament before the firm recension made by an Alexandrian editor which produced Hort's Neutral and Alexandrian text, is intrinsically more probable. Within the mass of 'Western' manuscripts, we now know that we can separate out 'families' which represent early archetypes, but none of these archetypes, nor probably even the early uncial D, represents an organized recension. The two recensions were the Alexandrian (von Soden's Palestinian text) and the later Byzantine or Syrian recension (von Soden's Koine text). The earliest manuscripts of the New Testament must have quickly become corrupt, and the Church must in the third century have taken steps to edit and purge the wild texts; the orthodox Church could not itself avoid doing conservatively what Marcion had tried to do radically. Recensions there were, but a theory that regards all our manuscripts as belonging to one of these recensions and does not allow for the possibility that we still possess 152

The Study of the New Testament more or less direct evidence of an earlier disordered stage in the transmission of the text cuts against the discoveries that belong to the last years of the nineteenth century: the discovery of 'families' and the publication of the Syriac Sinaiticus version. The true achievement of the nineteenth-century textual critics was not the replacing of the Textus Receptus by the original text of the Greek New Testament, but the discovery that the Textus Receptus was one recension and the Alexandrian text another recension; the problem they began to work on, and which they bequeathed to the twentieth century, was how to analyse and use the evidence of other early 'families' of manuscripts in the great group which von Soden labelled I for Jerusalem. As Kirsopp Lake wrote in 1898, 'until some probable theory can be reached, which will explain the curious phenomena to be found in that [Western] group of MSS., our views on the text of the New Testament as a whole, however probable, can only be tentative.'27 / / Criticism of the books said to be written by the Apostle John The New Testament contains five books which were traditionally said to be written by the Apostle John: the Fourth Gospel, an anonymous work in which the author claims to have seen the blood and water flow from Jesus' side when the soldier pierced it with a spear (John 19.35), and whose Gospel is accordingly ascribed to 'the beloved disciple', the only male follower present at the crucifixion (John 19.26O; the First Epistle of St John, an anonymous work that claims to have been written by someone who saw Jesus and touched him with his hands (1 John 1.1); the Second and Third Epistles of St John, short anonymous letters from someone calling himself The Presbyter; and the Apocalypse (or Book of Revelation) said to be by John 'your brother and companion in tribulation' who was on the island of Patmos on account of his testimony to Jesus, and who there received a vision (Revelation 1.1, 4, 9; 22.8). Only the Apocalypse mentions the name 'John' in the text, and it does not say that this John was one of the sons of Zebedee and an Apostle; the Fourth Gospel and the First Epistle claim to be by people who knew Jesus intimately, but neither actually claims to be written by John. An early Church Father mentions John the Presbyter, but the Second and Third Epistles claim merely to be written by The Presbyter without mention of whether or not his name was John. The Apocalypse was the first of these five books to be attacked as inauthentic. Gaius, a Roman Christian at the opening of the third century, already denied its authority, ascribing it to the heretic Cerinthus (Eusebius, 153

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Ecclesiastical History, in, 28.2), and Dionysius of Alexandria thought it must have been written by John Mark or another John, not John the Apostle who wrote the Fourth Gospel (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, vn, 25). Its place in the collection of canonical books was always uncertain: sometimes it was grouped with the Four Gospels, sometimes with Acts and the Catholic Epistles, sometimes with the Pauline Epistles, and sometimes put alone. At the time of the Reformation Erasmus (c. 1466-1536) revived the old doubts about the authenticity of Revelation, drawing attention to the stylistic difference between Revelation and the Fourth Gospel. Luther did not like Revelation and put it with James, Jude, and Hebrews at the end of his translation of the New Testament on unnumbered pages. Nevertheless the Apocalypse remained in the Protestant canon, and was popularly interpreted as referring to the time of the Reformation, with the Pope as Antichrist. Roman Catholic commentators answered these charges by showing that the book referred to events in the first century at the time of its composition. Luis de Alcazar (1554-1613) in his monumental work Vestigatio arcani sensus in apocalypsi (Antwerp, 1614) argued that the first part of the Apocalypse was directed against the Synagogue and the second part against the Roman Empire. This approach was taken up by the Protestant Hugo Grotius (1583-1645). The ancient questioning of the tradition that the author was the Apostle John was revived by the French Protestant Firmin Abauzit (1679-1767) whose mother sent him to Geneva for safety on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He travelled in Holland and England and in 1730 published in English an examination of the Apocalypse, arguing that it was a paraphrase of Mark 13 written at the time of Nero. In Germany Georg Ludwig Oeder took up the theme by arguing that Gaius was right in attributing the authorship of the Apocalypse to Cerinthus. Oeder's work was published and defended by Semler,28 who ascribed its authorship to a Montanist, that is, an apocalyptic fanatic. Herder and Eichhorn thought this judgment too harsh, and regarded the Apocalypse as a poetic work, a dramatic poem, whose author did not mean his visions to be taken literally. Semler's wish to remove the Apocalypse from the Christian Canon was part of his rejection of the alleged distortion of the universal gospel of Paul by the judaizers; the Apocalypse represented extreme Judaism. This estimate of the Apocalypse is already found in Thomas Morgan, for whom this judaizing of the Gospel prepared the way for Roman Catholicism.29 Morgan cited with approval Isaac Newton's defence of the traditional view that the author was the Apostle John, and it is one of the curiosities of criticism that the 154

The Study of the New Testament Johannine authorship of the Apocalypse was strongly defended by the nineteenth-century Tubingen school.30 The reason was simple: they needed literary evidence to support the historical reconstruction of the history of the early Church put forward by Marcion, revived by Thomas Morgan, and domesticated in Germany by Semler. According to this theory Peter and the other Jewish Apostles judaized Jesus' message in stark opposition to Paul's universal interpretation of the Gospel. The Apocalypse provided a good example of a book which emphasized the exclusive prerogatives of Jews and which foretold a visible triumph on earth of Christ and his saints - and if the traditional authorship of the book could be maintained, they would have evidence of just the distortion of Jesus' message by the early apostles which they required. The Gospel ofJohn, on the other hand, they regarded as a late work, written after the catholic synthesis between the two opposing original schools had been achieved. A great new step in understanding the Apocalypse was first taken by Friedrich Liicke (1791-1855) who argued that the book belonged to a whole series of Jewish apocalypses which had been produced in great profusion since the time of Ezekiel and Daniel.31 Liicke's thesis was sharpened by Eberhard Vischer (1865-1946) in a dissertation written under Adolf Harnack's supervision in which he argued that the Apocalypse was originally a Jewish document which had later been christianized by the addition of chapters 1-3; 5.9-14; 7.9-17; 13.9^ 141-5, i*f; 15-35 l 6 l 5 ; 17-Hi i9-9f, " , 13; 20.4-6; 2i.5b-8. 32 Finally, at the end of the nineteenth century Hermann Gunkel (18621932) put the Apocalypse at the centre of a whole new interpretation of the Bible as a part of the history of religions. He connected the myths contained in Genesis 1 and Revelation 12 with the Babylonian myths of creation and chaos at the beginning and end of history.33 Gunkel attacked the attempts to relate the myth in Revelation 12 to contemporary events as bankrupt; the material must first of all be seen as part of a long chain of tradition reaching back for thousands of years through Judaism into Babylonian religion. Gunkel's book was immediately followed by a soberer work on the Antichrist by Wilhelm Bousset (1865-1920) in which he acknowledged Gunkel's inspiration, but restricted himself to exploring the pre-Christian Jewish apocalyptic tradition and its Christian continuation down to the Middle Ages.34 He followed this monograph with an outstanding commentary on the Apocalypse in the Meyer series, which combined Gunkel's approach from the point of view of the history of religion with an attempt to relate the visions to contemporary events.35 The result of nineteenth-century criticism of the Apocalypse has been to 155

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set the book firmly in the tradition of pre-Christian Jewish apocalyptic literature; and since Jewish apocalyptic is more and more seen as the proper setting for understanding the ministry of Jesus, the Apocalypse is now recognized as an important source for understanding the origins of Christianity. The story of nineteenth-century criticism of the Fourth Gospel can be told more simply. I have already mentioned Clement of Alexandria's theory that John's Gospel was written deliberately by the Apostle John as a 'spiritual' Gospel in contrast to the other three 'bodily' Gospels. This became a commonplace of eighteenth-century criticism. However, as far as I can discover, no one questioned the traditional assumption that the Apostle John was the author until Edward Evanson (i731-1805) published The Dissonance of the Four Generally Received Evangelists, and the Evidence of Their Respective Authenticity Examined (Ipswich, 1792; 2nd edn,

Gloucester, 1805). Evanson took the Histories of Luke (Luke-Acts) as the standard by which to reject Matthew, Mark and John as written in the second century; by the same standard he accepted 1 and 2 Corinthians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Galatians and 1 and 2 Timothy as genuine, and rejected Romans, Ephesians, Colossians, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John, Jude and the Letters to the Seven Churches in Revelation. In Germany Evanson's book prompted Erhard Friedrich Vogel (17501823), superintendent of the church in Wunsiedel (Franken) to write an anonymously published two-volume arraignment of the Evangelist John and his Editors at the Last Judgment.36 He was followed by Georg Konrad Horst (1767-1832), until 1817 a pastor in South Hessen, when he became a freelance writer,37 by Hermann Heimart Cludius (1754-1835), and by Heinrich Christian Ballenstedt who argued that the dependence of the Fourth Gospel on the philosophy of Philo made it impossible that the Apostle could have been the author.38 In 1820 Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider, general-superintendent of the church in Gotha published Probabilia de evangelii et epistolarum Ioannis apostoli indole et origine (Leipzig) which collected the arguments against the authenticity of John's Gospel. This book raised such a storm - Schleiermacher came out strongly in favour of the traditional authorship - that Bretschneider confessed himself convinced that his book was mistaken. In 1826 Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette (1780-1849), Schleiermacher's protege (though later disowned), published a moderate and cautious but clear-sighted Introduction to the New Testament in which he was so far convinced by Bretschneider's book that he argued that 'the acceptance of the authenticity of this Gospel has not been raised above all doubt'.39 156

The Study of the New Testament Bretschneider's arguments were taken up by David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) in his famous Das Leben jfesu, kritisch bearbeitet (2 vols.,

Tubingen, 1835); he showed point-by-point that the historical statements in which the Fourth Gospel disagreed with the Synoptic Gospels and Acts, like the statement that Jesus won disciples among the Samaritans, were false; and he also argued that the discourses of Jesus were free compositions of the Evangelist written in the spirit of Alexandrian or Hellenistic philosophy. Bruno Bauer (1809-82) followed the same line in his book on the Fourth Gospel of 1840,40 and with E. K. J. Liitzelberger (1802-77) argued that the Gospel was written between A.D. 130-135 in Edessa.41 Ferdinand Christian Baur then made this view of the Fourth Gospel one of the pillars of the Tubingen-school system, arguing that it was written about A.D. 170 as an ideal presentation of Jesus at a time when the original opposition between Jewish Christianity and Paulinism had been overcome.42 The rest of the century was spent by the radical critics in arguing whether the date of composition should not be put somewhat earlier in the second century, and by the conservative critics in defending apostolic authorship. But there was a time-bomb ticking away underneath this debate. Semler and Lessing, followed in 1806 by Julius August Ludwig Wegscheider (17711849),43 and then by Schleiermacher and Christian Hermann Weisse44 doubted or outright denied the Fourth Evangelist knew the Synoptic Gospels at all. This did not necessarily mean that his historical accounts were more trustworthy than those of the Synoptic Evangelists, but if he did not know them, his Gospel could be dated early. The theory of Johannine independence of the Synoptics was powerfully revived by Percy GardnerSmith in 1938.45 Besides arguing that the historical details in John's Gospel were independent of the Synoptics, Christian Hermann Weisse also argued that the discourses were genuine discourses of the Apostle John expressing not so much his picture of Christ as his idea of Christ; and that these discourses were written down by disciples of the Apostle after his death. Weisse was followed in this line by Daniel Schenkel (1813-85) and Alexander Schweizer (1808-88).46 In 1863 Ernest Renan (1823-92) in his enormously popular Vie de Jesus argued that the historical part of the Gospel was essentially Johannine, going back to the Apostle, whereas the discourses were metaphysical essays added later; he spoke of a 'school of John' like the school of Socrates.47 The attempt to understand the discourses received a new twist at the end of the century, when new attention was given to the religious literature of the Mandaeans. Wilhelm Brandt (1855-1915) suggested that the Mandaean writings went back to a movement of religious reformation within Judaism

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which attracted a few followers (some of them Christian) and eventually became a new religion.48 Brandt's argument that the origins of Mandaeans were Jewish made the ideas available as possible sources for John's discourses. Mark Lidzbarski (i 868-1928), a Polish Jew who fled to Germany as a boy and eventually became Professor of Oriental Studies in Greifswald (1907) and Gottingen (1917), published new editions of the Mandaean literature and translated it into German.49 At the same time James Rendel Harris (1852-1941) published a manuscript in his own possession, the Syriac Odes of Solomon (Cambridge, 1909), which showed striking parallels to the language of the Johannine discourses.50 Harris himself thought that the Odes were written by a Christian who, while not a Jew, was a member of a community of Christians who were for the most part of Jewish extraction and beliefs, but Harnack, almost the first commentator in the field, argued that the Odes were a Jewish psalm-book composed near the beginning of the first century, and worked over soon afterwards by a Christian hand.51 The Mandaean literature and the Odes of Solomon suggested to Richard Reitzenstein, Walter Bauer and Rudolf Bultmann that the Fourth Evangelist may have used a pre-Christian Jewish source in composing the Prologue and the discourses.52 The result of radical criticism had a curious outcome: first the contradictions between the events narrated in the Fourth Gospel and the events narrated in the Synoptics led sharp-eyed critics like Weisse to argue that John's Gospel was independent of the Synoptics and earlier than them; then the observation of the parallels in Mandaean literature, which went back, perhaps, to John the Baptist, and the discovery of the Jewish Odes of Solomon gave support to the view that the discourses were early, too - in this case, even pre-Christian. Few scholars would now defend the apostolic authorship of the Gospel; but few would argue for a second century date of composition. The same authors who questioned the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel also raised the possibility that the First Epistle of.St John was written by a different author from the author of the Gospel: Georg Konrad Horst, Hermann Heimart Cludius and Ferdinand Christian Baur; their forerunner seems to have been Samuel Gottlieb Lange (1767-1823).53 Baur and his successors argued that the heretics the author of 1 John was combatting were Gnostics, and this helped locate the Epistle in the second century when the struggle with Gnosticism in the church was at its height. However C. Wittichen raised the interesting possibility in 1869 that the 'heretics' were really Essene Ebionites. His theory found little favour, but was 158

The Study of the New Testament revived in the form that the 'heretics' were Jews by Alois Wurm in 1904.54 The strong affinities between the language of the Epistle on the one hand and the newly discovered Essene writings at Qumran and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs on the other hand have confirmed the instincts of Wittichen and Wurm, and suggest that both the author of the Epistle and his opponents came out of the same religious setting, the Jewish sect of the Essenes. The discovery of the library in the caves near the ruins of the Qumran settlement has made more difference to the discussion of the writings that bear the name of John than to any other part of the New Testament, but the issues are still the issues raised in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. / / / Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels Modern discussion of the question of whether or not there was a literary relationship between our Greek Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and of what that literary relation might be goes back to two suggestions, one made by Hugo Grotius and the other by Jean Le Clerc (1657—1736), both men Arminians. Grotius took up a theory of Augustine's that Matthew's Gospel was the first Gospel, Mark's Gospel used Matthew, and Luke's Gospel used both Matthew and Mark. Grotius's scheme was followed by Wetstein and Thomas Townson (1715-92), whose Discourses on the Four Gospels, Chiefly with Regard to the peculiar Design of each, And the Order and Places in which

they were written (Oxford, 1778) was translated into German and annotated by Semler. The Grotius scheme was revived in the middle of the nineteenth century by Adolf Hilgenfeld (1823-1907).55 Henry Owen (1716-95) invented a variant of Grotius's theory, published as Observations on the Four Gospels; tending chiefly, To ascertain the Times of their Publication; And To illustrate the Form and Manner of their Composition

(London, 1744): Matthew was written first, for Jewish converts; but Luke second, using Matthew, for the Gentile converts; and Mark third, using Matthew and Luke, for Christians at large. This theory was adopted by Johann Jakob Griesbach and became the theory of Ferdinand Christian Baur and most of the Tubingen school. Le Clerc, the originator of the other leading idea, founded his theory on a remark of Jerome's. He argued that the verbal similarities between the Gospels rested on their common use of some Aramaic sources, chronicles left by those who had seen and heard Jesus. Semler and Michaelis, who had at first followed Grotius's theory, switched to this, and Lessing advocated it 159

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about the same time.56 This theory allowed one to say that the Greek Synoptic Gospels as they stood were independent of each other. Michaelis gave as his reason for abandoning the theory that Mark was dependent on another Gospel or Gospels his reading of a little monograph by Johannes Benjamin Koppe (1750-91), Marcus non epitomator Matthdi (1782). Koppe's argument led Gottlob Christian Storr (1746-1805), the leader of the old Tubingen school, to propose a new variant of Grotius by putting Mark first chronologically: Mark's Gospel was used by Matthew, and Luke used both Mark and Matthew.57 The idea that Matthew had to be the earliest Gospel of the three Synoptics because it alone bore the name of an Apostle was now broken, and Mark (or in the case of Edward Evanson and Schleiermacher, Luke) could be put first. Jean Le Gere's idea of Aramaic sources reached its culmination in the theory put forward in 1794 by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn. He argued that there were originally four Aramaic sources, the first used by Matthew, the second by Luke, the third (a combination of the first and second) used by Mark, and the fourth used by both Matthew and Luke. The Greek Gospels are independent of one another, but all four are dependent on roughly two Aramaic sources, one in various forms used by Matthew, Luke and Mark, and the other by Matthew and Luke.58 Herbert Marsh, fellow of St John's College, Cambridge (1757-1839), who translated and annotated Michaelis's Introduction to the New Testament, and whose annotations and supplements were in turn translated into German, refined Eichhorn's theory. He argued for two Hebrew sources, K which was translated into Greek and used with the Hebrew original by Mark and Luke, and which was supplemented to become the Hebrew Matthew, itself then translated into Greek; and!3, a Hebrew collection of precepts, parables, and discourses, which was used by Matthew and Luke.59 The Roman Catholic theologian Alois Peter Gratz (1769—1849) in his Neuer Versuch, die Entstehung der drey ersten Evangelien zu erkldren (Tubingen, 1812) then simplified this theory: an Aramaic source was translated into Greek to be used by Mark and Luke, while Matthew used the original Aramaic; and Luke and Matthew also shared a common collection of sayings. Gratz's book is the last to suppose that the history of the relationship between the Synoptic Gospels is bound up with the history of how two Hebrew or Aramaic sources were translated into Greek. The idea that there were two sources for the three Synoptics is nowfirmlyestablished, but, even if an Aramaic origin for a source is posited, little or no interest is shown from now on in any history the source might have had in its Aramaic form. 160

The Study of the New Testament Julius Wellhausen (i 844-1918), for example, concedes that a few variations between Matthew and Luke may be attributed to a different reading or rendering of an Aramaic original, but he insists that the source common to Matthew and Luke was in Greek, and that at best the Aramaic original must have still been accessible to the Evangelists.60 After Gratz the Synoptic Problem became the problem of how Greek sources were used by the three Greek Synoptic Gospels. The only exception was Heinrich Ewald (180375)-61 Why this clean break with a century of scholarly investigation? The deathblow to the older theories seems to have been delivered by the Roman Catholic scholar Johann Leonhard Hug whose outstanding contribution to the study of the text of the New Testament has already been noticed. Hug argued that the Greek of the Gospels agreed far too closely to be possible if the Gospels were independent translations from Hebrew. Even the hypothesis that a Hebrew Gospel was translated into Greek and then used by our Evangelists was unnecessary, since the missionaries among the Aramaicspeaking populace needed no written documents; written accounts were first needed only when the message was being preached in Greek-speaking lands. The same objection was brought by Hug against the recent revival of the theory that there was afixedoral Gospel.62 De Wette in his Introduction of 1826 reproduced and accepted just these arguments, without mentioning Hug's name.63 Hug went on to restate Grotius's theory that Matthew was used by Mark, and Matthew and Mark by Luke; this theory almost completely disappeared, but his demolition of the Hebrew or Aramaic Gospel theory won universal acceptance. In 1836 the classical scholar Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann concentrated attention on a simple reason for regarding Mark as the framework on which Matthew and Luke were built. He argued that the order of events to be found in Mark was the order followed and deviated from by Matthew and Luke. He also said that Matthew and Luke had in common some collections of sayings of Jesus.64 Although Lachmann was careful to say that Matthew and Luke did not have before them a copy of our Greek Mark, this complication was soon forgotten. Christian Gottlob Wilke (1786-1854) argued in a detailed and painstaking book published in 1838 that our Greek Mark was the original Gospel and that all the differences from Mark in Matthew and Luke could be explained as deliberate alterations. The same year Christian Hermann Weisse (1801-70) made exactly the same case with far less detail but a broader scope; he also argued that Luke first, then Matthew, both used our Greek Mark plus the Hebrew Logia source.65 161

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The Tubingen school (except for Bruno Bauer) went on supporting Griesbach's hypothesis, emphasizing the tendency of each of the Gospels: Matthew was a Jewish Christian Gospel; Luke used Matthew from the Paulinist side; while Mark was a neutral epitome made for use by a reconciled Catholic Church. But the renewed support for Owen and Griesbach did not stop scholars from exploring the newer two-document hypothesis. The greatest and most lasting work on what has become an agreed position was done by Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832-1910). His first attempt was published in 1863. He argued that there was a Greek source A, which consisted of all of our Mark that is contained in either Matthew and Luke, plus the pericope of the woman taken in adultery (John 7.53-8.11) and the resurrection appearance of Jesus to the women to tell the disciples to go to Galilee and his appearance there (Matthew 28.9, 10, 16-20). Our Mark was this source A plus some discourses, parables and narratives, with some excisions. Matthew and Luke were based on source A and a second source A plus their own individual sources.66 In 1885 Holtzmann modified this theory by supposing that Luke knew our Matthew as well as our Mark, and by abandoning the idea that there was any difference between an 'Urmarcus' and Mark.67 The nineteenth century succeeded in discovering a simple explanation for a complex literary relationship, but at the cost of forgetting another set of problems about the Gospels that had concerned Eichhorn and Marsh and Gratz, the originators of the two-document hypothesis, the set of problems to do with the fact that the accounts of Jesus' words and deeds came first from people who spoke Aramaic and wrote Aramaic and perhaps Hebrew. Hug's argument that no connected Gospel account was ever written or recited in Hebrew or Aramaic is not very likely, and was certainly not accepted by Weisse and countless others (including Wellhausen) for Q, the Sayings Source; yet no one except Ewald since Eichhorn and Marsh and Gratz seems to have considered that different translations and different recensions of this and other Hebrew or Aramaic sources could help explain the similarities and differences between the Synoptic Gospels. It is unlikely that the originators of the two-document hypothesis were completely mistaken in seeing more difficulties than their followers could face. The Synoptic Problem was a satisfactory problem for learned and efficient scholars to work upon; and it seemed to produce good solid results, so that at the beginning of the twentieth century Johannes Weiss could write, 'the assumption that our second Gospel is the oldest is no longer a hypothesis but a scholarly conclusion' (ein wissenschaftliches Ergebnis).6S

The real problems that needed to be solved, and which prompted all the hard investigation of the Synoptic Problem, were much more intractable, 162

The Study of the New Testament and work on them moved much more slowly. They were first, the question of what sort of literature the Gospels were; and second, the question about what Jesus himself actually did and taught. At the end of the eighteenth century Johann Gottfried Herder (17441803), w a s o n e of the first to suggest that Mark was the first Greek Gospel, which mostly followed a short original common oral Gospel in Aramaic; that Luke used Mark and a longer Gospel of the Hebrews; and that the Greek Matthew was a later free translation into Greek of this Gospel of the Hebrews.69 But his real significance was that he directed attention to these two great questions, the literary question of the sort of books the Gospels were and the sort of paragraphs they contained; and the historical and theological question of the real centre of Jesus' teaching. Herder set the lines on which both our two questions were discussed for the next two hundred years. Each of the Gospels, he said, was a Good News Rhapsody, freely composed by each Evangelist according to the needs of the audience.70 Indeed, the Gospel had always been preached in a form appropriate to the audience. When Christ spoke out of the people to the people, how else could he speak than in the people's speech with its mixture of Pharisaism and Hellenistic ideas? When he was outside and inside Galilee and spoke to heathen Galilee full of different nations, how else could he speak than in Galilean? Matthew, who seems so rightly to have embraced Jesus' words with folk-simplicity, had to aramaize; Luke, as he presented these words for Hellenists, had to hellenize. John even introduces suggestions in Jesus' lifetime that the gospel might be meant for the widely scattered Hellenes (John i2.2of).71

The ideas are childlike, presented as ideas of children and angels, in the speech of the people; now we laugh at the play of children, yet the children's game calls Truth! Truth! In this and many other similar passages Herder is suggesting that each of the Gospels is a work with a particular audience in mind, written in the language of the people. He was also suggesting that the individual paragraphs were folk-stories from a childlike age. Finally he was suggesting that Jesus' actual message could be identified behind its various dresses; there was a religion of Jesus behind the religion about Jesus: Kingdom of God! Heavenly Kingdom! immovable hidden life in him, life with the bountiful, strengthening, all-inspiring Divinity, that is the root of his teaching and his demands.72

Herder put forward in a new and powerful combination the ideas that led to Form criticism, Redaction criticism, and the nineteenth-century quest for the historical Jesus. David Friedrich Strauss took up the three themes by suggesting that the Gospel incidents and sayings were shaped mainly on the basis of Old 163

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Testament models by popular tradition; the Gospel accounts arose out of the popular need to create new and powerful myths out of a popular religious tradition. Nearly fifty years later Franz Overbeck (i837-1905) drew attention to the deceptively simple point that the New Testament did not contain 'literature' at all; the New Testament books are really pre-literature, when judged by their form; and 'literature' cannot be said to begin in the church until the Apologists. 'Gospel, Acts and Apocalypse are historical forms which from a quite definite point of time on simply disappear in the Christian church.'73 Georg Henrici (1844-1915) similarly emphasized that the Gospels were collections of documents and testimonies thrown up by a missionary movement; the literature both reflected and formed the life and piety of the early Christian congregations.74 At the same time Hermann Gunkel was emphasizing that the New Testament documents were religious documents; mythical pictures of the cosmos from other religions had become part of Judaism and thus part of Christianity.75 Not only did this lead to a greater interest in the form of the paragraphs, as expressions of popular religious themes; it led also to a new interest in the content of the documents, as containing religious ideas which had to be given full weight. For example, Herder and his successors had tacitly concluded that apocalyptic was at best a temporary clothing adopted by Jesus or Paul or the writer of the Apocalypse to present his message to his contemporaries. Overbeck scathingly pointed out that this picture of Jesus and the early Church completely obscured the truth.76 In 1892 Johannes Weiss wrote a book on the preaching of Jesus about the Kingdom of God in which he coolly argued, step by step, that Jesus never taught the presence of the Kingdom but looked forward rather to a future Kingdom of God on earth.77 So Reimarus's picture of Jesus was revived, and Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) celebrated this fact in his book From Reimarus to Wredey later to be generally known after its English title as The Quest ofthe HistoricalJesus ?% The century that thought it had solved the Synoptic Problem was left in deep uncertainty about the form of the Gospels as wholes and the form of their component parts, and in deeper uncertainty about the content of Jesus' message. Again, all the moves that were to prove fruitful in the twentieth century had already been made by 1901. IV Criticism of the New Testament Epistles and the Acts of the Apostles Semler followed Marcion (as revived by Thomas Morgan) in seeing the history of the early Church as a clash between Judaizers, who preached a 164

The Study of the New Testament gospel of the coming of a Jewish Kingdom of God on earth, and the Paulinists, who preached a universal spiritual gospel. Semler's contribution to the criticism of the New Testament was to try to 'place' the books according to their relation to this supposed history. The Gospels represented the Judaizers, and he argued that the Catholic Epistles (James, i and 2 Peter, 1,2, and 3 John, and Jude) were late writings by authors who looked back on the Pauline Epistles and were attempting to reconcile the two opposing wings of the church, the Petrine wing and the Pauline wing. He followed Luther and Grotius in denying that James was written by an Apostle; he doubted that 1 Peter was written by Peter; and 2 Peter and Jude he put well into the second century.79 The nineteenth-century critics followed this lead and tried to relate each book to events according to the tendency it showed: to support Judaistic Christianity, to support Paul, or to work a compromise. Semler's decisive move was to question the apostolicity of the Catholic Epistles and to put them late on in the history of the early Church, so it is best to consider the criticism of the Catholic Epistles first. The next move, also made by Semler, was to regard the Acts of the Apostles as the work of a Paulinist designed to reconcile Judaizers to Paul, and I shall deal with the history of the criticism of Acts next. Finally, criticism was turned on some parts of the Pauline corpus itself, first of all by Semler on Hebrews, then on the Pastoral Epistles, and finally on many others, and I shall conclude with the history of the criticism of the letters ascribed to Paul. (a) The Catholic Epistles Many early Church Fathers rejected the Epistle of James as inauthentic (Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius, Theodore of Mopsuestia) and Luther denied that an Apostle could have written it; the author was rather 'some good pious man who got hold of and put on paper some sayings of the disciples of the apostles'. Luther was followed by Grotius and Wetstein, de Wette and a long line of commentators.80 One defence against the late dating of the Epistle has been to attempt to put it before Paul raised the critical question of justification by faith or justification by works, and this line has been followed by Matthius Schneckenburger (1804-48), Bernhard Weiss (1827-1918) and many others.81 At the end of the century two scholars, L. Massebieau and Friedrich Spitta (1852-1924), went further and argued that the Epistle of James was not written by a Christian at all but by a Jew, and that the references to Jesus Christ at 1.1 and 2.1 are interpolations.82 Semler doubted the apostolic authorship of 1 Peter and pointed out the 165

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affinity with the writings and the religious ideas of Paul; and Eichhorn thought the writer was a Paulinist, probably Mark. Eichhorn was followed by Cludius who argued that the author was a pure Paulinist, a Gentile Christian writing after the close of the apostolic age.83 De Wette accepted Cludius's arguments,84 and this line was followed by the Tubingen school. Towards the end of the century Adolf Harnack and others argued that i Peter was composite; Harnack suggested that 1.1-2 and 5.12-14 were second-century additions to an earlier anonymous homily adding the name of Peter in order to gain a place for the book in the Canon.85 The various theories that divide up the Epistle into various parts, like Richard Perdelwitz's that 1.3-4.11 was a baptismal address added to a homily for a church composed mainly of people who had once been members of a mystery cult,86 show that nineteenth-century criticism had not yet come to rest at a completely satisfactory stopping place. The authenticity of 2 Peter was denied by Clement of Alexandria and others, doubted by Erasmus and Calvin, and in modern times rejected by Grotius, Semler, Johann Ernst Christian Schmidt, Eichhorn, de Wette and August Neander (1789-1850). The main argument was that 2 Peter looks back on a closed Pauline collection of letters. The Epistle of Jude was regarded as doubtful by Luther and put well into the second century by Semler, followed by Schleiermacher, Neander, Schwegler and the Tubingen school. (b) The Acts of the Apostles A curious feature of criticism of Acts is that scholars who emphasize the special tendency of the work to defend Paul against Judaizing Christians by making Peter and Paul as like to each other as possible do not necessarily reject the traditional ascription of authorship to Luke, Paul's companion. The tendency of Acts to play down the conflict between Peter and Paul, by omitting, for example, an account of their dispute at Antioch, was noted by Semler,87 and the same line was followed by Griesbach, and in 1836 by Karl Schrader and F. C. Baur. Schrader and Baur rejected Lucan authorship,88 but a few years later M. Schneckenburger accepted the apologetic tendency of Acts without giving up Lucan authorship.89 The most extreme rejection of Lucan authorship was at the same time a rejection also of the theory that Acts was a deliberate work to defend Paul against the Judaizers. In 1850 Bruno Bauer (1809-82) argued that when the Acts was written the tension of parties had collapsed, the opposition was veiled, the difference was obliterated and peace had already been concluded; the Acts is not a proposal of peace, but the expression and consummation of peace and toleration.90

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The Study of the New Testament This became the dominant critical position. The radical critics followed Eichhorn in rejecting the idea that Acts employed written sources, but nevertheless a line of scholars, beginning from the work of Bernhard Konigsman in 1798, worked on this hypothesis.91 Ziegler suggested very plausibly that the Acts of Peter and written accounts of the martyrdom of Stephen and the conversion of Paul were sources for the first part of Acts,92 and notable studies by Eugen Schwanbeck in 1847 and August Jacobsen in 1885 prepared for a flood of source theories in the last decade of the century.93 This issue is still alive. Bultmann warmly welcomed Haenchen's commentary on Acts, a commentary that places great emphasis on the creative work of Luke in shaping the story for theological reasons, but he sharply criticized Haenchen for rejecting too easily the evidence that Luke was using sources.94 (c) The Pauline Epistles Origen argued that the Epistle to the Hebrews could not have been written by Paul because of the far better Greek, although the thoughts were Paul's (Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, vi, 25.11-14), and this approach was repeated at the time of the Reformation by Luther, who attributed the authorship to Apollos. In the eighteenth century Thomas Morgan argued that it was written after the destruction of the Temple to support the extravagant notion that the Jewish priesthood and sacrifices had been abolished while nevertheless the whole Christian circumcision was still under the Law and submitting to the priesthood; in other words, Hebrews was an attempt to reconcile the Judaizers and the followers of Paul.95 F. C. Baur fitted the Epistle into his pattern as thefirstattempt to reconcile the two parties of the Judaizers and the Paulinists.96 Nineteenth-century critics were not able to settle on any single agreed view about the purpose of the Epistle or the people to whom it was addressed. The most extreme challenge to the traditional understanding of the Epistle was the rejection of its present title; in 1836 E. M. Roeth argued that the work was not addressed to Jewish Christians but to Gentile Christians.97 This thesis was revived by von Soden in 1884, and supported by Jiilicher and Wrede.98 It was not difficult to detach Hebrews from the Pauline corpus. Edward Evanson, whose book was reviewed in Germany, began the nineteenthcentury movement to question the authorship of others of the Epistles ascribed to Paul: by his test of'the spirit of prophecy' he rejected Romans, Ephesians and Colossians as well as Hebrews.99 Eichhorn in the 1804 edition of his Introduction to the New Testament observed that 1 and 2 Timothy and 167

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Titus, the Pastoral Epistles, were at least in form un-Pauline. In 1807 Schleiermacher denied the Pauline authorship of 1 Timothy, and in 1812 Eichhornfirmlydenied that Paul wrote any of the Pastorals, and this became a generally accepted view. Leonhard Usteri (1799-1833) and de Wette raised questions about the authenticity of Ephesians in the 1820s, and de Wette came to reject Pauline authorship in 1843, the position adopted by F. C. Baur and the Tubingen school.100 In 1838 Ernst Theodor Mayerhoff in a book published after his death denied that Paul wrote the Epistle to the Colossians, because of its vocabulary, style and thought, although he believed Ephesians to be authentic.101 His arguments were adopted by F. C. Baur and the Tubingen school. The second Epistle to the Thessalonians was questioned by J. E. C. Schmidt in his Introduction in 1801, who argued that at least 2 Thessalonians 2.1-12 was a Montanist interpolation. De Wette at first accepted the case against Paul's authorship in 1826, although he later withdrew from this position. In 1839 Friedrich Heinrich Kern (1790-1842) argued that the Epistle was the application by a Paulinist of the legend of the Antichrist to the belief in Nero redivivus.102 This view was adopted by F. C. Baur. The authenticity of 1 Thessalonians was challenged by Karl Schrader in 1836, and this view was adopted by F. C. Baur. The authenticity of Philippians and Philemon was also questioned by Baur.103 Baur's reduction of the genuine letters of Paul to four was immediately challenged even by his own followers, and the starkness of the original opposition between Paul and Peter softened. Adolf Hilgenfeld argued that the common basic beliefs shared by Paul and the original Apostles should not be denied, and that Philippians, 1 Thessalonians and Philemon were also genuine when measured against the undoubtedly genuine four chief letters.104 The ablest of Baur's disciples, Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89) soon diverged more and more from Baur, and his book Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche (Bonn, 1850) emphasized the fundamental agreement between Paul and the original Apostles and conceded the remnants of Judaism in Paul's thought, while retaining the idea that Catholic Christianity was a decline from the pure teaching that Paul had most clearly espoused. Joseph Barber Lightfoot (1828-89) especially recommended and built upon the second edition of Ritschl's book (1857) and in general brought to England and worked out in an irenic spirit the insights of Baur and his opponents, the most weighty of whom was Theodor Zahn (1838-1933), who defended the authenticity of all the books of the New Testament.105 168

The Study of the New Testament Zahn's position went back to the conservative scholars who immediately attacked Baur, men like Zahn's teacher Johann Christian Konrad von Hofmann (1810-77) and the spirited Heinrich W. J. Thiersch (1817-85), who in 1850 resigned his chair in Marburg in order to become an Irvingite missionary in Germany. But Baur was also attacked from a yet more radical position. In 1850 the brilliant young Hegelian, Bruno Bauer, argued that Paul did not write the four letters F. C. Baur regarded as genuine either. He showed that there were passages in all four Epistles that presupposed the decisive split between church and synagogue that had not occurred when Paul was alive. Bauer found a little support later in the century from a Dutch school and from a Swiss scholar, Rudolf Steck (1842-1924),106 but after that none. A few years after Bruno Bauer's book the philosopher Christian Hermann Weisse, already mentioned as one of the first to state clearly the ruling solution to the Synoptic Problem, proposed a new view of Paul's letters to meet Bauer's attack. He argued that 1 Corinthians was genuine and pure Paul, along with 1 Thessalonians and Philemon; 2 Corinthians was compiled from three genuine letters; Romans and Philippians were pastiches of genuine parts continuously interwoven with interpolations; Galatians and Colossians were straight letters of Paul with interpolations added; there was a tiny kernel of Paul in 2 Timothy and Titus; and Ephesians, 2 Thessalonians and 1 Timothy were entirely inauthentic.107 Weisse won little support except in Holland, above all from Jakob Cramer (1833-95).I08 Bruno Bauer's position seems to be a reductio ad absurdum of the critical process; can such a notable writer as Paul have had nothing survive? Christian Hermann Weisse's position, on the other hand, has a logic about it: if the critics can discern different authors when they compare say 1 Thessalonians and 2 Thessalonians, should they be surprised to find they can discern different authors when they compare Romans 3 and Romans 7? Certainly the presentations of Paul's theology in the nineteenth century could not decide on a single view of his thought, as Albert Schweitzer's masterly survey clearly showed,109 and it was in fact argued by Hermann Liidemann (1842—1933) that Paul held two distinct and different theologies, a Jewish-type theology and a Hellenistic-type theology.110 At the same time the problem of the nature and centre of Paul's thought was being sharpened. The emphasis shifted from the traditional Protestant doctrine of Justification by Faith as a juridical concept to an interest in Paul's religion as a religion of a converted man who turns from the outward man to the inward man, and there finds union with Christ.111 But, just as a similar view of Jesus' religion was challenged by Overbeck, Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, so this view of Paul was challenged, above all by Richard 169

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Kabisch (1868-1914),a schoolmaster, in his book Die Eschatologie des Paulus in ihren Zusammenhdngen mit dem Gesamtbegriff des Paulinismus (The Eschatology of Paul in its connections with the total notion of Paulinism) (Gottingen, 1893).112 He argued that eschatological hope for the future reward was the centre of all Paul's actions and of his faith, as it was the driving motive of early Christianity. (d) Conclusion to criticism of the Catholic Epistles, Acts, and the Pauline Epistles The nineteenth century certainly showed that critics could plausibly distinguish and differentiate between passages in the Epistles according to the form of writing (whether that of an epistle or homily or credal statement or hymn or apocalypse), or according to the religious affinity of the thought (whether with Judaism or Hellenism or with the diverse types of religious ideas to be found in both areas). Even the most conservative critic who accepted the majority vote of church tradition as to the authorship of these Epistles and Acts could not avoid accepting some parts of this analysis, admitting that the style of writing differed in different parts of the one author's work, and that the religious affinities of different parts also differed. Nevertheless, the most powerful theory the century produced, that of F. C. Baur and the Tubingen school, a continuation of Semler's hypothesis, did not succeed in establishing itself, even though it consolidated many insights into the nature of the literature. Marcion's Paul, the Paul who attacked the Law and who preached a universal gospel, has not been clearly discovered; the Jewish ideas he was supposed to attack seem to be an ineradicable part of his thought; and the alleged catholic synthesis when a mild form of Judaism and a mild form of Paulinism are supposed to have buried their differences cannot be dated late on, except on the arbitrary assumption that such a synthesis can only belong then. There seems no good reason for dating the Catholic Epistles, en bloc, in the second century; it is even suggested that one of them, the Epistle of James, is largely pre-Christian. Wherever we look there is uncertainty. In the nineteenth century this farreaching uncertainty drove scholars into 'schools' which provided some agreed fixed points against which detailed small-scale investigations could be carried on. A history of nineteenth-century criticism makes it clear that these fixed points are not as secure as the schoolmen have thought. Twentieth-century criticism has done little more than rehearse a few nineteenth-century ideas, and perhaps it is time to stand back and ask why the very achievements of criticism and the new discoveries have taken us little further forward. 170

The Study of the New Testament Marcion proposed a hypothesis about the history of the thought of Jesus and the Apostles and their successors; he argued that the message of Jesus and Paul was Judaized by the other Jewish Apostles. Marcion did not prevail in his own lifetime, although many of his ideas were adopted by the Catholic Church in a modified form. It was true, as Thomas Morgan and Semler and F. C. Baur argued, that Catholic Christianity was a compromise, but the question still remains open as to whether or not the history of early Christian thought before the catholic compromise was the story of how Jesus and Paul were misunderstood by their opponents and subtly betrayed by their followers, or the story of how a Jewish movement became Greek. The history of nineteenth-century New Testament criticism is the history of how Marcion's theory has not been sustained; but it is also the history of how Marcion's theory was always being modified but never clearly abandoned. The conservative critics were in general powerless against it, partly because of their timid handling of genuine historical and literary questions, but partly because there were elements in the thought of Luther which favoured Marcion's historical position, as Adolf von Harnack pointed out.113 Marcion the historian had his g