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p86 At Halle theological and philosophical educational traditions are interwoven in many ways, and first of all in the historical figure of August Hermann Francke, patron saint of the town, so to speak; that pietistic pedagogue who at the end of the seventeenth century -- in other words, soon after the foundation of the university -- formed in Halle the famous Francke Foundation of schools and orphanages, and in his own person and by its influence united the religious interest with the humanistic and linguistic...
p87 ...The intellectual atmosphere there [Halle] had been for centuries full of religious controversy, of those ecclesiastical brawls which have always been so detrimental to the humanistic impulse in culture. In Halle I felt a little like one of my scientific forebears, Crotus Rubeanus, who in 1530 was canon at Halle, and whom Luther called nothing else than “the Epicurean Crotus” or “Dr Krote, lickspittle of the Cardinal at Mainz.” He even said “the Divel’s sow, the Pope,” and was in every way an intolerable boor, although a great man. I have always sympathized with the embarrassment that the Reformation caused to spirits like Crotus, because they saw in it an invasion of subjective arbitrariness into the objective statutes and ordinances of the Church. Crotus had the scholar’s love of peace; he gladly leaned to reasonable compromise, was not against the restitution of the Communion cup -- and was indeed put after that in a painfully awkward position, through the detestable harshness with which his superior, Archbishop Albrecht, punished the enjoyment of the Communion at Halle in both kinds.
So goes it with tolerance, with love of culture and peace, between the fires of fanaticism. -- It was Halle that had the first Lutheran superintendent: Justus Jonas, who went thither in 1541 and was one of those who... , to the distress of Erasmus, had gone over from the humanistic camp to the reformers. But still worse in the eyes of the sage of Rotterdam was the hatred that Luther and his partisans brought down upon classical learning -- Luther had personally little enough of it -- as the source of the spiritual turmoil. But what went on then in the bosom of the Universal Church, the revolt of subjective willfulness, that is, against the objective bond, was to repeat itself a hundred and some years later, inside Protestantism itself, as a revolution of pious feelings and inner heavenly joy against a petrified orthodoxy from which not even a beggar would any longer want to accept a piece of bread: as pietism, that is, which at the foundation of the University of Halle manned the whole theological faculty. It too, whose citadel the town now long remained, was, as formerly Lutheranism, a renewal of the church, a reform and reanimation of the dying religion, already fallen into general indifference. And people like me may well ask themselves whether these recurrent rescues of a hope already declining to the grave are from a cultural point of view to be welcomed; whether the reformers are not rather to be regarded as backsliding types and bringers of evil. Beyond a doubt, endless blood-letting and the most horrible self-laceration would have been spared the human race if Martin Luther had not restored the Church.
I have quoted this passage in full as it more than touches on a topic of present interest to me -- at least in part, I admit, because Mann also raises it in The Magic Mountain. Having been raised a Lutheran, I long viewed the Reformation as a partisan of Reform. But now, as a non-Christian, it is hard to review the history of these centuries -- whether in Germany, Huguenot France, or Puritan England -- as anything but a tedious disaster... though with interesting consequences, of course.
And isn't it curious that it was the law abiding Germans who questioned all the laws and opted for disorder?
And isn't it curious that it was the law abiding Germans who questioned all the laws and opted for disorder?
p88 I should be sorry, after what I have said, to be taken for an utterly irreligious man. That I am not, for I go with Schleiermacher, another Halle theologian, who defined religion as “feeling and taste for the Infinite” and called it “a pertinent fact,” present in the human being. In other words, the science of religion has to do not with philosophical theses, but with an inward and given psychological fact. And that reminds me of the ontological evidence for the existence of God, which has always been my favorite, and which from the subjective idea of a Highest Being derives His objective existence. But Kant has shown in the most forthright words that such a thesis cannot support itself before the bar of reason. Science, however, cannot get along without reason; and to want to make science out of a sense of the infinite and the eternal mysteries is to compel two spheres fundamentally foreign to each other to come together in a way that is in my eyes most unhappy and productive only of embarrassment. Surely a religious sense, which I protest is in no way lacking in me, is something other than positive and formally professed religion. Would it not have been better to hand over that “fact” of human feeling for the infinite to the sense of piety, the fine arts, free contemplation, yes, even to exact research, which as cosmology, astronomy, theoretical physics, can serve this feeling with entirely religious devotion to the mystery of creation -- instead of singling it out as the science of the spirit and developing on it structures of dogma, whose orthodox believers will then shed blood for a copula? Pietism, by virtue of its overly emotional nature, would indeed make a sharp division between piety and science, and assert that no movement, no change in the scientific picture, can have any influence on faith. But that was a delusion, for theology has at all times willy-nilly let itself be determined by the scientific currents of the epoch, has always wanted to be a child of its time, although the time (in greater or less degree) made that difficult for it and drove it into an anachronistic corner. Is there another discipline at whose mere name we feel ourselves in such a degree set back into the past, into the sixteenth, the twelfth century? There is here no possibility of adaptation, of concession to scientific critique. What these display is a hybrid half-and-half of science and belief in revelation, which lies on the way to self-surrender. Orthodoxy itself committed the blunder of letting reason into the field of religion, in that she sought to prove the positions of faith by the test of reason. Under the pressure of the Enlightenment, theology had almost nothing to do but defend herself against intolerable contradictions which were pointed out to her: and only in order to get round them she embraced so much of the anti-revelation spirit that it amounted to an abandonment of faith. That was the time of the “reasonable worship of God,” of a generation of theologians in whose name Wolff declared at Halle: “Everything must be proved by reason, as on the philosopher’s stone”: a generation which pronounced that everything in the Bible which did not serve “moral betterment” was out of date, and gave out that the history and teaching of the Church were in its eyes only a comedy of errors. Since this went a little too far, there arose an accommodation theology, which sought to uphold a conservative middle ground between orthodoxy and a liberalism already by virtue of its reasonableness inclined to demoralization. But the two ideas “preserving” and “abandoning” have since then conditioned the life of “the science of religion” -- ideas both of which have something provisional about them, for theology therewith prolonged its life. In its conservative form, holding to revelation and the traditional exegesis, it sought to save what was to be saved of the elements of Bible religion; on the other hand it liberally accepted the historico-critical methods of the profane science of history and abandoned to scientific criticism its own most important contents: the belief in miracles, considerable portions of Christology, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and what not besides. But what sort of science is that, which stands in such a forced and precarious relation to reason, constantly threatened with destruction by the very compromises that she makes with it? In my view “liberal theology” is a contradictio in adjecto,” a contradiction in terms. A proponent of culture, ready to adapt itself to the ideals of bourgeois society, as it is, it degrades the religious to a function of the human; the ecstatic and paradoxical elements so essential to the religious genius it waters down to an ethical progressiveness. But the religious cannot be satisfied in the merely ethical, and so it comes about that scientific thought and theological thought proper part company again. The scientific superiority of liberal theology, it is now said, is indeed incontestable, but its theological position is weak, for its moralism and humanism lack insight into the daemonic character of the human existence. Cultured indeed it is, but shallow; of the true understanding of human nature and the tragic nature of life the conservative tradition has at bottom preserved far more; for that very reason it has a profounder, more significant relation to culture than has progressive bourgeois ideology.
The history and science of Christianity from the time of the Reformation to the author’s present day in one long paragraph. Now that’s a paragraph, the length and weight of which, even Proust would have admired.
Did you notice that he provides a translation for the most common Latin phrase he’s thrown at us (contradictio in adjecto)? Is there really a value in saying something in Latin that you are also going to say in the vernacular? This is better than only saying it in Latin, but what is the point of this aside from informing us that you know Latin?
p90 Here one sees clearly the infiltration of theological thinking by irrational currents of philosophy, in whose realm, indeed, the non-theoretic, the vital, the will or instinct, in short the daemonic, have long since become the chief theme of theory. At the same time one observes a revival of the study of Catholic medieval philosophy, a turning to Neo-Thomism and Neo-Scholasticism. On these lines theology, grown sickly with liberalism, can take on deeper and stronger, yes, more glowing hues; it can once more do justice to the ancient aesthetic conceptions which are involuntarily associated with its name. But the civilized human spirit, whether one calls it bourgeois or merely leave it at civilized, cannot get rid of a feeling of the uncanny. For theology, confronted with the spirit of the philosophy of life which is irrationalism, is in danger, by its very nature, of becoming daemonology.
[Introduction of the “Christian Students’ Union Winfried” at Halle that Adrian joined and whose guest Zeitblom sometimes was.] ... Here I will only say that some of these young people were the pale-complexioned “candidate” type, some robust as peasants, some also distinguished figures who obviously came from good academic circles... the members of Winfried were superior; they condemned not only dueling but also “boozing,” and so they were always sober -- that is, they were inaccessible to questions they might not like to answer...
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