EXCHANGE NOV 1Ilni\>erstt$ of Gbfcaao FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER THE REACTION AGAINST META PHYSICS IN THEOLOGY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND LITERATURE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (DEPARTMENT OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY) BY DOUGLAS CLYDE MACINTOSH CHICAGO 1911 THniverstts ot Cbtcago FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER THE REACTION AGAINST META- PHYSICS IN THEOLOGY A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND LITERATURE IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (DEPARTMENT OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY) BY DOUGLAS CLYDE MACINTOSH \\ CHICAGO 1911 AUTHOR'S NOTE This dissertation is the first part of an essay upon Theology and Metaphysics to be treated under the following four heads: 1. The Reaction against Metaphysics in Theology 2. The Reaction against Theology in Metaphysics 3. The Function of Theology in Metaphysics 4. The Function of Metaphysics in Theology ANALYSIS OF CONTENTS PAGE INTRODUCTION . . i 1. Theology 2. Metaphysics PART 1.^ THE NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY . . .8 3. In Non-Christian Religions 4. In the New Testament 5. In the Ancient Catholic Church 6. In the Roman Catholic Church 7. In the Older Protestantism 8. In Religious Romanticism 9. In the Ritschlian Movement 10. In Positivism 11. In Pragmatism PART II. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE ANTI-METAPHYSICAL REACTION 57 12. As Seen in the Early Church 13. As Seen in the "Double-Truth" Theory of Later Catholicism and Early Protestantism 14. As Seen in Kantianism and Its More Immediate Consequences 15. As Seen in Ritschlianism 1 6. As Seen in Pragmatism INTRODUCTION i. Theology is the systematic expression of religious conviction, i.e., of belief with regard to the nature and activity of the deity, more particularly in so far as these are related to the vital interests of men. In modern Protestant theology there are, in general, two methods, the conservative and the radical. 1 The former emphasizes objectivity as opposed to the merely subjective. The latter stands for internality as distinct from all that remains external. 3 But this distinction seems bound to disappear. The conservative is seeing ever more clearly the necessity of inner assurance; the radical, the importance of objective validity. Conservatism in its original form recognized no distinction between biblical and systematic theology. All biblical statements, literally or allegorically interpreted, were suppposed to form, without further criticism, the content of Christian theology, which everyone was in duty bound to accept. As a matter of fact theologians usually made a selection of such texts as appealed to them most strongly, and made them determining, not only for theological construction, but also for the interpretation of all other Scripture passages. The necessity of allegorical and other arbitrary and unscientific methods of exegesis was transcended when once there was frankly recognized the distinction between a purely historical and a constructive or normative science a distinction which was already implicit in Luther's critical evaluation of scriptural books according to the norm of the gospel. The differ- ence between the two disciplines in question was originally felt to be, however, not so much a difference of form as of content. There were 1 It should be noted that the conservative method may be retained even when the content of the theology is radical, e.g., in Socinianism; while even one who is conservative as to content of his theology may dare to employ the radical method. In this section the terms "conservatism," "conservative theology," "conservative theologian," and their antitheses, where used without further qualification, do not refer to content, but to method. 2 The term "objective" is here applied to that which is sufficiently confirmed or verified to be regarded as real and true. By "subjective" is meant that which is doubtful, because it is the unverified opinion of the subject. That is "internal" which has its evidence within one's own experience and thought, while that is "exter- nal" which has its evidence only in the experience and thought of another, if at all. The union of objectivity with internality is the desideratum. i 2 '*" : INACTION 1 A-GAlitfST. METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY elements in the Bible that seemed to resist the unifying efforts of the system-builder, and this became one of the chief factors in making the transition from the biblical to the systematic fundamentally a process of subtraction of refractory and unassimilable elements. 1 At first the endeavor was made to confine this elimination to certain phases of Old Testament thought. But once the subtraction principle was admitted, it soon assumed a more radical form, and was applied to all that could not readily be harmonized with what one felt compelled to believe on other than biblical grounds. Some felt free to apply the principle to all biblical materials save the recorded teachings of Jesus; others now give it application here also, assuming, however, that the parts pruned away do not represent the thought of Jesus but a misinterpre- tation of his teaching on the part of the primitive church; while still others and here we have the conservative method in its most radical form declare that even in what we must in fairness regard as quite probably the thought and teaching of Jesus there are elements which cannot find a place in the systematic theology of the modern Christian. Still, even in its most radical form, this method intends to be con- servative. It is generally considered "safe," as providing, supposedly, for the retention of all the elements of permanent value in primitive Christian belief. It thus has obvious advantages for the preacher. But, on the other hand, this gain in point of content would seem to be offset by a weakness with respect to certainty. How can the theologian know that he has not retained elements which may yet have to be elim- inated? So far as his methodological principle is concerned, no dis- tinction is made between what is either essential to faith or verifiable in some way, on the one hand, and that which, on the other hand, has simply not yet been proven unbelievable. As regards certainty, the former is reduced to the level of the latter. The radical method is interested above all else in certainty. Reject- ing all purely external authority, it seeks to set forth the religious con- victions which have grown up out of the theologian's own experience and reflection. To those who pursue the conservative method, this other seems compelled to oscillate between a negative position and purely individual opinion in questions of religion. Of the method in its most 1 Parallel with the elimination of certain phases of biblical thought, there goes on a process of addition of certain elements from modern thought; but so long as the method remains in principle conservative, this addition is incidental, and, in the more conservative forms, unconscious. It is the necessity for subtraction that is a matter of concern to the theologian himself, and significant for our present purpose. INTRODUCTION 3 radical form this is doubtless largely true; but it is possible, even for the one who has adopted this radical principle, to enrich the positive content of his system not only without a loss of inner certainty, but even with a decided gain in objective validity. It is perhaps the chief merit of Ritschlianism that it has led the radical theology in this conservative direction. It has pointed out how the individual can, certainly without the loss of individual autonomy, respond to the ethico-religious appeal of the Christian gospel, and can appropriate to himself, through experi- ence and reflection, those values which are cherished in the Christian community, and of which the New Testament Scriptures are the most original available expression. Thus directed, the radical theology moves by a process of addition toward a position ever more fully Chris- tian in content, and this with a positive gain rather than loss with respect to certainty. The religious faith of the individual becomes, psychologically speaking, more certain and objective by being known to >e essentially Christian. But theology based upon this radical principle must be greatly enriched by a critical but sympathetic study of the most significant expressions of the Christian faith (notably the New Testament), if it is to compare favorably, so far as content is concerned, with the type of theology previously described. The question is constantly pertinent as to whether full justice has been done to the content of the gospel. Theoretically the two types of theology, the conservative type modified by the principle of subtraction, and the radical type modified by its principle of addition, should ultimately coincide as to content. 1 But, as a matter of fact, there seem always to remain certain elements of biblical and ecclesiastical doctrine which the conservative method cannot exclude and the radical method cannot include, so long as the theology, whether conservative or radical, remains merely dogmatic and non- philosophical. Consequently, when the two types of theology are brought into contact with each other, this residual content becomes problematic for both; and, in the case of the conservative theologian, a measure of uncertainty tends to arise with respect to the entire content of his system, simply because he has not from the beginning made certainty a primary consideration. 2. Before proceeding to investigate the reaction against meta- 1 The essential content in both is in a sense the same, for the' conservative method starts from the classic expression (in the New Testament) of the Christian faith and experience, while the radical starts by expressing the faith and experience which have resulted from one's own response to the religio-ethical appeal of Jesus. 4 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY physics in theology, 1 it will be well to seek some definition of the nature and sphere of metaphysics in general. As a preliminary definition it may be said that metaphysics is the theory or science of reality. Mere dogmatic statements or bare practi- cal postulates with regard to the nature of reality do not properly come within the category of the metaphysical. It is not always true, let us hope, that metaphysics is, as Bradley facetiously puts it, "the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct," 2 but it certainly aims to be a finding of reasons; it is fundamentally an intellectual or truth- seeking process. In the words of Professor James, it is "an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly and consistently." 3 This is not a complete definition, but it is true as far as it goes. It remains to be emphasized that it is with the nature of reality that metaphysics is concerned. This was the original application of the term. Since Kant, however, the term has frequently been used to designate the theory of knowledge as well. This has its explanation in the fact that the problem as to the possibility of knowing reality has developed naturally out of the problem as to the nature of reality. But in the interest of clearness it is better to confine the term metaphysics to its narrower signification of the theory of reality, or, as Kiilpe expresses it, "the elaboration of a theory of the universe." 4 The divisions of metaphysics correspond to the divisions of reality. In the Wolffian philosophy, which was the heir of Aristotle and all the centuries of scholasticism, metaphysics was subdivided into a general part called ontology, and three special parts, viz., rational cosmology, rational psychology, and rational theology. Under the changed point of view introduced by the Kantian philosophy, ontology, i.e., the theory of being or reality in general, was developed into epistemology, or the science of the categories by which reality is known, or rather by which the reality to be known is constructed in being known. This is the only metaphysics recognized as legitimate by the Kantian philosophy. The three special parts- of metaphysics were criticized and rejected as pseudo-sciences. In Lotze we find a return to constructive metaphysics, which is divided into ontology, cosmology, and psychology, while the missing part, theology, reappears in the philosophy of religion. But it is probably truer to the fundamental interests of metaphysical think- 1 The present investigation is, in its primary intention, preliminary to a study of the function of metaphysics in theology. 2 Appearance and Reality, Preface. 3 Textbook of Psychology, p. 461. * Introduction to Philosophy (Eng. tr.), p. 27. INTRODUCTION 5 ing to abide by the Wolffian classification, however utterly we may repudiate the method employed in that philosophy. Our classifica- tion would then be as follows: Metaphysics is primarily concrete or material; the abstract or formal part is derivative and of little inde- pendent interest. Material metaphysics is subdivided into cosmology, psychology, and theology, while formal metaphysics is identical with general ontology. From this last the transition is easy to epistemology, but this carries one beyond the domain of metaphysics proper. The definition of metaphysics as the theory or science of reality, and its subdivision into cosmology, psychology, and theology, together involve the assumption of the reality of the world, the soul, and God. But there may be difference of view as to whether reality is to be regarded as existing within or beyond immediate human experience. Unsophis- ticated common sense declares that one and the same object exists both within and beyond, i.e., it is partly within and partly beyond, or some- times within and sometimes beyond, and yet it always remains one and the same object that is immanent and transcendent. Many types of philosophy, as materialistic sensationalism, Platonizing idealism, and critical agnosticism, hold that reality belongs to the extra-empirical only; experience gives but appearance. Within recent years several philosophers 1 having certain affiliations with the older empiricism of Hume and Mill have taken the opposite position. Several examples of a "philosophy of pure experience" have appeared, holding that the only reality is the reality of immediate human experience, 2 and thus that the real nature of anything is "what it is experienced as." This immediate empiricism, being a philosophy of immediate human experi- ence, might be called the newer or psychological positivism, as dis- tinguished from the philosophy of mediate human experience, which was the real nature of the older empiricism and positivism. But any metaphysic which outrages common-sense cannot satisfy for long, and there must be sought a way of doing justice to reality both within and beyond immediate human experience, and that without duplicating reality, as Cartesian dualism does. Philosophy must be enlightened common-sense. 1 E.g., Karl Pearson, The Grammar of Science; R. Avenarius, Kritik der reinen Erfahrung; J. Dewey, "The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism," Journal of Phi- losophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, II, 393-99. 2 In human "experience" here social as well as individual experience is meant to be included. The solipsistic view, which would confine reality to immediate indi- vidual human experience, is too outre for any philosopher. 6 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY The treatment accorded metaphysics in the various types of "experi- ence philosophy" is significant. The positivism of Comte was inter- ested primarily in the physical. It sought to get beyond immediate experience, or the psychological, to the reality mediated by it. The metaphysical or metempirical, as transcending what sense experience mediated, was ignored or repudiated. The new position is interested primarily in the psychological. It seeks to express the reality mediated by psychological experience entirely in terms of psychology. Corre- sponding to the old metaphysics there might conceivably be a meta- psychology, but all that transcends the scope of psychology is either non-existent or inaccessible. One may arbitrarily take his choice of world-views, or else confine himself to psychology. Then instead of cosmology and theology he would have the structural, functional, and genetic psychology of the idea of the universe and the God-idea as created by human thought. The only real metaphysics left is the more intricate part of psychology. But this position cannot commend itself to any but those who are so infatuated with psychology as to be oblivious of the claim made by common-sense, natural science, and religion, that there is a reality transcending the immediate experience of human beings. Nor will it do to make a mutually exclusive division of reality between the sciences and metaphysics, assigning to the former the empirical and to the latter the transcendent. Metaphysics is inter- ested in reality and although sometimes, it would seem, chiefly, still not merely, in transcendent reality. It seeks a synthetical apprehen- sion of reality which shall combine inductions from the facts of experi- ence with workable hypotheses as to the transcendent. Hence the line of cleavage between the special sciences and metaphysics will not be a hard and fast one so far as content is concerned; it will be found rather in the different purposes for which the material of experience is employed. This begins to suggest something different from the old a-priori, dogmatic, experience-contradicting metaphysics that has figured so largely in the history of theology and philosophy, and against which the modern mind has so justifiably reacted. The modern man has no more use for the mediaeval types of metaphysics than he has for the mediaeval types of casuistry; but it may very well be that there is a place and a need in modern life and thought for casuistry that shall recognize as a criterion not only the inner motive but the social effect of action, and for a metaphysic that shall not be satisfied with the test of INTRODUCTION 7 consistent deduction from uncriticized "innate" principles and theo- logical doctrines, but that shall construct, on the basis of the essential postulates of morality and religion and other fundamental interests of human life at its best, a world- view that will be regarded as a hypothe- sis, one element in the verification of which will consist in its agreement with the facts of human experience. 1 1 N. W. Marshall, in his book, Theology and Truth, p. 259, describes the meta- physical method as "the imposition of an ideal upon the given, the substitution of the ideal for .the given, and the assertion that this ideal is the real." He emphasizes the incompetence of the old dogmatic a-priorism, but, like many others, does not seem to recognize the need and the possibility of a different type of metaphysics. PART I THE NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY 3. In any historical investigation of the mutual relations of meta- physics and theology it will be found that there have been very frequent and most vigorous and persistent protests against the introduction or retention of the metaphysical element. Or, more accurately, because of the felt unsatisfactoriness of the results of attempting to harmonize the doctrines of the religion in question with other supposed truths about reality by means of a reasoning process which, in its more delib- erate and methodical forms, is called metaphysics, there have been repeated reactions against the attempt itself as well as protests against its results. In contemporary history the outstanding example of such reactions is found in the Ritschlian theology, but the history of Chris- tianity abounds in similar reactions, and many movements of the same kind have occurred in many other religions as well. For purposes of comparison some of these may be mentioned. In the history of Chinese religion we find the reaction of the Con- fucian Meng-tse against the quasi-philosophical speculations of Lao-tse and his not very numerous followers. In this Meng-tse is a typical representative of his people. The reaction is perhaps not so much an attempt to guard a threatened religious certainty or content even, as it is a revulsion of the constitutionally practical against the seemingly fruitless subtleties of abstract speculation. The case of Buddhism is interesting. Here we have a new religion with intensely practical interest, reacting emphatically against a religion or congeries of religions whose way of salvation was the way of meta- physical speculation. Buddha would have his disciples consider only what favored peace and holiness, and not pry into such questions as the finite or infinite character of the world. To primitive Buddhism, ethically protestant as it was against a religion essentially metaphysical, the problem of excluding metaphysical speculation was a matter of life and death. To speculate would not only imperil all certainty as to the vanity of this present life and lead possibly to a disintegration of the underlying world-view, but also and especially to become interested in speculative questions would be to be bound by another tie to the world, and thus to turn deliberately aside from the Way of Salvation. 8 NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION Q In the ancient Greek religion the protest against metaphysical speculation was comparatively insignificant and ultimately failed. There was an inner kinship between the religion of this naturalistic and liberty-loving people and the naturalizing criticism and free specu- lation of the philosophers. Still there were outbursts of conservative religious zeal from time to time, as, for instance, against Xenophanes, whose theological speculations seemed to the people to be destroying their religion ; again after and in reaction against the at first welcomed teaching of Anaxagoras in Athens ; and yet again in the attempt of Aristophanes to discredit such free thinkers as Euripides and Socrates, followed by the martyrdom of the latter. Among the more practical and less specu- lative Romans the conservative movement in the Augustan age was more successful. In the bitter, persecuting hostility of ancient Mazdeism toward Manichaeism' we have a typical example of the reaction of a religion of arbitrary will against all syncretizing and consequently rationalizing tendencies. The case is similar to that of Buddhism, save that here it was the old obedience-religion which reacted against the new rational- istic heresy, while there it was the new heretical obedience-religion which reacted against the old speculative religion. In the Manichaean system, for the antagonism of the good and evil personal beings, Ormuzd and Ahriman, there was substituted the opposition of two impersonal cosmic principles, while instead of authoritative revelation gnostic insight was made the criterion of certainty. There was not only a radical departure from the older content, but the adoption of a principle which made further departure probable and thus tended to undermine all certainty as to the older beliefs. This explains the persecuting reaction. Throughout the history of the religion of Israel there can be traced an ever-renewed opposition on the part of the vital piety of the older faith against a series of leveling movements primarily of life rather than of reflective thought, but tending in the direction of heretical meta- physical speculation. An early example is the conflict of the prophetic Jahvism with Baalism and other influences of pagan civilization. Every anti-Jahvistic movement was to be crushed out, regardless of any evidence that might be advanced in its favor. 1 The strenuous protest of the Chasidim against the religiously perilous Hellenistic culture a protest giving its real strength to the Maccabean uprising was closely similar in religious interest to the earlier Jahvistic prophetism. Prob- 'Deut. 13:1-5- 10 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY ably continuous with this Chasid movement was the settled, and finally successful opposition of the Pharisees to the rationalistic and sceptical Sadducees. To the pious Jew Greek science was an invention of the devil. 1 Even Philo acknowledges 2 that his synthesis of Greek wisdom with Hebrew religion was not favorably received by contemporary Judaism. Later expressions of the same exclusive religious conserva- tism appear in the distrust evinced toward the rationalizing tend- encies of Moses Maimonides, and in the abrupt excommunication of the detested heretic, Spinoza. But perhaps the closest parallel to the reactionary movement in Christianity is found in the history of Mohammedanism. 3 From the ninth century to the eleventh there existed in the East a tendency to seek to harmonize the doctrines of Islam with the principles of reason, sometimes interpreted from a neo-Platonic, at other times from an Aristotelian standpoint. Among the reactionary movements the most violent was that headed by Khalif Motawakkel; the most systematic and permanent, that undertaken by Al Ghazzali, whose Destruction of the Philosphers championed the Muslim faith against the rationalists. He combated especially those Aristotelian notions adopted by Al Farabi and Avicenna which involved a departure from Islamic faith, such as that the world is eternal, that God's essence is thought only, that God takes no cognizance of particulars, and that the soul only is immortal. Moreover he sought to found religious certitude upon mystical religious experience rather than upon mere tradition or the confirmations of reason. It is significant, not so much of the ability of Al Ghazzali as of the genius of the Mohammedan religion, that from the twelfth century to the nineteenth orthodoxy and mystic piety pre- vailed in the Eastern schools. In the West also the rationalistic phi- losophy was rejected. Even the famous Averroes, like the sceptical Omar Khayyam of the East, had his popularity and influence chiefly outside of Mohammedan circles. By his own people he was proscribed and banished, with the result that orthodoxy and implicit faith remained triumphant. 4 1 Book of Enoch; see Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, p. 50. a De Somniis, i. 16,17. 3 Cf. De Boer, The History of Philosophy in Islam (Eng. tr.), passim. * It is interesting to note that among the religions mentioned, those in which the anti-metaphysical movement has triumphed are strongly practical in interest and have a tendency toward legalism and an appeal to external authority. Christianity resembles them in these characteristics; will the reaction against metaphysics finally prevail in it also ? NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION II 4. Coming to Christianity we find already in the New Testament a rejection of mere intellectualism and uncontrolled speculation in mat- ters of religion. In the recorded teachings of Jesus there is a recognition of the spirit- ual conditions of religious knowledge. The largest content of religious truth is not necessarily the possession of "the wise and understanding." 1 Not intellectual qualifications but faith and moral obedience are the primary requisites for religious certainty. 2 In the early writings of Paul there is a discrediting of "wordly wis- dom" in the realm of religion. 3 It is evident that he includes in this category the Grecian philosophy; 4 apart from the gospel and Christian experience, not even this highest secular wisdom can give adequate religious knowledge. The "natural man" cannot arrive at the truth of faith; it is spiritually discerned. 5 And not the content alone, but the certainty of religious conviction also has its source primarily in religious experience rather than in rational processes. 6 Christian faith should not stand in the wisdom of men. 7 In the later Epistle to the Colossians the situation confronted is very clearly the encroachment into the church of some form of gnostic thought. The writer fears lest this type of "philosophy" should play havoc with the Christian community. 8 He is especially solicitous lest there should be a loss with respect to the content of the Christian faith, and above all lest the fantastic speculation about "powers" should lead to a failure to recognize the unique place of Christ as " above all principality and power." 9 In the Pastoral Epistles the problem has become still more serious, and the protest against a spurious "gnosis" 10 seems to be the main purpose of the letters. It is a matter of the utmost concern that the essential doctrines of Christian faith should be conserved, and that no incongruous elements should be "introduced."" The moral effect of 'Matt. 11:25. 2 Matt. 6:22, 23; John 7:17. 4 1 Cor. 1:22. 3 1 Cor. 2:1, 2. s I Cor. 1:21; 2:14; Rom. 1:21, 22. 6 Similar to the teaching of Jesus and Paul (in these letters) is that 'of James to the effect that religious knowledge has its source in inner revelation (Jas. 1:553: 13-17). vl Cor. 2:5, 12, 13. 8 Col. 2:8. 9 Col. 2:9, 10. 10 1 Tim. 6 : 20; cf. Titus i : 16; I Tim. 1:4; 4: i, 3, as indications that gnosticism was the movement attacked. "I Tim. 1:3, 19; 4:6; 6:3; II Tim. 2:2; 4 = 3,4,7; Titus 1:9, n; 2:1. 12 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY heresy is dreaded. 1 But there is a care for certainty also. The specu- lative, "questioning" attitude is discouraged, 2 and appeal is made for assurance to divine revelation, 3 and explicitly to the authority of Jesus Christ and of the apostle Paul. 4 In perhaps still later epistles (James [?], Jude, and II Peter) the still greater intensity of the reaction is indicated by the increased strength of the language of denunciation of " destructive heresies." 5 It is more keenly felt than ever that a departure from the essentials of Christian belief proves disastrous for the moral life, and so is to be avoided as diligently as sin itself. 6 5. In dealing with the anti-metaphysical movement in the history of Christian thought, only outstanding and typical examples can well be adduced. In the early church Marcion, Tatian, Tertullian, and Athanasius demand special attention. Marcion, as Harnack says, was one of the few pronouncedly typical religious characters before Augustine. 7 He attached himself with vigor to what he took to be the religious kernel of Christianity, viz., the Pauline gospel of grace and faith, and rejected not only the additional content incorporated into Christian doctrine from Jewish tradition, but also if, with Harnack, we read correctly between the lines of Justin and Tertullian the additional certainty sought by the Gnostics through cosmological speculation. While Marcion doubtless shared many of the characteristically Greek ideas of his gnostic contempo- raries, in his thinking religious experience was construed more, after the manner of Paul, as a moral renewal than as a transformation of under- lying substance; and so cosmological speculation generally, whether of Gnostics or Catholics, was rejected as injurious, rather than helpful, to religion. The value which this position was felt to have is indicated by the very large following which Marcion secured. The place of the type of apology represented by Tatian in the general apologetic movement of the time requires to be reviewed with special care. The real theological position of any apologist is usually difficult to determine, for the reason that the exigencies of controversy demand that he view things largely from the general point of view of his oppo- nent. Thus there is often a wide difference between the basis of the 1 1 Tim. 1:20; 6:4,5; II Tim. 2:14, 16-1 8, 23; 2:25,26. 3 1 Tim. 1:3; 6:3. 3 1 Tim. 1:4. s II Pet. 2:1. I Tim. 2:7; 6:3; II Tim. 3:14. 6 II Pet. 2; Jude; cf. Jas. 3:15. 7 Harnack, History of Dogma (Eng. tr.), I, 284; see further pp. 266-69. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 13 apologist's own religious certainty and the foundation which he seeks to lay for a favorable attitude toward his religion on the part of others. Naturally enough this frequently involves a difference too between the content held and the content defended. The history of the theology of the typical early Christian apologist was somewhat as follows. He had sought the satisfaction of his religious needs in Greek philosophy, only to be disappointed. Being brought into contact with the Christian gospel, it appealed to him as meeting his requirements and called forth his faith. He accepted it for what it claimed to be, a divine revelation, and continued to believe in it as such because it continued to satisfy his religious needs. But especially in the intervals between times of deeply emotional religious experience, the conclusion as to revelation tended to become a premise, so that the thinker would reassure him- self by recalling that his beliefs were vouched for by divine authority. But this was just the point at issue in discussion with non-Christians, and could not, of course, be made the presupposition of an apologetic. Recourse was had necessarily to the content of the gospel, as the apologist understood it. But Christianity, as the apologist understood it, was the true philosophy. He had come to it with his thinking more or less saturated with Greek philosophical concepts, and in accepting it he had retained many of his former ideas. The result was that the Christianity so appropriated was considerably modified in form and ultimately in content. The course naturally suggested to the apologist accordingly was to show that the doctrinal content of the Christian religion was not only unobjectionable to the Greek mind, but acceptable in the highest degree. It is the highest self-expression of the divine Reason, and so is more truly rational and philosophical than the philosophy of the Greeks. Such was the course taken by Justin, Aris tides, and Athe- nagoras. But just here Tatian diverged from the beaten track. 1 With respect to the basis of his own certainty and the main content of his theology he does not, in his "Address to the Greeks," differ materially from the others; but in his general attitude and method of apologetics he does. 2 He is violently antagonistic to Greek philosophy, and dis- parages speculative attempts as being fruitless of practical results. Instead of framing subtle arguments he makes dogmatic statements. Like others of a much later date, he evidently thought dogmatics the best apologetics. 1 Tatian was an Oriental, and though he had studied Greek philosophy before his conversion, he probably had not been strongly seized by it. 3 As an apologist Theophilus of Antioch belongs in the same general class with Tatian. 14 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY Irenaeus opposed speculation whenever it appeared to him either useless or dangerous. No good could possibly come of speculating on such questions as what God was doing before he made the world; and on the other hand enough had been seen of the vagaries of gnosticism to know the harm that might come when one was not guided by the norm of apostolic tradition. But Irenaeus can hardly be taken as a typical opponent of theological speculation as such, and it is chiefly in another connection that he is significant. It is Tertullian who of all the Fathers is the outstanding exemplar of animosity toward all signs of the encroachment of metaphysics into theology. This African was a prodigious believer. If he was almost a heretic, it was not that there were not articles enough in his creed. He had no trouble about religious certainty. He was lawyer enough to accept all he was told on proper authority, and enthusiast enough to find experimental confirmation for most of it. He did not need philos- ophy, therefore, as a prop to threatened certainty, and he had no patience with those who felt it to be essential. Tertullian will have "no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after believing the Gospel." 1 But Tertullian did not regard philosophy as just superfluous. That would not have accounted for the intensity of his antagonism. It was positively dangerous; it was the instigator of heresies. For Tertullian was concerned with the conservation of that whole body of doctrine which was accredited by those Scriptures which were recognized by the apos- tolic churches and interpreted according to the rule of faith which was observed by those same apostolic churches. It is this conservative interest in content which explains his extended vigorous refutation of Marcion. To be sure his interpretation of the Christian gospel was largely Pauline, as was Marcion's; but the "Pontic heresiarch," in attempting to limit his creed to the essence of Christianity, had elim- inated much that to Tertullian seemed absolutely essential. In fact nothing authoritatively taught was non-essential. At any rate one need neither reject the present classification of Tertullian with Marcion on the ground that the former found occasion to write a few books against the latter, nor refuse to regard the Montanist bishop as funda- mentally an opponent of speculative theology for the mere reason that some speculative elements have stolen into his theology, any more than he disputes the fact that the eminent defender of the authority of the Catholic church became himself a schismatic. Consistent inconsis- 1 The Prescription against Heretics, chap. vii. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 15 tency is all that can be expected of this omnivorous believer to whose ready appetite the choicest morsel that could be presented was the authoritative but incredible ! But it would be easy to do injustice to this remarkable and indeed admirable man. It was the intensity of his practical interest, of his moral and religious zeal, that impelled him to make light of the more theoretical problems. It was not that he loved thought less, but that he loved life more. It was because philosophy bred such "scorpions" as Basilides and Valentinus, or at best produced "a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition," that he could brook no interference of the comparative trivialities of the Academy with the momentous business of the church. In the case of those successors of Tertullian in the early church who can fairly be reckoned as in any sense anti-metaphysical, the matter of immediate concern seems to have been not certainty but content. The reaction is not explicitly against speculation as such, nor is it even primarily against premises; it is against conclusions, as being incompatible with the content of accredited and essential Christian faith. Origen's great system of metaphysical theology had appeared, and to some of its conclusions Methodius took exception, not on philosophical, but on religious and traditional, grounds. As against the Sabellians, Dionysius of Alexandria was led to develop Origen's doctrine of the generation of the Son into the view that the Son is a creature. This called forth an emphatic protest from Dio- nysius of Rome, who, on grounds of traditional Christianity, held to the unity and tripersonality of God, without attempting any meta- physical elaboration of the doctrine. When Arius was known to be teaching such a radically modified Origenism as emphasized the differ- ence between the Father and the Son until the Son became virtu- ally a quasi-divine being to be worshiped in addition to the Father, but who, because he was not absolutely divine, could not by his incarnation guarantee the redemption of human nature, Alexander, bishop of Alexandria, rejected the doctrine on purely religio-dogmatic grounds, denounced it as blasphemy, and anathematized all Arian sympathizers. 1 In all these cases the protest is made from religious motives against a content (or the apparent implications of that content) which, as an alien and incongruous element had been intro- duced into Christian theology by a presumably too free use of meta- 1 Alexander, however, did not refrain from making incidental use of some meta- physical considerations. 1 6 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY physical speculation. 1 Essentially similar to these reactions of Metho- dius, the Roman Dionysius, and Alexander, but more thoroughgoing and effective than any of them, was that of the great Athanasius, whose position with reference to metaphysics and theology we must now examine. With Athanasius the interests of practical religious faith were pri- mary and central. The Greek christological doctrine in its initial stages had been the product of the interest in redemption (with the help of certain originally Platonic and Stoic conceptions), but, as of ten happens in the course of theological development, this originally immediate inter- est became more and more remote, and Christology became interesting more and more for its own sake. Under these circumstances meta- physical speculation tended to escape from the bonds of the practical religious interest, so that elements inimical to the interest in redemption were at any moment liable to be introduced. This occurred when Paul of Samosata was compelled by his Aristotelian metaphysics to regard the Logos as a mere power of God, not personally pre-existent but bestowed upon the man Jesus to equip him for his work. This involved a denial of Origen's doctrine that Christ and God are one in substance. Paul was condemned as a heretic. Lucian, therefore, who was subject to the same philosophical influence, conceded that the Logos was personally pre-existent, but maintained that he was not of the same substance with the Father, in that he was created. This doctrine was popularized by Arius, and elicited, as we have seen, the anathema of Alexander. But Arianism was not so easily killed, and Athanasius was compelled to take up the weapons of controversy. To this cham- pion of orthodoxy it seemed indisputable that unless the pre-existent Logos is truly and literally God, there is no guarantee that by his incar- nation human nature is made divine and thus redeemed from eternal death. Thus from the viewpoint of Athanasius, and indeed of con- temporary Christian piety in so far as it was conscious of its own true nature, the issues involved in the controversy were literally eternal life and eternal death. 1 Because the particular article of faith threatened by the teachings of Dionysius of Alexandria and Arius was so essential (theoretically at least) to the certainty of the belief in redemption (though not to the assurance that the Christian religion was an authoritative divine revelation), there consequently was implicit in the reactions of Dionysius of Rome and Alexander a remote interest in religious certainty, as well as the immediate interest in doctrinal content. This interest in certainty becomes more explicit in Athanasius. It remains, however, the purely religious certainty that is affected. The question of theological certainty is not involved. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 17 This vital religious interest, and practically nothing else, determined the nature of Athanasius' theology. As Harnack says, his "greatness consisted in reduction, in the energy with which from a multitude of divergent speculations claiming to rest on tradition, he gave exclusive validity to those in which the strength of religion lay." 1 Without formally abandoning the conservative theological method, he had in prin- ciple really adopted the radical method in a very conservative form, and he was thus able to keep out of his doctrine all religiously objectionable philosophical elements, and at the same time maintain his inner certainty unimpaired. Moreover he did not go on to a philosophical rational- ization and defence of his religious position. He simply undertook to refute error by appeal to dogmatic religious considerations, believing that once the false was refuted, the truth would then require only to be declared to be accepted by the true Christian. 2 Indeed it would seem that he even progressively succeeded in eliminating the more distinc- tively Origenistic (and so, ultimately philosophical) elements from his own thought. 3 He did not, like Tertullian, decry all philosophy as such, but he managed to dispense with its services to an almost unprecedented extent. 6. The religious reactions in the Roman church against the meta- physical element in theology have been of two main types, which may be designated as the experiential and the ecclesiastical, respectively. The experiential reaction is represented by the opposition of Bernard to Abelard and of Pascal to Descartes. It was a reaction against a critical rationalism that threatened to make serious inroads upon the content of Catholic doctrine. It was made in the interests of evangelical piety and its appeal was away from objective philosophical standards, thus making for the greater independence of the individual. The ecclesiastical reaction is represented by the opposition of Duns Scotus and Occam to the type of thought represented by Thomas Aquinas and his school. It was a reaction against a realistic scholasticism which had undertaken to demonstrate the doctrines of the church. In so far as scholastic rationalism succeeded, it enabled the theologian to do without the authority of the church, and in so far as it failed to convince the critical of the rationality of the doctrines taught by the church, it was hostile to implicit faith in the church as an authoritative teacher. The reaction against it was at bottom in the interests of ecclesiastical 1 Harnack, op. tit., Ill, 140. 2 Against the Heathen, 1:7; 6:3. 3 Cf . A. Robertson, The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2d Series, IV, Ixviii. 1 8 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY authority; its appeal was away from subjective opinions and specula- tions to the external authority of the church, thus making for the greater dependence of the individual. But, with all these differences, what these two types of reactionary movement stood for and that against which they reacted were all represented already in the great Augustine, and to some extent are traceable to his influence. The realism still present in Thomas Aquinas was first introduced into west- ern theology by Augustine; not only Bernard but also Pascal might have been called "Augustinus redivivus," for they both stood for a revival of the evangelical piety of the great African; Abelard's and Descartes' method of universal doubt is used as a preliminary means of certainty by Augustine, and some of Descartes' best known and most fundamental rationalistic arguments exist in almost the same form in the Augustinian theology; finally, it is chiefly to the same Augustine that Romanism owes that doctrine of the authority of the church as a basis of religious certainty which obtained supremacy by means of the Scotist reaction. Before examining these reactionary movements further, it may be well to inquire whether there may not have been in Augustine himself something similar in the way of a religious reaction against the metaphysical. We find this to have been the case. Augustine learned to make great use of metaphysics, and yet his conversion-experience itself included a reaction in the interest of religious certainty away from the acknowledged uncertainty of the academic philosophy to an experi- mental knowledge of the power of faith, and also, with respect to content, away from the Manichaean dualistic philosophy to the more soul-satisfying belief in the sovereign grace of the one righteous God. In his opposition to Pelagianism, too, there is at least something similar. Here there is a strong reaction in the interests of the religion of divine grace against the Stoic ethics of Pelagius with its implicit anti-Christian metaphysical basis. Bernard's opposition to Abelard was the reaction of pious belief against daring criticism. Fundamental to Abelard's rationalistic atti- tude was not simply the nominalistic point of view learned from Ros- cellinus, but the influence of Greek philosophy. He esteemed the Greek philosophers more highly than the Church fathers and placed them but little below Jesus himself. The philosophical doctrine of the soul of the world he identified with the Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit. 1 But it was not merely against particular changes in respect of 1 Opera, II, 379. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 19 content, or against uncertainty on particular topics, that Bernard reacted. It was against the whole process for which his opponent stood, and which imperiled the whole content and rendered all uncertain, viz., the making of dialectical metaphysics, instead of religious faith, the primary thing in theological construction. W T ith Abelard metaphysics was no longer strictly ancillary to theology. He was thus led to esteem doubt very highly as leading to inquiry, and inquiry to knowledge of the truth, or at least to a highly probable opinion. Faith was simply belief of the more probable of conflicting opinions. But Bernard could not endure to have the treasures of faith "suspended uncertainly on vague and various human opinions." 1 The verities of faith are ren- dered certain, not simply by external evidence, but by the internal evidence of the spiritual experience. Thus "faith is not an opinion; it is a certitude." 2 Piety, not philosophy, is the door to knowledge. Thomas a Kempis, who was greatly influenced by the writings of Bernard, many of which he transcribed, exhibits a similar reaction against the subtleties of scholastic philosophy in favor of the immediate certainty of religious faith. What would it profit [he asks] to know by heart .... the sayings of all the philosophers, without the love of God and without grace ? . . . . What availeth it to cavil and dispute much about dark and hidden things, for igno- rance of which we shall not be reproved at the day of judgment ? . . . . And what have we to do with genera and species ? He to whom the eternal Word speaketh is delivered from many questionings. 3 Essentially similar is the anti-Cartesian, anti-rationalistic reaction of Pascal. Decartes' submission of all his opinions to the authority of the church did not strike his readers as being an integral part of his system of philosophy, and the general impression which his method created was that the making fundamental in theology of the principle of doubt would result disastrously. Pascal stood out boldly for a return to the principle of faith rather than doubt in matters of religion. Arguing to the existence of God from the works of nature is very well, he claims, when addressed to believers, but it fails to convince the irreligious. Religious certainty is not produced by rational processes but has its source in the emotional nature. "The heart has its reasons, which mere reason does not comprehend It is the heart that feels God, and not the reason. This is faith: God sensible to the heart 1 Ibid., I, 1449. 2 Ibid., 1450. 3 Of the Imitation of Christ, I, i, 3; III, i, 2. 20 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY and not to the reason To scorn philosophy is truly to philoso- phize." 1 It is interesting to trace the way in which nominalism, which was originally anti-religious, became the servant of religious reaction against the metaphysical element in theology. From the time of Augustine western philosophy and theology had been dominated by the so-called Platonic realism, which was simply a generalized way of stating the other-worldly ideal which had already been imported into European religious life and thought from the Orient. According to this realism true reality belongs not to the vain and transitory things of this world, but to the eternal and ideal things of the transcendent realm. This other-wordliness, in point of view so foreign to the natural man, could only be sustained by constant effort. Consequently the authority of the church and, through the church, of the Bible and the state, monas- ticism, mystical contemplation, and Platonic metaphysics were called into its service. But under the insistent influence of sense-experience and immediate practical needs, assisted by the less transcendent and more positivistic Aristotelian philosophy, men began to substitute for the other-worldly point of view a this-worldliness which finally took shape in nominalism. According to this philosophy true reality belongs to the particular things of this present world, while their supposed ideal transcendent counterparts are mere names, empty sound, and nothing more. When Berengar, a forerunner of nominalism, and Roscellinus, its first known representative, dared to apply the new principle of criti- cism, the one to the doctrine of the Eucharistj the other to the doctrine of the Trinity, the one was met with physical compulsion, the other with metaphysical. Ideally, according to the extreme notion then current, all dogmas of the church were demonstrable from innate first principles, and Anselm, while demanding first of all a surrender to the authority of the church, made a brave attempt to realize the old ideal. For the time being nominalism was rejected. The interest in conserving the content of Catholic doctrine, and more particularly the interest in theological certainty, were against it. But by the time of Thomas Aquinas we find that the influence of the this-worldly ideal had made itself felt. In philosophy Thomas was only a moderate realist, and by his Aristotelian principles he undertook to demonstrate not all but 1 Pensees, IX, 19, 35. The content which Pascal held to be thus accredited by "the heart" was nothing less than the whole body of Catholic doctrine, including, though he probably did not realize it, those elements introduced by speculative activity in the course of the development of dogma. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 21 only some of the dogmas of the church. Other doctrines, such as those of the Trinity and creation, which even Albert the Great and Bona- ventura undertook to demonstrate, the faithful were to continue to believe on the mere authority of the church. With the system of Duns Scotus the progress in the direction of nominalism was greatly accel- erated. This philosopher still clung rather inconsistently to realism, but in his emphasis on arbitrary will as opposed to rational determinism, he had in principle departed from it. From his changed point of view as well as by means of his critical acumen, he found many of the Thomistic demonstrations unconvincing. He accordingly held that the number of dogmas demonstrable by reason was smaller than that claimed by Aquinas, and correspondingly emphasized the authority of the church as the ground upon which they were to be believed. With Occam the process came to its culmination, and the victory of nominalism in the church was practically complete. For Occam and his followers nothing but a persistent concept or two, a few still venerated relics of the old realistic metaphysics, remained. Of the dogmas of the church, while Anselm would prove all, Aquinas some, and Duns fewer, Occam would undertake to prove not a single one. 1 All were to be accepted in implicit faith in the authority of the church. 2 This was held to be necessary for theological certainty, 3 because the old realism, by whose metaphysics they had been proved, was gone; it was thought desirable too, as mean- ing a revival of the Franciscan type of piety with its absolute surrender to the church, and at the same time increasing the solidarity of the church at a time when it was greatly needed in order to retain control of those political units which were beginning to grow restive under papal domination. The reaction against the old metaphysics was thus essentially the expression of a religious revival, viz., a revival of this- worldly, ecclesiastical religion. At its best its interest, as that of Ter- tullian and Augustine had been, was in sound morals as well as sound doctrine, and, as that of the Franciscans had been, in social service as well as personal piety; the sanctions of religion were used to reinforce 1 Cf. Ueberweg, History of Philosophy (Eng. tr.), I, 460. 3 Perhaps the best example of the reaction from the distraction resulting from unsucccessful speculative efforts to reconcile the content of a traditional theology with a more modern world-view, is afforded by the case of John Henry Newman. For the sake of certainty he bowed to the authority of the Roman church, even at the expense of accepting a theological content more repugnant to natural reason than that to which he had previously adhered. 3 There was at this time practically no dispute as to the content of Catholic doc- trine; that had already been denned by the church. 22 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY the demands of morality; the monk and the missionary were the benefi- cent agents of Mother Church. At its worst its interest was political power and other temporalities; its agents, the obedient tools of a self- seeking corporation; its means of coercion, the hope of future rewards and the fear of future punishments, modified by a traffic in indulgences. Of the new order in some of its best and many of its worst aspects, the history of Jesuitism affords characteristic illustrations. 7. In its theological aspect, Protestantism was initially (and many would say, essentially) significant as a protest on religious grounds against the old scholasticism with its metaphysical theology. This was due in a very large measure to the religious leadership of Luther. Among the influences which molded his thought, besides his deep religious experience and the circumstances of his life, the writings of Paul, Augus- tine, Bernard, and of the Nominalists, Biel, D'Ailly, and Occam, played a very important part. Like these last, he too reacted against the ex- aggerated other-worldliness of the Middle Ages, and carried the reaction a step or two farther. He preached the gospel of a present experience of salvation, as opposed to a mere hope for the future. 1 He regarded the Christian's faithful discharge of duties in the humblest vocation in the workaday world as of more religious value than the cloistered life of the monastery. And in his reaction against the metaphysical structure that had been reared by the scholastics to defend the other-worldly ideal, he was guided by a more definite critical principle than any of his predecessors had possessed. All that he could and must assert on the basis of his experience of the saving grace of God in Jesus Christ he asserted and defended with the fullest confidence. But all other propo- sitions about God he was inclined to regard as more or less "sophistical" and unimportant, and any doctrine which seemed detrimental to the purity of the Gospel of the grace of God in Christ and justification by faith alone, he rejected most emphatically, regardless of whatever argu- ments might be adduced in its favor. Of the content of his theology it was required (at least in principle) that it be all of vital religious interest. It was primarily and essentially a confession of the faith inspired by the gospel, not an analysis and synthesis of principles and facts available to all men alike. Luther recognized the application of this principle more clearly with 1 This led him to substitute for the external authority of the church the internal authority of the word of God in the gospel. Later the exigencies of controversy and political complications led him to utilize in religion the external authority of the Bible and the state. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 23 reference to mediaeval scholasticism than in the case of the older dog- matic formulations. As against the scholastic procedure, beginning with speculations about God and then inferring what is to be believed with regard to Christ and salvation, he would adopt the reverse order. " Begin to teach and preach of God," he says, "purely and solely of Christ, as formerly in high schools they speculated and played with his works in heaven above, what he is, thinks and does by himself." 1 From scholastic argumentation he deliberately turned away lest he should "philosophize too much." The point of Luther's special attack in scholasticism was its Aristo- telianism, on account of its incompatibility with the Augustinian doc- trines of human inability and divine grace. The chief objection, of course, lay against the Aristotelian ethics, but certain aspects of the metaphysical doctrine were involved as well. He said he longed to expose the shameful character of that comedian (Aristotle) who had deluded the church with his Greek mask; and against the common proverb, "Without Aristotle, no one can become a theologian," he put this saying, "No one can become a theologian who does not become such without Aristotle." 2 It was primarily an interest in theological certainty which led Luther into such pronounced antagonism to scholastic speculation. His theology being in principle the expression of his own religious faith, his theological certainty was identical with his religious certainty. 3 All elements of theology, therefore, which did not spring from this religious assurance, lacked the peculiar certainty which belonged to the former, and to introduce them into a theology formed on Luther's principle would be to say that that is an expression of one's religious faith which 1 Wakh, VIII, 697. 3 J. Kostlin, Theology of Luther (Eng. tr.), I, 134. 3 It is perhaps the most fundamental formal difference between the Catholic and the Protestant theology, that while the former is essentially an instrument (of intimidation, if not of torture) in the hands of the church, the latter is first and chiefly an instrument (of self-help) for the individual. This is to be explained as follows: In Catholicism religious certainty (assurance of salvation) is denied to the individual, except provisionally and in such a way as to leave him absolutely dependent upon the church; while the church has sought absolute certainty for her theology, that she may retain absolute power over the individual. Religious certainty is therefore not essential to theological certainty in the Catholic system. In Protestantism, however, the church mediates religious certainty to the individual in such a way as to make him independent. The certainty of the theology will thus depend upon the certainty of his personal faith. The theology of a Protestant is (or ought to be) his own produc- tion. Strictly speaking, it is non-transferable. 24 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY is really not such an expression, even if it may have been at one time the expression of the faith of someone else. The rigid application of this principle to the ancient Catholic doc- trinal system was not made by Luther. Much of the content of that theology existed in a form which was utterly foreign to Luther's thought, and could not be made the expression of his faith. He hated the term 6/toovo-tos and felt that the doctrine of the two natures of Christ was not a matter of personal concern to him. And yet he did not deny, but accepted as a whole the ancient Catholic creeds. If he had been con- sistent with the principle of his reaction against the scholastic theology, he would have employed the radical theological method, incorporating the elements of the ancient creeds only as he was able to assimilate them to his own religious faith. This he hesitated to do; and so, having taken over externally the ancient creeds, and having returned to the external authority of the Bible, he committed himself, and more fully his followers, to the use of the conservative method. The controversy between the radical and conservative method in Protestant theology is virtually the conflict between the real and "the whole Luther." In the early work of Melanchthon the religious principle of Luther is all-determining. As for Luther to know God was not to be able to reason about him, but to have, through the gospel, an experience of his love and saving power; so for Melanchthon to know Christ is to know his benefits, not to ponder over his natures and the mode of his incar- nation. 1 In the first edition of the Loci Communes, there is a distinct, if not very thoroughgoing, application of the radical method. The doctrines of anthropology and soteriology , in which the religious interest of the time lay, are developed at length and on the basis of the Christian believer's assurance of forgiveness, while the doctrines of the Trinity, Creation, and Incarnation are passed over very lightly. Indeed, any metaphysical investigation of these topics he seems to have regarded as unprofitable and dangerous. His interest during this early period being primarily in that content which was of vital importance to the new evangelical piety of the Reformers and which possessed a peculiar inner certainty as having been found valuable in personal religious experi- ence, he was reluctant to introduce any other elements into his theology. The special value and certainty attaching to the former content he explained by referring it to divine revelation. That the other elements of traditional scholasticism could not comfort men's hearts he regarded as due to their having been devised by human wit. Hence, during this 1 Corp. Re/., XXI, 85. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 25 early period of his domination by Luther's thought, he avoided meta- physics as unnecessary sophistry, deliberately turning his back upon the formerly interesting Aristotle, and expressing the opinion that the wisest men had always despised philosophy. In Zwingli's theology there is not so explicit a recognition of the experiential criterion as there is by Luther and the Melanchthon of 1521. The Swiss reformer protested, indeed, against putting other doctrines on a level with the gospel, but the gospel he interpreted as everything which God has made known to us through his Son, and this in turn he immediately identified with the content of the Scriptures. The result was that while for the German reformers, initially at least, the principle for determining the content of theology was congruity with the evangelical experience, for Zwingli it was rather correct exegesis of the New Testament, facilitated, however, by the insight given by Christian experience. Thus, while Zwinglianism has a radical aspect when viewed in relation to the content of Catholic theology, and was at the time a powerful means of liberation, it was nevertheless in reality the conservative method. In so far as its principle was made explicit, it undertook to determine its content by an external standard and to find its certainty in an external authority. Still, from this only mediately religious standpoint, Zwingli did react against the meta- physical element in scholastic theology. In his opinion that is a false religion which derives its knowledge of God from philosophy 1 instead of from revelation. There is no assurance that it will arrive at the truth. In Calvin there cannot be said to have been any independent reaction against the metaphysical element, as such, in theology. This has its explanation partially in the fact that he was converted to an already existent movement, which by that time had begun to emerge from the stage of mere protest against the old. He went beyond both Luther and Zwingli, in the direction of a metaphysical systematizing of reli- gious knowledge. But while it was the conservative method of Zwingli that he followed in determining the question of content, he nevertheless retained some of the effects of the Lutheran religious reaction. In particular he adhered to Luther's principle of the experiential basis of religious knowledge and so of theology. A noteworthy passage in this connection is that in which he says, "It does not signify so much to know what he (God) is in himself, as what he is willing to be to us." 2 1 De Vera et Falsa Religione, p. 9. 'Inst., Ill, 2:6. 26 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY So far as theological certainty is concerned there was an important modification from Luther's original principle. Instead of making the certainty of religious experience determinative directly for the content of theology, in which case each article of theology would possess religious value and certainty, he made religious certainty (Christian assurance, the testimony of the Spirit) a means of accrediting the Scriptures as a whole, which he then used in an external fashion to determine the content of theology. Religious experience was thus made to serve an apologetic rather than a dogmatic end But while Calvin did not reject a certain type of metaphysics in theology, he did most emphatically, if not religiously, react against the heretical results of the introduction into theology of the somewhat pantheistic metaphysical point of view of Servetus. His answer to metaphysical arguments and rationalistic criticism was the faggot and stake. In the later controversies between Lutherans and Calvinists as to the place of philosophy in theology, the Lutherans opposed the Cal- vinistic way of introducing philosophy into theology by admitting only such interpretations of Scripture as made its teachings appear philo- sophically possible. It cannot be said to have been a distinctly religious reaction, however. It was almost purely a question of methodology, and meant an extreme externalism and conservatism in method on the part of the Lutheran theologians. Profoundly religious in character, on the other hand, was the Pietist reaction, which must be examined presently. But between the Reform- ers and the Pietists at least two names Hoffmann and Cocceius deserve mention in this connection. Daniel Hoffmann, who had earlier been a professor of philosophy, reacted violently against the scholastic mingling of philosophy and theology on the part of contemporary Protestant theologians. He insisted that religious truth was attested by the inner . certainty of that faith which the Holy Spirit produced. Not to make this religious and divinely produced conviction the determining factor in theology was to sin against the Holy Spirit. The opinions of phi- losophers on matters of religion, being mainly speculations of unregen- erate men, he regarded as the source of the heretical deviations from the truth in Arianism, Scholasticism, and Calvinism. Whatever philosophy might be able to do in other spheres, in the realm of religion it was simply a robber. It was also an anticipation of the chief methodological principle of Pietism when Cocceius maintained that no one but the Christian believer can be a true theologian. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 27 Spener, the founder of German Pietism, undertook to call the Protestant churches out of the arid intellectualism which would sub- stitute the theological interest for the practical religious interest. This he sought to do by restoring the original state of affairs, in which theology was subservient to the interests of vital piety. He proclaimed a pro- found religious experience, produced by the Holy Spirit, as the necessary basis of a vital theology. No one but the regenerate man could know God aright or become a right theologian. Hence, not only were the hair-splitting distinctions of the scholastic theologians to be regarded as for the most part of trivial importance, but especially all mixture of philosophy and human science with divine wisdom was to be most care- fully avoided. In Spener's opinion, philosophy had done the church more harm than good. The philosophers had been truly called the patriarchs of the heretics. First of all Platonism, and in later times the " heathen Aristotle" had been brought into theology as corrupting elements. 1 With respect to the positive side of method, however, Spener did not apply his radical religious principle in a thoroughgoing fashion. The main doctrinal content of Protestant orthodoxy was uncritically retained and unconsciously made normative in the pietistic dogmatics, which aimed at being a simple and helpful Bible theology. The movement was thus an attempt, within the limits of the conserva- tive method, to increase the immediate religious value and certainty of theology, and this by eliminating as far as possible all non-biblical content and form of expression. In the words of Francke, it aimed to make the theologians Christians, not to make the young Christians theologians. 2 The influence of Pietism was far reaching and beneficent. This is seen especially in the Moravian movement under Zinzendorf, which was really a continuation of Pietism at its best, and in the epoch-making Wesleyan revival. Both of these movements were, as regards theology, conservative but anti-metaphysical. Zinzendorf evinces little interest in speculative questions about the Trinity and the God-man. In the spirit of Spener he protests against the "vain reason which does not understand what is meant by the inbreaking of Grace." 3 All that one can accomplish by philosophy, he claimed, is to perplex oneself. In Wesley's thought faith was, with regard to the spiritual world, what sense is to the material; it is a spiritual sensation of every regenerate 1 Bedenken, III, 370 f.; IV, 184 f. 2 Piinjer, History of the Christian Philosophy of Religion (Eng. tr.), I, 478. 3 Quoted by Piinjer, op. cit., p. 282. 28 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY soul. Hence reasoning about spiritual matters on the part of those without this spiritual insight, he regarded as absolutely futile. 1 On this basis he opposed the then widely current doctrines of the Deists, whom he designated "the Devil's apostles." Moreover, as against the somewhat scholastic development in Calvinism of the implications of the doctrine of election, 2 he reacted vigorously in the interests of practical evangelism. 3 The age-dominating reaction against metaphysics on the part of Immanuel Kant, in so far as it affected theology and was determined by religious motives, may be regarded as the expression of that relic of pietism which he retained from his early training. He sought to remove the illusory positive knowledge of an over-confident speculative theology as well as the illusory negative knowledge of its sceptical critics, by show- ing that there is in both an application of the categories of the under- standing and the regulative ideas of reason beyond the limits of actual or possible experience, and so beyond the bounds of possible scientific knowledge. His purpose in doing this was that he might make room for the faith which postulates its object on a practical, ethico-religious basis, and which is thus essentially Christian, evangelical, pietistic. 4 His essentially conservative religious interest is shown by his rejection of metaphysical theology on the ground that, inasmuch as it cannot prove its positions and issues in contradictions, it simply arms the 1 Wesley was powerfully influenced by William Law, who discounted the religious function of reason, as only able to help man's ignorance "to increase and fructify in doubts, fictions and absurd debates." Reason's only work is "to be an observer and comparer of things that manifest themselves to it by the senses." The Way to Divine Knowledge, p. 51. 2 In Wesleyanism a more immediate religious use is made of the argument from Christian experience than in Calvinism. Calvin tried to establish religious certainty by means of the doctrine of election. The "testimony of the Spirit" was made the basis of theological certainty, as attesting the Scriptures, through which in turn the content of theology was determined. With Wesley, however, the "witness of the Spirit " was made the immediate basis of religious certainty. With respect to theology, both content and certainty seem to depend upon the word of Scripture. 3 The New England theology of Jonathan Edwards was also, at the heart of it, the expression of a deeply religious reaction. This fact is reflected in such declara- tions of faith's independence of external support as the following: "The gospel of the blessed God does not go abroad a begging for its evidence so much as some think; it has its highest and most proper evidence in itself." 4 The Scottish reaction to common sense was also determined by religious motives, but it was a reaction against empiricism and ultimately to metaphysics, while Kant's was chiefly against rationalism and away from metaphysics. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 29 enemies of theology against itself. It is not by a knowledge of the world, he insists, but by moral experience, that one comes to a knowledge of God. But in his theological method Kant is radical, even to the point of a moralistic rationalism. That is to say, of the content of traditional theology there is to be admitted into his system only that which he regards as having religious value; and inasmuch as religion is inter- preted as the viewing of duty as a divine command, religious value amounts practically to just moral value. Morality is moreover inter- preted as rationality of action self-imposed as a law. Hence religious or moral value amounts to value for rationality of conduct. It is the radical method in theology, with a principle definitely limiting the per- missible addition of content, a ne plus ultra confining theology to an exposition of religion within the limits of mere reason. All the while the certainty attaching to this content is prevailingly moral and rational, and it is the securing of certainty for a minimum of essential content that interests Kant, rather than the conservation of a maximum of content. This essential content consists of postulates of the moral nature with deductions therefrom, always within the limits of the scientific postulate that all actual and possible phenomena constitute an orderly system. The single exception is to be made in the case of that content deducible from a postulate whose certainty such as it is is religious, the'postulate, namely, that the perfectly good will be made perfectly happy. But the Kantian reaction against metaphysics was made the basis of a theology much more conservative both as to method and content, than his own. Of this use of Kantian critical principles perhaps the best example is found in the position taken by Hamilton and Mansel. These thinkers were interested in controverting the positivism of Comte and especially the pantheism of Schelling, Hegel, and Cousin, both of which systems were beginning to make themselves felt in England at that time. As against the mere science of the one and the science and metaphysics only of the other, they advocated the claims of theology. Their chief significance for our present purpose consists in the fact that, unlike Kant, they were more interested in the conservation of the con- tent of Christian doctrine 1 than in the guarding of inner certainty. 1 It is interesting to compare Locke's rationalistic superaaturalism before the evangelical revival with Mansel's agnostic supernaturalism after it. Locke would, if necessary, part with all the peculiar content of "revealed religion," except the doctrine that Jesus was the Messiah. Mansel would preserve the whole content unimpaired, and so must keep rationalistic criticism off the premises. 30 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY They adopted the negative conclusion of the first Critique and used it in such a way as sacrificed the certainty of all thought about ultimate reality. Kant regarded intellect as liable to go beyond its proper limits; Hamilton and Mansel held it to be impotent to do what is demanded of it. By reducing all possible metaphysical speculation to the level of a sum-total of self-contradictory propositions, some of which must be regarded as true, it was thought to give credibility to even the most self-contradictory propositions of traditional theology. In the case of Mansel especially, knowledge was destroyed in order to make room for credulity. According to Hamilton science deals only with that which is conditioned by human experience and thought, and, as so conditioned, it is only relatively true. The ultimate truth about reality, which would . be knowledge of the Unconditioned, is, in the nature of the case, unat- tainable. The attempt to reach it leads one into a maze of antinomies, such as that the universe must be infinite and the universe cannot be infinite, of which pair one must, and one only can be true. As here there is a philosophical necessity for belief of the inconceivable, so in theology the difficulty may not be due to the content of the revelation, but to the limitations of the human mind. Besides there is a practical, ethical necessity for the belief in an unconditioned Being who is never- theless conditioned because related to the world in some definite way. This may be difficult, but no difficulty emerges in theology which has not already appeared in philosophy. Less interested in philosophical pro- cesses for their own sake than Hamilton, and more interested in these negative results of the critical philosophy for their apparent theological and ecclesiastical (if not immediately religious) value, Mansel went on to apply them to the doctrines of the church in further detail. His most far-reaching deviation from Hamilton is the repudiation of even our moral judgments as having any application with regard to God. Thus reason and conscience are retired in the interests of external authority. The critical philosophy has its only value in enabling the good churchman, in spite of the protests of reason and experience, to believe the traditional doctrine imposed by an external authority. It constitutes an apologetic for the conservative theological method in the most conservative and dogmatic form. 1 1 Essentially similar to the reaction of Hamilton and Mansel is that of A. J. Balfour, who, influenced probably by ecclesiastical-political as well as religious con- siderations, advocates a return from Naturalism and other metaphysical systems, none of which are ultimately thinkable, to that practical use of religious as of scientific principles, to which human need and instinct, common sense and social authority all alike impel. Thus "a defense of philosophic doubt" is made a means of revealing the true "foundations of belief." It is the tu quoque argument used as an apologetic for conservatism. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 31 Less extreme but more effective was the transfer of emphasis from intellectual, metaphysical processes to the religion of the heart and will, advocated by the Swiss preacher and theologian, Vinet. In his thought the influence of Pascal is very evident, 1 although he did not emphasize the opposition of faith and reason so strongly as did his predecessor. His sensitive, religious soul turned away with aversion from all move- ments tending to transform religion into philosophy. He would have nothing to do with rationalism, which he found not only in its sceptical variety, but also as unconsciously present in the intellectualism of the orthodox dogmatics. The human heart he held to be naturally reli- gious; it is by the heart that the gospel is understood. And mere meta- physics cannot arrive at the God of religious knowledge. It can supply neither the essential content nor the requisite certainty. It was in religious certainty a certainty satisfying the needs of the religious nature together with the conservation of whatever was essential to vital (i.e., moral) Christianity that Vinet was interested, and not in the retention of the content of traditional Christian doctrine as a whole. Thus in principle he had adopted the radical method, although in actual procedure he continued to travel with much difficulty the conservative way, subtracting what content he could not retain, until, toward the close of his life, in drawing up a summary of the faith of the new Free Church, his emphasis on the essential religio-ethical content of Chris- tianity and on that alone shows that he was finally brought to a con- sciousness of the method appropriate to his cherished principle of internality. In America Alexander Campbell, the founder of the " Church of the Disciples" reacted, in the interests of a legalistic type of Christian piety, not only against the "natural religion" of the Deists, 2 but also and chiefly against the subtle distinctions of an orthodox dogmatics which was not content to "speak of Bible things in Bible words," and so was to be regarded as mainly setting forth mere human opinion the prod- uct of philosophical speculation. 3 His main interest was in the union of all Christians as a means of converting the world by convincing them of the truth of Christianity. 4 One of the chief causes of division was the scholastic type of theology, which was accordingly to be forsaken for a theology which should find in Bible statements not only its whole 'The influence of Kant, De Wette, and Schleiermacher is also visible. 3 W. E. Garrison, The Theology of Alexander Campbell, pp. 109, no. 3 Campbell, Christianity Restored, pp. 5, 7, 9, n, 124-26. 4 Ibid., p. 103. 32 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY content, but also its sole basis of certainty. 1 The Bible in turn he regarded as accredited by miracle and prophecy so completely that any one statement in it was quite as credible as any other. 2 His theo- logical method was thus emphatically conservative, even to the practical exclusion of all appeal to the Christian consciousness. 3 One more theologian may be mentioned in this connection. Horace Bushnell, reacting against the intellectualistic orthodoxy of Taylor and others who regarded the stale products of bygone metaphysics as the revealed truth of God, and against the rationalistic criticism of the Unitarians, learned to place his chief dependence upon insight and experience. There had been a sceptical stage in his thinking, and from it he had emerged by following the impulses of his religious nature. What was so profoundly felt must surely be real. In coming to the principle of inner certainty he was greatly helped by Coleridge, who believed the biblical revelation divine because it found him; while Coleridge had learned this from Jacobi, and he in turn from Rousseau and Pascal. Having adopted his radical principle of internality, Bushnell proceeded in the conservative direction, seeking in his theology to formulate Christian experience. He had little sympathy with the metaphysical elaboration of the doctrine of the three persons in the Godhead; but on the other hand, he did not go over to Unitarianism, for while "there was enough to flee from," there was "not enough to go to." 4 8. We shall now turn to a theological movement of the latter part of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth, which may be called the romanticist religious reaction against meta- physics. The chief names in this connection are Rousseau, Hamann, Herder, Jacobi, Fries, De Wette, and Schleiermacher. These men were, as theologians, in part the product of a movement which was expressing itself in the philosophy and literature and life of the time, in part independent expressions of that movement, and in part influen- tial causes in the further development of the same. Romanticism 1 Campbell, op. cit. Campbell was greatly influenced not only by the Lockian transfer of emphasis from constructive metaphysics to the problem of knowledge, sensational- istically developed (see W. E. Garrison, op. cit., passim), but also, one would conjecture, by Locke's reduction of the essential content of Christian faith to a belief that Jesus is the Christ. This for Campbell was the only "faith" required of the candidate for fellowship in the Christian community. But of theology the content was, theoretically, the whole body of New Testament teaching. 2 Ibid., pp. 115, 116, 364. * Ibid., p. 5; Christian Baptism, p. 286. 4 T. T. Munger, Life and Letters of Horace Bushnell, p. 404. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 33 was a revolt against the intellectualism which increasingly since the Renaissance had sought to imprison the life of the modern world within the confines of classic forms of thought. It viewed with an almost naive delight every expression of spontaneity, every indication of origi- nality; in fact nothing human was alien to its interest, except the more habitual and mechanical modes of human thinking. As applied to religion it meant an emphasis upon the instinctive, impulsive, and emo- tional phases, as opposed to the intellectualism of conservative dogma- tism on the one hand and of critical rationalism on the other. 1 It was this radical humanism which, in the main, characterized the theological thinkers here classified as romanticists, as opposed to the strictly and strongly evangelical Christian interest of those discussed in the pre- ceding section. The forerunner of romanticism was Rousseau. In religion, as in education and politics, he advocated returning from the conventions of society to the uncorrupted life of Nature. He had been powerfully enough influenced by deistic rationalism to find no sufficient basis of religious certainty in external authority of church or of Bible, and the major portion of the content of orthodox Catholicism and Protestantism was distasteful to him, with his genial view of human nature and his easy-going attitude toward life. But he was interested in the funda- mental principles of theism, and for these he sought a soul-satisfying certainty. He had no confidence, however, in the rationalistic or any other type of philosophy as a means of accrediting religious faith. Accordingly he consulted the inner light and resolved to admit as evi- dent all those beliefs and only those to which in the sincerity of his heart he could not refuse his consent. This meant the adoption of the radical method, and that in its radical form, since there was no distinct purpose to conserve the whole essential content of Christian faith. As a matter of fact, however, the gospel, as Rousseau understood it, found place in his theology, because it spoke to his heart. And yet he found all reli- gions good in proportion as they permit and encourage the worship of the heart. "Keep thy soul in such a condition," says the Savoy vicar, "that thy wish is always that God exists; then wilt thou never doubt it." It may seem strange that the orthodox Lutheran and ardent pietist, Hamann, should be put in the same class with Rousseau and others 1 Cf. Royce, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, p. 173: "Trust your genius, follow your noble heart; change your doctrine whenever your heart changes, and change your heart often. Such is the practical creed of the romanticists." This suggestive characterization is something of a caricature. 34 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY of this group. But, besides the fact that it is among the roots of the Romantic movement that he is integrated by his influence over Herder and Jacobi, there is something even in his advocacy of positive religion as against the impiety of the philosopher's abstraction, which he calls "natural religion," that is singularly in keeping with the spirit of roman- ticism. It was in the concrete, human individual, with all his contra- dictions and inconsistencies, that Hamann was interested, and not in the empty abstractions of the philosophy of the understanding. He recognized and valued highly "the mystical and poetical vein in all religions" which the Illuminati had either ignored or despised; for the ground of religion, in his opinion, lay in the whole being of man, and not merely or chiefly in that most contingent and abstract phase of his existence, his power of cognition. Hamann's reaction was in the interests of the type of inwardly assured religious experience which found expression in orthodox pietism and which was well able, he judged, to stand without the support of philosophy, and even in the face of its attacks. For Spinoza, Lessing, Voltaire, Hume, and Kant, he manifested supreme contempt. The theism of the Aufklarung he met with ridicule. Philosophy "incom- petent, icy, beggarly philosophy" which is nothing but the product of reflection upon those words which are used to symbolize the inexpres- sible realities and mysteries of the soul, has for its God nothing but a poetic personification of a purely verbal symbol. Hamann's principle of the inwardness and independence of religious certainty might have led him to adopt the radical method in theology, but in his reaction against "the presumption of the Aufklarung that our taste and judgment should be the test of the divine Word," he was led to discredit all criticism; and so, having no difficulty in accepting the traditional doctrinal content, there seemed no occasion for departing from the conservative theological method. Herder, who was very fundamentally influenced by Hamann, differs from him most significantly in making antithetical application of the same principle. While Hamann condemned the intellectualism of liberal theology in the interests of conservative Christian piety, Herder condemned the concealed intellectualism of the orthodox system of theology in the interests of a liberal, somewhat poetical "religion of man." He claimed that by means of attempts to bring the doctrine into a closed system from philosophical points of view, the empty images of human phantasy had penetrated into the Christian religion. He advocated an historical study of the Bible as the starting-point in NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 35 theology, not meaning, however, to justify thereby the use of the con- servative method, but to lead to a deeper appreciation of the concrete, the immediate and the involuntary, in religion. Christ's religion would thus be found to be a non-scholastic religion of pure human goodness. Jacobi had received a pietistic education and was strongly influenced by Pascal, Rousseau, and Hamann. He was more of a pietist than Herder and more of a romanticist than Hamann. With Herder he opposed the intellectualism of the orthodox dogmaticians, and with Hamann that of the rationalists. "Jacobi was the first to bring the opposition to the intellectualism of the Aufklarung to scientific expression." 1 He criticized the phi- losophy of the intellect as having from the time of Aristotle endeavored to subordinate immediate knowledge to mediate, whereas immediate certainty is the more essential. He assumed that when secular phi- losophy is self-consistent it leads inevitably to a monism such as that of Spinoza or Fichte, whose pantheism is virtually atheism. In thus thwarting the needs and contradicting the immediate conviction of the pious soul, philosophy has proved its own incompetence. But Jacobi reacted almost if not quite as vigorously against the metaphysical element in orthodox theology. He was never satisfied with the traditional arguments for the existence of God, and readily agreed with Kant in his critique of rational theology. The mixture of philosophy with popular religion had made of the Deity a monster of many contradictions, which tended to atheism. Like Hamann, Jacobi would have nothing to do with a God who is the mere conclusion of a syllogism. He is not the living God, and a God that can be known is no God at all. Thus there is, according to Jacobi, "no other means of safety from the steep heights of metaphysics than to turn our back upon all phi- losophy and throw ourselves overhead into the depths of faith." 2 It is only to the heart that God reveals himself. Faith, as distinguished from reason (or, in his later terminology, reason, as distinguished from the understanding) is a sense for the supersensible, corresponding to the senses, to which sensible reality is revealed. Intellect has a merely logical, regulative function. In sensation and in faith there is an imme- diate certainty of objective reality, whereas the conviction produced by demonstration has certainty only at second hand. Here the interest is mainly in certainty, and the method in principle is radical, although by no means either clearly defined or consistently applied. 1 Piinjer, op. tit., p. 623. 2 Quoted by Piinjer, op. tit., p. 632. 36 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY Fries had been nurtured in the Moravian faith, but his psychological studies gradually undermined his earlier belief. Later he was power- fully influenced by Kant and Jacobi. His studies in the Kantian philosophy and in psychology led him to regard knowledge and demon- stration as belonging to the realm of the scientific understanding alone, according to which nature is to be interpreted as a mechanical system. And yet all proofs and knowledge are strictly subjective; all that can be shown is the agreement of immediate with mediate knowledge. And through the joint action of the lingering influence of his Moravian piety with his later study of Jacobi, Fries was led to develop on the back- ground of this theory of the subjectivity of science, the further view that the faith which rises out of the feeling of the heart, and the dogmas in which it finds expression, may also be regarded as valid, inasmuch as they also symbolize that reality which transcends positive objective knowledge. There seems to be in the development of this point of view some trace of the religious interest, but it is not so much practically religious as it is colored by aesthetic and social motives. There is little interest in religious certainty, and the content of religious belief is valued chiefly for its associations as expressing the spiritual sentiment of the religious community. Inasmuch as these religious ideas are not held to have any cognitive value within the world of the understanding, there is practically no motive for revising them, and so there cannot be said to be any theological method, either conservative or radical. Only a negative theology being literally true, almost any symbolic language may be tolerated. As for metaphysical mediation between the ideas of religion and the concepts of science, that is quite uncalled for, as the two spheres are mutually exclusive, though supplementing each other in life. De Wette was influenced greatly by Herder, but still more powerfully by Fries. When first brought as a young man into contact with the rationalistic historical criticism of Paulus he felt the need of finding some means of conserving the values wrapped up with his religious ideas. The most promising device seemed to be that offered by Fries, whose general view of religious symbolism the younger thinker adopted and developed further. Having thus silenced the protests of his religious consciousness, he took up the work of historical criticism, and carried it on in a very radical fashion. We may surmise then that while the religious interest was really felt by De Wette in these early days, the dominant interest was the scientific, and the division of labor was NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 37 effected as much as anything for keeping dogmatic considerations from interfering with the scientific accomplishment of the historian's task. De Wette criticized rationalism because it undertook to controvert the doctrines of the church as contradictory, whereas it should have been recognized that these doctrines are not, properly speaking, products of metaphysical knowledge, but mere poetical symbols to express religious feeling. The task of theology, he claimed, was simply to attempt to show the original relation of these symbols to the religious life out of which they arose. 1 To attempt a metaphysical mediation between these ideas and the facts and laws of scientific knowledge could only result from a mistake as to the real nature of religious ideas. 2 Schleiermacher's final religious and theological position was in large part the product of a series of successive influences of widely varying types to which he was subjected. In early life, at home and at school, he was under the strongly pietistic influence of the Moravian brother- hood. Then, through his contact with the philosophy and theology of the Aufklarung, he reacted to a thoroughly radical position, rejecting much of the content of orthodox dogmatics. This radicalism as to content largely remained, even after the rejection of Illuminism, show- ing the still powerful influence of Spinoza and the rationalistic features of the Kantian philosophy. But the strongly romanticist atmosphere into which Schleiermacher was thrown fastened in him a growing revul- sion against the exaggerated intellectualism of the Aufklarung. This found expression in the Reden uber die Religion, published in 1799. Having once made religious feeling rather than philosophy determina- tive in theology, he began to move toward a more conservative position as to content, although retaining the radical method in the interests of inwardness and certainty. His great work, Der chrisiliche Glaube, shows that, through his renewed relations with the evangelical com- munity and apparently under the influence to some extent of Jacobi, he reacted increasingly against mere romanticism in religion toward a position more essentially Christian and evangelical. The centrality of Christ and the normative function of the religious consciousness of the Christian community are more distinctly recognized than in the Reden. But the characteristic thing in Schleiermacher remained his T So sympathetically did De Wette perform this task that the young Vinet's first impression of him was that he was quite orthodox. 2 An interesting revival of the Friesian philosophy of religion is that being under- taken by Dr. Nelson and Professors Otto and Bousset of Gottingen (Abhandlungen der fries' schen Schule, Gottingen, Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht). 38 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY revolt in the name of religious feeling against what he felt to be the irreligious principle and tendency of the speculative theology, which was being revamped on a post-Kantian basis by his antagonist, Hegel. Schleiermacher's reaction against metaphysics, if not the most thor- oughgoing, has been one of the most influential in the history of Chris- tian theology. This has been due in no small part to the vital interest in religious experience which everywhere dominates his thought. It was for the purpose of making the religious consciousness more inde- pendent of foreign materials and disturbing influences that he protested against the mingling and consequent confusing of the dogmatic expres- sions of religious feeling with the questionable and religiously colorless propositions of "objective" metaphysics. 1 In his opinion not only rationalism, but scholasticism, was radically mistaken in treating reli- gion as essentially metaphysical doctrine, rather than as the feeling of absolute dependence with its more or less spontaneous expression. Theology, he claimed, was thus not a philosophical but a descriptive, historical discipline. It should not aim to set forth proofs of the exist- ence of God or a speculative formulation of the doctrine of the Trinity, but sympathetically to delineate the fundamental affirmations of the Christian believer on the basis of his religious experience, and as a mem- ber of the Christian community. 9. Of all the religious reactions against the metaphysical element in theology, the Ritschlian is the most deliberate, definite, and methodi- cal. The history of Albrecht RitschTs theological development 2 in its broad outlines is quite similar to that of Schleiermacher. In both of them there was an initial transition from the conservative method and content of evangelical orthodoxy to a radical, rationalistic position, followed by a new appreciation of the nature of religion and religious knowledge, a vigorous reaction against intellectualism in religion and theology, and a growing conservatism as to theological content. In the interests of inner certainty also there was retained by both of them what we have called the radical method. Ritschl's break with conserva- tism was at least hastened by his contact with Hegelianism, not only through Hegel's own works, but especially through the direct influence of Erdmann and Baur. This philosophy did not for long wholly satisfy 1 As distinct from the tentative conclusions of philosophy, whose fundamental principle is radical doubt, dogmatics builds upon the certitude of religious faith. Schleiermacher felt that to introduce metaphysics into theology would make the entire product of this amalgamation tentative and subject to disturbing doubts. 2 Otto Ritschl, Albrecht Ritschls Leben, passim. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 39 him, and while unable to employ what seemed to him the unscientific method of such conservative theologians as his own father and the school of Hengstenberg, he nevertheless felt that, so far as vital religion was concerned, they had the advantage over the Hegelians. Probably the most potent influence in leading him to abandon the speculative method for one more consonant with the evangelical religious interest was his intensive study of biblical theology and the history of Christian doctrine. He gave special attention to the Pauline theology, and it is significant, in view of later developments, that he seems to have been particularly interested in other anti-speculative theologians, such as Mar- cion, Tertullian, and Luther. The Pietists and Kant and Schleiermacher also seem to have had more influence over him, and his own position to be more essentially in accord with theirs, than he himself recognized. The vagaries of Pietism he severely censured, and its great religious value he appreciated, although increasingly, still only imperfectly; and yet as against intellectualism in religion, whether orthodox or rationalistic, the Ritschlian revolt is essentially pietistic and continuous with the older movement. 1 Ritschl was not altogether unaware of what he owed to Kant and Schleiermacher for helping him to disentangle himself from Hegelianism, and he acknowledged that in respect of method Schleiermacher was his predecessor; yet he felt strongly the difference between their views of the nature of religion and his own. Uniting the moral interest of Kant with the aesthetic-religious interest of Schleiermacher (especially of the Schleiermacher of the Reden) he was able to be truer to the essence of Christianity than either, and to criti- cize the defects of both. Indeed, his chief advance beyond Schleier- macher in theological method consists in the fact that, on the one hand, he secured an increased objectivity and a conservatism as regards content by making explicitly normative for the ideas in which religious feeling expresses itself, the historic gospel of the grace of God mani- fested in Jesus Christ for the moral redemption of the world, 3 together with the additional fact, on the other hand, that he accomplished this without any loss of internality and religious assurance. . Schleiermacher, however, before him had already moved a long distance in this direction. His own dependence upon Kant also in point of method seems to have been underestimated by Ritschl. In theory of knowledge he claimed to stand with Lotze rather than with Kant, but it was really after he had found his theological position that he gave much attention to 1 Cf. Gustav Ecke, Die theologische Schule Albrecht RitsMs, I, 25-32. 2 Cf. F. Kattenbusch, Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl. 40 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY Lotze's epistemology, 1 and his own system was not radically affected thereby. Moreover, he interpreted Lotze in a somewhat Kantian sense, and Kant, after the manner of Locke; and, Ritschl himself to the con- trary notwithstanding, the subsequent history of thought has shown the Ritschlian principle to be more fundamentally at one with the Kantian than with the Lotzian philosophy. 2 Ritschl's reaction, as has been suggested, was primarily a revolt of the Christian consciousness against the pantheism of the Hegelian monistic idealism. Vital convictions as to the personality of God and the reality of sin and salvation were felt to be imperiled by the specu- lative doctrine of the Absolute. Ritschl came to look upon the God of contemporary philosophy as merely the generic concept of a thing, personified and deified in reality nothing but the mental shadow- picture of the world. "The Absolute!" he exclaimed, "How sublime the sound! Dimly only do I remember that this word occupied my thoughts in youth, when the Hegelian terminology threatened to draw me as well as others into its vortex. That was a long time ago, and the word has become strange to me, since I found in it no fruitful thought." 3 But religion was not alone in ite reaction against the despotic domination of the Hegelian Absolute. Science also had rebelled, and where Chris- tian faith did not exist it was a naturalistic empiricism which had dis- placed the now thoroughly discredited speculative philosophy. It was this that Ritschl had to confront. In the social situation, therefore, as well as in his own individual history, Ritschl's theology was an essen- tially conservative movement. It aimed to retain unimpaired the essence of evangelical Christianity, while conceding all the legitimate demands of the scientific understanding. And yet in breaking with the liberal speculative theology of the Hegelians Ritschl was further than ever from returning to the method of orthodox scholasticism. In the first place he could not give up his radical method, especially because of his interest in Christian certainty. In the second place the method he pursued corresponded with the pur- 1 Pfleiderer plausibly suggests that Ritschl probably did not make this theory of cognition the basis of his theology from the first, but rather propounded it subse- quently in its defense (Development of Theology, etc., p. 183). 2 Traub, "Ritschls Erkenntnistheorie," Zeitschr. fur Theol u. Kirche, IV, 91 ff.; Schoen, Les origines historiques de la theologie de Ritschl; Ecke, op. tit. 3 Theologie u. Metaphysik, p. 18. There seems to have been fundamental to the Ritschlian movement a recognition of the unsatisfactoriness of any conceivable Absolute of philosophy as equated with the God of Christian faith. So long at least as a merely static world-view obtained, this was doubtless true. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 41 pose of Luther to break with the scholastic theology. 1 The meta- physical element in the older theology seemed to him to curtail the value of the knowledge of God derived from revelation. It was an addition of content which meant a subtraction of value. Hence he opposed natural religion and "mixed articles" in theology. The tra- ditional proofs of the existence of God he successively discarded. The combination of scholastic ontology with mystical psychology he felt had rendered the traditional theology unintelligible and neo-Platonic. It was for the securing of the "positive and proper character of theology," 2 the conservation of the gospel, the whole gospel, and nothing but the gospel, and that without abandoning the radical method, that Ritschl was concerned. He sought to eliminate from ecclesiastical doctrine all alien content, whether of ancient or recent introduction, to retain all content essential to the expression and guidance of evan- gelical piety, and to restore to the believer in the affirmation of that content the certitude which flows from religious experience. 3 With this in view he took the position that theology should consist of faith propositions solely. The religious world-view is based upon the fact that the human spirit distinguishes itself as to value from all other things in the world, and expresses itself in a series of religious proposi- tions which are essential if one is to maintain this self -evaluation; when properly formulated they must stand or fall with it, and it with them. 4 These religious propositions are thus of the nature of independ- ent value-judgments, 5 and move in a different sphere from the judg- ments of mere scientific description. This doctrine of the value-judgment is not the only ground upon which Ritschl endeavored to justify theoretically his exclusion of metaphysics, as merely theoretical, from its former place in theology. Indeed, when we recall, with Wendland, 6 that Ritschl attempted in several different ways at different times to find a theoretical defence for his proposed procedure, we are confirmed in the view that his real motive was practical, and that this theoretical consideration was origi- nally a mere after- thought, devised as an apology for his method. He 1 Theologie u. Metaphysik, pp. 18, 65. 3 Justification and Reconciliation (Eng. tr.), p. 17. s Ecke analyzes (op. cit., II, 16) the practical interest which produced the Ritschlian movement into the apologetic motive, the ethical, the religious and the ecclesiastical. These are at bottom one and the same, viz., an interest in the propagation of evan- gelical Christianity. 4 Theol. u. Met., p. 9. * /. and R., p. 28. 6 Albrecht Ritschl und seine Schiller, pp. 46-52. 42 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY simply wished to show how needless and foolish it was to submit the products and values of Christian faith to a tribunal whose judgment was pre-determined by ideas from which all religious faith was on principle excluded. In accordance with this purpose constructive metaphysics was assumed necessarily to have a dogmatic a priori method, 1 on account of which it was to be rejected, while the only " metaphysics " to be retained was general ontology, interpreted as a mere analysis of the categories of human cognition, and so as amounting to nothing more than epistemology. 8 Professor Herrmann of Marburg was one of the first of Ritschl's disciples. He is an avowed Kantian, both in his retiring of constructive metaphysics in favor of faith, and in his emphasis upon the a priori character and absolute authority of the moral law. He values Schleier- macher for his having shown the ways whereby science and religion could each allow the other to go on its own way unmolested, but criti- cizes him as inconsistent in introducing questions of cosmology into his theology. Ritschl's chief significance he finds in the fact that he sup- plements Kant and Schleiermacher by showing that true morality and true religion are inseparable, 3 but he criticizes him as not entirely exclud- ing metaphysics from theology in his discussions of the personality of God. He shows great respect for such religious theologians as Tertul- lian and Athanasius. He is in substantial accord with the religious ideals of the Reformation, and in his opinion the need of the hour is to experience in our situation the spiritual emancipation which Luther in his day achieved for himself and for us. 4 He has much in common with the early Pietists, and even more closely resembles Jacobi. Like Jacobi in his assumption first that Spinoza and later that Fichte had evolved the only consistent metaphysic, Hermann seems practically to have assumed that there can be but one outcome of meta- physical construction when it operates with the conceptions furnished by natural science, viz., materialistic monism. 5 In this he has been influenced by F. A. Lange, and it is as a protest against taking such a metaphysical synthesis of the facts and scientific laws of nature as ulti- mate 6 that his protest on religious grounds is so vehemently made. 1 TheoL u. Met., p. 39. a Ibid., pp. 40, 41. 3 Die Metaphysik in der Theologie, p. 50. 4 Communion with God, passim; Zeitschr. fiir. Th. u. Kirche, 1907, p. 33. 5 Cf. O. Fliigel, Die speculative Theologie der Gegenwart, pp. 259 f. 6 On this point see Wendland, op. cit., p. 53; Goguel, Wilhelm Herrmann et le pro- bleme religieux actuel, pp. 162, 172. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 43 But speculative idealism is viewed by Herrmann with hardly more favor. He regards it as inimical to some of the most essential elements of the Christian point of view. He mentions particularly the attitude of resignation it tends to foster toward moral evil as being unavoidable and a means of ultimate good, and the very different content of its God- idea from that revealed in the Gospel. 1 Nor does Herrmann permit the time-honored metaphysical encrusta- tions that have gathered upon the traditional theology to pass unnoticed. The Aristotelian conception of God as an unmoved Cause of all move- ment, he regards as really setting forth the fundamental idea of the ancient Greek religion of an unbending and impersonal Necessity. The fusion of this idea, however, with the Christian God-idea under the urgency of the need felt by the early church for an apologetic against the attacks of pagan philosophers, while excusable in view of this cir- cumstance, has led to unfortunate results. 2 The early reformers also introduced an alien element, he claims, when they adopted the idea of an absolute determination of all created existences. 3 But Herrmann does not mean to say that ideas and doctrines which were originally thoughts of faith rather than metaphysical speculations should be taken over externally from the apostles or Scriptures. 4 He acknowledges inner authority only. His religious interest is strongly conservative, but his method is nothing if not radical. The religious motivation of Herrmann's opposition to metaphysics is everywhere apparent. The religious character of theology must be kept unimpaired. 5 As against rationalism which regards theological propositions as universally valid because the whole universe is a reve- lation of God, for Christian faith revelation is, strictly speaking, found only in Jesus Christ; 6 through him alone do we know that there is a God, and we know the nature of God only through the religious experi- ence of emancipation from guilt. If one has not had this religious experience it is useless for him to theologize. 7 The Aristotelian God- idea, when tested religiously, is found to be defective, for it does not include the idea of providence, and such a God cannot awake the response of Christian faith and love. 8 Even Pfleiderer's speculative theology from the standpoint of Christian faith has a merely pathological interest. 1 Die Metaphysik, pp. 17 ff., 38 f. 2 Die Religion in Verhtiltnis zunt Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit, pp. 123-31. 3 Die Metaphysik, p. 28. 6 Ibid., p. 76. 4 Communion with God (Putnam), p. 353. 1 1bid., p. 17. 5 Die Metaphysik, p. 8. 8 Die Religion, etc., pp. 124-26. 44 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY As regards certainty the only kind worth having in religion or in theology is that which grows out of the experience of moral redemption, 1 and the only universality of theological propositions is that which comes from the universal validity of the moral law. 2 The only valid apolo- getic is the leading of men to experience the saving power of the gospel. 3 Professor Kaftan of Berlin is another prominent follower of Ritschl. His early evangelical training and religious experience, together with the influence of his teacher, the Aristotelian Trendelenburg, combined to produce in him at first a theological method in which the content of confessional Biblicism was set forth as proved by Christian experience. It was the radical method employed uncritically, so as to leave the whole traditional content practically unaffected. But a more careful historical study of the Scriptures and of dogma showed that a religious experience does not necessarily prove the permanent validity of those forms, partly of philosophical rather than of religious origin, in which a similar experience found expression in the past. In Christian experi- ence by itself there was no sufficient norm for Christian doctrine, and so a readjustment became necessary. Ritschl's principle of the Chris- tian revelation or the gospel as the norm of Christian doctrine afforded a means of retaining the element of authority which Kaftan felt to be essential to dogmatics. But a new difficulty arose. Formerly Kaftan's theology had been (or at least he thought it was) empirical, like science; but now it appeared that his theology was dogmatic while his science was empirical. How could conflict between the two be avoided, and how could philosophy, interpreted as a final synthesis of the empirical sciences, find room for the content of a purely dogmatic discipline? The only way of escape seemed to be to give up the Aristotelian phi- losophy and all constructive metaphysics, adopting instead the phi- losophy of Kant, 4 whereby scientific knowledge should be limited to the phenomenal world, and religious knowledge to the realm of revelation and faith. Thus Kaftan became agnostic and positivistic in philosophy, and the most conservative of radicals in dogmatics, in essential con- tinuity with the reformers and the pietists. 5 1 Die Metaphysik, p. 35. 2 Die Religion, pp. 273-81. 3 Christlich-protestantische Dogmatik; Die Kultur der Gegenwart (Die christliche Religion), II, 623-24. 4 Kaftan regards Aristotle as the philosopher of Catholicism, and Kant as the philosopher of Protestantism. See Kant, der Philosoph des Protestantismus, passim; and Das Christentum und die Philosophie, pp. 5 ff. 5 On the subject of this paragraph see article by G. B. Foster, "Kaftan's Dog- matik," American Journal of Theology, II, 802 ff. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 45 Kaftan's attack upon constructive metaphysics in theology is based explicitly upon practical grounds, although he seeks also an additional theoretical reason for its rejection. These practical grounds are two, viz., that metaphysical theology is inimical to the content of Christian faith, and second, that it is unfavorable to Christian certainty. So far as content is concerned, the essential is likely to be omitted, Kaftan thinks, and the alien and injurious to be introduced, when an attempt is made to arrive at the knowledge of God through the knowl- edge of the world. 1 Empirical science does not lead directly to God, and the God to which it would lead, if at all, would be a nature-God, a mere seeming God (like Aristotle's thought-thinking-itself and unmoved-mover), not the spiritual, personal God of Christian faith, 2 who is known through moral experience. Moreover, the attempt to unify in a final philosophy the scientific view of the world with religious knowledge of God has been uniformly pantheistic in tendency. 3 Of this a conspicuous example is afforded by Hegelianism, whose logical Absolute is very different from the God of Christianity.* But even in the case of the ecclesiastical apologists and dogmaticians, in so far as use was made of current metaphysical concepts, abridgments and transformations of the Christian faith resulted. 5 Thus "the attempt to apprehend objectively the content of the faith involves a substantial alteration of it, and consequently is equivalent to an injury to Chris- tianity." 6 Therefore all that is not of Christian faith should be rigidly excluded from dogmatics. 7 With reference to certainty, Kaftan makes a distinction between the religious certainty which is aroused by preaching and the scientific proof of the truth of the Christian religion. 8 For him this "scientific proof," or apologetics, is really nothing more than a technique for making a religious believer satisfied with religious certainty, while dogmatics is the presentation of the Christian truth thus assured, in an exact, connected, and exhaustive fashion. 9 But any constructive philosophical combination of apologetics and systematic theology is to be avoided; 10 because it is so hard to unite a philosophy based upon the sciences with 1 Kant, der Philosoph, etc., p. 15. 2 Das Christentum, etc., pp. 5, 14, etc. 3 Drei akademische Reden (1908), p. 63. Das Christentum, p. 23. s The Truth of the Christian Religion, II, 413. 6 Ibid., I, 119. 7 Ibid., II, 419. 8 Ibid., I, 10, n. Ibid., pp. 10, n. 10 Ibid., pp. 141-46, etc.; Dogmatik, n. 46 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY the Christian faith in God, that the latter is made hypothetical in the very attempt. Besides, philosophy is always ready to revise its judg- ments, and holds its content as hypothetical, human opinion. It thus is never quite inwardly certain, and theology, if united with it, would share in its uncertainty. 1 Professor Harnack was brought up in an environment of confes- sional Lutheranism. His attention was early directed, however, to the fields of historical theology. In this connection he came to some extent under the still lingering rationalistic influence of Baur; but the chief factor entering into the formation of his opinions, apart from the results of his own historical investigations, was the already influential doctrine of Ritschl. The new emphasis placed by the Ritschlians upon the value of the historical element in the doctrines of the Christian religion grew with Harnack into an emphasis upon the value of the religious element in the doctrines of historical Christianity. His interest thus came to be primarily in content. Himself an exponent of the radical method of theology, he undertook to criticize, from a historical standpoint, the content of the conservative dogmatics, and to show the necessity of subtracting certain elements. Like Marcion, Athanasius, and Luther, he is interested in reduction, simplification. 2 He shows that while gnostic speculation with its sudden and radical departure from the essential content of Christian doctrine was promptly repudiated by the church, there was a gradual and therefore almost unnoticed remodeling of doctrine through the introduction of philo- sophical elements by Catholic writers. 3 Thus ecclesiastical dogma, while having its certainty still in the gospel, derived only a part of its content from it. 4 Consequently such formu- lations as the Catholic doctrines of the Trinity and the two natures of Christ are, because of the foreign elements they contain, extremely unsatisfactory to the evangelical faith of today. 5 The Lutheran doc- trine of faith put an end in principle to the old theology with its abso- lute metaphysics, 6 and since then the gospel, in spite of retrograde movements, has been pushing itself out of the forms which it was once compelled to assume; 7 but the problem still remains of freeing the doctrine of the Christian community from everything which, in order to be adopted, requires a surrender of spiritual autonomy. 8 In other 1 Das Christentum, p. 25. 2 History of Dogma (Eng. tr.), I, 279 .; Ill, 140; VII, 183. 3 Ibid., I, 227. s Ibid., p. 244. 7 Ibid., I, 21. * Ibid., p. 17. 6 Ibid., p. 226. 8 Ibid., VII, 240. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 47 words, the task of the hour is the separation of the "science of Chris- tianity" from those alien accretions which have been combined with it in the course of history through metaphysical speculation. But this question of content is not for Harnack without its bearing upon the problem of certainty. Not only is the speculative method in his opinion itself unable to produce religious certainty, 1 but the change of doctrinal content by means of speculation was naturally accomplished by a change in the character of the religion itself. Instead of its doctrines appealing to faith, they stimulated curiosity and criticism. Thus one of the most significant results of the "secularizing or Hellenizing" of Christianity which in Gnosticism was acute and in Catholicism more gradual, 2 was the obscuration of that religious assurance that comes of laying hold of the grace of God in the simple, unadulterated gospel. 3 From among the multitude of Ritschl's disciples but a few more can be mentioned here. Brief reference may be made to Schultz, Otto Ritschl, Reischle, Lobstein, and Sabatier.* Hermann Schultz in his apologetics is in general accord with Kaftan. He does not undertake to defend Christianity by metaphysically proving the rationality of its doctrinal content or the reality of the objects of its faith. He finds the method of Pascal superior to that of Leibnitz. 5 No proof based on non-religious foundations can be successful, for mere theoretical knowledge cannot go beyond the causal connection of indi- vidual things in the empirical world. But the devout man has in his piety an assurance which is for him not inferior in strength to sensuous or scientific certainty. 6 To keep this religious certainty in its normal strength is the function of apologetics. To this end its chief tasks are first to show that science can never disprove the Christian faith, and then to exhibit the practical value of religion and the religious value of Christianity. 7 In accord with this general method, the metaphysical doctrine of the Deity of Christ is given up, Jesus being regarded as a truly human personality whose work for us has a truly divine value. 8 Otto Ritschl, the son of Albrecht, undertakes to set forth the com- plete and independent certainty of the affirmations of Christian faith, in the face of science and without the aid of metaphysics. All human 1 Ibid., VII, 21. a Ibid., I, 226-27. 3 Mid., VII, 182. 4 Professor F. Traub's recently published Theologie und Philosophic, is in essen- tial agreement with the views of these other members of the earlier Ritschlian school. 5 Outline of Christian Apologetics (Eng. tr.), p. 9. 6 Ibid., pp. 82, 83. i Op. cit., pp. 3, 83. 8 Die Lehre von der Gottheit Christi. 48 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY knowledge, he claims, is by means of value-judgments, although in cus- tomary or so-called existential judgments the feeling of this value has largely disappeared. 1 The affirmations of religious faith are none the less true of reality and should be none the less certain for their being value- judgments; for all value- judgments intend to be true, and even the " existential " judgments may be mistaken. 2 The present condition and possible future developments of scientific knowledge should cause the believer no concern, for the transcendent realities with which faith deals are absolutely inaccessible to science. 3 Besides, the conflict of views, so far as the Christian world- view is concerned, is not with science, which is limited to nature and history, but with the world- views of other forms of religions. Moreover, this conflict is one which is to be settled by religion rather than by the scientific understanding^ Those who really have the religious life and experience out of which the affirmations of faith grow, are as sure of the reality of the objects of their faith as the scientist is of the object of his science, and he has no need of further assurance by means of theoretical proofs. 5 The late Professor Reischle was one of the many exponents of Ritsch- lianism who, in excluding metaphysical speculation even from the dis- cussion of the personality of God, 6 applied the Ritschlian principle more rigidly than Ritschl himself had been able to do. He criticized Lotze for supposing that the ideas of the imagination give us an adequate knowledge of God, and for attempting metaphysically to defend the idea of the personality of God; it was an attempt which seemed to Reischle foredoomed to failure and thus not in the interests of Christian certainty. 7 Biedermann's Hegelian principle of abandoning "repre- sentation" for the forms of philosophical thought, as giving the only adequate knowledge of the Divine Being, seemed equally illusory because no adequate conception of "Absolute Spirit" is possible. 8 Besides, Reischle felt that by such metaphysical attempts the view of God essential to Christian piety is liable to injurious modification; as when the supposedly orthodox Frank set up in the place of God the idol of Thought-existing-m,-through-and-for-itself, and when Strauss rejected the belief in a personal God because of his inability to combine the notion of personality with that of the "Absolute." 9 Only by par- 1 Ueber Werturteile, pp. 13 ff., 34. 2 Ibid., p. 22. 3 Ibid., p. 24. < Ibid., pp. 33-35. s Ibid., p. 26. 6 Cf. Traub, Zeitschr.fiir. Th. u. Kirche, IV, 91 ff. 7 Erkennen ivir die Tiefen Gottes? Aufsatze u. Vortrage, 1906, pp. 19-26. 8 Ibid., pp. 26-36. ' Ibid., pp. 67-71. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 49 ticipating in the Christian experience of faith in Christ can one know with certainty the "depths of God," the almighty holy love of God. 1 This knowledge finds utterance in "thymetic judgments," expressions of the attitude of the feeling-willing self to its object. 2 Christian dog- matics should consist entirely of those thymetic judgments of whose truth and revelation-value one can be certain only through faith in Jesus Christ. 3 An exhibition of this independence of religious judgments as related to theoretical understanding, together with a demonstration of the practical value of Christian faith, constitutes the only and suffi- cient apologetic. 4 Professor Lobstein, in the course of an admirable exposition of the Ritschlian method in dogmatics, 5 takes occasion to criticize upon reli- gious grounds the method of metaphysical speculation as employed by orthodox and rationalistic theologians. This apriori deductive pro- cess, descending from the absolute and universal to the relative and particular, 6 tries to substitute intellectual for religious certainty; with the result that, for those who cannot understand the "proof" or are able to detect the fallacies in the argument, all assured conviction tends to disappear.7 Moreover, when apriori speculation is made determina- tive for theology, a deviation from the content of the gospel is to be expected; as when the Hegelian theology issues in an abstract specu- lative pantheism which denies or osbcures the fundamental truths of Christian revelation. 8 Sabatier can scarcely be called a Ritschlian in the sense in which the term would apply to most of those mentioned in this section. He might almost be classed as well as a belated romanticist or even more appropriately as a forerunner of the new " religio-historical " school which has come into existence under the combined influence of Ritschlianism and the comparative study of religions. 9 But the influence of the Ritschlians as well as that of Schleiermacher has been very strong with Sabatier; and this circumstance, together with the fact that he synchronizes with the Ritschlian school, brings him most naturally within this group. 1 Ibid., pp. 36, 54. 2 Werturteile und Glaubensurteile, pp. 85-87. 3 Erkennen Wir, etc., p. 71. 4 Werturteile, etc., pp. 112-17. s An Introduction to Protestant Dogmatics (Eng. tr.). 6 Op. cit., p. 151. 7 Ibid., pp. 152-55- 8 Ibid., PP- IS3-S5- 9 Cf. G. B. Smith, Biblical World, 1908, p. 118. 50 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY Sabatier emphasizes what he calls the subjectivity of religious knowledge. 1 By this he means not what we have called subjective in the first section, with its implication of uncertainty, but rather what was called internal, or more definitely what Reischle calls "thymetic." His thought is that religious knowledge does not come into existence apart from the activity of the subject. 2 But this religious knowledge is no less certain than "objective" scientific knowledge of nature. 3 Being one's own independent judgment, it needs not, as religions of external authority do, to be buttressed by a system of scholastic metaphysics.* Such procedure is superfluous for the pious, and would be useless to one devoid of piety. Moreover, for theology to be treated as metaphysics would be inimical to its certainty, for, inasmuch as we can never deduce subjective religious knowledge from objective science, 5 the attempt but not the deed confounds us, and leaves us in a state of doubt. 6 From the standpoint of content also, Sabatier finds metaphysical theology a thing to be deprecated. Orthodoxy forgets the historically and psychologically conditioned character of all doctrines, 7 and still includes in its confession of faith injurious elements which originated not in Christian religious experience but in pagan philosophical specu- lation. Rationalistic speculation on the other hand loses sight of the specifically religious content of the dogmas which it attacks, 8 with the result that it "throws out the child with the bath." Obviously Sabatier is radical in method, but faced in the conservative direction. 10. Earlier in its beginnings than Ritschlianism, but not yet so fully worked out, and more radical in its reaction against metaphysics, was the movement which found initial expression in Positivism. This name is derived from the French word positif meaning matter-of-fact as opposed to fictitious or speculative, and was chosen by Comte 9 to designate his philosophy, which deliberately turned away from the transcendent and the speculative to the phenomenal and the verifiable. Comte's Positivism is not so important as a cause of later development in religious thought and feeling, as it is significant as a symptom of a 1 Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion Based on Psychology and History (Eng. tr.), P- 303- 2 Ibid., pp. 304, 307. 3 ibid. } p. 303. 4 Religions of Authority and the Religion of the Spirit (Eng. tr.), pp. 342-57; Out- lines of a Philosophy of Religion, etc., p. 310. s Ibid., p. 303. 6 Ibid., p. 314. 1 1bid., p. 338. 8 Ibid., p. 339. 9 Cours d'une philosophic positive; Systeme de politique positive; The Catechism of Positive Religion; see also Levy-Bruhl, The Philosophy of Comte. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 51 movement which would have come without it. Comte simply felt it coming and gave it, for the time being, a local habitation and a name. Positivism in its religious aspect represents such an extreme transi- tion as to be either the development of a new religious interest, or the growth of an anti-religious spirit, according as religion is broadly or narrowly defined. 1 It is the change from other-worldliness in an exag- gerated form to this-worldliness exclusively. It is the product of all those influences from the Renaissance down which have been tending to make this world more interesting and the personal life seemingly more worth while. Especially have the advances in general scientific, and even naturalistic and relativistic directions made the supernatural- istic, eschatological-messianic features of Christianity extremely dis- tasteful to many minds. In the case of Comte the revolt from the old was probably more radical than it would otherwise have been because of his being most familiar with the unreformed Catholic type of Chris- tianity with its unmitigated mediaevalism of ideal and idea and its ill-cemented combination of dogmatic utterance and fantastic specu- lation. Moreover the contemporary socialistic reaction following the individualism of Rousseau and the French Revolution was one of the most influential factors in molding early positivism. The period of Comte's activity falls naturally into two divisions. The first of these was devoted to the construction of the positive phi- losophy, or "the making of philosophy scientific"; the second was concerned with the attempt to revolutionize religion by means of the positive philosophy. But it would be a mistake to regard this as an afterthought. Comte's work was a unity. His ultimate purpose was to reconstruct society in a stable and satisfactory way. In order to accomplish this permanently he undertook to transform the religious ideals of the people and bring them into accord with other departments of modern life. To accomplish this a thoroughly modern philosophy or world- view would require to be propagated. In constructing such a philosophy the principles of empirical science must of necessity, in Comte's opinion, be all-controlling. At the very threshold of the positive philosophy we are confronted with the doctrine of the three stages of human thought, viz., the theo- logical or fictitious, the metaphysical or abstract, and the scientific or 1 E. Caird points out the radical defect, from a religious standpoint, of the so-called "Religion of Humanity," viz., that its object of worship does not coincide with the Reality upon which our lot depends (The Social Philosophy and Religion of Comte, p. 134). 52 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY positive. The theological mode of thought arose, according to Comte, spontaneously as the primitive mode of interpreting the facts of observa- tion. But when doubt as to the existence of God entered, attempts to prove his existence were made. These "proofs," however, instead of buttressing the threatened certainty, simply state the doubts anew and propagate them further. Now this endeavor to prove the existence of God marks the transition from the theological to the metaphysical mode of thought. Such work is essentially an ti- theological. Its method is critical, not dogmatic. Metaphysics is a vain attempt to support the fantastic structures of theology which empirical observation increasingly discredits. With the progress of inductive science metaphysics becomes more abstract, seeking to explain phenomena by abstract substances or essences, and events by final causes. The final stage of metaphysical thought is where events are explained as being caused by nature and natural causes, instead of a simple description of the laws of phenomena being formulated. Thus the metaphysical stage is simply transitional. Its content is theology modified by physics. Its value lies entirely in its critical function; in so far as it is constructive it is but the disappear- ing remainder of theology. With the death and burial of theology the occasion for metaphysical activity disappears. As a substitute for all theistic religions Comte offers the "religion of humanity," and sociology in place of the discarded theology. Human- ity, the sum-total of all human beings, past, present, and future, dis- places the anthropomorphic God of dogmatic theology and the color- less Absolute of metaphysics. Immortality is subjective only, i.e., the great and good continue to live in the memory and affection of suc- ceeding generations. Comte's revolt, then, was against the whole content of theology, none of which possessed or could possibly be made to have, as it seemed to him, any degree of certainty. From the point of view of the old religion, his method was radical, therefore, to the point of nihilism. In this respect he is followed by perhaps the majority of modern sociol- ogists. This should not, however, prevent a recognition of the fact that positivism was, in its primary intention, only an unusually radical method of conservatism. It sought to conserve political and other social values in a community that had become used to atheism and revolution, and was in danger of having to choose between anarchy and despotism. From the standpoint of the "religion of humanity" or the social interest religiously interpreted, positivism, even in its anti- theological and anti-metaphysical propaganda, meant to be conservative. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 53 ii. The most recent and most radical reaction against metaphysics is the movement generally known as pragmatism. That it was per- vaded by an anti-metaphysical animus from the beginning there is abundant evidence. In his now celebrated paper on "How to Make Our Ideas Clear," C. S. Pierce, the forerunner of pragmatism, said as long ago as 1878, " Metaphysics is a subject much more curious than useful, the knowledge of which, like that of a sunken reef, serves chiefly to enable us to keep clear of it." 1 Professor William James has con- stantly charged metaphysics, especially that of Hegelian and other forms of monistic absolutism, with being altogether excessive in its claims; it is unconvincing in its processes and useless in its results. "The hollow, unreal God of scholastic theology" and "the unintelli- gible, pantheistic, absolutist monster" of Bradley's and Royce's monism have no "cash- value" in terms of experience; and only a "vicious intellectualism " could lead to such thin and empty abstractions. Even then, its reasoning has no coercive certainty. It is high time, he claims, for philosophy to abandon metaphysics and transform itself from a theology into a science of religion. 2 Dr. F. C. S. Schiller, the Oxford pragmatist, in his earliest published work, 3 while standing for a theistic pluralism, still protested against the current despair of a theoretical understanding of the meaning of life. He has come to hold, however, that the present age has grown "wisely sceptical of philosophical systems which lay claim to universal cogency and profess a final answer to the riddle of existence. "4 Any metaphysical system is a mere individual work of art, whose one value consists in aesthetic satisfaction. 5 The absolutist's Absolute is inhuman, impersonal, and even mad; it has no real religious value, and its existence can only be maintained by falla- cious arguments. 6 Even Lotze's monism has neither scientific nor religious value. 7 Professor John Dewey antagonizes the static, fatal- istic absolutism which says to man that his strivings are already eter- nally fulfilled, his errors eternally transcended, his partial belief eternally 1 Popular Science Monthly, XII, 301. 2 See, for example, The Will to Believe, p. 272; Varieties of Religious Experience, PP- 453> 455 > Pragmatism, p. 19; Journal of Philosophy, etc., I, 683 ff.; II, 115; Hibbert Journal, VI, 725, 728; A Pluralistic Universe, pp. 46, 60, and chaps, ii and in. 3 Riddles of the Sphinx (1891). Hibbert Journal, IV, 937. slbid., IV, 937, 338. Cf. Karl Pearson, Grammar of Science, p. 17; K. Gordon, Journal of Philosophy, etc., Ill, 365. 6 Ibid., etc., Ill, 482; Hibbert Journal, III, 85, 86. 7 Humanism, pp. 62-84. 54 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY comprehended. 1 He mentions with apparent approval the view that philosophy, after wandering hither and yon in a wilderness without purpose or outcome, has finally come to its senses has given up meta- physical absurdities and unverifiable speculations, and become a purely positive science of phenomena. 2 According to Professor G. H. Mead, metaphysics is really only a systematic statement of certain problems, and when in any case science, especially psychology, finds the solution, the problem (i.e., the metaphysics) naturally disappears. 3 Giovanni Papini, the Italian pragmatist, declares that pragmatism contains no metaphysics and is hostile not only to monism but to all cosmological metaphysics; for the pragmatist the classical problems of metaphysics are non-existent and senseless; pragmatism is less a philosophy than a method of doing without a philosophy .4 But while this wholesale rejection of metaphysics may seem icono- clastic, and while the pragmatist may himself be a radical, pragmatism is the new conservatism. It is the conservatism of the radical man, the conservatism of the man who would otherwise be a sceptic. 5 Ideal- istic systems had been elaborately constructed, but they "failed to be convincing objectively," 6 and were now suffering disintegration from within. After Bradley so it seemed at least it was scepticism or pragmatism. Apodictic certainty was gone, but the demand for practi- cal certainty with regard to life postulates was still insistent. Intellect having failed to afford it, recourse was had to will the will to believe. This will, in the absence of demonstration, to believe what was felt to be humanly essential drew to its support the doctrine in which the essence of pragmatism consists, viz., that experience and practice deter- mine truth; all true judgments are actually or potentially useful, and other than utility there is no test of truth. Thus while conservative in its initial impulse, pragmatism is radical in its method. The test of truth being its function in human life, it was a natural development when a systematic method was sought not only by reducing metaphysics to logic, 7 but by making logic a branch of 1 Philosophical Review, XV, 120. 3 The Significance of the Problem of Knowledge, p. 20; cf. also Monist, II, 17; Mind, N.S., XV, 307. 3 Philosophical Review, IX, 4. - Popular Science Monthly, LXXI, 351-58. s Cf. J. B. Pratt, What Is Pragmatism? p. 191. 6 James, Varieties of Rel. Exp., p. 436. ? See J. Dewey, Mind, XII, O.S., p. 88. NATURE AND MOTIVATION OF THE REACTION 55 psychology 1 and psychology a branch of biology. 2 Among the instru- ments which the organism uses in adapting itself to its environment, in order that it may survive in the struggle for existence, are the ideas which enter into the judgments made from time to time. The whole value of these ideas is their practical value as "plans of action"; the truth of the judgments into which they enter is their utility in the vital processes. 3 Now it is evident that the particular judgments regarded as true on this basis vary to some extent according as the life-interests recognized by the thinkers are different. In each case the pragmatism is a method of conserving the values already cherished. If only the interests of mere physical well-being are recognized, all conscious life and all judgments made being regarded as subservient thereto; or even if the intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and social interests are recognized as ends, and only the distinctly religious interest is repudiated, the position of the pragmatist will appear very radical and revolutionary; but even so, it is essentially conservative in its primary intention. It is a radical method of conserving the values recognized, and the radi- calism belongs to the life-interests of the man, rather than to his pragmatism. When the distinctly religious interest (for example, the evangelically Christian) is recognized and given primary importance, the result of pragmatism will be conservative of the ideas essential to that interest; when "a sense of the value of our social relationships," and devotion to the well-being of society is regarded as the whole of religion, pragmatism will seem radical from the standpoint of the- istic religion, whereas in reality it is, or at least intends to be, con- servative of what is denned as the essence of religion. It is a fact, however, that the principle of pragmatism does tend to react in a radical fashion upon the content it was designed to conserve; only that content which has practical value has any assurance of being conserved. Some idea of the religious or quasi-religious values which pragmatism is employed to conserve may be gained by examining the literature of the subject. The new doctrine was first promulgated by Professor James before a theological audience as a method of settling the long 1 J. R. Angell, Relations of Psychology to Philosophy, pp. 9-14. 3 Angell, Psychology, passim. 3 "Thought is 'true' when it meets the demand of the concrete situation in which it arises; when it brings about the reconstruction of the activity out of which and for whose reconstruction it is born." A. W. Moore, The Functional vs. Representational Theories of Knowledge in Locke's Essay, p. 67. 56 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY controversy between reason and faith. 1 He protests against the view that the heart should wait until all the evidence is in, acting meanwhile as if religion were not true. 2 He stands for an empirical religious phi- losophy and not only claims that if it can be shown that the notion of God fits in with the demands of life, the pragmatist cannot possibly deny God's existence, 3 but himself strongly favors the belief in "some form of superhuman life with which we may, unknown to ourselves, be co-conscious. "4 Dr. Schiller, while disclaiming that pragmatism explicitly endorses any sectarian form of religion, 5 says that religion, with its idea of God, works, and is therefore true, at least until superseded by some- thing truer. Professor Dewey long ago adopted a position which, in certain of its aspects, has seemed radical from the standpoint of theistic religion, when he advocated the reduction of philosophy to psychology, saying that consciousness is the only possible Absolute. 6 But this means that for the "tough-minded pragmatist" 7 the social consciousness is made to function for the religious consciousness proper; the "religion of humanity" has displaced the religion of God, and the aim is not to con- serve the religion which finds its practical expression in soul-saving, but that which manifests itself instead in efforts toward social amelioration. 8 The results of our investigation so far, then, go to show that the reaction against metaphysics in theology has been almost invariably, in its primary intention, conservative of religious interests. On the one hand, the movements antagonistic to the metaphysical element in doctrines traditionally received have been animated in the main by the desire to regain religious certainty. On the other hand, the opposition to the vagaries of speculative theology has been primarily for the preser- vation of the doctrinal content felt to be religiously essential. The relative justification of the reaction is founded upon the raison d'etre of vital religion. 1 Dr. J. B. Pratt, himself a critic of pragmatism, says: "I think I shall be justified in saying that James's Witt to Believe has been one of the greatest influences for genuine religious faith that have appeared in the last half-century." What is Pragmatism ? p. 194. 2 The Will to Believe, p. 29. 3 Pragmatism, pp. 73, 299. 4 Hibbert Journal, VI, 724; cf. also A Pluralistic Universe, pp. in, 299, 300. s Hibbert Journal, IV, 331. 6 Mind, O.S., XI, 17, 153, 164; cf. J. R. Angell, The Relations of Psychology to Philosophy, p. 20; Dewey, "The Postulates of Immediate Empiricism," Journal of Philosophy, II, No. 19; cf. also A. W. Moore's statement (Philos. Rev., XIV, 335) that there is no ultimate purpose, but only purposings. 7 Pratt, op. cit., pp. 250-51. 8 G. H. Mead, University of Chicago Record, 1908, p. 108. PART II CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE ANTI-METAPHYSICAL REACTION 12. We shall now turn to a re-examination of this historical material in order to learn whether the results of this reaction against theological metaphysics have been altogether satisfactory to the religious con- sciousness, and if not, in what particulars whether as regards content, or certainty, or both it has been found wanting. With regard to the non-Christian religions, little need be said in this connection, save that especially where the reaction against philosophical speculation in religion was unaccompanied by a vigorous cultivation of the mystical experi- ence, it tended to issue in either a return to bare traditionalism with its consequent stagnation, or else a lapse into utter scepticism. We shall turn immediately, therefore, to the history of religious thought in the early Christian church. So far as the New Testament thought is concerned, it is a fair question whether, in view of the outcome, Paul was fully justified in presenting the Gospel so unrelieved of its distinctly Jewish interpretative concepts and so unmediated to the gentile mind that it proved "to the Greeks foolishness." It is true that he was able to reassure himself with the thought that "the foolishness of God is wiser than men"; but in strong contrast to the later days when philosophers accepted Jesus as the incar- nate Logos, in Paul's day it had to be acknowledged that "not many wise" were called to share the privileges of Christian faith. 1 And among the later New Testament writers, those who fail to avail themselves of the mediation of the best gentile thought are the ones who have to meet departures from the content of Christian teaching, not with refutation, but with mere denunciation. 2 Among the apologists, Tatian, who so violently opposed himself to Greek philosophy, sought, as we have seen, to defend Christianity by bold and dogmatic assertions. The perilous proximity of this dog- matism to a virtual scepticism may be inferred from his representing Christianity as too sublime to be grasped by earthly perception. 3 Both Tatian and Theophilus, unlike the philosophic Justin, found them- 1 1 Cor. i : 23, 25, 26. 2 See, for example, II Peter and Jude. 3 Harnack, History of Dogma, I, 190. 57 58 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY selves obliged by the logic of their position to ascribe even the seeming truths of philosophy to the devils. 1 This dualism of the apparently true but really false and the apparently false but really true was scarcely ministrant to Christian certainty. But the classic example of this epistemological dualism in the ancient church was Tertullian. His utter repudiation (at least in theory) of all that savored of human philosophy he carried to the extreme of declaring exultingly his belief of the impossible and the absurd. He taught that nothing is to be believed in addition to what belongs to Christian faith, 2 and declared that it was better to remain ignorant of a truth than to know it by man's wisdom instead of by divine revelation. 3 This extravagant credulity was clearly not calculated to commend itself to the thoughtful as conducive to religious certainty; and his Chris- tianity was too lacking in unity and convincing power for the content of later theological thought to be more than superficially affected thereby. 4 With Athanasius independence of philosophy was not only his strength, as we have seen, but also his weakness. It saved the essential Christian doctrine at the time of crisis, but did it in such a way as created difficulty for the reflective Christian consciousness ever after. 5 13. Among the historical results of the reaction against the philo- sophical element in theology we must reckon the " double- truth" theory as developed in later Catholicism and early Protestantism. A partial anticipation of this point of view appears in the many-sided Augustine. Owing to the negative theology of the philosophical (neo-Platonic) element in his thought, he is led to say that we know with certainty only what God is not; 6 but he elsewhere maintains that we know enough of God to pray to and love him. 7 In later scholasticism the Thomistic cleavage between what is above reason and what is according to reason 8 widened into the theory of " double truth," according to which something might be true in theology and false in philosophy, and vice versa. This change from scholastic 1 Haraack, op. cit., pp. 194, 200; Theophilus, II, 8, 15. 2 The Prescription against Heretics, chap. vii. s Treatise on the Soul, chap. i. s Ibid., Ill, 142; IV, 49. * Harnack, op. cit., II, 236. 6 De Ord. II, 44, 47. i On the Trinity, XII, 24, and passim. 8 A characteristic expression of this distinction is found in the words of Bernard: "The blessed Trinity, which I do not understand, I believe in, and by faith I hold what I do not grasp with my mind." Serm. in Cant., 76. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 59 rationalism to ecclesiastical obscurantism was facilitated by Duns Scotus, who upheld the principle of arbitrary authority, and said that a thing might be true for the philosopher without being true for the theologian; but with William of Occam the transition was practically complete. According to this teacher there is probable evidence for a First Cause, but as for the other articles of faith, they are not even probable. However, the will to believe these doctrines of the church is meritorious. 1 Unreasonableness and authority were, as Harnack says, in a certain sense the stamp of truth. 2 It seems clear to them, that even in the form in which it was most favorable to ecclesiastical religion, this doctrine of double truth was a mere makeshift; it sought to relieve the otherwise intolerable uncertainty of a theology which had felt obliged to give up the attempt to secure a reasonable philosophical vindication. Although this theory of double truth was condemned as sceptical by the Council of Lateran in 1512, we find that the reaction against the use of reason in matters of religion led Pascal to what was practically the same dualistic position. Not only did he hold that we can prove nothing; but contradictions and mysteries became, in his opinion, wit- nesses for the faith. The more flagrant the contradictions and the more impenetrable the mysteries, the greater was the amount of truth. 3 He even advised the use of holy water and the saying of masses on the ground that their stupefying effect would make belief easy. 4 From this to scepticism the step is short. Indeed Pascal recommended Pyrrhonism as an antidote to rationalistic doubts of Catholic dogmas. 5 Among Protestants, too, the double-truth theory has had quite a history. Luther accepted this view from his nominalist masters. He discusses the question whether a thing can be false in philosophy and true in theology, and answers decidedly, yes. Of reason he was accus- tomed to speak in the most contemptuous fashion. He declares that it is not possible to understand even the smallest article of faith by human reason; natural knowledge is complete darkness; we should listen to the Son of God who declares, "This is my body," and trample reason under our feet. We should shut our eyes and believe what Christ says, though no man can understand how it can be true. It is small 1 Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, I, 464. 3 History of Dogma, VI, 167. 3 Penstes, pp. 21, etc.; see LeVy-Bruhl's Jacobi, p. 168. 4 Pensees, xi, i. s Ibid., xxv, 33. 60 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY wonder that as the years passed, Luther became steadily narrower and more obscurantist. 1 Among the later followers of Luther there were many who held not only that theological truth might contradict natural reason, but that even contradictory theological statements might both be true. 2 An outstanding example of this dualism in religious thought, resulting from ' the refusal to give philosophy a place in theology, is seen in the case of Daniel Hoffman. He regarded reason as the greatest enemy of God and the church, next to the devil. He held the double- truth theory in its most exaggerated form. Natural knowledge of God, he says, is false truth. What is true in philosophy is all false in theology. It is philo- sophically true that the world is eternal; it is theologically true that the world was created. If the philosopher teaches that there is a God, and that he is good, this is a lie in theology. If the unregenerate says there is a God, he lies. 3 Coming down to later times, one finds almost as extreme a dualism in the religious thinking of Hamann and Jacobi. The former regarded the mystery of things as impenetrable by abstract analysis. 4 To philosophy religion is foolishness, and yet much that to reason is incred- ible is nevertheless true. Human philosophy is not in a position to grasp and to judge divine revelation; 5 for philosophy is only the exer- cise of reflection upon language, and language is simply the sensible symbol of the inexpressible reality of the soul. The object of religious reflection and devotion is not God; it is a purely verbal symbol, person- ified by a poetic license. 6 Jacobi also regarded philosophizing as simply deepening the mystery of language. By his method of safe-guarding religion by turning from reason to instinct, or, as he later used the terms, from the understand- ing to reason (the latter being interpreted as the faculty which makes us believe in the incomprehensible, even if it contradicts what we com- prehend) he adopted a dualistic position of unstable equilibrium, ever hovering between mysticism and total nescience. The absolutely fatalistic and non-personalistic pantheism of Spinoza is the inevitable 1 J. Kostlin, The Theology of Luther (Eng. tr.), II, 267, 216, 264, 195, 265; Piinjer, op. cit., pp. 128, 130; Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, I, 259. 2 Harnack, op. cit., VI, 236; Ptinjer, op. cit., p. 166. 3 Ptinjer, op. cit., pp. 180, 184-86. 4 Levy-Bruhl, op. cit., p. 46. s Piinjer, op. cit., pp. 613, 616. 6 L6vy-Bruhl, op. cit., pp. 46, 47. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 6 1 conclusion, he claimed, of logical thought; but it is nevertheless untrue; nothing that we either affirm or deny of the Absolute has any logical value. The heart impels us to believe in a supra-natural, extra- mundane, supra-mundane, personal God; but we should say nothing of his metaphysical attributes; the attempt to render God intelligible leads to atheism. 1 A personal God and human freedom are inconceivable but true, and the less one thinks about them, the surer he is of their truth. 2 Jacobi could well say, "With my heart I am a Christian; with my head, a pagan." 3 This double-truth outcome of the extreme reaction against the reflective and metaphysical element in theology was practically indis- tinguishable in many of its utterances, from complete scepticism with regard to religious ideas. This is evident when the positions of these theologians and religious philosophers are compared with the opinions of some of their contemporaries in whom the philosophical, rather than the religious, interest was uppermost. Thus Pomponatius criticized on grounds of natural reason the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and concluded that the question was insoluble. Nevertheless he bowed to the teaching of the church and said, "I believe as a Christian what I cannot believe as a philosopher." 4 Francis Bacon also, guided by what seemed to him the interests of natural philosophy, opposed all mixture of theology with philosophy as leading to a fantastic philosophy and a heretical religion 5 so that some have raised the question as to whether or not he was sincere in his profession of religious belief. Hobbes also took the position that theology and the "doctrine of God's worship" should be excluded from philosophy; for the truths of philosophy are capable of demonstration, while the dogmas of religion are to be deter- mined by the sovereign and received with unquestioning obedience. 6 ' Ibid., pp. 46, 82, 87, 88, 90, 91, 168. 2 See Ibid., p. 204; cf. Piinjer, op. tit., pp. 640-41. This view of freedom reminds one of Bergson's treatment of the question: Les donnees immediates, etc. (Eng. tr., Time and Free Will], passim. 3 Essentially similar in this regard to the position of Hamann an4 Jacobi, although starting from theistic rather than Christian presuppositions, was the standpoint which had previously been taken by Rousseau. Witness the following expressions from the " Savoy pastor": "Keep thy soul in such a condition that thy wish is always that God exists; then wilt thou never doubt it If I say God is such and such, I feel it and prove it to myself, but I do not therefore conceive any better how God can be so The worthiest use of reason is to annihilate itself before God." 4 Piinjer, op. cit., p. 51; Hoffding, History of Modern Philosophy, I, 15. s Novum Organum, pp. 65, 89. 6 Elements of Philosophy, Pt. I, chap, i, p. 8; Leviathan, chap, xxxi., etc. 62 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY Here we see the principle of external religious authority used by this materialist philosopher in such a way as amounts to practical scepticism in religion. Descartes too made use of the idea of a double realm of truth in a way that not only suggests religious scepticism, but raises the question as to the ethical quality of his motive. Although he committed himself to the principle of doubting all that could be doubted, in order that he might have certain knowledge to rest upon, he nevertheless said that as the revealed truths of theology lay beyond the reach of human intelligence, he did not presume to submit them to the feebleness of his reasonings. Moreover he submitted the "clear and distinct" conclu- sions of his Meditations to the ecclesiastical authority of the doctors of the theological faculty of Paris. 1 One wonders whether he had in mind the fate of Bruno and Galileo. Pierre Bayle is interesting in this connection. His works contain a defense of the view that religious dogmas are true, although contrary to reason. The philosophical world is even yet divided as to whether he was a sincere believer or a clever sceptic. Erdmann, Windelband, Hoffding, and Falckenberg with varying degrees of assurance maintain that he was sincere. Lange, Zeller, Ueberweg, Piinjer, and many others have asserted the contrary. 2 Theology and philosophy, according to Bayle, are contrary to each other. To show this he put down seven theological propositions, and set over against them nineteen proposi- tions of philosophy. One must choose, he said, between natural reason and supernatural revelation; he cannot follow both. In religion one should not reason, but simply believe. Manichaeism was more reason- able than Christianity, but this is no disadvantage to the latter. The more opposed to reason the dogma is, the more glorious and meritorious is the faith that believes it. It is true, as Piinjer has said, 3 that Bayle seemed to be interested in showing all that could be said against a dogma; but yet, as Erdmann reminds us, 4 he rejected the arrogance which would doubt the honesty of the man who asserted that he believed what was contrary to reason. The one thing that is certain and it is, although not surprising, the point of importance is that Bayle's works were powerfully influential in turning the views of the religious world gener- ally, and of France in particular, in the direction of religious scepticism. 5 1 (Euvres (Paris, 1824), I, 129, 221-22. 3 See History of Philosophy, in locis. 3 Op. tit., p. 451. 4 History of Philosophy, pp. 277, 5. s Windelband, History of Philosophy (Eng. tr.), p. 439. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 63 Henry Dodwell may also be mentioned here. In his book, Chris- tianity not Founded on Argument (1742), he claimed that the arguments by which religious ideas are defended do not produce certainty, and would never give rise to the martyr's zeal. All religion has depended for its certainty upon authority, and must ever so depend. For this authority to remain effective there would have to be a constant particu- lar supernatural revelation to each individual. 1 Some regarded Dod- well as a sincere believer, but in reality his book was a clever attack upon rational supernaturalism. It is worthy of note that, in the par- ticular positions taken, it closely approximated the views of his prede- cessor, William Law, who, to defend Christianity, claimed that the intellect cannot comprehend the mysteries of faith, and that in such high matters reason is helpless, save to receive what God reveals. 2 Thus what Law made subservient to obscurantism, Dodwell turned into an instrument of scepticism. Entirely similar was the use frequently made of the arguments set forth by Butler in his Analogy. He aimed to show that the Deist, who denied revealed religion because of certain intellectual difficulties, might with equal reason doubt his own natural religion, for it had its difficulties too. 3 The result was that many were led, not back to an acceptance of Christian revelation, but on to a rejection of all natural religion. In this connection Sir Leslie Stephen says: " Depreciation of reason leads more naturally to universal scep- ticism than to implicit faith. "4 For one John Henry Newman there are a hundred David Humes. In Hume we see caricatured the implicit scepticism of "implicit faith." After arguing to show the unreasonableness of the belief in the immortality of the soul, and concluding that there will never be found any good reason whatever for the belief, unless we get a new logic and new faculties of mind to comprehend it, he goes on to say that this only shows our infinite obligations to divine revelation, for by no other medium than revelation could this great and important truth be ascer- tained. 5 The oft-quoted conclusion of his famous Essay on Miracles is in entirely similar vein. 6 Thus we see that so closely may the intellectual expressions of reason- defying credulity and mocking scepticism approximate each other as 1 Pp. 30, no, etc. 2 Works, II, 7-36. 3 The Analogy of Religion, etc., Introduction. 4 History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, I, 162. s Hume's Essays, edited by Green and Grose, II, 406. 6 Ibid., p. 108. 64 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY to be almost indistinguishable. This is because a "faith" afraid of reason is already on the way to unbelief. 14. The epistemological dualism which we have found involved in the rejection of metaphysics, where this rejection is not at the same time an abandonment of the distinctly religious interest, takes on a new form of expression in Kant's distinction between the pure, or theoretical, and the practical reason. In Comte's positivism we have a more radical parallel movement in which the dualistic feature is kept in the background, if not entirely eliminated, through the substitution of the social for the distinctly religious interest. But in Benjamin Kidd there is a curious bifurcation of positivistic thought into a dualism of the theoretically true and the practically true or expedient. It amounts almost to a reversion to the old double standard of truth. Recognizing that human evolution in its higher phases requires altruistic action on the part of the masses, and holding that only the sanctions of an externally authorized religion will enforce such altruistic action externally authorized, perforce, because religion itself is irrational he advocates authoritative, dog- matic religious instruction as a social necessity. 1 On the one hand, rationality and disaster; on the other, irrationality and progress. It is a position unjustifiable on any ground. Socially it would prove divisive, setting intellectual and proletarian against each other in irrec- oncilable antagonism. Ethically it would mean doing evil that good might come. Epistemologically it could be defended only by the worst type of pseudo-pragmatism, according to which that is to be held true for the other man which it suits my purposes to have him believe. But coming to Kant, with whom the higher spiritual values were an end in themselves, we find an unresolved dualism of the theoretical and the practical, owing to his having given up the problems of ontologi- cal metaphysics. Thus the ideas affirmed as the necessary postulates of the practical reason, which postulates are to be controlling in the life, are not to be regarded as having theoretical validity, as giving knowledge of reality; moreover, the philosophical concepts of the self as the unity of consciousness and of the Absolute as the unifying principle of all reality are to be regarded merely as ideas whose theoretical value lies in the ordering of experience; they are not transcripts of reality. Thus the theoretically necessary is practically defective, or even unusable, while the ethically essential is theoretically indefensible. God, the Kingdom of God, and immortality are "ideas made by our- selves with a practical purpose, which must not be given theoretical 1 Social Evolution, passim. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 65 value." 1 Kant regards himself as having performed a service for theology by making it independent of the judgments of dogmatic speculation, thereby assuring it completely against the attacks of all philosophical opponents; 2 but a theology which requires to be shielded from trying conclusions with other theories of reality is one that comes under suspicion by that very necessity. This Kantian dualism proved stimulating to thought and provoked two contrary developments. In the effort to transcend the dualism the conservatives made use of the idea of revelation; the liberals, of evolution. Hamilton and Mansel reduced Kant's "theoretical" and "practical" to the old "natural" and "revealed," respectively, the latter being higher than the former in value as well as in origin. Hegel and his followers chose to regard Kant's theoretical and practical knowledge as referring to adequate philosophical and inadequate repre- sentative or popular knowledge, respectively, the former being a higher stage in the evolution of thought than the latter. But in the end neither of these developments proved satisfactory from the standpoint of religion. According to Hamilton and Mansel, Reality, or the Unconditioned, is inaccessible to knowledge; because to think is to condition, and to condition the unconditioned is not to know it as unconditioned. It is like the magic tree of the fairy story, upon which, whenever a chip was chopped off, two more immediately grew in its place; so, to reach the Absolute by thought is impossible, for every step takes one farther away. Affirmations and denials are equally unavailing; reality is incon- ceivable. The door is then left open to faith in a divine revelation, and nothing that faith affirms can be denied by reason, because reason is incompetent in the realm of revelation, with which faith deals. Mansel especially delighted in showing that faith involves believing the incon- ceivable; such as that the Absolute is a person, and that penal substi- tution accords with justice and everlasting punishment with the love of God. But the trouble with all this is that faith is in just as bad a way as knowledge; revelation has no advantage over nature. Faith, to express itself, must use ideas, all of which are incompetent to express the truth with regard to things divine. And so Mansel had to acknowledge that theology is not a true ontology, but only a higher kind of phenomenology. 3 Religious scepticism was the logical issue. 1 Hartenstein's edition of Kant's Works, IV, 267. 2 Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic (Eng. tr., Chicago, 1902), p. 163. 3 Metaphysics (sd ed.), p. 383. In one of its aspects Bergson's anti-conceptualism is the extension of Mansel's agnosticism from the philosophy of religion to all con- ceptual knowledge. 66 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY This was the conclusion drawn by Herbert Spencer and many others. Mansel had thought it sufficient to show that what Christian faith affirmed of God could not be disproved, because to deny anything of God was to condition the unconditioned. But Spencer emphasized the opposite side, showing that the affirmations of faith similarly undertook to condition the unconditioned. Hence religion became mere silent adoration of the Unknowable; and, as has often been shown, even that is more than can be logically defended from the premises. Balfour's thought is essentially an attempt to return to the Hamil- tonian position. He claims that neither the ultimate conceptions of science nor those of religion can claim philosophical probability; not reasoning chiefly, but the necessities of life, together with the pressure of social authority, explain our beliefs in both realms. 1 Here the posi- tion is that of a revolt from naturalism, issuing in scepticism, combined with a certain obscurantist anticipation of pragmatism. Hegel sought to overcome the Kantian agnosticism by extending theoretical knowledge over the whole field of reality, leaving to the so-called practical the function of anticipating the speculative or truly philosophical interpretation of reality. This lower kind of knowledge sets forth in the language of the imagination, drawing its symbols from sense-experience, what may by courtesy be called representative knowl- edge. To this lower kind of knowledge belong the ideas of religion, even when systematized in dogmatic theology. The Hegelians of the Right regarded this as a vindication of positive Christianity and ortho- dox theology, so that the Hegelian philosophy was to them simply apologetics; but those of the Left, as Strauss, 2 interpreting Hegelian idealism pantheistically and in a Way that amounted, practically speak- ing, to materialism, separated the philosophical from the representative so widely that almost no value at all was attached to the latter. Feuerbach carried the transition a step farther in the positivistic direction by substituting for speculative philosophy under the category of valid knowledge a religious anthropology in which religious ideas have a psychological interest simply. Theology, then, in its specula- tive as truly as in its common "representative" form, becomes a mere mass of childish illusions, from whose injurious influence men would be freed by a true knowledge of human nature. Then they would see 1 A Defense of Philosophic Doubt, pp. 322-25; Foundations of Belief (8th ed.) pp. 382, 384; cf. also Percy Gardner, Exploratio Evangelica, chaps, iv-vi. 2 Der alte und der neue Glaube. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 67 that all our gods are mere creations of our wishes. The only place left for theology then is as a branch of anthropology. 1 F. A. Lange differed from Feuerbach in his disposal of religious knowledge chiefly in regarding its ideas not as injurious but as useful illusions. 2 They belong to the realm of poetry, and by means of them man is lifted above the sorrows of the earth and transported into an ideal dream-world. 3 He admits a double sense of the word truth, but when applied to religious ideas the word is used figuratively only. In science we have fragments of truth; in the ideas of philosophy and religion we have & figure of truth. "We ought to have and may have a theory of the world (or religion), but we must not believe in it theoreti- cally; we must only allow ourselves to be practically, aesthetically, ethically influenced by it. "4 But as has often been pointed out, if the illusion is recognized as illusion, the illusion ipso facto ceases, 5 and with it its influence, whether injurious or otherwise. Thus we see that the final outcome of the Kantian dualism of the theoretical and practical was decidedly unfavorable to religious knowl- edge. On the one hand, the attempt by means of the Kantian distinction to shield religious knowledge from criticism led to the total loss of the content intended to be conserved. On the other hand, the measure of patronizing recognition accorded to religious ideas as constituting an in- ferior kind of knowledge, was followed shortly by their total repudiation so far as knowledge- value was concerned. Parallel with the Hegelian development, but differing for our present purpose chiefly in that its essential interest was in the religious knowl- edge, rather than the philosophical, was that in which Schleiermacher was the central figure. He forms the connecting link between Kantian- ism and Ritschlianism, and between himself and Kant, the chief transi- tional figure was that of De Wette. He in turn was powerfully influenced by Fries, who had held that the ideas of religion are simply figures of speech, valuable for feeling but not for science. According to De Wette dogma and science have nothing to do with each other, and the two must be kept entirely separate. The religious sentiment he regarded as purely aesthetic. Religious doctrines are mere symbols which express the ideals of religious feeling and imagination, but they have, 1 Cf. G. B. Foster, The Function of Religion, etc., pp. 89 ff. 2 Geschichte des Materialismus, II, 61 ff., 540 ff. 3 Ibid. (Eng. tr.), II, 281-82. 4 Stahlin, in Kant, Lotze, and Ritschl (Eng. tr.), p. 106. 5 Ibid., p. 199. 68 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY properly speaking, no knowledge-value; they do not lead one to the truth. What they do is to stir, like religious poetry, the higher emo- tions and stimulate to worthy action. 1 But the question is as to whether religious ideas will continue to do this, if they are no longer thought of as having knowledge- value, and this question De Wette apparently did not sufficiently consider. Schleiermacher adopted practically the same position. He recog- nized the place of speculative philosophy but claimed that Christian theology has an altogether different thing to do, viz., to express the essential convictions of Christian faith and thus to serve as a guide to the Christian Church. 2 The purely scientific endeavor aims truly to represent existence, and must, to be complete, include propositions con- cerning the ultimate reality. Such propositions are with difficulty distinguished from those which arise out of reflection upon religious experiences; but the two are very definitely distinguished by the entirely different states of consciousness in which they arose. The two must be kept so rigidly apart that the old question as to whether the same proposition can be true in philosophy and false in Christian theology, and vice versa, will arise no longer, because a proposition, inasmuch as it is in the one, can find no place in the other. 3 The type of phi- losophy one holds has nothing to do with his theology.' Schleiermacher here seems to have allowed the fact that the scien- tific and philosophical interests on the one hand and the religious interest on the other are psychologically different, to shut his eyes to the fact that they make assertions in large measure about the same object; religion has to adjust man to a situation concerning which science has also something to say, and the two sets of judgments cannot perma- nently be kept entirely apart. In philosophy Schleiermacher agreed with Jacobi that Spinozism in its essentials was the final system; but what troubled Jacobi was that the difference between the expression of Christian faith and this pantheism, or practical atheism, as he regarded it, did not seem to trouble Schleiermacher at all. 5 Jacobi felt that, strongly as Spinozism appealed to his intellect, as a Christian he must reject it, while Schleiermacher serenely accepted it and went on his Christian way rejoicing. 1 Ueber Religion und Theologie; Gedanken uber den Geist der neueren protestan- tischen Theologie. 2 Kurze Darstellung des theol. Studiums, i, 5. 3 Der christliche Glaube (1830), I, 116, 117. Ibid., p. 168. s L6vy-Bruhl, op. cit., p. 233. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 69 But this dualistic principle of Schleiermacher's has received its definitive criticism at the hands of history. Among his followers were theologians of very diverse points of view, some very conservative, others quite liberal, each claiming that his system was the expression of the Christian consciousness, and that its several doctrines were veri- fied by Christian experience. Thus Frank claimed that the Christian experience of regeneration established for the Christian the whole con- tent of orthodox theology. By excusing Christian theology from the necessity of coming to terms with science, he failed to provide, as he might otherwise have done, for the criticism and reconstruction of dog- matics in such a way as to insure its being an expression of belief, not only consonant with the deepest religious experience, but also compatible with the most advanced scientific knowledge. 15. The Ritschlian school, with its fundamental distinction of judg- ments of existence and judgments of value, retained, along with the elements of greatest value in Schleiermacher's theology, some of its most characteristic defects. Chief among these, perhaps, was the dualistic feature which has militated so strongly against the most ade- quate form of theological statement, and, in certain situations and for certain minds at least, against the highest degree of Christian certainty. To support this view there is in the writings of Ritschlian theologians a great mass of evidence, and although with Ritschl himself the dualism did not come to such clear and defiant expression as in the case of some of his followers, still it is noticeably present as the presupposition of all the work of his maturer years. Ritschl was impelled, as we have seen, by the desire to conserve for the Christian church the values of the evangelical Protestant faith. He accordingly wished to avoid speculation about the nature of ultimate reality, as being unduly hazardous to faith; he would be dogmatic in religion, and so escape the need of having to verify the utterances of religious faith by bringing them into contact with the scientific world- view through the process of philosophical criticism and construction. He found a ready means of defending this mode of procedure in a distinction already familiar since the days of Schleiermacher the dis- tinction between religious and speculative knowledge. He would make his theology a formulation of religious knowledge, keeping it free from the foreign elements of speculation. Now as a method of getting the hypothesis to be used in the construction of a philosophically veri- fied theology, this would have been an excellent method of procedure, and here lies the strength of the Ritschlian principle; but when used as 70 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY Ritschl used it, as a means of avoiding philosophical verification, it was dualistic, divisive, and self-defeating. For it is evident that to avoid verification is to leave objective validity insufficiently guaranteed. In the presence of counter-propositions of any plausibility, the dogmatic statements come into question; they take their place as mere hypotheses, mere ideas; all becomes subjective and uncertain. Unless this subjec- tivism is relieved, it tends to express itself philosophically in either critical idealism (agnosticism) or subjective idealism the two phi- losophies of doubt. We find that of these two evils Ritschl chose both or at best he kept perpetually oscillating between the two. The question as to whether he was a Kantian or a Lotzian should probably be answered by saying that he was both as well as neither, and something more than either. To begin with, he took over from Lotze the distinction of theo- retical judgments, or judgments of fact, and worth-judgments, judg- ments of value. Science belonged to the former; the faith-judgments of religion, to the latter. This distinction he then employed to support the Kantian rejection of constructive ontological metaphysics. He claimed that revelation may be said to go contrary to reason when by reason is meant a connected view of the world which interprets reality with instruments of knowledge which have no connection with religion. 1 But this philosophical world- view, in so far as it presents itself as a unified view of all reality, betrays a religious impulse, which departs from the disinterested, purely cognitive methods to which philoso- phy ought properly to be confined. 2 In deference to Lotze the term on- tology is retained, but it is interpreted in such a way as makes it simply the analysis of the categories involved in the cognition of a thing; that is, it is defined as meaning the metaphysics which Kant would admit as legitimate, viz., epistemology. 3 But having used Lotze's idea of value- judgment to select the content to be excluded from metaphysical treat- ment, and having used Kant's idea of admissible metaphysics to obviate the possibility of that content being so treated, Ritschl next proceeded to make use of the Lotzian philosophy to get rid of the troublesome Kantian thing-in-itself, out of which constructive ontological meta- physics was so likely to arise. In opposition to the common distinction between the thing-in-itself and its appearance, he maintained that the 1 Justification and Reconciliation (Eng. tr.), p. 24. 2 Ibid., p. 207. 3 Theologie u. Metaphysik, passim. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 71 thing is nothing more than the appearance, and the so-called thing-in- itself is a mere abstraction, the purely formal concept without content. 1 But in doing this he was undoing his own system. He had dis- tinguished God-for-us, with whom religion, and so the value-judgments of religion, and theology, have to deal, from God-in-himself. 2 But if the real thing is the thing-for-us, and the thing-in-itself is a mere abstrac- tion, so must the only real God be God-for-us, and God-in-himself a mere abstraction. But again, God-for-us, unlike the thing-for-us, is not a percept but a concept; if its appearance is its entire reality, instead of God we have but the God-idea. In other words, we are landed in subjective idealism with its implication that the value- judgments of religion have only subjective value. Now it may readily be granted that Ritschl did not intend this, and he did not himself draw this conclusion; but this was the conclusion drawn from his premises by Luthardt, 3 Frank,4 Stahlin, 5 Pfleiderer, 6 and Pfennigsdorf 7 among others; and, as Wendland 8 and Ecke 9 admit, he himself did not make himself clear on this point. And if, as Haring, 10 Traub, 11 and Otto Ritschl 12 rightly urge, it was all the while meant that the religious value-judgments, while subjectively grounded, have objective validity, this involves, when worked out with consistency, a return from Ritschl's version of Lotzianism to the Kantian Ding-an-sich, and through that to some sort of a realistic philosophy which will recognize reality within and beyond immediate human experience. Thus we see how Ritschl's effort to confine systematic theology to dogmatics, by excluding metaphysics and interpreting the distinction between judgments of fact and judgments of value as absolute, led him into a dualism which he sought to escape by fleeing from one unsatis- factory position to another. I Ibid.; cf. E. Pfennigsdorf, Vergleich der dogmatischen Systeme von Lipsius u. Ritschl, p. 10. 3 G. Ecke, Die theologische Schule Albrecht Ritschls, etc., I, 141. 3 Zeitschr. fur kirchliche Wissenschaft und kirchliches Leben (1881), p. 621. 4 Gesch. u. Krit. der neueren TheoL, p. 326. sKant, Lotze and Ritschl, p. 222. 6 Jahrbuchfiirprot. Th. (1889), pp. 186-88. ?0p. cit., p. 12. 8 Albrecht Ritschl u. seine Schiller, p. 51. ' Op. cit., I, 143. 10 Die TheoL u. der Vorwurf der doppelten Wahrheit, p. 27. II Zeitschr. fiir Th. u. Kirche (1894), p. in. " Theologische Litteraturzeitung (1893), S. 645. 72 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY Herrmann, however, stood his ground. His standpoint, perhaps, best illustrates the fact that even apart from shifts in philosophical position, there is in the making absolute of the distinction between value-judgments and theoretical or existential judgments a dualism which is not in the interests of a sane and assured religiousness. According to Herrmann there is in the nature of the case an unbridged gulf between the ideas of metaphysics and those of religion. 1 The only proper point of contact between philosophy and religion is in the process of distinguishing their fields and excluding them each from the other. 2 All attempts at mediation must be renounced. 3 It is a matter of utter indifference to the theologian whether philosophy be idealistic or materialistic, whether it be deistic, pantheistic, theistic, or whatever it may be. 4 It is quite true and proper that where dogmatic theology reigns, inquiry ceases. 5 The subjectivism to which this extreme dualism gave rise is mani- fest throughout Herrmann's work. Religion, he admits, does not deal with universally valid truths. 6 The world of religion is real for persons only in so far as they feel and will it to be so. 7 He claims that if the dualism, which he admits, could be avoided, it would be of advantage only to a wordly, grasping church. 8 The more fully a philosophical God-idea explains the phenomenal world, the less is it suited to satisfy the demands of the heart and life for a Being who transcends phenomenal reality. 9 So Herrmann would be compelled to assert in effect that to know the world as it really is, scientifically and metaphysically, is not a help but a hindrance to a true and moral and religious adjustment to the world, thus denying the primary function of knowledge; or else to admit that religion is after all an illusion It is small wonder that Herrmann's paradoxical position provoked the charge of repeating the old dualism of the head and the heart, 10 and that one critic went so far *Die Metaphysik in der Theologie (1876), p. 18. 2 Die Religion im Verhaltnis zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit (1879), Vor- wort, p. ix. 3 Communion with God (Putnam), p. 354. 4 Die Metaphysik, p. 17; Die Religion, p. in, etc.; see Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion , II, 190. s Faith and Morals (Eng. tr.), p. 10. 6 Zeitschr.fur Th. u. Kirche (1906), p. 233. 7 Die Religion, etc., p. 66. 8 Communion, etc., p. 354. 9 Die Religion, p. 127. 10 Wegener, Jahrbuchfur prot. Th. (1884), p. 226. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 73 as to say that no metaphysics in theology means no religion. 1 When metaphysics is the particular instrument which religion needs in order satisfactorily to conserve its values, to be debarred from seeking meta- physical satisfaction might prove religiously disastrous. In the opening pages of Kaftan's Truth of the Christian Religion we meet with statements which seem to promise an avoidance of this dual- istic subjectivism. He says that the believer may require proof in that he may want to be assured that the Christian truth recognized by him in faith is consistent with what he recognizes elsewhere as truth. Like all real proof, this must consist in considerations which exist for every- one; the proof must be scientific, that is, objective, without regard to will or judgments of value. And finally such a proof is possible. 2 But when the question comes to be asked how such a proof is possible, we are informed that it must not be by pointing out the connection of the reality presented to faith with the reality otherwise discoverable; it must not be by a fusion of apologetics and dogmatics. We must not attempt a proof of the truth of the objects of the Christian faith, but of the truth of the faith itself. 3 It must be shown that the question of a world-view is not a matter of objective, theoretical knowledge at all, but of practical faith; that the Christian idea of the Kingdom of God fulfils the requirements of such a faith, enabling man to realize in prac- tice the highest ethical idealism; that finally it is reasonable to regard this Christian faith as being based upon a divine revelation in history, because only thus does the history of the race come to have unity and meaning. 4 This historical, practical proof is. the sole and sufficient objective proof of the Christian faith. The negative side of Kaftan's theory of apologetics is fully elaborated. The idea that the general truth of the Christian faith must be made good by its content being made an object of scientific knowledge, he declares to be utterly groundless. 5 Moreover a combination of the results of science and of the content of faith is today and forevermore impossible. 6 No direct employment of the results of natural science can be made in the construction of a satisfactory world- view; 7 when the attempt is made it results either in materialism or an intellectual- istic or voluntaristic idealism, 8 never in the spiritual, personal God of ' x Krauss, ibid. (1883), pp. 226 f. 2 Truth of the Christian Religion (Eng. tr.), I, 8-10. 3 Ibid., pp. 14-16. s Ibid., p. 420. * Ibid., pp. 19, 385, 426. 6 Ibid., p. 420. 7 Das Christentum und die Philosophic, p. 19. 8 Dogmatik (3te AufL), p. 109. 74 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY the Christian faith. 1 The only legitimate constructive philosophy, then, is not the science of the World-Ground, but the doctrine of the highest good, such as Christianity itself is. 2 The question as to the Absolute is the question as to the highest value. 3 Any other type of philosophy holds its content as hypothetical, subject to revision, and so must be kept forever separate from faith, which is always inwardly bound and certain through obedience and submission to divine revelation. 4 This keeping separate of faith and philosophy seems, then, to have its ultimate justification for Kaftan in the danger to the content and certainty of Christian belief that comes from allowing them to act upon each other. It has its excuse, however, in the fact that, while the Chris- tian knowledge of God and the scientific knowledge of the world are both spiritual awareness of reality, nevertheless the conditions under which the knowledge comes with existence in the different spheres is very different, and so for this reason it is impossible to order the whole knowledge in a unitary fashion. 5 But in criticism of Kaftan's position here it may be said that the fact that judgments are psychologically different in their origin does not prevent their having to do with the same or closely related subject-matter; and where this is the case, unless the judgments are brought into harmony with each other, one or the other set of judgments is thrown under suspicion. And owing to the prestige of science in the modern mind, when religious judgments seem out of harmony with the scientific world-view, apart from metaphysical mediation both the certainty and the content of vital faith are imperiled- Harnack does not agree with the extreme statement of Sabatier that the intellectual element in dogma is only the symbolical expression of religious experience; on the contrary, he maintains that it has a definite content which reacts or ought to react upon the religious experi- ence itself. 6 Still he holds that it is impossible to give a rational account of nature and history from the standpoint of grace; the doctrines of grace cannot be rationally stated. 7 We are unable to bring our scien- tific knowledge and the postulates of our inner life into the unity of a philosophical view of the world. 8 Christian doctrine is certain only for faith; 9 all the efforts of speculation can produce no certainty. 10 1 Das Christentum, etc., p. 14. 2 Ibid., pp. 5, 26. & Dogmatik (30! Edition) p. 109. 3 Drei akademische Reden (1908), p. 69. 6 Hist, of Dogma (Eng. tr.), I, 22. 4 Das Christentum, etc., pp. 25-26. 7 Ibid., V, 204. 8 The Essence of Christianity (Eng. tr.), p. 151. 9 Hist, of Dogma, VII, 268. * I0 Ibid., p. 21. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 75 Now it must be granted to Harnack that if the speculation is an attempt, by harmonizing with known facts of experience, to make certain that which is in whole or in part unrationalizable, because it is contrary to experience, it cannot be done! Moreover the merely intellectual plausibility of speculation can never produce the vital assurance that grows out of ethico-religious experience. And yet, granted that the content in question does not contradict human experi- ence, and that the religious and moral assurance does exist, it has not been proven that, through the mediation of philosophical criticism and construction, assistance may not be given to faith in the face of the objection that appearances are against her. And indeed, not to give this needed assistance is to that extent to impair the certainty and to imperil the content of faith. Schultz finds a modicum of truth in Tertullian's credo quid absurdum* Argument and analysis do not constitute the way of making evident the truths of religion. 2 The theoretic results of reason are not proper standards by which to measure the truth of religious conviction. 3 Theo- retic knowledge has no right to go beyond the causal connection of individual things in the empirical world. 4 In the sphere of knowledge doubt is a conscientious duty; in the realm of religion it is a moral defect. 5 That this approximates dangerously near to obscurantism must be very evident. If religious doctrines are ever properly to be reconstructed at all, it must be in situations where religious doubt is a "conscientious duty." Moreover, how can we be quite sure, as Schultz claims, that the work of the man Christ Jesus "has for us a truly divine value," unless God was in Christ, willing his volitions, and reconciling the world unto himself? And to attempt to clear up this conception is to enter the field of constructive metaphysics. In Otto Ritschl's statement of Ritschlianism its objectionable features are reduced perhaps to a minimum, and yet it is a question whether he really escapes the "dualism" which he disowns. He says the Chris- tian world-view and science exist side by side without interfering, because science is limited in its sphere to nature and history, and for the Christian the only world-view is his faith. 6 But it may be asked, does not Christian faith make assertions concerning things, persons, and events with which the natural and historical sciences deal? And do not the results of the sciences of nature and history have any bearing upon one's 1 Outlines of Christian Apologetics (Eng. tr.), p. 92. 2 Ibid., pp. i, 82. 3 ibid., p. 2. 4 Ibid., p. 83. s Ibid., pp. 89, 90. 6 Ueber Werturteile, pp. 33, 34. 76 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY general world- view ? And does not the prohibition of the attempt to harmonize our scientific and religious beliefs about the world we live in tend to produce religious uncertainty and finally loss of essential Christian truth ? Reischle, while claiming that as Christians we have in the " thymetic " judgments of faith a knowledge of the depths of God, nevertheless says that we do not know God as the Cause of the World, 1 and that when we speak of him as personal, it must not be supposed that we know the form of the divine existence or intend a theistic explanation of the world. 2 We can never unite in an adequate idea of God the thoughts of transcendence and immanence. 3 The idea of a personal God is essential to hold together the experiences of our dependence upon a power which places us within a community of believers and so leads to our salvation; and yet the personality of God cannot be vindicated on theoretical grounds. 4 The only unification of the thymetic and theoreti- cal judgments consists in their being both included within the life of one and the same individual spirit. 5 But it may be objected that the presence of elements really or apparently discordant within the life of the same person does not obviate, but itself creates, the necessity of a process of harmonization. "A house divided against itself cannot stand." This dualistic feature is a characteristic mark of Ritschlianism. We find it again in Traub, Thikotter, Kattenbusch, Rade, Lobstein, and a host of others. Thikotter insists that the Christian has to judge the world of religious faith to be real, but points out, that if one claims to know the substance of things, it is hard to keep clear of insoluble cos. mological problems. 6 Traub holds that the reality with which faith deals is practically experienceable but not theoretically knowable; hence theology is made scientific, not by the attempt to accredit its content in the presence of secular knowledge of the world, but by being limited to the exposition of the content of the objects of faith. 7 Kattenbusch claims that anything about God or Christ which is not included in the propositions of Christian faith, while not necessarily non-existent, 1 Erkennen Wir, etc., pp. 36, 54. 2 Ibid., p. 67. 3 Ibid., p. 70. 4 Ibid., pp. 67, 71. s Werturteile und Glaubensurteile, pp. 118-20. 6 Jugend erinnerungen einer deutschen Theologen, pp. 217, f. See Ecke (op. cit., PP- 5> S 1 )) who say 3 that here Thikotter represents the genuine Ritschlian position as against even Ritschl himself. 7 Zeitschr. fur Th. u. Kirche (1894), p. Hi; (1903), p. 76. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 77 is non-existent for us; 1 he expresses doubt moreover as to whether Christianity will stand being handled so scientifically as to have its theology subjected to the test of philosophical criticism. 2 Rade is typically Ritschlian in treating theology as a religio-historical discipline simply that and nothing more thus precluding, as Wobbermin points out, 3 all consideration of the question of its ultimate truth. Lobstein regards religious knowledge as being inescapably subjective, and opposes any attempt to show by means of intellectual evidence that it is objectively valid. 4 One of the earliest and most extreme expressions of the Ritschlian dualism, but one which simply accentuated that particular element in the system, was what came to be known as Benderism. Bender, who had been a pupil of Ritschl, and had also been deeply influenced by Feuerbach's doctrine, made bold to affirm that religious ideas are mere products of phantasy for the ends of the spiritual life. 5 The contro- versy to which this doctrine gave rise showed that many regarded Bender's position as representing the real import of Ritschlianism, which was accordingly interpreted as teaching that what is true in one sphere might be false in another, and that the value-judgments are useful illusions. 6 This was, of course, unfair with respect to what Ritschlianism intended to be, but it was its defect that its most prominent feature lent itself so readily to this caricature It is remarkable how closely the doctrine which had been rejected when propounded by the more or less anti-ecclesiastical Feuerbach and Lange and the "secularized" 7 Bender, is approximated by that which found such wide acceptance when set forth with religious feeling and sympathetic imagination by Sabatier. Sabatier says religious knowledge can never pass out of subjectivity. The object of scientific knowledge not the Ding-an-sich, but the phenomenal thing is always 1 Theologische Litteraturzeitung (1882), p. 158. 2 Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl, pp. 75, 76. 3 Theol. u. Met., p. 59. 4 Introduction, etc., p. 152. s Bender, Das Wesen der Religion, pp. 22, 89, 105. See Nippold: Die theologische Einzelschule, II, 150-61. 6 Cf. Stahlin, op. cit., pp. 198, 226, 238; Orr, The Ritschlian Theology, p. 249; Wennagel, La logique des disciples de Ritschl, etc., p. 4; Luthardt, Zeitschrift fur kirchliche Wissenschaft, etc., II, 622-24. 7 Herrmann called Bender a "secularized Kaftan" (Theologische Litteratur- zeitung [1886], IV, 84 ff.; see Nippold, op. cit., p. 159. 78 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY outside the ego; but God, the object of religious knowledge, is immanent in the subject himself. But religious knowlege is not only subjective; it is merely symbolical. It is a mistake to believe that a religious symbol, such as the idea of God, represents God as he really is; the true content of the symbol is entirely subjective. The entire content of religious ideas is metaphorical; when the figurative element is elimi- nated there is nothing left. 1 It is easily seen that when one holding such a point of view passes from the religious to the critical frame of mind, he has no alternative but agnosticism. 2 The criticism of sym- bolism contained in the papal encyclical on Modernism although somewhat naively stated puts its finger upon the weak spot in the system when it asks, "If all the intellectual elements, as they call them, of religion are pure symbols, will not the very name of God or of the divine personality be also a symbol, and if this be admitted, will not the personal God become a matter of doubt and the way be opened to pantheism ?" 3 Nor is it any avoidance of the dualism and consequent doubt involved in such a theory as Sabatier's, when it is said that the two ways of regarding events, the scientific and the religious, meet in the personal life of each believer, and that that constitutes their synthe- sis. 4 As well might any felt contradiction be said to be already over- come, by virtue of its warring elements being experienced in one and the same personal life. But still other extreme and negative developments of this dualistic religious epistemology may be seen in the progress of recent religio- philosophical thought, in which the doctrines of the value- judgment and religious symbolism are determining. Rauwenhoff held that the religious satisfaction of human needs constitutes a practical ground for the belief that under the poetic form of religious symbolism we have some truth, which may be embodied in an intellectually worked-out world- view; and yet, on the other hand, he denies that we have any right to construct the idea of God ex analogia hominis, inasmuch as that would be to transfer to the Infinite the attributes of the finite. 5 Siebeck says that, while we have some speculative knowledge of the absolute World- Ground, a reconciliation of religion and theoretical knowledge is not possible; they belong to different sides of human life. 6 Hoffding claims 1 Outlines, etc., pp. 303-5, 327, 331. Cf. the position of the neo-Friesian school. 3 See infra, 16. 3 The Catholic Mind (1907), p. 393. 4 M6negoz, Publications diver ses sur le fideisme, p. 155. 5 Religionsphilosophie, pp. 427-537. 6 Lehrbuch der Religions philosophic, pp. 203, 219, etc. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 79 that the God-idea has no knowledge-value for the explanation of the world; it is mere poetry and symbolism, valuable for the religious consciousness, but without any guarantee of objective validity. When objectively applied, it is the illegitimate personification of a highest value. On the other hand the ideas of personality and activity cannot be applied to the principle of unity underlying the systems of time, space and the causal series. 1 Thus we see that in so far as one's theology, in which the religious interest was primary, resolves itself into a philosophy of religion, in which the philosophical interest dominates, any epis- temological dualism which there may be in the former becomes onto- logical agnosticism in the latter, and what were the treasured symbols of faith come to be regarded as more or less useful illusions. 1 6. Coming finally to pragmatism, it remains to inquire into the effect of its rejection of metaphysics upon the content and certainty of religious faith. The truth of judgments being tested by their practical utility in serving the interests of life, it will be seen that it is only what was to be expected when pragmatism appears in a considerable variety of forms. When life is interpreted in its lowest terms, as the physical existence of the individual and of the race, and consciousness in all its phases as having value simply as a means of so adjusting the organism to its environment that the life may be prolonged and propagated, then we have an animalistic variety of pragmatism. This type accords well not only with the materialistic interpretation of history but with the crassest utilitarianism in epistemology as well, 2 and in it the whole question of the truth of religion is exhausted by the investigation of its function in man's struggle for physical existence. But when there has been a " transvaluation of values," and life is interpreted in its highest terms as the spiritual development and efficiency of the indi- vidual and society; when, instead of consciousness being regarded as mere means for the promotion of the physical life, the physical life is regarded as simply or chiefly instrumental in the promotion of the conscious life in its spiritual aspects, then we have instead of the animal- istic, a humanistic type of pragmatism. Here the question of truth is the question of the function of judgments in promoting spiritual rather than merely physical interests, the distinctly human instead of the purely animal. The chief question with reference to religion then comes to be not that of its function in man's struggle for bare existence, but the question of its function in man's struggle for a better existence. 1 Philosophy of Religion (Eng. tr.), pp. 87-95, 199-217, etc. 3 See G. A. Tawney, Journal of Philosophy, I, 337. 80 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY This humanistic pragmatism in turn varies according to the interests which are recognized as genuinely human. For example, there may be a positivistic pragmatism, in which the distinctly religious interest is repudiated, the attempt being made to have the social and other interests function in its stead. Or there may be a religious pragmatism in which, along with the social, scientific, aesthetic, and moral interests, the distinctly religious interest is also recognized as genuinely human. In this case, judgments essential to the promotion of the highest type of religious life are equally true with those discharging a similar function for the other interests. But the pragmatism might possibly vary also from what we shall call the atomistic, through the individualistic and socialistic, to the universalistic type. Atomistic pragmatism would recognize as true whatever judgment furthered the impulse or interest of the passing moment. Or, more accurately, it would tend to dispense with the idea of "true "altogether, for by this reckoning lies themselves would be true. Everything would be what it was experienced as at any moment simply that and nothing more. But atomistic pragmatism cannot long maintain itself. Man keeps his intellectual instruments in a mental tool-chest, and he often finds that when he brings forth an old implement it no longer works in the changed situation. "Any old thing that works" is still true, but any old thing that does not work is not true, no matter how sanctified by time it may be. As an instrument it is "put out of busi- ness" by a new invention. Thus the standard of truth comes to be that which stands the test of practice in a prolonged series of similar experi- ences of the individual. This view may be termed individualistic pragmatism; the individual man is the measure of all things, both of truth and of its opposite. A thing is simply what the individual experi- ences it as. Metaphysics is retired in favor of individual psychology, and even the physical sciences have to be reinterpreted from the psy- chological viewpoint. But this is too solipsistic to be long satisfactory. The judgments we make are social products, and their truth must be decided by their experienced value to society. Individualistic gives place to socialistic pragmatism; individual to social psychology. This now is held to obviate the necessity of any further metaphysic of the transcendent. A thing is what it is to the social consciousness, and that exhausts its whole reality. But, strictly interpreted, this would lead to some curious results. For instance, in the days of the undisputed supremacy of the Ptolemaic astronomy the universe actually was geo- centric, but in the days of Copernicus it began to change its funda- CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 8 1 mental constitution, until today it is divided up into solar systems, each of them heliocentric. Again, the evolving world, antedating the appear- ance of conscious forms of life upon the earth, is itself, with all the past, a product of the evolved social consciousness. Thus society is able to do what we used to think God himself could not do, viz., change the past. It is very evident that this merely human social transcendence is not adequate. Social psychology cannot give us the final word as to reality; there must be a metaphysic of all reality, including that of immediate individual and social experience, but recognizing the exist- ence of reality beyond all immediate human experience and framing hypotheses as to the nature and interrelation of all. The test of truth being still its vital function, this type of thought might be termed cosmological or universalistic pragmatism. Now the claim to be made here is that pragmatism must be universalistic and therefore meta- physical, if it is to be distinctively religious instead of purely positivistic. There is a misinterpretation of pragmatic theory somewhat common among novices in the subject, which may be styled pseudo-pragmatism. This assumes that what serves any human interest is serviceable, i.e., true, for every other human interest. Thus whatever is found service- able for religion or morality is assumed to be, without further criticism, true for science, and whatever hypothesis is found serviceable by the physical scientist, for example, is on that account true in the realm of morals and religion. But experience soon shows this type of pragma- tism to be untenable. There occur conflicts between the hypotheses of the sciences and the postulates of the moral and religious consciousness, so keen that in many cases those dominated by one interest repudiate entirely as useless and even injurious (i.e., untrue) the thought- instrument cherished by those in whom some other interest is upper- most. Out of pseudo-pragmatism, then, there are three possible avenues of escape for one who does not wish to abandon the ground of prag- matism. One may do the obvious thing, viz., undertake to reconstruct all of one's ideas so far as is necessary to bring them into harmonious co-operation with each other without impairing their efficiency in their own departments; this would lead to a religious type of humanistic pragmatism, which, for its working out, would require to become what we have called universalistic and so metaphysical. Or, one may do the desperate thing and repudiate one of the warring interests entirely, such as the religious interest on the one hand, or the scientific on the other. If the religious interest is repudiated, either explicitly or vir- tually by the substitution for it of some other, as the social interest, 82 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY and the calling of it religious; then the resultant pragmatism will be at best positivistic; it will the more contentedly try to do with social psychology instead of metaphysics and will be what we have termed socialistic rather than universalistic. Or, finally, one may attempt the impossible, viz., to hold the different life-interests quite separate from each other, so that the judgments serviceable to each interest will be regarded as true for that interest alone, having nothing to do with those true for other interests. This leads to a dualistic epistemology, or as we may term it, dualistic pragmatism. Now, strange as it may appear, it is this impossible position, this dualistic pragmatism, which most out-and-out pragmatists attempt to hold. They shun the obvious metaphysical pathway as too old and common-place; they shrink from the desperate course of repudiating any fundamental human interest (such as the distinctly religious), as being altogether outre, at least in the present stage of the social con- sciousness. Hence they choose the middle ground of dualistic pragma- tism, promising thereby to guarantee sufficiently the certainty and content of religious faith. But this dualistic pragmatism is a position of unstable equilibrium. It marks the determination to prolong indefinitely a state of distressing tension. Even if we grant that Professor James, following Bergson, is to a great extent justified in an attack upon conceptualist logic, 1 yet to abandon the search for rationality is to give up the effort to harmoni- ously adjust the great human life-interests to each other. No theoreti- cal glorification of disharmony will keep men from seeking relief from the friction which arises from having to use ideas to get them out of trouble in religion which get them into trouble in science, and others to get them out of trouble in science which get them into trouble in religion. The result is that those who refuse to take the metaphysical way out inevitably tend to pass from dualistic pragmatism to the posi- tivistic type combined with either subjectivism or agnosticism. In this transition one of the intermediate steps is usually a doctrine of symbolism, somewhat akin to that of De Wette, Sabatier, and Hoff- ding. Various stages of the transition are represented in the recent literature of pragmatism. Thus according to Dr. Irving King our concepts are only functionally valid and do not refer to ontological real- ities. For example, Jesus' promise of the Holy Spirit as a comforter in his place was a practical concept to allay the sorrow of his disciples over his departure, and it was illogical to turn this into a dogma and 1 A Pluralistic Universe, Lectures V-VIII. CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 83 postulate as ontologically real what had functional reality only. It is an unavoidable but perverse peculiarity of the movement of thought to regard as true ontologically what was only true functionally in meet- ing some specific need of life, as for example the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. 1 Similarly, according to Dr. E. S. Ames, the statement of the genesis and development of an idea carries its own indication of the truth of the idea. Thus the idea of God, which is the great working hypothesis of religion, is true because and in so far as it is of value in actual experience; but no one has ever been able to produce any ade- quate answer to the question, Is there an actual objective reality cor- responding to the subjective idea of God, and the question itself has fallen under suspicion. 2 Again, in the words of Professor Foster, "The word God is a symbol to designate the universe in its ideal-achieving capacity. It is the expression of our appreciation of existence, when our feelings are so excited as to assign worth to existence. But all our highest ideas are but figurative expressions. Even the concept of a personal God has symbolic validity only, and the function of a symbol is not to give an exact report concerning the nature of an object, but to express the appreciations of the subject. However, since personality is our highest idea, it must ever be on that account the word which most fittingly symbolizes our experience of the relation of reality to our ideal values." But "it would seem that we are shut up to ontological agnosticism." "The correlate of faith is value and not fact." 3 In these quotations the essential points seem to be that religious ideas are true in religious crises only; they should not be regarded as true of reality permanently, but they may be regarded as symbols by means of which we poetically represent that which transcends knowledge. If this is not to mean psychological positivism and religious agnosticism, in which 1 "The Pragmatic Interpretation of Christian Dogma," Monist, XV, 251, 254-56. Cf. The Development of Religion, passim. No more pertinent criticism of this position can be found than the words of Professor G. B. Foster, "Let any functional psychologist try to act upon the idea of God, no matter how it arose, and at the same time disbelieve in his existence; he will find that no action will follow, if ontological reference be denied to the idea." Am. Journal of Theology, XI, 596. a "Theology from the Standpoint of Functional Psychology," Am. Jour, of TheoL, X, 228-29, 232; cf. The Psychology of Religious Experience, passim. 3 The Function of Religion in Man's Struggle for Existence, pp. 109, no, 181, 198. These quotations from Professor Foster's recent book might perhaps have been intro- duced with equal propriety at the close of the preceding section, in connection with the reference to Sabatier, Hoffding, and other philosophers of religion who have felt the influence of Ritschlianism. 84 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY the certainty and the content of religious faith are both lost, it would seem necessary to call in all the powers not only of Professor James' ''will to believe," but of Dr. Urban's "will to make-believe" as well, according to which religion is essentially "the very human assumption that what is not nevertheless is" 1 But in opposition to all this it should be noted that when ideas are really functioning in life, the individual claims to have valid knowledge of objective reality. When one is eating he is dealing with an objective reality, food, not with sensations and ideas. So when one is religious he is dealing, not with the God-idea, but with God. He theologizes, ontologizes, but does not in that situation psychologize. The moment he can no longer regard God as Object to which he adjusts himself, that moment the God-idea ceases to exercise its function in the religious life; it ceases to control his action. When one has faith, he theologizes; his consciousness is ontological in its method of procedure. But there is the time of subjectivity in the religious life, as in other phases of life. This comes when the ideas which have functioned satisfactorily no longer do so completely in the changed situation. Attention is immediately turned from the object to the instrument of adjustment, viz., the idea. The object has disintegrated into its ele- ments of existence and idea, both now regarded psychologically because subjectively, as sensation and hypothesis. In the moment of faith and action we ontologize; in the moment of doubt we cease from our imme- diately practical activity and psychologize. The moment of faith is the ontological moment; the moment of doubt is the psychological moment. At present in religion it is the psychological moment, the moment of uncertainty and reconstruction, and that for two reasons. In the first place, many of the religious ideas of the past do not function satisfac- torily in the present situation; and secondly, an insight into the func- tional criterion of truth has led many to say that what did function serviceably in the past was then true, but it is now true no longer. This casts doubt upon even what is functioning satisfactorily at present, for it is assumed that it too will cease to function and will be replaced by something else. This makes the subjective moment chronic and leads to a scepticism which the pragmatic interpretation of truth only thinly veils. It would be better to speak of degrees of truth, or of approxi- mation to truth, and to regard the changes as from less adequate to more adequate, from less true to truer; in short, as an evolution, not a mere exchange. 1 International Journal of Ethics, XIX, 212-13, 2 3 I - CONSEQUENCES TO RELIGION OF THE REACTION 85 The religious unsatisfactoriness of the recent attempts to apply functional psychology to theology seems to be due to the making of the subjective moment, the moment of doubt, normative and final, instead of making it what it is in other departments of life, viz., the moment or stage of reconstruction, and when once the reconstruction is completed, going on to use the reconstructed idea in the moment of faith, of life, of activity, i.e., the moment of theology and ontology. It is a mistake to take the moment of doubt, in which consciousness becomes subjective, and attention is turned upon the idea in its psy- chological existence, as final and normative; it should rather be regarded as merely transitional and therefore transient and to be tran- scended. If the psychology of religion, instead of being an aid in theo- logical reconstruction, becomes a substitute for theology, it will be an indication that religion is dead. Instead of performing a much needed operation upon the living body of theology, it will be shut up to a dis- section of the corpse. But theistic religion is not dead yet. Nor is it so inert and ineffec- tive a phenomenon as that its ideas function by way of "self-discharge" only. As steam in the engine functions not primarily in being dis- charged, but in driving the piston to and fro in the cylinder, and so moving the wheels of mechanical progress, so it is with the function of theistic religion and the ideas which determine it. Control, not discharge, is the function of primary importance. But that which is merely subjective and under suspicion can never be controlling. There is need of passing from the psychological to the ontological moment. A psy- chology of the perception of our food will not satisfy our hunger, even if it should temporarily destroy our appetite. Our food is just as much' (and just as little) a mental construction as our God. Yet even Mrs. Eddy has said that it would be foolish for us yet to try to do without eating. Functional psychologists should recognize that it is foolish for us yet, to say the least, to try to do without an active response to an objectively real, ontologically existent God. We might perhaps survive in the struggle for existence, but we could not succeed in the struggle for a better existence as we otherwise might. And doubtless the "yet" may be eliminated both with regard to eating and to the religious life. This will mean then that theology, instead of fading away into mere psychology of religion, must boldly take up the ontological-metaphysical task. Theology must, if religion is not to suffer seriously, under- take to build into the very fiber of its tissues a philosophy of reality. It must pass, not into a psychological philosophy of religion, valuable 86 REACTION AGAINST METAPHYSICS IN THEOLOGY as that is, but into an ontological philosophy of God. To resolve the expression of faith into mere poesy, and then to invite the distressed religious soul to continue to utilize it as "useful illusion" is likely to appeal to him as adding insult to injury. He may play with religious ideas under the guidance of the aesthetic interest, but he cannot work with them in the serious business of life. But once one has stepped fairly into the field of religious psychology, there is only one way out of this state of subjectivism and distressing doubt, and that opens immediately into ontology and metaphysical theology. Our conclusion, then, is that the reaction against metaphysics in theology, while originally intended, in the great majority of cases, as a means of conserving the certainty and content of religious faith, and while finding its relative justification in the degree in which it effects this conservation, has necessarily tended toward a dualistic religious episte- mology which is a serious menace to both the certainty and the content which the reaction was designed to conserve. When, through the advances of the various sciences, the objects of religion as previously conceived are called in question, readjustment to the total religious situation through the reconstruction of religious ideas becomes impera- tive at the demand of both religion and science. This will mean the introduction of metaphysical processes into theological thought. The only alternative is to leave religious ideas under suspicion, and conse- quently the objects of religion problematic at best. And ultimately this destruction of religious certainty, if uninterrupted, must eventuate in the total loss of the content of religious faith. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY BERKELEY Return to desk from which borrowed. This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. DEC 7 1947 5 -5*48 LD 21-100m-9,'47(A5702sl6)476 2. Ms