Appendix Delta: The Leiden Intellectual Line Connecting brothers of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell University, tracing their fraternal Big Brother/Little Brother line to tri-Founder John Andrew Rea (1869)
John Andrew Rea, tri-founder of Phi Kappa Psi at Cornell . . . . . . was advised by Andrew Dickson White, . . . Maurice caroused at Heidelberg President of Cornell . . . with his cousin Willem Lodewijk . . .
. . . . who was lectured by, and referred Jack . . . both men studied under theologian David Rea to, Washington Irving . . . Pareus . .
. . . who was inspired by von Schiller ...... who studied under Zacharias Ursinus, the Reformer . . .
. . . Schiller, in turn, was an intellectual soul . . . Zach was mentored by Philipp mate of Goethe . . . Melanchthon, room mate of the monk Martin Luther . .
. . . who was influence by Herder ...... Phil’s primary mentor was his uncle, Johann Reuchlin ...... Herder, in turn, was influenced by Hamann ...... Johann was tutored by Johann Heynlin . . .
. . . Hamann, in turn, was influenced by . . . Heynlin was a theologian of the realist Coenraad van Beuningan, Irving now being school founded by William of Champeaux . . . tied to Diederich Knickerbocker’s world . . .
. . . van Beuningan studied under Gerhard . . . Bill was mentored by Anselm of Laon . . . Vossius...... Gerhard, in turn, was friend and confidant . . . who found inspiration in Anselm of of Hugo Grotius . . . Canterbury . . . . . . Hugo Grotius was friend and ally of Johan . . . Anselm being instructed by the great van Oldenbarnevelt in the Dutch revolt. . . Lafranc . . .
. . . Johan was in league with Maurice, until the . . . who studied at the University of Pavia, went their separate ways . . . founded in 725 A.D. by king Lothar the Lombard . . .
Below we present short biographies of the Leiden intellectual line of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell University.
“Who defends the House.”
This intellectual line is dedicated to the memory of brother
Francis R. “Frank” Properzi
Pledge Class of 1944 and Cornell Class of 1946,
who dropped the “zi” in his last name as an incoming Freshman to pass as a descendant of northern European stock at a time when the Ivy League was still known to place quotas on the admission of students adhering to the Roman rite.
Frank, we have lots of Italian-Americans now, buddy, and Catholics, too.
2
We begin with John “Jack” Andrew Rea, Cornell Class of 1869 and one of the three founders of the New York Alpha Chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell University.
Jack only spent a year at Cornell, transferring in the summer before his Senior course of studies. Much of that year he spent founding the fraternity, and its predecessor, the Irving Literary Society. Jack was one (1) of nine (9) transfer students who were in the first Class of Cornellians. Three (3) of those nine (9) were the founders of Phi Kappa Psi. All three had Faculty advisors. Jack was assigned Andrew Dickson White, the first President of Cornell;
Mo Buchwalter was assigned visiting professor Goldwin Smith, the former Regis Professor of Modern History at Oxford University; and Joe Foraker was assigned visiting professor Theodore Dwight. These three (3) relationships, scholar-to-scholar in the Cornell tradition, form the tap root of the intellectual legacy within New York Alpha.
The founding of the Irving Literary Society was the common project of President White and his protégé Jack Rea; Jack then used the Irving as the vehicle to rush that first immortal Pledge Class of 1869, Phi Kappa Psi, the New York Alpha. The intellectual legacy of this relationship includes both the influences on Andrew Dickson White as a doctoral student (see Appendix Alpha and Gamma) and the role model proffered to Jack Rea by the Cornell president (this Appendix and Appendix Beta).
3 Andrew Dickson White was Faculty Advisor to John Andrew Rea (1869), founder of New York Alpha;
Andy White was lectured by, and looked to, author Washington Irving as one source of inspiration for the new Irving Literary Society, later to become the New York Alpha Chapter of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity at Cornell:
Washington Irving was influenced by the writing and works of Johann von Schiller, below.
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (Marbach am Neckar, November 10, 1759 – May 9, 1805 in Weimar) was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and dramatist. During the last several years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang Goethe. He and Goethe greatly discussed issues concerning aesthetics, and Schiller encouraged Goethe to finish works he left merely as sketches; this thereby University of Jena gave way to a period now referred to as Weimar Classicism.
They also worked together on Die Xenien (The Xenies), a collection of short but harshly satiric poems in which both Schiller and Goethe verbally attacked those persons they perceived to be enemies of their aesthetic agenda.
Schiller was born in Marbach, Württemberg (located at the river Neckar in southwest Germany, north of Stuttgart, the region of Swabia), as the only son, besides ten sisters, of military doctor Johann Kaspar Schiller (1733-1796), and Elisabeth Dorothea Kodweiß (1732-1802). On February 22, 1790, he married Charlotte von Lengefeld (1766-1826). Four children were born between 1793 and 1804, the sons Karl and Ernst, and the daughters Luise and Emilie. The grandchild of Emilie, Baron Alexander of Gleichen-Rußwurm, died in 1947 at Baden-Baden, Germany, as the last living descendant of Schiller.
His father was away in the Seven Years' War when Friedrich was born. He was named after Frederick II of Prussia (Friedrich is German for Frederick), the king of the country his father was fighting, Prussia, but he was called Fritz by nearly everyone. Caspar Schiller was rarely home at the time, which was hard
4 on the mother, but he did manage to visit the family once in a while and the mother and the children also visited him where he happened to be stationed at the time occasionally. In 1763, the war ended. Schiller's father became a recruiting officer and was stationed in Schwäbisch Gmünd. The family moved with him, of course; but since the cost of living especially the rent soon turned out to be too expensive, the family moved to nearby Lorch, which was at the time still a fairly small village.
Although the family was happy in Lorch, the father found his work unsatisfying. He did, however, take Friedrich Schiller with him occasionally. In Lorch Schiller received his primary education, but the schoolmaster was lazy, so the quality of the lessons was fairly bad; therefore, Friedrich regularly cut class with his older sister. Because his parents wanted Schiller to become a pastor himself, they had the pastor of the village instruct the boy in Latin and Greek. The man was a good teacher, which led Schiller to name the cleric in Die Räuber after Pastor Moser. Schiller was excited by the idea of becoming a clericalist and often put on black robes and pretended to preach.
In 1766, the family left Lorch for the Duke's seat, Ludwigsburg. Schiller's father had not been paid for three years and the family had been living on their savings, but could no longer afford to do so. So Kaspar Schiller had himself relocated to the garrison in Ludwigsburg. The move was not easy for Friedrich, since Lorch had been a warm and comforting home through out his childhood.
He came to the attention of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg. He entered the Karlsschule Stuttgart (an elite, extremely strict, military academy founded by Duke Karl Eugen), in 1773, where he eventually studied medicine. During most of his short life, he suffered from illnesses that he tried to cure himself.
While at the Karlsschule, Schiller read Rousseau and Goethe and discussed Classical ideals with his classmates. At school, he wrote his first play, Die Räuber (The Robbers), which dramatizes the conflict between two aristocratic brothers: the elder, Karl Moor, leads a group of rebellious students into the Bohemian forest where they become Robin Hood-like bandits, while Franz Moor, the younger brother schemes to inherit his father's considerable estate. The play's critique of social corruption and its affirmation of proto- revolutionary republican ideals astounded the original audience, and made Schiller an overnight sensation. Later, Schiller would be made an honorary member of the French Republic because of this play.
In 1780, he obtained a post as regimental doctor in Stuttgart, a job he disliked.
Following the remarkable performance of Die Räuber in Mannheim, in 1781, he was arrested and forbidden by Karl Eugen himself from publishing any further works. He fled Stuttgart, in 1783, coming via Leipzig and Dresden to
5 Weimar, in 1787. In 1789, he was appointed professor of History and Philosophy in Jena, where he wrote only historical works. He returned to Weimar, in 1799, where Goethe convinced him to return to playwriting. He and Goethe founded the Weimar Theater which became the leading theater in Germany, leading to a dramatic renaissance. He remained in Weimar, Saxe-Weimar until his death at 45 from tuberculosis.
Some Freemasons speculate that Schiller was a Freemason, but this has not been proven.
In 1787, in his tenth letter about Don Carlos Schiller wrote:
“I am neither Illuminati nor Mason, but if the fraternization has a moral purpose in common with one another, and if this purpose for the human society is the most important, ...”
In a letter from 1829, two Freemasons from Rudolstadt complain about the dissolving of their Lodge Günther zum stehenden Löwen that was honoured by the initiation of Schiller. According to Schiller's great-grandson Alexander von Gleichen-Rußwurm, Schiller was brought to the Lodge by Wilhelm Heinrich Karl von Gleichen-Rußwurm, but no membership document exists.
Schiller wrote many philosophical papers on ethics and aesthetics. He synthesized the thought of Immanuel Kant with the thought of Karl Leonhard Reinhold. He developed the concept of the Schöne Seele (beautiful soul), a human being whose emotions have been educated by his reason, so that Pflicht und Neigung (duty and inclination) are no longer in conflict with one another; thus "beauty," for Schiller, is not merely a sensual experience, but a moral one as well: the Good is the Beautiful. His philosophical work was also particularly concerned with the question of human freedom, a preoccupation which also guided his historical researches, such as The Thirty Years War and The Revolt of the Netherlands, and then found its way as well into his dramas (the "Wallenstein" trilogy concerns the Thirty Years War, while "Don Carlos" addresses the revolt of the Netherlands against Spain.) Schiller wrote two important essays on the question of the Sublime (das Erhabene), entitled "Vom Erhabenen" and "Über das Erhabene"; these essays address one aspect of human freedom as the ability to defy one's animal instincts, such as the drive for self-preservation, as in the case of someone who willingly dies for a beautiful idea.
Schiller is considered by most Germans to be Germany's most important classical playwright. Critics like F.J. Lamport and Eric Auerbach have noted his innovative use of dramatic structure and his creation of new forms, such as the melodrama and the bourgeois tragedy. What follows is a brief, chronological description of the plays.
6 The Robbers (Die Räuber): The language of The Robbers is highly emotional and the depiction of physical violence in the play marks it as a quintessential work of Germany's Romantic 'Storm and Stress' movement. The Robbers is considered by critics like Peter Brooks to be the first European melodrama. The play pits two brothers against each other in alternating scenes, as one quests for money and power, while the other attempts to create a revolutionary anarchy in the Bohemian Forest. The play strongly criticises the hypocrisies of class and religion and the economic inequities of German society; it also conducts a complicated inquiry into the nature of evil. Fiesco (Die Verschwörung des Fiesco zu Genua): Intrigue and Love (Kabale und Liebe): The aristocratic Ferdinand von Walter wishes to marry Luisa Miller, the bourgeois daughter of the city's music instructor. Court politics involving the duke's beautiful but conniving mistress, Lady Milford and Ferdinand's ruthless father create a disastrous situation reminiscent of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Schiller develops his criticisms of absolutism and bourgeois hypocrisy in this bourgeois tragedy. Act 2, Scene 2 is an anti-British parody that depicts a bloody firing-squad masacre, in which young Germans who refused to join the Hessian Army to squash the American Revolutionary Army are fired upon. Giuseppe Verdi's opera Luisa Miller is based on this play. Don Carlos: This play marks Schiller's entrée into historical drama. Very loosely based on the events surrounding the real Don Carlos of Spain, Schiller's Don Carlos is another republican figure--he attempts to free Flanders from the despotic grip of his father, King Phillip. The Marquis Posa's famous speech to the king proclaims Schiller's belief in personal freedom and democracy. The Wallenstein Trilogy: These plays follow the fortunes of the treacherous commander Albrecht von Wallenstein during the Thirty Years' War. Mary Stuart (Maria Stuart): This "revisionist" history of the Scottish queen who was Elizabeth I's rival makes of Mary Stuart a tragic heroine, misunderstood, and used by ruthless politicians, including and especially, Elizabeth herself. The Maid of Orleans (Die Jungfrau von Orleans): The Bride of Messina (Die Braut von Messina): William Tell (Wilhelm Tell): Demetrius (unfinished):
A pivotal work by Schiller was On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a series of Letters, (Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen) which was inspired by the great disenchantment Schiller felt about the French Revolution, its degeneration into violence and the failure of
7 successive governments to put its ideals into practice. Schiller wrote that "a great moment has found a little people," and wrote the Letters as a philosophical inquiry into what had gone wrong, and how to prevent such tragedies in the future. In the Letters he asserts that it is possible to elevate the moral character of a people, by first touching their souls with beauty, an idea that is also found in his poem Die Künstler (The Artists): "Only through Beauty's morning-gate, dost thou penetrate the land of knowledge."
On the philosophical side, Letters put forth the notion of der sinnliche Trieb / Sinnestrieb ("the sensuous drive") and Formtrieb ("the formal drive"). In a comment to Immanuel Kant's philosophy, Schiller transcends the dualism between Form and Sinn, with the notion of Spieltrieb ("the play drive") derived from, as are a number of other terms, Kant's The Critique of the Faculty of Judgment. The conflict between man's material, sensuous nature, and his capacity for reason (Formtrieb being the drive to impose conceptual and moral order on the world), Schiller resolves with the happy union of Form and Sinn, the "play drive," which for him is synonymous with artistic beauty, or "living form." On the basis of Spieltrieb, Schiller sketches in Letters a future ideal state (an eutopia), where everyone will be content, and everything will be beautiful, thanks to the free play of Spieltrieb. Schiller's focus on the dialectical interplay between Form and Sinn has inspired a wide range of succeeding aesthetic philosophical theory.
For his achievements, Schiller was ennobled, in 1802, by the Duke of Weimar. His name changed from Johann Christoph Friedrich Schiller to Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller.
Quotations
"Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." — (Talbot in) Maid of Orleans "The voice of the majority is no proof of justice." "Deeper meaning resides in the fairy tales told to me in my childhood than in any truth that is taught in life." "Eine Grenze hat die Tyrannenmacht", which literally means "A tyrant's power has a limit" - — Wilhelm Tell "It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons." Musical settings of Schiller's poems and stage plays
Ludwig van Beethoven said that a great poem is more difficult to set to music than a merely good one because the composer must improve upon the poem. In that regard, he said that Schiller's poems were greater than those of Goethe, and perhaps that is why there are relatively few famous musical settings of Schiller's poems. Two notable exceptions are Beethoven's setting of Ode an
8 die Freude (Ode to the Happiness) in the final movement of the Ninth Symphony), and the choral setting of Nänie by Johannes Brahms. In addition, several poems were set by Franz Schubert in lieder, mostly for voice and piano.
Also, Giuseppe Verdi admired Schiller greatly and adapted several of his stage plays for his operas: I masnadieri is based on Die Räuber; Giovanna d'Arco, on Die Jungfrau von Orleans; Luisa Miller, on Kabale und Liebe; Don Carlos on the play of the same title. Donizetti's Maria Stuarda is based on Maria Stuart, and Rossini's Guillaume Tell is an adaptation of Wilhelm Tell.
9 New York Alpha’s intellectual Schiller, above, in turn, was close friends with Johann von Goethe, below.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German writer. George Eliot called him "Germany's greatest man of letters... and the last true polymath to walk the earth." Goethe's works span the fields of poetry, drama, literature, theology, humanism, science and painting. Goethe's magnum opus, lauded as one of the peaks of world literature, is the two-part dramatic poem Faust. Goethe's other well- known literary works include his numerous poems, the Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and the epistolary novel The Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe was one of the key figures of German literature and the movement of Weimar Classicism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; this movement coincides with Enlightenment, Sentimentality ("Empfindsamkeit"), Sturm und Drang, and Romanticism. University of Leipzig
The author of the scientific text Theory of Colours, he influenced Darwin with his focus on plant morphology. Goethe was a German poet, novelist, dramatist, theorist, painter, natural scientist and long-serving Privy Councilor ("Geheimrat") of the duchy of Weimar. He was born Johann Wolfgang Goethe; in 1782 he was ennobled, becoming von Goethe.
Goethe is also the originator of the concept of Weltliteratur ("world literature"), having taken great interest in the literatures of England, France, Italy, classical Greece, Persia, Arabic literature, amongst others. His influence on German philosophy is virtually immeasurable, having major impact especially on the generation of Hegel and Schelling, although Goethe himself expressly and decidedly refrained from practicing philosophy in the rarefied sense.
Goethe was one of the key figures of German literature, with a career spanning Enlightenment ("Aufklärung"), Sentimentality ("Empfindsamkeit"), Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism and Romanticism. His scientific ideas influenced
10 Darwin with his focus on plant morphology. Goethe's influence spread across Europe, and for the next century his works were a primary source of inspiration in music, drama, poetry and philosophy. Goethe is widely considered to be one of the most important thinkers in Western culture and is generally acknowledged as the most important writer in the German language. Early in his career, however, he wondered whether painting might not be his true vocation; late in his life, he expressed the expectation that he would ultimately be remembered above all for his work in optics
Goethe's father, Johann Caspar Goethe (Frankfurt-am-Main, Hessen, 29 July 1710 – Frankfurt-am-Main, Hessen, 25 May 1782), lived with his family in a large house in Frankfurt am Main, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. Goethe's mother, Catharina Elisabeth Textor (Frankfurt-am-Main, Hessen, 19 February 1731 – Frankfurt-am-Main, Hessen, 15 September 1808), the daughter of the Mayor of Frankfurt Johann Wolfgang Textor (Frankfurt-am-Main, Hessen, 11 December 1693 – Frankfurt-am-Main, Hessen, 6 February 1771) and wife (married at Wetzlar, 2 February 1726) Anna Margaretha Lindheimer (Wetzlar, 23 July 1711 – Frankfurt-am-Main, Hessen, 18 April 1783, a descendant of Lucas Cranach the Elder and Henry III, Landgrave of Hesse-Marburg), married 38-year- old Johann Caspar when she was only 17 at Frankfurt am Main on 20 August 1748. All their children, except for Goethe and his sister, Cornelia Friderike Christiana, who was born in 1750, died at an early age.
Johann Caspar and private teachers gave Goethe lessons in all common subjects, especially languages (Latin, Greek, French and English). Goethe also received lessons in dancing, riding and fencing. He had a persistent dislike of the church, characterizing its history as a "hotchpotch of mistakes and violence" (Mischmasch von Irrtum und Gewalt). His great passion was drawing. Goethe quickly became interested in literature; Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Homer were among his early favourites. He had a lively devotion to theatre as well and was greatly fascinated by puppet shows that were annually arranged in his home; a familiar theme in Wilhelm Meister.
Goethe studied law at the University of Leipzig from 1765 to 1768. Learning age-old judicial rules by heart was something he strongly detested. He preferred to attend the poetry lessons of Christian Fürchtegott Gellert. In Leipzig, Goethe fell in love with Käthchen Schönkopf and wrote cheerful verses about her in the Rococo genre. In 1770, he anonymously released Annette, his first collection of poems. His uncritical admiration for many contemporary poets vanished as he became interested in Lessing and Wieland. Already at this time, Goethe wrote a good deal, but he threw away nearly all of these works, except for the comedy Die Mitschuldigen. The restaurant Auerbachs Keller and its legend of Faust's 1525 barrel ride impressed him so much that Auerbachs Keller became the only real place in his closet drama Faust Part One. Because his studies did not progress, Goethe was forced to return to Frankfurt at the close of August 1768.
11 In Frankfurt, Goethe became severely ill. During the next year and a half which followed, because of several relapses, the relationship with his father worsened. During convalescence, Goethe was nursed by his mother and sister. Bored in bed, he wrote an impudent crime comedy. In April 1770, his father lost his patience; Goethe left Frankfurt in order to finish his studies in Strasbourg.
In Alsace, Goethe blossomed. No other landscape has he described as affectionately as the warm, wide Rhine area. In Strasbourg, Goethe met Johann Gottfried Herder, who happened to be in town on the occasion of an eye operation. The two became close friends, and crucially to Goethe's intellectual development, it was Herder who kindled his interest in Shakespeare, Ossian and in the notion of Volkspoesie (folk poetry). On a trip to the village Sesenheim, Goethe fell in love with Friederike Brion, but, after a couple of weeks, terminated the relationship. Several of his poems, like Willkommen und Abschied, Sesenheimer Lieder and Heideröslein, originate from this time.
Despite being based on his own ideas, his legal thesis was published uncensored. Shortly after, he was offered a career in the French government. Goethe rejected: he did not want to commit himself, but to remain an "original genius".
At the end of August 1771, Goethe was certified as a licensee in Frankfurt. He wanted to make the jurisdiction progressively more humane. In his first cases, he proceeded too vigorously, was reprimanded and lost the position. This prematurely terminated his career as a lawyer after only a few months. At this time, Goethe was acquainted with the court of Darmstadt, where his inventiveness was praised. From this milieu came Johann Georg Schlosser (who was later to become his brother-in-law) and Johann Heinrich Merck. Goethe also pursued literary plans again; this time, his father did not have anything against it, and even helped. Goethe obtained a copy of the biography of a noble highayman from the Peasants' War. In a couple of weeks the biography was reworked into a colourful drama. The work, called Götz von Berlichingen, went directly to the heart of his contemporaries.
Goethe could not subsist on being one of the editors of a literary periodical (published by Schlosser and Merck). In May 1772, he once more began the practice of law at Wetzlar. At the invitation of Carl August, Grand Duke of Saxe- Weimar-Eisenach in 1775, Goethe went to live in Weimar where he held a succession of political offices; becoming the Duke's chief adviser.
He was ennobled in 1782. His journey to the Italian peninsula from 1786 to 1788 was of great significance for his later æsthetical and philosophical development, as was his admission in 1782 that he was "a decided non- Christian". His diaries of this period form the basis of the non-fiction Italian Journey. In late 1792, Goethe took part in the battle of Valmy against revolutionary France, assisting Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar during the
12 failed invasion of France. Again during the Siege of Mainz he assisted Carl August as a military observer. In 1794 Friedrich Schiller wrote to Goethe offering friendship, which lasted until the former's death in 1805; they had previously had a wary acquaintance since 1788. In 1806, he married Christiane Vulpius. By 1820, he was on amiable terms with Kaspar Maria von Sternberg. Post-1793, Goethe devoted his endeavour principally to literature. In 1832, after a life of vast productivity, Goethe died at Weimar. He is buried in the Ducal Vault at Weimar's Historical Cemetery.
In 1806, Goethe was living in Weimar with his mistress Christiane Vulpius, the sister of Christian A. Vulpius, and their son Karl August. On October 13, Napoleon's army invaded the town. The French "spoon guards", the least- disciplined soldiers, occupied Goethe's house.
The 'spoon guards' had broken in, they had drunk wine, made a great uproar and called for the master of the house. Goethe's secretary Riemer reports: 'Although already undressed and wearing only his wide nightgown … he descended the stairs towards them and inquired what they wanted from him … . His dignified figure, commanding respect, and his spiritual mien seemed to impress even them.' But it was not to last long. Late at night they burst into his bedroom with drawn bayonets. Goethe was petrified, Christiane raised a lot of noise and even tangled with them, other people who had taken refuge in Goethe's house rushed in, and so the marauders eventually withdrew again. It was Christiane who commanded and organized the defense of the house on the Frauenplan. The barricading of the kitchen and the cellar against the wild pillaging soldiery was her work. Goethe noted in his diary: "Fires, rapine, a frightful night … Preservation of the house through steadfastness and luck." The luck was Goethe's, the steadfastness was displayed by Christiane.
The next day, Goethe legitimized their relationship by marrying Christiane in a quiet marriage service at the court chapel. Christiane Vulpius and Goethe produced a son, Karl August von Goethe (25 December 1789 – 28 October 1830), and whose wife, Ottilie von Pogwisch (31 October 1796 – 26 October 1872), cared for Goethe until he died in 1832. They had three children: Walther, Freiherr von Goethe (9 April 1818 – 15 April 1885), Wolfgang, Freiherr von Goethe (18 September 1820 – 20 January 1883) and Alma von Goethe (29 October 1827 – 29 September 1844).
The most important of Goethe's works produced before he went to Weimar were his tragedy Götz von Berlichingen (1773), which was the first work to bring him recognition, and the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), which gained him enormous fame as a writer in the Sturm und Drang period which marked the early phase of Romanticism - indeed the book is often considered to be the "spark" which ignited the movement, and can arguably be called the world's first "best-seller". (For the entirety of his life this was the work with which the vast majority of Goethe's contemporaries associated him.) During
13 the years at Weimar before he met Schiller he began Wilhelm Meister, wrote the dramas Iphigenie auf Tauris (Iphigenia in Tauris), Egmont, Torquato Tasso, and the fable Reineke Fuchs.
To the period of his friendship with Schiller belong the continuation of Wilhelm Meister, the idyll of Hermann and Dorothea, and the Roman Elegies. In the last period, between Schiller's death, in 1805, and his own, appeared Faust, Elective Affinities, his pseudo-autobiographical Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From my Life: Poetry and Truth), his Italian Journey, much scientific work, and a series of treatises on German art. His writings were immediately influential in literary and artistic circles.
Although his literary work has attracted the greatest amount of interest, Goethe was also keenly involved in studies of natural science. He wrote several works on plant morphology, and colour theory.
With his focus on morphology he influenced Darwin. His studies led him to independently discover the human intermaxillary bone in 1784, which Broussonet (1779) and Vicq d'Azyr (1780) had identified several years earlier. In 1790, he published his Metamorphosis of Plants.
Light spectrum, from Theory of Colours – Goethe observed that with a prism, colour arises at the edges, and the spectrum occurs where these coloured edges overlap.
During his Italian journey, Goethe formulated a theory of plant metamorphosis in which the archetypal form of the plant is to be found in the leaf - he writes, "from top to bottom a plant is all leaf, united so inseparably with the future bud that one cannot be imagined without the other.".
In 1810, Goethe published his Theory of Colours, which he considered his most important work. In it, he (contentiously) characterized colour as arising from the dynamic interplay of darkness and light. After being translated into English by Charles Eastlake in 1840, this theory became widely adopted by the art world, most notably J. M. W. Turner (Bockemuhl, 1991. It also inspired the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, to write his Remarks on Colour.
Goethe outlines his method in the essay, The experiment as mediator between subject and object (1772). In the Kurschner edition of Goethe's works, the science editor, Rudolf Steiner, presents Goethe's approach to science as phenomenological. Steiner elaborated on this in the books The Theory of Knowledge Implicit in Goethe's World-Conception and Goethe's World View, in which he emphasizes the need of the perceiving organ of intuition in order to grasp Goethe's biological archetype (i.e. The Typus).
14 The following annotated citation of principal works may explain the gravity and impact of Goethe's corpus upon Modernity:
The short epistolary novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, or The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, recounts an unhappy romantic infatuation that ends in suicide. Goethe admitted that he "shot his hero to save himself": a reference to Goethe's own near-suicidal obsession with a young woman during this period, an obsession he quelled through the writing process. The novel remains in print in dozens of languages and its influence is undeniable; its central hero, an obsessive figure driven to despair and destruction by his unrequited love for the young Lotte, has become a pervasive literary archetype. The fact that Werther ends with the protagonist's suicide and funeral — a funeral which "no clergyman attended" — made the book deeply controversial upon its (anonymous) publication, for on the face of it, it appeared to condone and glorify suicide. Suicide was considered sinful by Christian doctrine: suicides were denied Christian burial with the bodies often mistreated and dishonoured in various ways; in corollary, the deceased's property and possessions were often confiscated by the Church. Epistolary novels were common during this time, letter-writing being a primary mode of communication. What set Goethe's book apart from other such novels was its expression of unbridled longing for a joy beyond possibility, its sense of defiant rebellion against authority, and of principal importance, its total subjectivity: qualities that trailblazed the Romantic movement.
The next work, his epic closet drama Faust, was to be completed in stages, and only published in its entirety after his death. The first part was published in 1808 and created a sensation. The first operatic version, by Spohr, appeared in 1814, and was subsequently the inspiration for operas and oratorios by Schumann, Gounod, Boito, Busoni, and Schnittke as well as symphonic works by Liszt, Wagner, and Mahler. Faust became the ur-myth of many figures in the 19th century. Later, a facet of its plot, i.e., of selling one's soul to the devil for power over the physical world, took on increasing literary importance and became a view of the victory of technology and of industrialism, along with its dubious human expenses. In 1919, the Goetheanum staged the world premiere of a complete production of Faust. On occasion, the play is still staged in Germany and other parts around the world.
Goethe's poetic work served as a model for an entire movement in German poetry termed Innerlichkeit ("introversion") and represented by, for example, Heine. Goethe's words inspired a number of compositions by, among others, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Rammstein and Wolf. Perhaps the single most influential piece is "Mignon's Song" which opens with one of the most famous lines in German poetry, an allusion to Italy: "Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?" ("Do you know the land where the lemons bloom?").
15 He is also widely quoted. Epigrams such as "Against criticism a man can neither protest nor defend himself; he must act in spite of it, and then it will gradually yield to him", "Divide and rule, a sound motto; unite and lead, a better one", and "Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must", are still in usage or are often paraphrased. Lines from Faust, such as "Das also war des Pudels Kern", "Das ist der Weisheit letzter Schluss", or "Grau ist alle Theorie" have entered everyday German usage. Although a success of less tasteful appeal, the famous line from the drama Götz von Berlichingen ("Er kann mich im Arsche lecken": "He can lick my arse") has become a vulgar idiom in many languages, and shows Goethe's deep cultural impact extending across social, national, and linguistic borders.
It may be taken as another measure of Goethe's fame that other well- known quotations are often incorrectly attributed to him, such as Hippocrates' "Art is long, life is short", which is found in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.
Many of Goethe's works, especially Faust, the Roman Elegies, and the Venetian Epigrams, depict hetero- and homosexual erotic passions and acts. In Faust, having signed (the Devil insists on his signature in an actual contract) his deal with the devil, the very first use of his new power thus gained sees Faust ravishing a young teenage girl. In fact, some of the Venetian Epigrams were held back from publication due to their sexual content. However, Karl Hugo Pruys caused national controversy in Germany when his 1999 book The Tiger's Tender Touch: The Erotic Life of Goethe tentatively deduced from Goethe's writings the possibility of Goethe's homosexuality. The sexual portraitures and allusions in his work may stem from one of the many effects of Goethe's eye-opening sojourn in Italy, where men, who shunned the prevalence of women's venereal diseases and unconscionable conditions, embraced homosexuality as a solution that was not widely imitated outside of Italy. Whatever the case, Goethe clearly saw sexuality in general as a topic that merited poetic and artistic depiction. This went against the thought of his time, when the very private nature of sexuality was rigorously normative, and makes him appear more modern than he is typically thought to be.
Born into a Protestant (Lutheran) family, Goethe's early faith was shaken by news of such events as the 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the Seven Years' War. His later spiritual perspective evolved among pantheism, humanism, and various elements of Western esotericism, as seen most vividly in Part II of Faust. A year before his death he expressed an identification with the Hypsistarians, an ancient Jewish-pagan sect of the Black Sea region. After describing his difficulties with mainstream religion, Goethe laments:
... I have found no confession of faith to which I could ally myself without reservation. Now in my old age, however, I have learned of a sect, the Hypsistarians, who, hemmed in between heathens, Jews and Christians, declared that they would treasure, admire,
16 and honour the best, the most perfect that might come to their knowledge, and inasmuch as it must have a close connection to the Godhead, pay it reverence. A joyous light thus beamed at me suddenly out of a dark age, for I had the feeling that all my life I had been aspiring to qualify as a Hypsistarian. That, however, is no small task, for how does one, in the limitations of one's individuality, come to know what is most excellent?
Letter to Sulpiz Boisserée (March 22, 1831)
Goethe had a great effect on the changing dynamics of the 19th century. In many respects, he was the originator of—or at least the first to cogently express—many ideas which would later become familiar. Goethe produced volumes of poetry, essays, criticism, and scientific work, including a theory of optics and early work on evolution and linguistics. He was fascinated by minerals and early mineralogy (the mineral goethite is named for him). His non-fiction writings, most of which are philosophic and aphoristic in nature, spurred on the development of many philosophers, such as G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Cassirer, Carl Gustav Jung, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others, and of various literary movements, such as romanticism. The mystical philosopher Rudolf Steiner, founder of the anthroposophist movement, named two buildings after Goethe. In contemporary culture, he stands in the background as the author of the story upon which Disney's The Sorcerer's Apprentice is based.
Goethe embodied many of the contending strands in art over the next century: his work could be lushly emotional, and rigorously formal, brief and epigrammatic, and epic. He would argue that classicism was the means of controlling art, and that romanticism was a sickness, even as he penned poetry rich in memorable images, and rewrote the formal rules of German poetry.
His poetry was set to music by almost every major Austrian and German composer from Mozart to Mahler, and his influence would spread to French drama and opera as well. Beethoven declared that a "Faust" Symphony would be the greatest thing for Art. Liszt and Mahler both created symphonies in whole or in large part inspired by this seminal work, which would give the 19th century one of its most paradigmatic figures: Doctor Faustus. The Faust tragedy/drama, often called "Das Drama der Deutschen" (the drama of the Germans), written in two parts published decades apart, would stand as his most characteristic and famous artistic creation.
Goethe was also a cultural force, and by researching folk traditions, he created many of the norms for celebrating Christmas, and argued that the organic nature of the land moulded the people and their customs—an argument that has recurred ever since, including recently in the work of Jared Diamond. In this regard, he also presaged the decision by Andrew Dickson White at Cornell
17 University to use the life and works of Washington Irving as a model for the promotion of undergraduate life on the campus, through the Irving Literary Society and the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity.
New York Alpha’s intellectual Johann Goethe also argued that laws could not be created by pure rationalism, since geography and history shaped habits and patterns. This stood in sharp contrast to the prevailing Enlightenment view that reason was sufficient to create well-ordered societies and good laws.
Goethe's influence was dramatic because he understood that there was a transition in European sensibilities, an increasing focus on sense, the indescribable, and the emotional. This is not to say that he was emotionalistic or excessive; on the contrary, he lauded personal restraint and felt that excess was a disease: "There is nothing worse than imagination without taste". He argued in his scientific works that a "formative impulse", which he said is operative in every organism, causes an organism to form itself according to its own distinct laws, and therefore rational laws or fiats could not be imposed at all from a higher, transcendent sphere; this placed him in direct opposition to those who attempted to form "enlightened" monarchies based on "rational" laws by, for example, Joseph II of Austria or, the subsequent Emperor of the French, Napoleon I. A quotation from his Scientific Studies will suffice:
We conceive of the individual animal as a small world, existing for its own sake, by its own means. Every creature is its own reason to be. All its parts have a direct effect on one another, a relationship to one another, thereby constantly renewing the circle of life; thus we are justified in considering every animal physiologically perfect. Viewed from within, no part of the animal is a useless or arbitrary product of the formative impulse (as so often thought). Externally, some parts may seem useless because the inner coherence of the animal nature has given them this form without regard to outer circumstance. Thus...[not] the question, What are they for? but rather, Where do they come from?
Suhrkamp ed., vol 12, p. 121; trans. Douglas Miller, Scientific Studies
This change later became the basis for 19th century thought; organic rather than geometrical, evolving rather than created, and based on sensibility and intuition, rather than on imposed order, culminating in, as he said, a "living quality" wherein the subject and object are dissolved together in a poise of inquiry. Consequently, he embraced neither teleological nor deterministic views of growth within every organism. Instead, the world as a whole grows through continual, external, and internal strife. Moreover, he did not embrace the mechanistic views that contemporaneous science subsumed during his time, and therewith he denied rationality's superiority as the sole interpretation of reality. Furthermore, he declared that all knowledge is related to humanity through its
18 functional value alone and that knowledge presupposes a perspectival quality. He also stated that the fundamental nature of the world is aesthetic.
His views make him, along with Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, and Ludwig van Beethoven, a figure in two worlds: on the one hand, devoted to the sense of taste, order, and finely crafted detail, which is the hallmark of the artistic sense of the Age of Reason and the neo-classicistic period of architecture; on the other, seeking a personal, intuitive, and personalized form of expression and society, firmly supporting the idea of self-regulating and organic systems. Thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson would take up many similar ideas in the 1800s. His ideas on evolution would frame the question which Darwin and Wallace would approach within the scientific paradigm.
19 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Johann Goethe, was influenced by Johann Gottfried von Herder, below:
Johann Gottfried von Herder (August 25, 1744 in Mohrungen (Morąg), Kingdom of Prussia - December 18, 1803 in Weimar) was a German philosopher, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the periods of Enlightenment, Storm and Stress, and Weimar Classicism. While Prussia was climbing to power in the later half of the 18th century, new thoughts were sweeping in from her eastern domains. Born in Mohrungen (Polish: Morąg) in Kingdom of Prussia, Herder grew up in a poor household, educating himself from his father's Bible and songbook. In 1762, an introspective youth of seventeen, he enrolled at the local The University of Königsberg University of Königsberg.
At Königsberg von Herder became a student of Johann Georg Hamann, a patriotic Francophobe and intensely subjective thinker who championed the emotions against reason. His choice of Hamann over such luminaries as Immanuel Kant was significant, as this odd figure, a needy hypochondriac, delved back into the German mysticism of Jacob Böhme and others, pronouncing obscure and oracular dicta that brought him fame as the "Magus of the North". Hamann's disjointed effusions generally carried subtitles such as Hierophantic Letters or A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose.
Hamann's influence led Herder to confess to his wife later in life that "I have too little reason and too much idiosyncrasy", yet Herder can justly claim to have founded a new school of German political thought. Although himself an unsociable person, Herder influenced his contemporaries greatly. One friend wrote to him in 1785, hailing his works as "inspired by God." A varied field of theorists were later to find inspiration in Herder's tantalisingly incomplete ideas.
In 1764, now a clergyman, Herder went to Riga to teach. It was during this period that he produced his first major works, which were literary criticism. In 1769 Herder traveled to the French port of Nantes and continued on to Paris. This resulted in both an account of his travels as well as a shift of his own self- conception as an author. By 1770 he went to Strassburg (Strasbourg), where he met the young Goethe.
This event proved to be a key juncture in the history of German literature, as Goethe was inspired by Herder's literary criticism to develop his own style.
20 This can be seen as the beginning of the "Sturm und Drang" movement. In 1771 Herder took a position as head pastor and court preacher at Bückeburg under Count Wilhelm von Schaumburg-Lippe.
By the mid-1770s, Goethe was a well-known author, and used his influence at the court of Weimar to secure Herder a position as General Superintendent. Herder moved there in 1776, where his outlook shifted again towards classicism. Towards the end of his career, Herder endorsed the French Revolution, which earned him the enmity of many of his colleagues. At the same time, he and Goethe experienced a personal split. Herder died in 1803 in Weimar.
In 1772 Herder published Treatise on the Origin of Language and went further in this promotion of language than his earlier injunction to "spew out the ugly slime of the Seine. Speak German, O You German". Herder now had established the foundations of comparative philology within the new currents of political outlook. hroughout this period, he continued to elaborate his own unique theory of aesthetics in works such as the above, while Goethe produced works like The Sorrows of Young Werther — the Sturm und Drang movement was born.
Herder wrote an important essay on Shakespeare and Auszug aus einem Briefwechsel über Ossian und die Lieder alter Völker (Extract from a correspondence about Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples) published in 1773 in a manifesto along with contributions by Goethe and Justus Möser. Herder wrote that "A poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world." To him such poetry had its greatest purity and power in nations before they became civilised, as shown in the Old Testament, the Edda, and Homer, and he tried to find such virtues in ancient German folk songs and Norse poetry and mythology.
After becoming General Superintendent in 1776, Herder's philosophy shifted again towards classicism. Herder was at his best during this period, and produced works such as his unfinished Outline of a Philosophical History of Humanity which largely originated the school of historical thought. Herder's philosophy was of a deeply subjective turn, stressing influence by physical and historical circumstance upon human development, stressing that "one must go into the age, into the region, into the whole history, and feel one's way into everything". The historian should be the "regenerated contemporary" of the past, and history a science as "instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit".
Along with Johann Fichte and others, Herder replaced the traditional concept of a juridico-political state with that of the "folk-nation" as organic in its historical growth, thus creating the Romantic nationalist school. Every nation was in this manner organic and whole, nationality a plant of nurture. He talked of the "national animal" and of the "physiology of the whole national group" , which organism was topped by the "national spirit", the "soul of the people" (Volksgeist).
21 Herder gave Germans new pride in their origins, modifying that dominance of regard allotted to Greek art (Greek revival) extolled among others by Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He remarked that he would have wished to be born in the Middle Ages and mused whether "the times of the Swabian emperors" did not "deserve to be set forth in their true light in accordance with the German mode of thought?". Herder equated the German with the Gothic and favoured Dürer and everything Gothic. As with the sphere of art, equally he proclaimed a national message within the sphere of language. He topped the line of German authors emanating from Martin Opitz, who had written his Aristarchus, sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae in Latin in 1617. This urged Germans to glory in their hitherto despised language, and Herder's extensive collections of folk-poetry began a great craze in Germany for that neglected topic.
Along with Wilhelm von Humboldt, Herder was one of the first to argue that language determines thought, a theme that two centuries later would be central to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Herder's focus upon language and cultural traditions as the ties that create a "nation" extended to include folklore, dance, music and art, and inspired Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in their collection of German folk tales.
Herder attached exceptional importance to the concept of nationality and of patriotism — "he that has lost his patriotic spirit has lost himself and the whole worlds about himself", whilst teaching that "in a certain sense every human perfection is national". Herder carried folk theory to an extreme by maintaining that "there is only one class in the state, the Volk, (not the rabble), and the king belongs to this class as well as the peasant". Explanation that the Volk was not the rabble was a novel conception in this era, and with Herder can be seen the emergence of "the people" as the basis for the emergence of a classless but hierarchical national body.
The nation, however was individual and separate, distinguished, to Herder, by climate, education, foreign intercourse, tradition and heredity. Providence he praised for having "wonderfully separated nationalities not only by woods and mountains, seas and deserts, rivers and climates, but more particularly by languages, inclinations and characters". Herder praised the tribal outlook writing that "the savage who loves himself, his wife and child with quiet joy and glows with limited activity of his tribe as for his own life is in my opinion a more real being than that cultivated shadow who is enraptured with the shadow of the whole species", isolated since "each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity". With no need for comparison since "every nation bears in itself the standard of its perfection, totally independent of all comparison with that of others" for "do not nationalities differ in everything, in poetry, in appearance, in tastes, in usages, customs and languages? Must not religion which partakes of these also differ among the nationalities?"
22 He also predicted that Slavic nations would one day be the real power in Europe, as the western Europeans would reject Christianity, and thus rot away, and saying that the eastern European nations would stick to their religion and their idealism; and would this way become the power in Europe.
This question was further developed by Herder's lament that Martin Luther did not establish a national church, and his doubt whether Germany did not buy Christianity at too high a price, that of true nationality. Herder's patriotism bordered at times upon national pantheism, demanding of territorial unity as "He is deserving of glory and gratitude who seeks to promote the unity of the territories of Germany through writings, manufacture, and institutions" and sounding an even deeper call:
"But now! Again I cry, my German brethren! But now! The remains of all genuine folk-thought is rolling into the abyss of oblivion with a last and accelerated impetus. For the last century we have been ashamed of everything that concerns the fatherland."
Herder presented formal defiance of the age of reason and Enlightenment. In his Ideas upon Philosophy and the History of Mankind he even wrote "Compare England with Germany: the English are Germans, and even in the latest times the Germans have led the way for the English in the greatest things."
Herder, who hated absolutism and Prussian nationalism, but who was imbued with the spirit of the whole German Volk, yet as historical theorist turned away from the light of the eighteenth century. Seeking to reconcile his thought with this earlier age, Herder sought to harmonize his conception of sentiment with reason, whereby all knowledge is implicit in the soul; the most elementary stage is sensuous and intuitive perception which by development can become self-conscious and rational. To Herder, this development is the harmonizing of primitive and derivative truth, of experience and intelligence, feeling and reason.
Herder is the first in a long line of Germans preoccupied with this harmony. This search is itself the key to much in German theory. And Herder was too penetrating a thinker not to understand and fear the extremes to which his folk-theory could tend, and so issued specific warnings. While regarding the Jews as aliens in Europe, he refused to adhere to a rigid racial theory, writing that "notwithstanding the varieties of the human form, there is but one and the same species of man throughout the whole earth".
He also announced that "national glory is a deceiving seducer. When it reaches a certain height, it clasps the head with an iron band. The enclosed sees nothing in the mist but his own picture; he is susceptible to no foreign impressions." And:
23 "It is the apparent plan of nature that as one human being, so also one generation, and also one nationality learn, learn incessantly, from and with the others, until all have comprehended the difficult lesson: No nationality has been solely designated by God as the chosen people of the earth; above all we must seek the truth and cultivate the garden of the common good. Hence no nationality of Europe may separate itself sharply, and foolishly say, "With us alone, with us dwells all wisdom."
Time was to demonstrate that while many Germans were to find influence in Herder's convictions and influence, fewer were to note his qualificatory stipulations.
Herder had emphasised that his conception of the nation encouraged democracy and the free self-expression of a people's identity. He proclaimed support for the French Revolution, a position which did not endear him to royalty. He also differed with Kant's philosophy and turned away from the Sturm und Drang movement to go back to the poems of Shakespeare and Homer.
To promote his concept of the Volk, he published letters and collected folk songs. These latter were published in 1773 as Voices of the People in Their Songs (Stimmen der Völker in ihren Liedern). The poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens von Brentano later used Stimmen der Võlker as samples for The Boy's Magic Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn).
24 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Johan Gottfried von Herder, above, was influenced by Johann Georg Hamann, below:
Johann Georg Hamann (August 27, 1730, Königsberg - June 21, 1788, Münster) was an important philosopher of the German (Counter-)Enlightenment and a main proponent of the Sturm und Drang movement. He was Pietist Lutheran, and a friend (while being an intellectual opponent) of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. He was also a lutenist, having studied this instrument with Timofey Belogradsky (a student of Sylvius Leopold Weiss), a Ukrainian virtuoso then living in Königsberg. His distrust of reason and the Enlightenment led him to conclude that faith in God was the only solution to the vexing problems of philosophy. Hamann The University of Königsberg was greatly influenced by Hume's writings.
Hamann famously used the image of Socrates, who often proclaimed to know nothing, in his Socratic Memorabilia, an essay in which Hamann is critical of the Enlightenment's dependence on reason. Also known by the epithet Magus im Norden ("Magus of the North"), he was one of the precipitating forces for the counter-enlightenment with great effect. He was, moreover, a mentor to Herder and an admired influence to Goethe, Jacobi, Hegel, and Kierkegaard. Hans Urs von Balthasar devoted a monograph to Hamann in his volume, Studies in Theological Styles: Lay Styles (Volume III in the English language translation of The Glory of the Lord series).
His writings were known to be allusive, extremely difficult, and heavily involved. One such work, for instance, was called Golgatha and Scheblimini! By a Preacher in the Wilderness (1784), which was directed against Moses Mendelssohn 's Jerusalem, or on Religious Might and Judaism (1782). Brevity and responsive writing to others' works colored the pamphletary form of all his writings.
Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788) lived and worked in Prussia, in the context of the late German Enlightenment. Although he remained outside ‘professional’ philosophical circles, in that he never held a University post, he was respected in his time for his scholarship and breadth of learning. His writings were notorious even in his own time for the challenges they threw down to the reader. These challenges to interpretation and understanding are only heightened today.
25 Nevertheless an increasing number of scholars from philosophy, theology, aesthetics and German studies are finding his ideas and insights of value to contemporary concerns. His central preoccupations are still pertinent: language, knowledge, the nature of the human person, sexuality and gender and the relationship of humanity to God. Meanwhile, his views, which in many respects anticipate later challenges to the Enlightenment project and to modernity, are still relevant and even provocative.
Johann Georg Hamann was born in Königsberg in 1730, the son of a midwife and a barber-surgeon. He began study in philosophy and theology at the age of 16, changed to law but mainly read literature, philology, and rhetoric, but also mathematics and science. He left university without completing his studies and became the governor to a wealthy family on a Baltic estate. During this time he continued his extraordinarily broad reading and private research. He took up a job in the family firm of a friend from his Königsberg days, Christoph Berens, and was sent on an obscure mission to London, in which he evidently failed. He then led a high life until he ran out of friends, money and support. In a garret, depressed and impoverished, he read the Bible cover to cover and experienced a religious conversion.
He returned to the House of Berens in Riga, where they evidently forgave him his failure. He fell in love with Christoph Berens' sister, Katharina, but was refused permission to marry her by his friend, on the grounds of his religious conversion; Berens was an enthusiastic follower of the Enlightenment and was nauseated by the more pious manifestations of Hamann's new-found religiosity. Smarting from this blow and its motivations, Hamann returned to his father's house in Königsberg, where he lived for the rest of his life until his final months.
In Königsberg, he never held an official academic post, nor an ecclesiastical one; this may in part have been due to his pronounced speech impediment, which inhibited him from either lecturing or preaching. Eventually, through the intercession of his acquaintance, Immanuel Kant, he found employment as a low-level civil servant working in the tax office of Frederick the Great; a ruler Hamann in fact despised. Nevertheless his principal activity was as an editor and a writer; he was considered one of the most widely-read scholars of his time (greatly aided by his fluency in many languages), as well as a notorious author. During this time, despite his committed Christianity, he lived with a woman whom he never married but to whom he remained devoted and faithful, having four children on whom he doted, and who occasionally feature in his writings (principally as unruly distractions to the author's scholarship).
At the end of his life he accepted an invitation to Münster from one of his admirers, Princess Gallitzin. He died in Münster in 1788.
Hamann had a profound influence on the German ‘Storm and Stress’ movement, and on other contemporaries such as Herder and Jacobi; he
26 impressed Hegel and Goethe (who called him the brightest head of his time) and was a major influence on Kierkegaard. His influence continued on twentieth century German thinkers, particularly those interested in language. His popularity has increased dramatically in the last few decades amongst philosophers, theologians, and German studies scholars around the world.
Hamann's writings are all short; he was not given to extensive treatises. They are also usually motivated by something very specific: someone else's publication, or particular circumstances and events. When responding to these, he presupposes considerable knowledge on the part of the reader; typically his responses to the work of others involves adoption of their terminology and style, blending into mimicry and parody as a rhetorical and argumentative device. Moreover, woven into these writings is an extraordinary breadth and quantity of citations and allusions; and by no means are these all clear and obvious. Thus, when he chooses, his essays are a tapestry of multicolored threads of the ideas, language, and imagery of thinkers, be they ancient, biblical, or contemporary. These are woven across a woof of a love of irony, which as ever adds a layer of interpretative complexity.
Hamann's writings also frequently appear under the name of various fanciful characters: Aristobolus, the Knight of the Rose-Cross, the Sibyl, Adelgunde. It cannot be assumed that such characters faithfully represent Hamann's own views; The opinions of Aristobolus, for example, are a device to deconstruct and drive to absurdity a number of views which Hamann opposes.
These factors combine to make Hamann's writings notoriously difficult to understand and interpret. Goethe observed that when reading Hamann, “one must completely rule out what one normally means by understanding” [Goethe, 550]. Even if one has – or painfully acquires, or borrows from other current scholars – the breadth of reference to understand the source of an allusion or citation, it is not always clear what the citation is doing there, and what Hamann means to suggest by referring to it. He delighted in sporting with his reader; preferring to present a balled fist and leave it to the reader to unroll it into a flat hand (to borrow one of his own images; cf. the end of the “Metacritique of the Purism of Reason”, 1780).
This impenetrability has been taken by some to signify an incapacity for clear expression on Hamann's part. Hegel remarked: "The French have a saying: Le stile c'est l'homme meme (“The style is the man himself”); Hamann's writings do not have a particular style but rather are style through and through" [Hegel, 209]. Others, however, have pointed to the clarity and concision of his letters, in contrast to the puzzling style he uses to address the public. They suggest that Hamann's challenging style forms are an important part of Hamann's hermeneutics and his understanding of the relationship between the writer and reader: two halves of a whole who must relate themselves to one another and unite for a common goal (“Reader and Critic”, 1762). The reader cannot be
27 passive and must work to reconstruct Hamann's meaning. As Hamann observed, “A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow.”
Consequently, Hamann is highly susceptible to misinterpretation. For example, one can find in recent English-language treatments the understanding of Hamann as an ‘irrationalist’, and one who simply opposed the Enlightenment with all his might; this however is not supported by the majority of Hamann scholars and is seen as a failure to understand the complexity of his thinking.
His principal writings include: Biblische Betrachtungen [Biblical Reflections], Gedanken über meinen Lebenslauf [Thoughts on the Course of my Life], Brocken [Fragments], Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten [Socratic Memorabilia], Wolken [Clouds], Kreuzzüge des Philologen [Crusades of the Philologian], a collection of essays including Aesthetica in Nuce, Versuch über eine akademische Frage [Essay on an academic question], and Kleeblatt Hellenistischer Briefe [Cloverleaf of Hellenistic Letters]; Schriftsteller und Kunstrichter [Author and Critic], Leser und Kunstrichter [Reader and Critic], Fünf Hirtenbriefe [Five Pastoral Letters], Des Ritters von Rosencreuz letzte Willensmeynung über den göttlichen und menschlichen Urprung der Sprache [The Knight of the Rose-Cross' Last Will and Testament on the divine and human origin of language], Philologische Einfälle und Zweifel [Philological Ideas and Doubts], Hierophantische Briefe [Hierophantic Letters], Versuch einer Sibylle über die Ehe [Essay of a Sibyl on Marriage], Konxompax, Metakritik über den Purismum der Vernunft [Metacritique of the Purism of Reason], Golgotha und Scheblimini [Golgotha and Scheblimini], Fliegender Brief [Flying Letter].
At the end of his life, Hamann chose to designate his authorship as “Metacritique”, a word he coined for his engagement with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Instead of creating a systematic theology, or an epistemology, he seems to have seen his work as one that examines the foundations and nature of philosophical and theological critique itself. Rather like the late Wittgenstein, his work was deconstructive; he belongs in the camp of philosophers whom Richard Rorty has described as “edifying and therapeutic” rather than “constructive and systematic” (Rorty, 5-6). He brings to any issue in philosophy not a constructive account, but an approach, a set of convictions, something akin to ethical principles. He anticipated Rorty's emphasis on the curative aspects of this task; at the end of his life, he wanted his collected works to be published under the title “Curative Baths” (“Saalbadereyen” — a reference to healing practices of the time and an allusion to his father's profession.) Each volume was to be called a ‘Tub’. This project was sadly never realized, not even under a more conventional title.
One abiding characteristic of Hamann's many responses to the philosophy of his time, therefore, is this ‘metacritical’ instinct: not to construct a rival account, but to go for the jugular; not to set up a rival critique, but to insist that critique itself must be subject to meta-critique, which concerns itself with the issues that
28 must be attended to in relation to the act of philosophical reflection itself. It consists of attention to the fundamental stance or position on issues or insights that must underlie any work on philosophy or theology. According to Hamann, often “the difficulties lie in womb of the concepts” (N III, 31, 21). Hamann's writing therefore is not so much ‘unsystematic’ as is sometimes said, but ‘presystematic’. He addresses issues that must be recognized in any self-critical reflection, matters that must be presuppositions for any system. Thus one of the most salient features of his “Metacritique of the Purism of Reason”, his unpublished response to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, was to focus on the question of language. Through a tissue of imagery, he suggests that a proper view of language implies that the alleged ‘purity’ of a priori reason is untenable.
These metacritical issues, for Hamann, principally include language, knowledge, and the nature of the human person. Hamann also, most urgently and most controversially (then as now), did not believe that any of these issues can be answered outside a theological perspective; that is, without reference to God as humanity's creator and dialogue partner.
A second feature of Hamann's approach is a tendency which Goethe saw as holism. This is perhaps not the best way to describe Hamann's insight, as Hamann characteristically emphasised the brokenness of human experience, and fragmentariness of human knowledge: “Gaps and lacks … is the highest and deepest knowledge of human nature, through which we must climb our way up to the ideal — ideas and doubts — the summum bonum of our reason” (ZH 3, 34:33-35). Hamann essentially disliked attempts to isolate the phenomenon under consideration from other aspects with which he felt it to be intimately connected; this precludes a deep and true understanding of our existence. Taken as far as he did, this means that philosophy of language must include a discussion of God, and a discussion of God must make reference to sexuality and vice versa.
Thus in “Essay of a Sibyl on Marriage”, which he takes as an opportunity to write about sex, a proper understanding of human sexuality and erotic enjoyment cannot be understood without seeing humanity as the creature of God, made in God's image. He plays with the Christian idea of God as a Trinity to depict a trinity of woman-man-God in the moment of lovemaking; and reworks the account of the creation of Adam in Genesis to describe the act of coitus itself. The woman on perceiving her lover in his excitement sees ‘that rib’ and cries out in enthusiastic appropriation, ‘That is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!’ The man then ‘fills the hole of the place with flesh’ (as Genesis describes God doing with Adam after the creation of Eve). In doing so the lover also acknowledges that the origin of a man is in woman's body: the ‘Sibyl’ describes this moment of lovemaking as ”he entered in whence he once came forth.” Indeed, as Christ was born of a woman, the salvation of humanity proceeds from a woman's sexual body; the vagina is also described as the place that the Saviour came forth as the body's healer (the German language permits Hamann here to pun on ‘healer’
29 and ‘saviour’). This inclination to combine topics more often kept separate (such as ‘the concept of God’ and ‘having sex’) is salient throughout his work.
Hamann's tool for conceiving the interrelation of these dimensions of human life increasingly was the Principle of the Union of Opposites. He writes approvingly of this principle to his friends; particularly after his encounter with Kant's new epistemology, claiming to value it more than the principles of contradiction and of sufficient reason, and indeed more than the whole Kantian Critique (ZH 5, 327:12ff; ZH 4, 462:7-8). Contradictions and apparent oppositions fill our experience:
Yes, daily at home I have the experience that one must always contradict oneself from two viewpoints, [which] never can agree, and that it is impossible to change these viewpoints into the other without doing the greatest violence to them. Our knowledge is piecemeal — no dogmatist is in a position to feel this great truth, if he is to play his role and play it well; and through a vicious circle of pure reason skepsis itself becomes dogma (ZH 5, 432:29-36). (This is in the context of a discussion of Kant.)
Far from being a pre-condition for truth, the absence of contradiction is in Hamann's eyes a pre-condition for dogmatism. Knowledge must not proceed on the basis of unanimity and the absence of contradiction, but must proceed through the dialogue and relation of these different voices. (Hamann does not think in terms of Hegel's later dialectical synthesis.) When Hamann speaks of ‘opposition’ and contradictions, however, he does so in an ironic tone; for it is clearly his conviction that there is a fundamental unity in things, and the oppositions and contradictions that we perceive are chiefly of our own making. He insists that his perception is ‘without Manichaeism’ (ZH 5, 327:16-17). Body and mind, senses and reason, reason and passion are not truly opposed. These are contrasting elements of the same unified — unified but not homogenous — reality. Hamann tries to steer a course between Scylla and Charybdis: between the dogmatic, even tyrannical extermination of opposition and contradiction; and the elimination of contradiction through a false synthesis or fusion achieved by an apparent acceptance of antithetical realities.
The Principle of the Union of Opposites as a tactical tool, therefore, does not imply that Hamann sees the world in terms of divisions and dualism. It is his strategy for coping with the schematic antitheses abundant in Enlightenment philosophy.
Nothing seems easier than the leap from one extreme to the other, and nothing so difficult as the union to a center. … [The Union of Opposites] always seems to me to be the one sufficient reason of all contradictions — and the true process of their resolution and mediation, that makes an end to all feuds of healthy reason and pure unreason. (ZH 4, 287:5-17)
30 Hamann used the notion of ‘Prosopopoeia’, or personification, as an image of what can happen in philosophical reflection. In a medieval morality or mystery play, the experience of being chaste or being lustful is transformed from a way of acting or feeling into a dramatic character who then speaks and acts as a personification of that quality. So too in philosophy, Hamann suggests. The philosopher distinguishes differing aspects in the phenomenon under scrutiny and exaggerates their difference. These aspects are ennobled into faculties, and through ‘prosopopoeia’ are hypostasized into entities. Thus in the act of reflecting on something, ‘reasoning’ is distinguished from ‘feeling’, and turned from a verb or gerund into a noun — ‘reason’—which is then named as a constituent of our being. Reason then becomes a thing to which we can ascribe properties. (This shows perhaps a streak bordering on nominalism in Hamann.)
The best example of this, and of Hamann's response, is his treatment of the word ‘reason’. Since he handles it with a kind of skepticism or even distaste, he is often called an ‘irrationalist’. It is clear however that Hamann puts a high value on certain ways of being reasonable and of reasoning activity. “Without language we would have no reason, without reason no religion, and without these three essential aspects of our nature, neither mind [Geist] nor bond of society” (N III, 231, 10-12).
Hamann's treatment of reason instead is a deconstruction, both of the prosopopoeic use of the word and the Enlightenment valuation of it. There is no such thing as reason — there is only reasoning. Reasoning, as something we do, is as fallible as we are, and as such is subject to our position in history, or own personality, or the circumstances of the moment. ‘It’ is therefore not a universal, healthy and infallible ‘faculty’ as Hamann's Enlightenment contemporaries often maintained:
Being, belief and reason are pure relations, which cannot be dealt with absolutely, and are not things but pure scholastic concepts, signs for understanding, not for worshipping, aids to awaken our attention, not to fetter it. (ZH 7, 165:7-11)
Hamann is sometimes portrayed simply as an opponent of ‘the Enlightenment’. This presupposes of course that ‘the Enlightenment’ constitutes a unified stance on a number of philosophical issues, an assumption which is questionable. The majority of Hamann scholars today see his position in a more complex way. Hamann opposed many of the popular convictions of his time. However, Hamann fought his contemporaries on many fronts; often with areas of considerable agreement with some of his opponents.
One example would be the way that he deployed Hume as a weapon against Enlightenment rationalism, not least against Kant (although Hamann was the one who introduced Kant to Hume's writings in the first place). Although Hamann, as a Christian, had profound disagreements with Hume's thought in its
31 atheistic aspects, nevertheless he used Humean skepticism in his own deconstructive writings. Hume's doubts about the reliability and self-sufficiency of reason were grist to Hamann's mill. Hume's insistence that ‘belief’ underlies much of our thinking and reasoning was adopted and deployed by Hamann, often with a linguistic sleight of hand. By using the word ‘Glaube’ (which in German includes both ‘belief’ in an epistemic sense and ‘faith’ in a religious sense), Hamann could assert that ‘faith’, not rational grounds, underlies his contemporaries' high valuation of reason. Thus even the enthusiastic advocates of impartiality and ‘reason’, who are also skeptics about ‘blind faith’, have ultimately only faith as the ground for their convictions.
In one sense, however, Hamann can certainly be seen as a critic—or metacritic—of the Enlightenment. The question of what ‘Enlightenment’ consists in was a challenge Hamann through down to his contemporaries, from his debut with Socratic Memorabilia (1759) to the end of his life. It is instructive to juxtapose Kant's famous essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784) with Hamann's response in a letter to his acquaintance Christian Jacob Kraus. Kant defines enlightenment as the exit from ‘self-incurred minority’ (or ‘immaturity’ or ‘tutelage’), which arises from laziness and cowardice. (The ‘entire fairer sex’ in particular is said by Kant to regard the transition to maturity and thinking for oneself as difficult and dangerous). ‘Sapere aude!’ (‘Dare to know!’), Kant instructs the reader. However, while Kant urges the ‘public’ use of reason (use of reason as a scholar), he nevertheless claims that ‘private’ (we would perhaps say, ‘professional’) use of reason must be circumscribed, for example, for the clergyman, soldier, or taxpayer; they must simply obey. Moreover, Kant heaps praise on their monarch, Frederick the Great, whom Hamann deemed immoral and despotic.
The irony of being instructed to think for oneself, and being told to have the courage to know, was not lost on Hamann. More painful is the irony in being told to appreciate the freedom to think, but “believe, march, pay if the devil is not to take you” (Hamann's depiction of Kant's insistence that clergymen, soldiers and taxpayers must just obey orders). “What good to me is the festive garment of freedom when I am in a slave's smock at home?” Hamann asks, referring to Kant's approval of public use of reason but ‘private’ requirement to obey. In Hamann's view, the scholarly freedom to reflect, which Kant commends, is a luxury compared to the ethical imperative to question and debate in the professional and political sphere, which Kant restricts. “Thus the public use of reason and freedom is nothing but a dessert, a sumptuous dessert. The private use is the daily bread that we should give up for its sake. The self-incurred immaturity is just such a sneer as he makes at the whole fair sex, and which my three daughters will not put up with.”
Most urgently, therefore, Hamann objects to the allegation that this immaturity is ‘self-incurred’, rather than imposed on the people firstly by a despotic monarch, and secondly by intellectuals like Kant, with the ‘prattle and
32 reasoning of those emancipated immature ones, who set themselves up as guardians’. ‘True enlightenment,’ Hamann concludes sarcastically, with an eye to the likes of Kant and Frederick, “consists in an emergence of the immature person from a supremely self-incurred guardianship.”
Language is one of Hamann's most abiding philosophical concerns. From the beginning of his work, Hamann championed the priority which expression and communication, passion and symbol possess over abstraction, analysis and logic in matters of language. Neither logic nor even representation (in Rorty's sense) possesses the rights of the first-born. Representation is secondary and derivative rather than the whole function of language. Symbolism, imagery, metaphor have primacy; “Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race” (N II, 197). To think that language is essentially a passive system of signs for communicating thoughts is to deal a deathblow to true language.
For all Hamann's emphasis in his earlier writings on passion and emotion, he does not equate language with emotional expression. This became clear in his engagement with the writing of his younger friend Herder on the origin of language. Language has a mediating relationship between our reflection, one another, and our world; and as it is not simply the cries of emotion of an animal, so too it is not a smothering curtain between us and the rest of reality. Language also has a mediating role between God and us. Hamann's answer to a debate of his time, the origin of language — divine or human?—is that its origin is found in the relationship between God and humanity. Typically he has the ‘Knight of the Rose-Cross’ express this in the form of a ‘myth’, rather than attempting to work out such a claim logically and systematically. Rewriting the story of the Garden of Eden, he describes this paradise as:
Every phenomenon of nature was a word,—the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas. Everything the human being heard from the beginning, saw with its eyes, looked upon and touched with its hands was a living word; for God was the word. (NIII, 32: 21-30)
This makes the origin of language as easy and natural as child's play.
By the end of his life, because of his engagement with Kant, the most urgent question among the relationships that constitute language is the relationship of language to thinking or ‘reason’. In his view, the central question of Kant's first Critique, the very possibility of a priori knowledge and of pure reason, depends on the nature of language. In a passage full of subtle allusions to Kantian passages and terms, he writes:
Indeed, if a chief question does remain: how is the power to think possible?—The power to think right and left, before and without, with and above experience? then it does not take a deduction to prove the genealogical priority
33 of language…. Not only the entire ability to think rests on language... but language is also the crux of the misunderstanding of reason with itself. (N III, 286:1-10) Language is forced to take part in the ‘purification of philosophy’, as he describes it in his Metacritique of Kant: the attempt to expunge experience and tradition from rational reflection. Language itself is the final victim in this threefold ‘purification’. It is for this reason however that language can constitute the cure for philosophy. Language is the embodiment of experience and tradition; as long as the ability to think rests on language, neither ‘reason’ nor ‘philosophy’ can be pure of the empirical, of experience, and of the experience of the others to whom we relate. It itself, for Hamann, embodies a relation: it itself is a ‘union of opposites’, of the aesthetic and the logical, the bodily and the intellectual; it unites the divisions Kant's Critique creates.
For Hamann, in contrast to Kant, the question is therefore not so much ‘what is reason?’ as ‘what is language?’, as he writes in a letter. This is the ground of the paralogisms and antinomies that Kant raises in his Critique. Sharing Hume's empiricism and Berkeley's suspicion of universals and abstract terms, he concludes: “Hence it happens that one takes words for concepts, and concepts for the things themselves” (ZH 5, 264:34-265:1). Language then has a fundamental role to play in unmasking the philosopher's tendency to ‘prosopopoeia’. The relation of language to reason he certainly did not feel had solved, however, as he wrote to a friend:
If only I was as eloquent as Demosthenes, I would have to do no more than repeat a single word three times. Reason is language—Logos; I gnaw on this marrowbone and will gnaw myself to death over it. It is still always dark over these depths for me: I am still always awaiting an apocalyptic angel with a key to this abyss. (ZH 5, 177:16-21)
For Hamann, knowledge is inseparable from self-knowledge, and self- knowledge inseparable from knowledge of the other. We are visible, as in a mirror, in each other; “God and my neighbor are therefore a part of my self- knowledge, my self-love” (N I, 302:16-23). He writes in a letter: “Self knowledge begins with the neighbor, the mirror, and just the same with true self-love; that goes from the mirror to the matter” (ZH 6, 281:16-17). Sometimes this exploration of self-knowledge through interpersonal intimacy takes a sexual form, as in the Sibyl's Essay on Marriage (already discussed).
All forms of knowledge, of learning and development even of the most natural functions, require the help of another. (The ‘Knight of the Rose Cross’, while jesting with Hume, tells us ironically that even eating and drinking, and indeed excretion, are not instinctual or innate but require teaching.) (N III, 28:26- 28; N III, 29:7-10) This is conceived not only in such immediately interpersonal ways, but also more widely in the context of the community. The indispensability of ‘the other’ for knowledge is also the reason that Hamann gives the importance
34 he does to tradition in the formation of knowledge. “Our reason arises, at the very least, from this twofold lesson of sensuous revelations and human testimonies” (N III 29:28-30). Years before Kant's first Critique, Hamann attempts to relate the senses and the understanding and their roles in knowledge, using a characteristically concrete metaphor: the senses are like the stomach, the understanding like blood vessels. Not only do the blood vessels need the stomach to receive the nourishment that they distribute; the stomach also needs the blood vessels to function.
This insistence on the mutual dependency and interrelation of sense experience and understanding (as opposed to many Enlightenment views that plumped for either reason or the senses as the dominant party) was refined in his engagement with Kant's critique. Throughout his life, he was neither materialist, purely empiricist or positivist, nor idealist, rationalist or intellectualist in his epistemology. Rather, he is firmly against dividing knowledge or ways of knowing into different kinds. “The philosophers have always given truth a bill of divorce, by separating what nature has joined together and vice versa” (N III, 40: 3-5). With Kant's critique, the problem becomes still more urgent; Kant's treatment of the issue is a “violent, unwarranted, obstinate divorce of what nature has joined together”.
Revising Kant's metaphor of sensibility and understanding as two stems of human knowledge, he suggests we see knowledge as a single stem with two roots. Thus he rejects the division of what can be known a priori from what can be known a posteriori, and many of the consequences of such a stance. Here again he reaches for the ‘Principle of the Union of Opposites’ in his deployment of imagery to suggest a different approach. The relation of the senses and understanding is a ‘hypostatic union’, a ‘communicatio idiomatum’ (phrases borrowed from Christian theological discussion of how the two natures of divine and human are united in Christ). This mysterious union can only be revealed and understood by ‘ordinary language’. (In suggesting that the problems in philosophy can be cured by attending to ‘ordinary language’, he clearly anticipates the late Wittgenstein).
In this engagement with Kant, Hamann returns and deepens the lesson he had learnt much earlier in his reading of Hume: that belief or faith is an essential precursor for knowledge. Everything is dependent or grounded on faith; there is no privileged position for any kind or form of knowledge (a priori, scientific, etc.) In Hamann's epistemology, the hard division between ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’ or ‘faith’ becomes eroded. Both knowledge and faith rest on a foundation of trust; neither rest on a foundation of indubitability. “Every philosophy consists of certain and uncertain knowledge, of idealism and realism, of sensuousness and deductions. Why should only the uncertain be called belief? What then are— rational grounds?” (ZH 7, 165:33-37) ‘Sensuousness’ translates Sinnlichkeit (Kant's ‘sensibility’). Belief and reason both need each other; idealism and realism are a fantasized opposition, of which the authentic use of reason knows
35 nothing. The unity that lies in the nature of things should lie at the foundation of all our concepts and reflection (ZH 7, 165:7-17).
From his ‘debut’ work, Socratic Memorabilia, Hamann began to promulgate a particular view of what it means to understand something. From the beginning of that essay he emphasized the importance of passion and commitment in interpretation; undermining the more conventional assumption that objectivity and detachment are prerequisites of philosophical reflection and understanding. In Aesthetica in Nuce, wearing the authorial mask of the ‘kabbalistic philologian’, he provocatively maintained that initiation into orgies were necessary before the interpreter could safely begin the hermeneutical act. The idea that one must rid oneself of presuppositions, prejudices, and predilections in order to do justice to the subject matter he characterizes as ‘monastic rules’—i.e. an excessive asceticism and abstinence. He goes so far as to compare such individuals to self-castrating eunuchs (N II, 207:10-20).
Hamann's skepticism about neutrality and objectivity does not make him a ‘subjectivist’, however. The stance and disposition of the interpreter is integral, helpful, indeed, indispensable and must be acknowledged; but limitless subjectivity arouses Hamann's scorn. Those who ‘flood the text’ with glosses and marginalia, “dreaming up one's own inspiration and interpretation,” Hamann likens to the blind leading the blind (N II, 208:3ff).
The constraints which Hamann places on the interpreter's subjectivity are not those usually advocated, therefore: an avoidance of prejudice and pre- conceptions; an amnesia for one's own history, tradition and culture; an obedience to exegetical rules. The first restraint on subjective distortion is the interpreter's own common sense; the last is the reaction of the text itself: “what are you trying to make of me?” The interpreter's freedom is inextricable from the interpreter's respect and responsibility, in Hamann's view.
The responsible interpreter is conscious of standing within something larger than oneself: a tradition. The wise interpreter is a kabbalist, one who interprets an ancient text, and a rhapsodist—the original meaning of the latter being one who stitches something together from pre-existing materials. (In Ancient Greece the ‘rhapsodist’ was one who recited poems cobbled together from prior sources, usually bits of Homer.) In creating interpretations, the interpreter enjoys the freedom to create anew, as Hamann created his characteristic prose from pre-existing texts, while creating a new meaningful piece. Hamann's use of this genre itself makes the point: the demand that only one meaning may exist for a text arises from an impoverished notion of meaning and creativity; one that misunderstands the nature of composition and the nature of interpretation alike.
Hamann's rejected both exegetical ‘materialism’ and ‘idealism’, as he called them — literalism and excessive flights of fancy. In thus insisting on the
36 integrity of ‘the letter and the spirit’, he means to preserve the place of author, text and reader alike. Both meaning and interpretation rest in a three-way relationship.
For Hamann, the depth and meaning of a text go beyond the author's own contribution, and are the responsibility of the interpreter: “Few authors understand themselves, and a proper reader must not only understand his author but also be able to see beyond him” (ZH 6, 22:10-12). And yet this recognition that the author's opinions and intentions do not exhaust the possibilities of the text does not annihilate the place of the author. At the very least, the ‘beyond’ of the text includes a territory which, if unknown to the author, is not unrelated: that is, the author's own unconscious workings and meanings. It is not accidental that Hamann observes not that few authors understand their own text, but that few authors understand themselves. This suggests a picture of creation in which more of the author is expressed in a text and entrusted to the interpreter than the author's conscious intentions and opinions. This in turn suggests a picture of interpretation—of “understanding one's hero” as Hamann put it when writing about Socrates—in which greater sensitivity, insight, and fidelity is demanded of the interpreter than would otherwise be the case.
Above all, the interpreter must have the courage to be a kabbalist; that is, to say more than the text does, not to express oneself but to say what the author left unsaid. The fruits of such faithful creativity may be impossible to ‘justify’ or ‘verify’ to the demands of the objectivist, however.
Fundamentally, for Hamann hermeneutics consists in perceiving the underlying relationship beneath the phenomenon in question; at the least, of course, the relationship between the author and the interpreter which requires such fidelity. Given Hamann's religious views, this at once introduces a theological dimension. Ultimately, this means that for Hamann proper hermeneutics rests on one thing: perceiving God revealed within the phenomenon, whether that be nature or history (cf. Socratic Memorabilia and Aesthetica in Nuce for examples). Even the interpretation of ourselves is a revelation of God; a recognition of whose image solves all the most complicated knots and riddles of our nature (N II, 206:32-207:2; 198:3-5).
The topics examined so far all have their anthropological implications. Hamann's critique of the socio-political implications of Kant's vision of ‘enlightenment’ rests on a conviction about our social and political destiny. Hamann sees our socio-political vocation as consisting firstly in ‘criticism’ (or ‘critique’)—recognizing and appropriating, or hating and rejecting, the true vs. the false, good vs. evil, beautiful vs. ugly; and secondly in ‘politics’, which is increasing or reducing them. This is not the prerogative of the ruler; every one is at once their own ‘king’, their own ‘legislator’; but also the ‘first-born of their subjects’. It is our “republican privilege” to contribute to this destiny, “the critical and magisterial office of a political animal” (N III, 38-39).
37 The concepts of knowledge and language and their many facets also imply a particular anthropology: the diversity yet integration of the human being. For Hamann, the truest picture of humanity is of diversity in unity; a number of different, often contrasting aspects and features together composing the human person. Hamann consequently did not confine his attention to epistemology and reason when considering what human beings are, and passion, the thirst for vengeance, and sexual ecstasy form a part of his picture as well. (In response to the Enlightenment aesthetic of art as the imitation of ‘beautiful nature’, Hamann's ironic observation was: “The thirst for vengeance was the beautiful nature which Homer imitated” (ZH 2, 157:12).)
The theme of interdependence between human beings, which was emphasized in his epistemology, also has its roots in his understanding of what it is to be human. We are not self-sufficient; but for Hamann, even our lacks and failings have a positive thrust, this signifier of dependency making us all the more suited for the enjoyment of nature and one another.
If there is a fundamental key to his thinking on humanity, it is the idea that the human being is the image of God. This is admittedly more theological than philosophical, but is essential for understanding Hamann's philosophical anthropology. Hamann's treatment of this perennial theme is hardly conventional in the history of Christian thinking. While the experience of sinfulness and wickedness is a powerful theme, particularly in his earlier, post-conversion writing, the fundamental thrust of his thinking is the easy exchange between the human and the divine. In this exchange, language is “the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas” (N III, 32:21-24). Despite his reputation for being an irrationalist, reasoning too relates us to God; God, nature and reason are described as having the same relation as light, the eye and what we see, or as author, text and reader (ZH 5, 272:14-16).
One must also remember that Hamann confessed that he could not conceive of a Creative Spirit without genitalia; indeed, he was quite happy to assert that the genitals are the unique bond between creature and Creator. So sexuality in divine-human relations has two aspects. First, as paradigm of creativity, it is the way in which our God-likeness can most strikingly be seen. Secondly, as the point of the most profound unity, it is the locus for our union both with another human being and with the divine. Provocatively, Hamann sees original sin and its rebellion as embodied not in sexuality, but in reason. Overweening reason is our attempt to be like God; meanwhile, prudery is the rejection of God's image, while trying to be like God in the wrong sense (bodilessness). (See Essay of a Sibyl on Marriage and Konxompax.) One should therefore distinguish ‘likeness to God’ from ‘being equal to God’. In the Sibyl's essay, the male version of grasping at equality with God (cf. Phil. 2:6) is the attempt to be self-sufficient, to be the God of monotheism: the sole ruler, who possesses self-existence.
38 Instead, the encounter with the opposite sex should engender in the man an attitude of profound respect towards the woman's body, as the source of his own existence, from his mother. As the source of his own joy, lovemaking also is an acknowledgement of his own dependence, his lack of self-sufficiency and autonomy. But this dependence on another paradoxically is the Godlikeness of the Creator, the father, the one who humbles himself in self-giving (a favourite Hamannian theme in his discussion of God). Meanwhile, the woman's temptation is to an artificial innocence; a secret envy of God's incorporeality and impassibility. The defence of one's virginity is another cryptic attempt at self- sufficiency. Instead, the woman must brave the ‘tongues of fire’ in a ‘sacrifical offering of innocence’, in order to realize her Godlikeness; which is not to be found in bodilessness and the absence of passion, but in passionate creativity; in the willingness to be incarnate. Thus, if human beings are in the image of God, it is a trinitarian image of God, a mutual relation of love of ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’; found in creating, in saving, and in tongues of fire.
39 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Johann George Hamann, above, was influenced by Coenraad van Beuningan, below:
Coenraad van Beuningen (1622 - Amsterdam, Oct. 26, 1693) was the Republic's most experienced diplomat, burgemeester of Amsterdam in 1669, 1672, 1680, 1681, 1683 and 1684, and from 1681 a VOC director. He probably was a manic depressive, becoming unaccountable after the loss of his fortune. Coenraad was baptized at home because his father Dirk van Beuningen and mother Catharina Burgh were remonstrants and did not want to cause a fuss. He was the grandson of Geurt van Beuningen as well as of Albert C. Burgh, both mayors of Amsterdam and heavily involved in the VOC. Coenraad grew up near the Sint Antoniesbreestraat in a very multi-religious The University of Leiden and multi-ethnic neighborhood, next to Pieter Lastman.
Coenraad was taught at the Latin school of Gerhard Johann Vossius and Barlaeus, before commencing studies at the University of Leiden in 1639. In 1642, Hugo de Groot, Swedish envoy in Paris, made Coenraad his secretary and in 1643 he became town clerk in Amsterdam, although he did not feel himself capable.
About 1650, Van Beuningen felt himself attracted to Spinoza and the Collegiants in Rijnsburg. He lived as simply as possible, without a job, somewhere within the area. In 1652, he was send on a mission to queen Christina of Sweden, who was being taught Greek by his schoolfriend Isaac Vossius. In 1654 he traveled to Stade to negotiate an end to an argument about the entry point to the Oresund. The north of Germany was occupied by Swedish. The Danish tried to control the Elbe, the trade to Hamburg and occupied Bremen. Van Beuningen pronounced that the keys of Oresund lay in a dock in Amsterdam. Three years later as an envoy in Copenhagen, he almost ended up the hands of king Charles X Gustav of Sweden. He succeeded to get away in a small boat.
In 1660, he got missions to France and England. Louis XIV of France offered him a post in France that he refused. Van Beuningen warned against the imperialist and mercantilist French policy and wanted to move to Constantinople. Van Beuningen was impressed by Jan Swammerdam, traveling in France for study, and remained firm supporter for the rest of his life. In the same yeas,
40 1664, a treaty with French, was followed by the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the Triple Alliance. In 1669, he bought a plot in a backstreet and built a house (Blijenburg) in 's-Gravenhage, and embellished it with paintings and Turkish rugs. Van Beuningen agreed to the ban on French silk and actions against French brandy and salt. In that year he became mayor of Amsterdam. In 1672, he was nominated as successor to Johan de Witt, not being a hard core republican. Losing the favor of stadholder William III someone made an attempt on his life; it is said he was shocked and burnt part of his furniture. In one of his letters he wrote of the fantastic expansion of trade and imperialism in India and America. He also noticed that the Republic then had for 150 years had more soldiers than all the other Christian countries put together.
Van Beuningen became more interested in literature, philosophy, theology, history and the natural sciences. He wrote deeply on the consequences of the tropical winds and currents, discussing them with Isaac Vossius. He was on friendly terms with Jan Six and Anna Maria van Schurman. Van Beuningen was interested in the ideas of Descartes and combined this with an interest for mysticism, astrology, Millennialism dream-interpretation and supernatural wonders. He sympathised with Jean de Labadie and the Quakers.
In 1672 the Rampjaar, the local theatre, called Schouwburg of Van Campen was shut during the war with the French, the English and two German bishops, Bernhard von Galen from Münster and Maximilian Henry of Bavaria from Cologne. In 1677 it reopened, after a determined campaign led by Van Beuningen and Joan Hudde, on condition nothing was staged which could be deemed harmful either to morals or the public church. In 1682, he funded the publication of the work of the mystic Jacob Böhme. In 1686, Van Beuningen married his neighbour, the rich and lewd Jacoba Victoria Bartolotti, many years his junior, turning out in being a serpent.
Van Beuningen demanded economies by the VOC, proposing measures to introduce more efficient administration and demanding more supervision and sharper observance of the Company's rules in Asia. Conditions were peaceful and so convoys and the maintenance of the VOC's forts were now deemed less necessary. Attacked in his various roles for making these suggestions, he renounced them, but claimed the company's success was the work of its capable administrators in its first twenty years.
Van Beuningen lost half a million guilder in 1688 through speculations in VOC shares. The funding of the armed invasion of William III in England caused a financial crisis in the Dutch Republic. The Amsterdam deputies argued against raising the 16.000 men in the States, on 3 November.: such a move, they insisted, would make war more, no less, likely .... Ensuing madness the city of Amsterdam was appointed his legal guardian. Quickly he was put under custodial care by his colleagues, one was Johannes Hudde. His house in the Hague was taken over in 1690 by the VOC.
41 In his last years New York Alpha’s intellectual Van Beuningen wrote letters to the ecclesiastical authorities about the coming apocalypse, painting Hebrew or Kabbalistic signs on his house at the Amstel. He was locked up nearby and died in poverty on October 26, 1693, leaving ‘a cape and two dressing gowns,’ a bed, some chairs, a desk, an oval shaped mirror, four old taborets and ‘a man’s portrait’ by Rembrandt valued at seven guilders (three dollars).
42 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Coenraad van Beuningan, above, was influenced by Gerhard Vossius, below:
Gerhard Johann Ernie Vossius (Voss) (1577 - March 19, 1649), Dutch classical scholar and theologian, was the son of Johannes Voss, a Protestant of the Netherlands, who fled from persecution into the Palatinate and briefly became pastor in the village near Heidelberg where Gerhard was born, before friction with the strict Lutherans of the Palatinate caused him to settle the following year at the University of Leiden as student of theology, and finally became pastor at Dordrecht, where he died in 1585. Here in Dordrecht the son received his education, until in 1595 he entered the university of Leiden, where he became the lifelong friend of Hugo Grotius, and studied The University of Leiden classics, Hebrew, church history and theology.
In 1600 he was made rector of the latin school in Dordrecht, and devoted himself to philology and historical theology. From 1614 to 1619 he was director of the theological college at Leiden University.
Meantime he was gaining a great reputation as a scholar, not only in the Netherlands, but also in France and England. But in spite of the moderation of his views and his abstention from controversy, he came under suspicion of heresy, and escaped expulsion from his office only by resignation (1619). The year before he had published his valuable history of Pelagian controversies, which his enemies considered favoured the views of the Arminians or Remonstrants.
In 1622, however, he was appointed professor of rhetoric and chronology, and subsequently of Greek, in the university. He declined invitations from Cambridge, but accepted from Archbishop Laud a prebend in Canterbury cathedral without residence, and went to England to be installed in 1629, when he was made LL.D. at Oxford. In 1632 he left Leiden to take the post of professor of history in the newly founded Athenaeum Illustre at Amsterdam, which he held till his death.
His son Isaak (1618-1689), after a brilliant career of scholarship in Sweden, became residentiary canon at Windsor in 1673. He was the author of
43 De septuaginta interpretibus (1661), De poematum cantu et viribus rhythmi (1673), and Variarum observationum liber (1685).
Vossius was amongst the first to treat theological dogmas and the non- Christian religions from the historical point of view. His principal works are Historia Pelagiana sive Historiae de controversies qvas Pelagius ejusque reliquiae moverunt (1618); Aristarchus, sive de arte grammatica (1635 and 1695; new ed. in 2 vols., 1833-35); Etymologicum linguae Latinae (1662; new ed. in two vols., 1762-63); Commentariorum Rhetoricorum oratoriarum institutionum Libri VI. (1606 and often); De Historicis Graecis Libri III (1624); De Historicis Latinis Libri III (1627); De Theologia Gentili (1642); Dissertationes Tres de Tribus Symbolis, Apostolico, Athanasiano et Constantinopolitano (1642). Collected works published at Amsterdam (6 vols., 1695-1701).
Vossius's works are well-represented in the Library of Sir Thomas Browne. See Jean-Pierre Nicéron, Mémoires pour servir de I'histoire des hommes illustres, vol. xiii. (Paris, 1730); Herzog's Realencyklopädie, art. "Vossius"; and the article in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. C.S.M. Rademaker ss.cc., Life and Works of Gerardus Joannes Vossius (1577-1649), (Assen, 1981); G.J. Vossius, Poeticarum institutionum libri III (with English translation and commentary), (Stuttgart, 2006).
44 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Gerhard Vossius, above, was a lifelong friend of Hugo Grotius, below:
Hugo Grotius or Huig de Groot, or Hugo de Groot; (Delft, 10 April 1583 – Rostock, 28 August 1645) worked as a jurist in the Dutch Republic and laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law. He was also a philosopher, Christian apologist, playwright, and poet. Born in Delft during the Dutch Revolt, Hugo was the first child of Jan de Groot and Alida van Overschie. His father was a man of learning, once having studied with the eminent Justus Lipsius at Leiden, as well as of political distinction, and he groomed his son from an early age in a traditional humanist and Aristotelian education. A prodigious learner, Hugo entered the University of Leiden when he The University of Leiden was just eleven years old.
There he studied with some of the most acclaimed intellectuals in northern Europe, including Franciscus Junius, Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Rudolph Snellius. Upon graduation from Leiden in 1598, Grotius was invited to accompany the influential Dutch statesman, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt on a diplomatic mission to France. When the fifteen year-old Grotius was brought into an audience with King Henry IV, his impressive learning so delighted the court that the king declared "Behold the miracle of Holland!". Grotius mingled with a variety of noted intellects while in France, and before he returned to his home country, the University of Orleans conferred upon him an honorary Doctor of Laws.
In Holland, Grotius earned an appointment as advocate to The Hague in 1599 and then as official historiographer for the States of Holland in 1601. His first occasion to write systematically on issues of international justice came in 1604, when he became involved in the legal proceedings following the seizure by Dutch merchants of a Portuguese carrack and its cargo in the Strait of Singapore.
The Dutch were at war with Spain and Portugal when the loaded merchant ship, the Santa Catarina, had been captured by captain Jacob van Heemskerk in 1603. Heemskerk was employed with the United Amsterdam Company (part of the Dutch East India Company), and though he did not have authorization from the company or the government to initiate the use of the force, many of the shareholders were eager to accept the riches that he brought back to them. Not
45 only was the legality of keeping the prize questionable under Dutch statute, but a faction of shareholders (mostly Mennonite) in the Company also objected to the forceful seizure on moral grounds, and of course, the Portuguese were demanding their cargo back. The scandal led to a public judicial hearing and a wider contest to sway public (and international) opinion. It was in this wider contest that representatives of the Company called upon Grotius to draft a polemical defense of the seizure.
The result of Grotius' efforts in 1604-1605 was a long, theory-laden treatise that he provisionally entitled De Indis (On the Indies). Grotius sought to ground his defense of the seizure in terms of the natural principles of justice. In this, he had cast a net much wider than the case at hand; his interest was in the source and ground of war's lawfulness in general. The treatise was never published in full during Grotius' lifetime, perhaps because the court ruling in favor of the Company preempted the need to garner public support. The manuscript was not made public until it was uncovered from Grotius' estate in 1864 and published under the title, De Jure Praedae (On the Right of Capture). The principles that Grotius developed there, however, laid the basis for his mature work on international justice, De jure belli ac pacis, and in fact one chapter of the earlier work did make it to the press in the form of the influential pamphlet, Mare Liberum.
In Mare Liberum (The Free Seas, published 1609) Grotius formulated the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade. Grotius, by claiming 'free seas', provided suitable ideological justification for the Dutch breaking up of various trade monopolies through its formidable naval power (and then establishing its own monopoly).
England, competing fiercely with the Dutch for domination of world trade, opposed this idea and claimed sovereignty over the waters around the British Isles. In Mare clausum (1635) John Selden endeavoured to prove that the sea was in practice virtually as capable of appropriation as terrestrial territory. As conflicting claims grew out of the controversy, maritime states came to moderate their demands and base their maritime claims on the principle that it extended seawards from land. A workable formula was found by Cornelius Bynkershoek in his De dominio maris (1702), restricting maritime dominion to the actual distance within which cannon range could effectively protect it. This became universally adopted and developed into the three-mile limit.
The dispute would later have important economic implications. The Dutch Republic supported the idea of free trade (even though it imposed a special trade monopoly on nutmeg and cloves in the Moluccas). England adopted the Act of Navigation (1651), forbidding any goods from entering England except on English ships. The Act subsequently led to the First Anglo-Dutch War (1652 - 1654).
46 Aided by his continued association with van Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius made considerable advances in his political career, being retained as Oldenbarnevelt's resident advisor in 1605, Advocate General of the Fisc of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland in 1607, and then as Pensionary of Rotterdam (the equivalent of a mayoral office) in 1613. In 1608 he married Maria van Reigersbergen, with whom he would have eight children (four surviving beyond youth) and who would be invaluable in helping him and the family to weather the storm to come.
In these years a great theological controversy broke out between the followers of Jacobus Arminius, chair of theology at Leiden, and the more confessional Reformed or Calvinist theologian, Franciscus Gomarus. In 1610, several months after the death of their leader, the Arminians issued a 'Remonstrance' declaring their doctrinal differences with the mainstream Reformed doctrines of salvation, most often associated with the Protestant Reformer Calvin, but also held by most Reformed pastors and theologians throughout Europe. They had particular problems with the Belgic Confession, art. 16, on election and reprobation.
The Remonstrants did not reject the doctrines of election or predestination, as is often assumed, but rather redefined them so that the decisive factor in a person's salvation is not God's inscrutable decree, but the individual's faith, which God foresees from eternity. According to Arminius and the Remonstrants, God decrees to elect all who meet the condition of faith. Led by Oldenbarnevelt, the States of Holland took an official position of toleration towards the disputants, and Grotius was eventually asked to draft an edict to express this policy. The edict of 1613 put into practice a view that Grotius had been developing in his writings on church and state (see Erastianism): that only the basic tenets necessary for undergirding civil order (e.g., the existence of God and His providence) ought to be enforced while differences on obscure theological doctrines should be left to private conscience.
The edict did not have the intended effect, and hostilities flared throughout the republic. To maintain civil order, Oldenbarnevelt eventually proposed that local authorities be given the power to raise troops (the Sharp Resolution). Such a measure putatively undermined the authority of the stadtholder of the republic, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, son of William the Silent. Maurice seized the opportunity to solidify the preeminence of the Gomarists, whom he had supported, and to eliminate the nuissance he perceived in Oldenbarnevelt (the latter had previously brokered the Twelve Years' Truce with Spain in 1609 against Maurice's wishes). He had Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius arrested on 29 August 1618. Ultimately, Oldenbarnevelt was executed, and Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment in Loevestein castle.
In 1621, with the help of his wife and maidservant, Grotius managed to escape the castle in a book chest and fled to Paris. In the Netherlands today, he is mainly famous for this daring escape. Both the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam
47 and the museum Het Prinsenhof in Delft claim to have the original book chest in their collection.
Grotius was well received in Paris by his former acquaintances and was granted a royal pension under Louis XIII. It was here in France that Grotius completed his most famous philosophical works.
While in Paris, Grotius set about rendering into Latin prose a work which he had compiled in prison, providing rudimentary yet systematic arguments for the truth of Christianity. (Showcasing Grotius' skill as a poet, the earlier Dutch version of the work, Bewijs van den waren Godsdienst (pub. 1622), was written entirely in didactic verse.) The Latin work was first published in 1627 as De veritate religionis Christianae.
It was the first Protestant textbook in Christian apologetics, and was divided into six books. Part of the text dealt with the emerging questions of historical consciousness concerning the authorship and content of the canonical gospels. Other sections of the work addressed pagan religion, Judaism and Islam. What also distinguished this work in the history of Christian apologetics is its precursor role in anticipating the problems expressed in Eighteenth century Deism, and that Grotius represents the first of the practitioners of legal or juridical apologetics in the defence of Christian belief. Hugely popular, the book was translated from Latin into English, Arabic, Persian and Chinese by Edward Pococke for use in missionary work in the East and remained in print until the end of the nineteenth century.
Grotius also developed a particular view of the atonement of Christ known as the "Governmental" or "Moral government" theory. He theorized that Jesus' sacrificial death occurred in order for the Father to forgive while still maintaining his just rule over the universe. This idea, further developed by theologians such as John Miley, became the dominant view in Arminianism and Methodism.
Living in the times of the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Netherlands and the Thirty Years' War between Catholic and Protestant European nations, it is not surprising that Grotius was deeply concerned with matters of conflicts between nations and religions. His most lasting work, begun in prison and published during his exile in Paris, was a monumental effort to restrain such conflicts on the basis of a broad moral consensus. Grotius wrote:
Fully convinced...that there is a common law among nations, which is valid alike for war and in war, I have had many and weighty reasons for undertaking to write upon the subject. Throughout the Christian world I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barbarous races should be ashamed of; I observed that men rush to arms for slight causes, or no cause at all, and that when arms have once been taken up there is no longer any respect
48 for law, divine or human; it is as if, in accordance with a general decree, frenzy had openly been let loose for the committing of all crimes.
De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (On the Laws of War and Peace) was first published in 1625, dedicated to Grotius' current patron, Louis XIII. The treatise advances a system of principles of natural law, which are held to be binding on all people and nations regardless of local custom. The work is divided into three (3) books:
Book I advances his conception of war and of natural justice, arguing that there are some circumstances in which war is justifiable.
Book II identifies three 'just causes' for war: self-defense, reparation of injury, and punishment; Grotius considers a wide variety of circumstances under which these rights of war attach and when they do not.
Book III takes up the question of what rules govern the conduct of war once it has begun; influentially, Grotius argued that all parties to war are bound by such rules, whether their cause is just or not.
The arguments of this work constitute a theory of just war. Roughly, the second book takes up questions of jus ad bellum (justice in the resort to war) and the third, questions of jus in bello (justice in the conduct of war). The way that Grotius conceived of these matters had a profound influence on the tradition after him and on the later formulation of international law.
Many exiled Remonstrants began to return to the Netherlands after the death of Prince Maurice in 1625, but Grotius, who refused to ask for pardon since it would imply an admission of guilt, was denied repatriation despite his repeated requests. Driven out once again after attempting to return to Rotterdam in October of 1631, Grotius fled to Hamburg. In 1634 he met the opportunity to serve as Sweden's ambassador to France. The recently deceased Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus had been an admirer of Grotius (he was said to have carried a copy of De jure belli ac pacis always in his saddle when leading his troops), and his successor's regent, Axel Oxenstierna, was keen to have Grotius in his employ. Grotius accepted the offer and took up diplomatic residence at Paris, which remained his home until he was released from his post in 1645. While departing from his last visit to Sweden, Grotius was shipwrecked on his voyage. He washed up on the shore of Rostock, ill and weather-beaten, and on August 28, 1645 he died; his body at last returned to the country of its youth, being laid to rest in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft.
49 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Hugo Grotius, above, was mentored by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, below:
Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (September 14, 1547, Amersfoort – May 13, 1619, The Hague) was a Dutch statesman, who played an important role in the Dutch struggle for independence from Spain. Van Oldenbarnevelt studied law at Leuven, Bourges, Heidelberg and Padua, and traveled in France and Italy before settling in The Hague. He was a moderate Calvinist, so he supported William the Silent in his revolt against Spain, and fought in William's army. He served as a volunteer for the relief of Haarlem (1573) and again at Leiden (1574). In 1576 he obtained the important post of pensionary of Rotterdam, an office which carried with it official membership of The University of Leiden the States of Holland. In this capacity his industry, singular grasp of affairs, and persuasive powers of speech speedily gained for him a position of influence. He was active in promoting the Union of Utrecht (1579) and the acceptance of the countship of Holland and Zeeland by William (1584). He was a fierce opponent of the policies of the Earl of Leicester, the Governor-General at the time, and instead favoured Maurice of Nassau, a son of William. Leicester left in 1587, leaving the military power in the Netherlands to Maurice. During the governorship of Leicester, Van Oldenbarnevelt was the leader of the strenuous opposition offered by the States of Holland to the centralizing policy of the governor.
On March 16, 1586, van Oldenbarnevelt, in succession to Paulus Buys, became Land's Advocate of Holland for the States of Holland, an office he held for 32 years. This great office gave to a man of commanding ability and industry unbounded influence in a many-headed republic without any central executive authority. Though nominally the servant of the States of Holland he made himself politically the personification of the province which bore more than half the entire charge of the union, and as its mouthpiece in the States-General he practically dominated that assembly. In a brief period he became entrusted with such large and far-reaching authority in all the details of administration, as to be virtually minister of all affairs.
During the two critical years which followed the withdrawal of Leicester, it was the statesmanship of the Advocate which kept the United Provinces from falling asunder through their own inherent separatist tendencies, and prevented them from becoming an easy conquest to the formidable army of Alexander of
50 Parma. Fortunately for the Netherlands the attention of Philip was at their time of greatest weakness riveted upon his contemplated invasion of England, and a respite was afforded which enabled Oldenbarneveldt to supply the lack of any central organized government by gathering into his own hands the control of administrative affairs. His task was made the easier by the whole-hearted support he received from Maurice of Nassau, who, after 1589, held the Stadholderate of five provinces, and was likewise Captain-General and Admiral of the Union.
The interests and ambitions of the two men did not clash, for Maurice's thoughts were centered on the training and leadership of armies and he had no special capacity as a statesman or inclination for politics. The first rift between them came in 1600, when Maurice was forced against his will by the States- General, under the Advocate's influence, to undertake an expedition into Flanders, which was only saved from disaster by desperate efforts which ended in victory at Nieuwpoort. In 1598 Oldenbarneveldt took part in special embassies to Henry IV and Elizabeth, and again in 1605 in a special mission sent to congratulate James I on his accession.
The opening of negotiations by Albert and Isabel in 1606 for a peace or long truce led to a great division of opinion in the Netherlands.
The archdukes having consented to treat with the United Provinces as free provinces and states over which they had no pretensions, Oldenbarneveldt, who had with him the States of Holland and the majority of burgher regents throughout the county, was for peace, provided that liberty of trading was conceded.
Maurice and his cousin William Louis, stadholder of Frisia, with the military and naval leaders and the Calvinist clergy, were opposed to it, on the ground that the Spanish king was merely seeking an interval of repose in which to recuperate his strength for a renewed attack on the independence of the Netherlands.
For some three years the negotiations went on, but at last after endless parleying, on the 9th of April 1609, a truce for twelve years was concluded. All that the Dutch asked was directly or indirectly granted, and Maurice felt obliged to give a reluctant and somewhat sullen assent to the favorable conditions obtained by the firm and skillful diplomacy of the Advocate.
The immediate effect of the truce was a strengthening of Oldenbarneveldt's influence in the government of the Dutch Republic, now recognized as a free and independent state; external peace, however, was to bring with it internal strife. For some years there had been a war of words between the religious parties, known as the Calvinist Gomarists (or Contra Remonstrants) and the Arminians.
51 In 1610 the Arminians, henceforth known as Remonstrants, drew up a petition, known as the Remonstrance, in which they asked that their tenets (defined in five articles) should be submitted to a national synod, summoned by the civil government. It was no secret that this action of the Arminians was taken with the approval and connivance of the Advocate, who was what was styled a libertine, i.e. an upholder of the principle of toleration in religious opinions.
The Gomarists in reply drew up a Contra-Remonstrance in seven articles, and appealed to a purely church synod. The whole land was henceforth divided into Remonstrants and Contra-Remonstrants; the States of Holland under the influence of Oldenbarneveldt supported the former, and refused to sanction the summoning of a purely church synod (1613). They likewise (1614) forbade the preachers in the Province of Holland to treat of disputed subjects from their pulpits.
Obedience was difficult to enforce without military help; riots broke out in certain towns, and when Maurice was appealed to, as Captain-General, he declined to act. He did more, though in no sense a theologian; he declared himself on the side of the Contra-Remonstrants, and established a preacher of that persuasion in a church at the Hague (1617).
The Advocate now took a bold step. He proposed that the States of Holland should, on their own authority, as a sovereign province, raise a local force of 4000 men (waardgelders) to keep the peace.
The States-General, meanwhile, by a bare majority (4 provinces to 3) agreed to the summoning of a national church synod. The States of Holland, also by a narrow majority, refused their assent to this, and passed (August 4, 1617) a strong resolution (Scherpe Resolutie) by which all magistrates, officials and soldiers in the pay of the province were required to take an oath of obedience to the States of Holland on pain of dismissal, and were to be held accountable not to the ordinary tribunals, but to the States of Holland.
It was a declaration of sovereign independence on the part of Holland, and the States-General of the Republic took up the challenge and determined on decisive action. A commission was appointed, with Maurice at its head, to compel the disbanding of the waardgelders. On the 31st of July 1618 the Stadholder appeared at Utrecht, which had thrown in its lot with Holland, at the head of a body of troops, and at his command the local levies at once laid down their arms.
His progress through the towns of Holland met with no opposition. The States party was crushed without a blow being struck. On the 23rd of August, by order of the States-General, the Advocate and his chief supporters, (q.v.) and Hoogerbeets, were arrested.
52 Oldenbarneveldt was, with his friends, kept in the strictest confinement until November, and then brought for examination before a commission appointed by the States-General. He appeared more than sixty (60) times before the commissioners and was examined most severely upon the whole course of his official life, and was, most unjustly, allowed neither to consult papers nor to put his defence in writing.
On February 20, 1619 he was arraigned before a special court of twenty- four members, only half of whom were Hollanders, and nearly all of them his personal enemies. It was in no sense a legal court, nor had it any jurisdiction over the prisoner, but the protest of the Advocate, who claimed his right to be tried by the sovereign province of Holland, whose servant he was, was disregarded.
It was in fact not a trial at all, and the packed bench of judges on Sunday, 12th May, pronounced sentence of death. On the following day the old statesman, at the age of seventy-one, was beheaded in the Binnenhof in The Hague. Such, to use his own words, was his reward for serving his country forty- three years.
Oldenbarneveldt was married in 1575 to Maria van Utrecht. He left two sons, the lords of Groeneveld and Stoutenburg, and two daughters. A conspiracy against the life of Maurice, in which the sons of Oldenbarneveldt took part, was discovered in 1623. Stoutenburg, who was the chief accomplice, made his escape and entered the service of Spain; Groeneveld was executed.
53 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Johan van Oldenbarnveldt, above, was in league, partially, with Maurice of Nassau, below:
Maurice of Nassau (Dutch: Maurits van Nassau)(Nov. 14, 1567 – Apr. 23, 1625), Prince of Orange (1618–1625), son of William the Silent and Princess Anna of Saxony, was born at the castle of Dillenburg. He was named after his maternal grandfather, the Elector Maurice of Saxony. Maurice never married but was the father of illegitimate children by Margaretha van Mechelen and Anna van de Kelder. He was raised in Dillenburg by his uncle Johan of Nassau (Jan the Old). Together with his cousin Willem Lodewijk, he studied in Heidelberg and later with his brother Philip in Leiden where he met Simon Stevin. The University of Heidelberg
The States of Holland and Zeeland paid for his studies, as their father had run into financial problems after spending his entire fortune in the early stages of the Dutch revolt. Only 16 when his father was murdered in Delft in 1584, he soon took over as stadtholder (Stadhouder), though this title was not inheritable (The monarchs of England and France had refused, and there simply was no one else to take the job). He became stadtholder of Holland and Zeeland in 1585, of Guelders, Overijssel and Utrecht in 1590 and of Groningen and Drenthe in 1620 (following the death of Willem Lodewijk, who had been Stadtholder there and in Friesland).
Maurice was preceded as Prince of Orange (not a Dutch title) by his elder half-brother Philip William. However, Philip William was in the custody of Spain, remaining so until 1596, and was thus unable to lead the Dutch cause.
He was appointed captain-general of the army in 1587, bypassing the Earl of Leicester, who returned to England on hearing this news. Maurice organised the rebellion against Spain into a coherent, successful revolt. He reorganised the army together with Willem Lodewijk, studied military history, strategy and tactics, mathematics and astronomy, and proved himself to be among the best strategists of his age. Paying special attention to the siege theories of Simon Stevin, he took valuable key fortresses and towns: Breda in 1590, Steenwijk in 1592, and Geertruidenberg in 1593.
His vicitories in the cavalry battles at Turnhout (1597) and at Nieuwpoort (1600) earned him military fame and acknowledgment throughout Europe.
54 Despite these successes, the House of Orange did not attain great respect among European Royalty, as the Stadtholdership was not inheritable.
Maurice started out as the protégé of Landsadvocaat (Land's Advocate, a kind of secretary) Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (q.v). But gradually tensions rose between these two men. Against Maurice's advice, and despite his protests, Van Oldenbarnevelt decided to sign the Twelve Years' Truce with Spain, which lasted from 1609 - 1621. The required funds to maintain the army and navy, and the general course of the war were other topics of constant struggle.
With the religious troubles between Gomarists (Calvinist) and Arminians, the struggle between Van Oldenbarnevelt and Maurice reached a climax. Van Oldenbarnevelt was arrested, tried and decapitated despite numerous requests for mercy. From 1618 till his death Maurice now enjoyed uncontested power over the Republic.
Maurice urged his brother Frederick Henry to marry in order to preserve the dynasty. In 1621 the war resumed, and the Spanish, led by Ambrosio Spinola, had notable successes, including the recapture of Breda, the Nassau's old family residence, in 1625. Maurice died with the siege still underway.
55 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Maurice of Nassau, above, was cousin to and college friend of, Willem Lodewijk, below:
William Louis, Count of Nassau- Dillenburg (Dutch : Willem Lodewijk; West Frisian : Willem Loadewyk) (born March 13, 1560, Dillenburg, Hesse; died July 13, 1620, Leeuwarden, Netherlands) was Count of Nassau-Dillenburg from 1606- 1620, and stadtholder of Friesland, Groningen, and Drenthe. He was the eldest son of John VI, Count of Nassau- Dillenburg. William Louis served as a cavalry officer under William the Silent. Together with his cousin Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, he helped plan the military strategy of The Netherlands against Spain from 1588-1609. On November 25, 1587, he married his cousin, Anna of Nassau, daughter of William the Silent and Anna of Saxony, The University of Heidelberg and older sister of Maurice of Nassau. Anna died less than six months later on June 13, 1588, and William Louis never remarried. He was nicknamed "Us Heit" (West Frisian for "our father").
56 New York Alpha’s intellectuals, Maurice of Nassau and Willem Lodewijk, both studied under Dr. David Pareus at Heidelberg, below:
Dr. David Pareus (1548-1622) was a German Protestant theologian and reformer. Pareus studied from the age of fourteen in Hirschberg. His father then disinherited him because of the opinions that David formed during his studies. Pareus entered the College of Sapience in Heidelberg where he studied Divinity. He was a student of Zacharias Ursinus. After several years preaching in the area and lecturing at the college in Heidelberg, Pareus gained his doctorate. In 1596 he was appointed Professor of the Old Testament and in 1602 he was appointed Professor of the New Testament. Pareus advocated calling rulers to account for their actions. These opinions were viewed with suspicion by the absolute monarchy The University of Heidelberg of James I of England.
In 1622, authorities in Oxford were ordered to search libraries and bookshops and to burn every copy of his work.
57 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Dr. David Pareus, studied under Zacharias Ursinus, below:
Zacharias Ursinus (July 18, 1534, Breslau - May 6, 1583, Neustadt), a sixteenth century German theologian, born Zacharias Baer in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland). Like all young scholars of that era he gave himself a Latin name, in his case one stemming from ursus, meaning bear. He is best known as a professor of theology at the University of Heidelberg and co-author with Caspar Olevianus (1536-1587) of the Heidelberg Catechism. At age fifteen he enrolled at Wittenberg University, boarding for the next seven The University of Wittenberg years with Philipp Melanchthon, the (now combined with Halle) erudite successor of Martin Luther. Melanchthon admired young Ursinus for his intellectual gifts and his spiritual maturity.
Basel, Lausanne, and Geneva. Sojourns in Lyon and Orleans gave him expertise in Hebrew. Returning to Breslau he published a pamphlet on the sacraments, which aroused the ire of Lutherans who charged him with being more Reformed than Lutheran. The Breslau opponents’ vitriolic reaction succeeded in driving him out of the city to Zurich, where he became friends with Peter Martyr, the Italian Reformer.
In 1561, upon Peter Martyr's recommendation, Frederick III, Elector Palatine, appointed him professor in the Collegium Sapientiae at Heidelberg, where in 1563, having been commissioned by the Prince elector, he completed the Heidelberg Catechism in cooperation with Olevianus. The death of the Prince elector in 1576 led to the removal of Ursinus, who occupied a professorial chair at Neustadt an der Haardt from 1578 until his death in 1583.
His Works were published in 1587-1589, and a more complete edition by his son and two of his pupils, Pareus and Reuterus, in 1612. Ursinus College is a small, liberal arts college founded in his name.
58 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Zacharias Ursinus, was college friend and studied under Philipp Melanchthon, below:
Philipp Melanchthon (born Philipp Schwartzerd) (February 16, 1497 – April 19, 1560) was a German professor and theologian, a key leader of the Lutheran Reformation, and a friend and associate of Martin Luther. Melanchthon was born sometime in 1497, at Bretten, near Karlsruhe, where his father, Georg Schwarzerd, was armorer to Count Palatine Philip. In 1507 he was sent to the Latin school at Pforzheim, the rector of which, Georg Simler of Wimpfen, The University of Wittenberg introduced him to the study of the Latin (now combined with Halle) and Greek poets and of the philosophy of Aristotle.
But he was chiefly influenced by his great-uncle, Johann Reuchlin, the great representative of humanism, who advised him to change his family name, Schwarzerd (literally Black-earth), into the Greek equivalent Melanchthon.
Not yet thirteen years old, he entered in 1509 the University of Heidelberg where he studied philosophy, rhetoric, and astronomy/astrology, and was known as a good Greek scholar. Being refused the degree of master in 1512 on account of his youth, he went to Tübingen, where he pursued humanistic and philosophical studies, but devoted himself also to the study of jurisprudence, mathematics, astronomy/astrology, and even of medicine.
When, having completed his philosophical course, he had taken the degree of master in 1516, he began to study theology. Under the influence of men like Reuchlin and Erasmus he became convinced that true Christianity was something quite different from scholastic theology as it was taught at the university. But at that time he had not yet formed fixed opinions on theology, since later he often called Luther his spiritual father. He became conventor (repetent) in the contubernium and had to instruct younger scholars. He also lectured on oratory, on Virgil and Livy.
His first publications were an edition of Terence (1516) and his Greek grammar (1518), but he had written previously the preface to the Epistolae clarorum virorum of Reuchlin (1514). The more strongly he felt the opposition of the scholastic party to the reforms instituted by him at the University of Tübingen, the more willingly he followed a call to Wittenberg as professor by Luther, whose influence brought him to the study of Scripture, especially of Paul, and so to a more living knowledge of the Evangelical doctrine of salvation.
59 He was present at the disputation of Leipzig (1519) as a spectator, but influenced the discussion by his comments and suggestions, so that he gave Johann Eck an excuse for an attack. In his Defensio contra Johannem Eckium (Wittenberg, 1519) he had already clearly developed the principles of the authority of Scripture and its interpretation.
On account of the interest in theology shown in his lectures on the Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Romans, together with his investigations into the doctrines of Paul, he was granted the degree of bachelor of theology, and was transferred to the theological faculty. Soon he was bound closer than ever to Wittenberg by his marriage to Katharina Krapp, the mayor's daughter, a marriage contracted at his friends' urgent request, and especially Luther's (Nov. 25, 1520).
In the beginning of 1521 in his Didymi Faventini versus Thomam Placentinum pro M. Luthero oratio (Wittenberg, n.d.), he defended Luther by proving that Luther rejected only papal and ecclesiastical practises which were at variance with Scripture, but not true philosophy and true Christianity. But while Luther was absent at Wartburg Castle, during the disturbances caused by the Zwickau prophets, there appeared for the first time the limitations of Melanchthon's nature, his lack of firmness and his diffidence against these prophets, and had it not been for the energetic interference of Luther, the prophets might not have been silenced.
The appearance of Melanchthon's Loci communes rerum theologicarum seu hypotyposes theologicae (Wittenberg and Basel, 1521) was of great importance for the confirmation and expansion of the reformatory ideas. In close adherence to Luther, Melanchthon presented the new doctrine of Christianity under the form of a discussion of the "leading thoughts" of the Epistle to the Romans. His purpose was not to give a systematic exposition of Christian faith, but a key to the right understanding of Scripture.
Nevertheless, he continued to lecture on the classics, and, after Luther's return, might have given up his theological work altogether, if it had not been for Luther's urging.
On a journey in 1524 to his native town, he was led to engage in negotiations with the papal legate Campeggio who tried to draw him from Luther's cause, but without success either at that time or afterward. In his Unterricht der Visitatorn an die Pfarherrn im Kurfürstentum zu Sachssen (1528) Melanchthon by establishing a basis for the reform of doctrines as well as regulations for churches and schools, without any direct attack upon the supposed errors of the Catholic Church, presented clearly the Evangelical doctrine of salvation.
In 1529 he accompanied the elector to the Diet of Speyer to represent the Evangelical cause. His hopes of inducing the imperial party to a peaceable
60 recognition of the Reformation were not fulfilled. He later repented of the friendly attitude shown by him toward the Swiss at the diet, calling Zwingli's doctrine of the Lord's Supper "an impious dogma" and confirming Luther in his attitude of non-acceptance.
The composition now known as the Augsburg Confession was laid before the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, and would come to be considered perhaps the most significant document of the Protestant Reformation. While the confession was based on Luther's Marburg and Schwabach articles, it was mainly the work of Melanchthon. Although commonly thought of as a unified statement of doctrine by the two reformers, Luther did not conceal his dissatisfaction with the irenic tone of the confession. Indeed, some would criticize Melanchthon's conduct at the Diet as unbecoming of the principle he promoted, implying that faith in the truth of his cause would logically have inspired Melanchthon to a more firm and dignified posture. Others point out that he had not sought the part of a political leader, suggesting that he seemed to lack the requisite energy and decision for such a role and may simply have been a lackluster judge of human nature. Melanchthon's subsequent Apology of the Augsburg Confession reveals further doctrinal strains with Luther.
Melanchthon then settled into the comparative quiet of his academic and literary labors. His most important theological work of this period was the Commentarii in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos (Wittenberg, 1532), noteworthy for introducing the idea that "to be justified" means "to be accounted just," whereas the Apology had placed side by side the meanings of "to be made just" and "to be accounted just." Melanchthon's increasing fame gave occasion for several honorable calls to Tübingen (Sept., 1534), to France, and to England, but consideration of the elector caused him to refuse them.
He took an important part in the discussions concerning the Lord's Supper which began in 1531. He approved fully of the Wittenberg Concord sent by Bucer to Wittenberg, and at the instigation of the Landgrave of Hesse discussed the question with Bucer in Cassel, at the end of 1534. He eagerly labored for an agreement, for his patristic studies and the Dialogue (1530) of Œcolampadius had made him doubt the correctness of Luther's doctrine. Moreover, after the death of Zwingli and the change of the political situation his earlier scruples in regard to a union lost their weight. Bucer did not go so far as to believe with Luther that the true body of Christ in the Lord's Supper is bitten by the teeth, but admitted the offering of the body and blood in the symbols of bread and wine. Melanchthon discussed Bucer's views with the most prominent adherents of Luther; but Luther himself would not agree to a mere veiling of the dispute. Melanchthon's relation to Luther was not disturbed by his work as a mediator, although Luther for a time suspected that Melanchthon was "almost of the opinion of Zwingli"; nevertheless he desired to "share his heart with him."
61 During his sojourn in Tübingen in 1536 Melanchthon was severely attacked by Cordatus, preacher in Niemeck, because he had taught that works are necessary for salvation. In the second edition of his Loci (1535) he abandoned his earlier strict doctrine of determinism which went even beyond that of Augustine, and in its place taught more clearly his so-called Synergism. He repulsed the attack of Cordatus in a letter to Luther and his other colleagues by stating that he had never departed from their common teachings on this subject, and in the antinomian controversy of 1537 Melanchthon was in harmony with Luther.
The personal relation of the two great Reformers had to stand many a test in those years, for Amsdorf and others tried to stir up Luther against Melanchthon so that his stay at Wittenberg seemed to Melanchthon at times almost unbearable, and he compared himself to "Prometheus chained to the Caucasus." About this time occurred the notorious case of the second marriage of Philip of Hesse. Melanchthon, who, as well as Luther, regarded this as an exceptional case was present at the marriage, but urged Philip to keep the matter a secret. The publication of the fact so affected Melanchthon, then at Weimar, that he became exceedingly ill.
In October, 1540, Melanchthon took an important part in the religious colloquy of Worms, where he defended clearly and firmly the doctrines of the Augsburg Confession. It is to be noted that Melanchthon used as a basis of the discussion an edition of the Augsburg Confession which had been revised by him (1540), and later was called Variata. Although Eck pointed out the not inessential change of Article X. regarding the Lord's Supper, the Protestants did not then take any offense. The colloquy failed, according to some not because of the obstinacy and irritability of Melanchthon, as others assert, but because of the impossibility of making further concessions to the Roman Catholics. The conference at Regensburg in May, 1541, was also fruitless, owing to Melanchthon's firm adherence to the articles on the Church, the sacraments, and auricular confession.
His views concerning the Lord's Supper, developed in union with Bucer on the occasion of drawing a draft of reformation for the electorate of Cologne (1543), aroused severe criticism on the part of Luther who wished a clear statement as to "whether the true body and blood were received physically." Luther gave free vent to his displeasure from the pulpit, and Melanchthon expected to be banished from Wittenberg. Further outbreaks of his anger were warded off only by the efforts of Chancellor Bruck and the elector; but from that time Melanchthon had to suffer from the ill-temper of Luther, and was besides afflicted by various domestic troubles. The death of Luther, on Feb. 18, 1546, affected him in the most painful manner, not only because of the common course of their lives and struggles, but also because of the great loss that he believed was suffered by the Protestant Church.
62 The last eventful and sorrowful period of his life began with controversies over the Interims and the Adiaphora (1547). It is true, Melanchthon rejected the Augsburg Interim, which the emperor tried to force upon the defeated Protestants; but in the negotiations concerning the so-called Leipzig Interim he made concessions which many feel can in no way be justified, even if one considers his difficult position, opposed as he was to the elector and the emperor.
In agreeing to various Roman usages, Melanchthon started from the opinion that they are adiaphora if nothing is changed in the pure doctrine and the sacraments which Jesus instituted, but he disregarded the position that concessions made under such circumstances have to be regarded as a denial of Evangelical convictions.
Melanchthon himself perceived his faults in the course of time and repented of them, perhaps having to suffer more than was just in the displeasure of his friends and the hatred of his enemies. From now on until his death he was full of trouble and suffering. After Luther's death he became the "theological leader of the German Reformation," not indisputably, however; for the Lutherans with Matthias Flacius at their head accused him and his followers of heresy and apostasy. Melanchthon bore all accusations and calumnies with admirable patience, dignity, and self-control.
In his controversy on justification with Andreas Osiander Melanchthon satisfied all parties. Melanchthon took part also in a controversy with Stancari, who held that Christ was our justification only according to his human nature.
He was also still a strong opponent of the Roman Catholics, for it was by his advice that the elector of Saxony declared himself ready to send deputies to a council to be convened at Trent, but only under the condition that the Protestants should have a share in the discussions, and that the Pope should not be considered as the presiding officer and judge. As it was agreed upon to send a confession to Trent, Melanchthon drew up the Confessio Saxonica which is a repetition of the Augsburg Confession, discussing, however, in greater detail, but with moderation, the points of controversy with Rome. Melanchthon on his way to Trent at Dresden saw the military preparations of Maurice of Saxony, and after proceeding as far as Nuremberg, returned to Wittenberg in March 1552, for Maurice had turned against the emperor. Owing to his act, the condition of the Protestants became more favorable and were still more so at the Peace of Augsburg (1555), but Melanchthon's labors and sufferings increased from that time.
The last years of his life were embittered by the disputes over the Interim and the freshly started controversy on the Lord's Supper. As the statement "good works are necessary for salvation" appeared in the Leipzig Interim, its Lutheran opponents attacked in 1551 Georg Major, the friend and disciple of Melanchthon,
63 so Melanchthon dropped the formula altogether, seeing how easily it could be misunderstood.
But all his caution and reservation did not hinder his opponents from continually working against him, accusing him of synergism and Zwinglianism. At the Colloquy of Worms in 1557 which he attended only reluctantly, the adherents of Flacius and the Saxon theologians tried to avenge themselves by thoroughly humiliating Melanchthon, in agreement with the malicious desire of the Roman Catholics to condemn all heretics, especially those who had departed from the Augsburg Confession, before the beginning of the conference. As this was directed against Melanchthon himself, he protested, so that his opponents left, greatly to the satisfaction of the Roman Catholics who now broke off the colloquy, throwing all blame upon the Protestants. The Reformation in the sixteenth century did not experience a greater insult, as Nitzsch says.
Nevertheless, Melanchthon persevered in his efforts for the peace of the Church, suggesting a synod of the Evangelical party and drawing up for the same purpose the Frankfurt Recess, which he defended later against the attacks of his enemies.
More than anything else the controversies on the Lord's Supper embittered the last years of his life. The renewal of this dispute was due to the victory in the Reformed Church of the Calvinistic doctrine and its influence upon Germany. To its tenets Melanchthon never gave his assent, nor did he use its characteristic formulas. The personal presence and self-impartation of Christ in the Lord's Supper were especially important for Melanchthon; but he did not definitely state how body and blood are related to this. Although rejecting the physical act of mastication, he nevertheless assumed the real presence of the body of Christ and therefore also a real self-impartation. Melanchthon differed from Calvin also in emphasizing the relation of the Lord's Supper to justification.
But before these and other theological dissensions were ended, he died; a few days before this event he committed to writing his reasons for not fearing it. On the left were the words, "Thou shalt be delivered from sins, and be freed from the acrimony and fury of theologians"; on the right, "Thou shalt go to the light, see God, look upon his Son, learn those wonderful mysteries which thou hast not been able to understand in this life." The immediate cause of death was a severe cold which he had contracted on a journey to Leipzig in March, 1560, followed by a fever that consumed his strength, weakened by many sufferings.
The only care that occupied him until his last moment was the desolate condition of the Church. He strengthened himself in almost uninterrupted prayer, and in listening to passages of Scripture. Especially significant did the words seem to him, "His own received him not; but as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God." When Caspar Peucer (q.v.), his son
64 in-law, asked him if he wanted anything, he replied, "Nothing but heaven." His body was laid beside Luther's in the Schloßkirche in Wittenberg.
He is commemorated in the Calendar of Saints of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod on February 16 and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America on June 25.
Melanchthon's importance for the Reformation lay essentially in the fact that he systematized Luther's ideas, defended them in public, and made them the basis of a religious education. These two, by complementing each other, could be said to have harmoniously achieved the results of the Reformation. Melanchthon was impelled by Luther to work for the Reformation; his own inclinations would have kept him a student. Without Luther's influence Melanchthon would have been "a second Erasmus," although his heart was filled with a deep religious interest in the Reformation. While Luther scattered the sparks among the people, Melanchthon by his humanistic studies won the sympathy of educated people and scholars for the Reformation. Aside Luther's strength of faith, Melanchthon's many sidedness and calmness, his temperance and love of peace, had a share in the success of the movement.
Both men had a clear consciousness of their mutual position and the divine necessity of their common calling. Melanchthon wrote in 1520, "I would rather die than be separated from Luther," whom he afterward compared to Elijah, and called "the man full of the Holy Ghost." In spite of the strained relations between them in the last years of Luther's life, Melanchthon exclaimed at Luther's death, "Dead is the horseman and chariot of Israel who ruled the Church in this last age of the world!"
On the other hand, Luther wrote of Melanchthon, in the preface to Melanchthon's Commentary on the Colossians (1529), "I had to fight with rabble and devils, for which reason my books are very warlike. I am the rough pioneer who must break the road; but Master Philipp comes along softly and gently, sows and waters heartily, since God has richly endowed him with gifts." Luther also did justice to Melanchthon's teachings, praising one year before his death in the preface to his own writings Melanchthon's revised Loci above them and calling Melanchthon "a divine instrument which has achieved the very best in the department of theology to the great rage of the devil and his scabby tribe." It is remarkable that Luther, who vehemently attacked men like Erasmus and Bucer, when he thought that truth was at stake, never spoke directly against Melanchthon, and even during his melancholy last years conquered his temper.
The strained relation between these two men never came from external things, such as human rank and fame, much less from other advantages, but always from matters of Church and doctrine, and chiefly from the fundamental difference of their individualities; they repelled and attracted each other "because nature had not formed out of them one man." However, it can not be denied that
65 Luther was the more magnanimous, for however much he was at times dissatisfied with Melanchthon's actions, he never uttered a word against his private character; but Melanchthon, on the other hand, sometimes evinced a lack of confidence in Luther. In a letter to Carlowitz he complained that Luther on account of his polemical nature exercised a personally humiliating pressure upon him. Some would say that any such pressure was more than justified, but that would have been a matter of opinion even then.
As a reformer, Melanchthon was characterized by moderation, conscientiousness, caution, and love of peace; but these qualities were sometimes said to only be lack of decision, consistence, and courage. Often, however, his actions are shown stemming not from anxiety for his own safety, but from regard for the welfare of the community and for the quiet development of the Church.
Melanchthon was not said to lack personal courage, but rather he was said to be less of an aggressive than of a passive nature. When he was reminded how much power and strength Luther drew from his trust in God, he answered, "If I myself do not do my part, I can not expect anything from God in prayer." His nature was seen to be inclined to suffer with faith in God that he would be released from every evil rather than to act valiantly with his aid.
The distinction between Luther and Melanchthon is well brought out in Luther's letters to the latter (June, 1530): "To your great anxiety by which you are made weak, I am a cordial foe; for the cause is not ours. It is your philosophy, and not your theology, which tortures you so,-- as though you could accomplish anything by your useless anxieties. So far as the public cause is concerned, I am well content and satisfied; for I know that it is right and true, and, what is more, it is the cause of Christ and God himself. For that reason, I am merely a spectator. If we fall, Christ will likewise of Christ and God himself. For that reason, I am merely a spectator. If we fall, Christ will likewise fall; and if he fall, I would rather fall with Christ than stand with the emperor."
Another trait of his character was his love of peace. He had an innate aversion to quarrels and discord; yet, often he was very irritable. His irenical character often led him to adapt himself to the views of others, as may be seen from his correspondence with Erasmus and from his public attitude from the Diet of Augsburg to the Interim. It was said not to be merely a personal desire for peace, but his conservative religious nature that guided him in his acts of conciliation. He never could forget that his father on his death-bed had besought his family "never to leave the Church." He stood toward the history of the Church in an attitude of piety and reverence that made it much more difficult for him than for Luther to be content with the thought of the impossibility of a reconciliation with the Roman Catholic Church. He laid stress upon the authority of the Fathers, not only of Augustine, but also of the Greeks.
66 His attitude in matters of worship was conservative, and in the Leipsic Interim he was said by Cordatus and Schenk even to be Crypto-Catholic. He never strove for a reconciliation with Roman Catholicism at the price of pure doctrine. He attributed more value to the external appearance and organization of the Church than Luther did, as can be seen from his whole treatment of the "doctrine of the Church." The ideal conception of the Church, which the Reformers opposed to the organization of the Roman Church, which was expressed in his Loci of 1535, lost for him after 1537 its former prominence, when he began to emphasize the conception of the true visible Church as it may be found among the Evangelicals.
The relation of the Church to God he found in the divinely ordered office, the ministry of the Gospel. The universal priesthood was for Melanchthon as for Luther no principle of an ecclesiastical constitution, but a purely religious principle. In accordance with this idea Melanchthon tried to keep the traditional church constitution and government, including the bishops. He did not want, however, a church altogether independent of the State, but rather, in agreement with Luther, he believed it the duty of the secular authorities to protect religion and the Church. He looked upon the consistories as ecclesiastical courts which therefore should be composed of spiritual and secular judges, for to him the official authority of the Church did not lie in a special class of priests, but rather in the whole congregation, to be represented therefore not only by ecclesiastics, but also by laymen. Melanchthon in advocating church union did not overlook differences in doctrine for the sake of common practical tasks.
The older he grew, the less he distinguished between the Gospel as the announcement of the will of God, and right doctrine as the human knowledge of it. Therefore he took pains to safeguard unity in doctrine by theological formulas of union, but these were made as broad as possible and were restricted to the needs of practical religion.
As a scholar Melanchthon embodied the entire spiritual culture of his age. At the same time he found the simplest, clearest, and most suitable form for his knowledge; therefore his manuals, even if they were not always original, were quickly introduced into schools and kept their place for more than a century.
Knowledge had for him no purpose of its own; it existed only for the service of moral and religious education, and so the teacher of Germany prepared the way for the religious thoughts of the Reformation. He is the father of Christian humanism, which has exerted a lasting influence upon scientific life in Germany.
His works were not always new and original, but they were clear, intelligible, and answered their purpose. His style is natural and plain, better, however, in Latin and Greek than in German. He was not without natural eloquence, although his voice was weak.
67 As a theologian, Melanchthon did not show so much creative ability, but rather a genius for collecting and systematizing the ideas of others, especially of Luther, for the purpose of instruction. He kept to the practical, and cared little for connection of the parts, so his Loci were in the form of isolated paragraphs.
The fundamental difference between Luther and Melanchthon lies not so much in the latter's ethical conception, as in his humanistic mode of thought which formed the basis of his theology and made him ready not only to acknowledge moral and religious truths outside of Christianity, but also to bring Christian truth into closer contact with them, and thus to mediate between Christian revelation and ancient philosophy.
Melanchthon's views differed from Luther's only in some modifications of ideas. Melanchthon looked upon the law as not only the correlate of the Gospel, by which its effect of salvation is prepared, but as the unchangeable order of the spiritual world which has its basis in God himself. He furthermore reduced Luther's much richer view of redemption to that of legal satisfaction. He did not draw from the vein of mysticism running through Luther's theology, but emphasized the ethical and intellectual elements.
After giving up determinism and absolute predestination and ascribing to man a certain moral freedom, he tried to ascertain the share of free will in conversion, naming three causes as concurring in the work of conversion, the Word, the Spirit, and the human will, not passive, but resisting its own weakness. Since 1548 he used the definition of freedom formulated by Erasmus, "the capability of applying oneself to grace."
His definition of faith lacks the mystical depth of Luther. In dividing faith into knowledge, assent, and trust, he made the participation of the heart subsequent to that of the intellect, and so gave rise to the view of the later orthodoxy that the establishment and acceptation of pure doctrine should precede the personal attitude of faith. To his intellectual conception of faith corresponded also his view that the Church also is only the communion of those who adhere to the true belief and that her visible existence depends upon the consent of her unregenerated members to her teachings.
Finally, Melanchthon's doctrine of the Lord's Supper, lacking the profound mysticism of faith by which Luther united the sensual elements and supersensual realities, demanded at least their formal distinction.
The development of Melanchthon's beliefs may be seen from the history of the Loci. In the beginning Melanchthon intended only a development of the leading ideas representing the Evangelical conception of salvation, while the later editions approach more and more the plan of a text-book of dogma. At first he uncompromisingly insisted on the necessity of every event, energetically rejected
68 the philosophy of Aristotle, and had not fully developed his doctrine of the sacraments.
In 1535 he treated for the first time the doctrine of God and that of the Trinity; rejected the doctrine of the necessity of every event and named free will as a concurring cause in conversion. The doctrine of justification received its forensic form and the necessity of good works was emphasized in the interest of moral discipline. The last editions are distinguished from the earlier ones by the prominence given to the theoretical and rational element.
In ethics Melanchthon preserved and renewed the tradition of ancient morality and represented the Evangelical conception of life. His books bearing directly on morals were chiefly drawn from the classics, and were influenced not so much by Aristotle as by Cicero. His principal works in this line were Prolegomena to Cicero's De officiis (1525); Enarrationes librorum Ethicorum Aristotelis (1529); Epitome philosophiae moralis (1538); and Ethicae doctrinae elementa (1550).
In his Epitome philosophiae moralis Melanchthon treats first the relation of philosophy to the law of God and the Gospel. Moral philosophy, it is true, does not know anything of the promise of grace as revealed in the Gospel, but it is the development of the natural law implanted by God in the heart of man, and therefore representing a part of the divine law. The revealed law, necessitated because of sin, is distinguished from natural law only by its greater completeness and clearness. The fundamental order of moral life can be grasped also by reason; therefore the development of moral philosophy from natural principles must not be neglected. Melanchthon therefore made no sharp distinction between natural and revealed morals.
His contribution to Christian ethics in the proper sense must be sought in the Augsburg Confession and its Apology as well as in his Loci, where he followed Luther in depicting the Evangelical ideal of life, the free realization of the divine law by a personality blessed in faith and filled with the spirit of God.
Melanchthon's formulation of the authority of Scripture became the norm for the following time. The principle of his hermeneutics is expressed in his words: "Every theologian and faithful interpreter of the heavenly doctrine must necessarily be first a grammarian, then a dialectician, and finally a witness." By "grammarian" he meant the philologist in the modern sense who is master of history, archaeology, and ancient geography. As to the method of interpretation, he insisted with great emphasis upon the unity of the sense, upon the literal sense in contrast to the four senses of the scholastics. He further stated that whatever is looked for in the words of Scripture, outside of the literal sense, is only dogmatic or practical application.
69 His commentaries, however, are not grammatical, but are full of theological and practical matter, confirming the doctrines of the Reformation, and edifying believers. The most important of them are those on Genesis, Proverbs, Daniel, the Psalms, and especially those on the New Testament, on Romans (edited in 1522 against his will by Luther), Colossians (1527), and John (1523). Melanchthon was the constant assistant of Luther in his translation of the Bible, and both the books of the Maccabees in Luther's Bible are ascribed to him. A Latin Bible published in 1529 at Wittenberg is designated as a common work of Melanchthon and Luther.
In the sphere of historical theology the influence of Melanchthon may be traced until the seventeenth century, especially in the method of treating church history in connection with political history. His was the first Protestant attempt at a history of dogma, Sententiae veterum aliquot patrum de caena domini (1530) and especially De ecclesia et auctoritate verbi Dei (1539).
Melanchthon exerted a wide influence in the department of homiletics, and has been regarded as the author, in the Protestant Church, of the methodical style of preaching. He himself keeps entirely aloof from all mere dogmatizing or rhetoric in the Annotationes in Evangelia (1544), the Conciones in Evangelium Matthaei (1558), and in his German sermons prepared for George of Anhalt. He never preached from the pulpit; and his Latin sermons (Postilla) were prepared for the Hungarian students at Wittenberg who did not understand German. In this connection may be mentioned also his Catechesis puerilis (1532), a religious manual for younger students, and a German catechism (1549), following closely Luther's arrangement.
From Melanchthon came also the first Protestant work on the method of theological study, so that it may safely be said that by his influence every department of theology was advanced even if he was not always a pioneer.
As a philologist and pedagogue Melanchthon was the spiritual heir of the South German Humanists, of men like Reuchlin, Wimpheling, and Rodolphus Agricola, who represented an ethical conception of the humanities. The liberal arts and a classical education were for him only a means to an ethical and religious end. The ancient classics were for him in the first place the sources of a purer knowledge, but they were also the best means of educating the youth both by their beauty of form and by their ethical content. By his organizing activity in the sphere of educational institutions and by his compilations of Latin and Greek grammars and commentaries, Melanchthon became the founder of the learned schools of Evangelical Germany, a combination of humanistic and Christian ideals. In philosophy also Melanchthon was the teacher of the whole German Protestant world. The influence of his philosophical compendia ended only with the rule of the Leibniz-Wolff school.
70 He started from scholasticism; but with the contempt of an enthusiastic Humanist he turned away from it and came to Wittenberg with the plan of editing the complete works of Aristotle. Under the dominating religious influence of Luther his interest abated for a time, but in 1519 he edited the "Rhetoric" and in 1520 the "Dialectic."
The relation of philosophy to theology is characterized, according to him, by the distinction between law and Gospel. The former, as a light of nature, is innate; it also contains the elements of the natural knowledge of God which, however, have been obscured and weakened by sin. Therefore, renewed promulgation of the law by revelation became necessary and was furnished in the Decalogue; and all law, including that in the scientific form of philosophy, contains only demands, shadowings; its fulfilment is given only in the Gospel, the object of certainty in theology, by which also the philosophical elements of knowledge-- experience, principles of reason, and syllogism-- receive only their final confirmation. As the law is a divinely ordered pedagogue that leads to Christ, philosophy, its interpreter, is subject to revealed truth as the principal standard of opinions and life.
Besides Aristotle's "Rhetoric" and "Dialectic" he published De dialecta libri iv (1528 ); Erotemata dialectices (1547); Liber de anima (1540); Initia doctrinae physicae (1549); and Ethicae doctrinae elementa (1550).
There have been preserved original portraits of Melanchthon by three famous painters of his time-- by Holbein in various versions, one of them in the Royal Gallery of Hanover, by Albrecht Dürer (made in 1526, meant to convey a spiritual rather than physical likeness and said to be eminently successful in doing so), and by Lucas Cranach.
Melanchthon was dwarfish, misshapen, and physically weak, although he is said to have had a bright and sparkling eye, which kept its color till the day of his death. He was never in perfectly sound health, and managed to perform as much work as he did only by reason of the extraordinary regularity of his habits and his great temperance. He set no great value on money and possessions; his liberality and hospitality were often misused in such a way that his old faithful Swabian servant had sometimes difficulty in managing the household.
His domestic life was happy. He called his home "a little church of God," always found peace there, and showed a tender solicitude for his wife and children. To his great astonishment a French scholar found him rocking the cradle with one hand, and holding a book in the other.
His noble soul showed itself also in his friendship for many of his contemporaries; "there is nothing sweeter nor lovelier than mutual intercourse with friends," he used to say. His most intimate friend was Camerarius, whom he called the half of his soul. His extensive correspondence was for him not only a
71 duty, but a need and an enjoyment. His letters form a valuable commentary on his whole life, as he spoke out his mind in them more unreservedly than he was wont to do in public life. A peculiar example of his sacrificing friendship is furnished by the fact that he wrote speeches and scientific treatises for others, permitting them to use their own signature. But in the kindness of his heart he was said to be ready to serve and assist not only his friends, but everybody.
He was an enemy to jealousy, envy, slander, and sarcasm. His whole nature adapted him especially to the intercourse with scholars and men of higher rank, while it was more difficult for him to deal with the people of lower station. He never allowed himself or others to exceed the bounds of nobility, honesty, and decency. He was very sincere in the judgment of his own person, acknowledging his faults even to opponents like Flacius, and was open to the criticism even of such as stood far below him. In his public career he sought not honor or fame, but earnestly endeavored to serve the Church and the cause of truth.
His humility and modesty had their root in his personal piety. He laid great stress upon prayer, daily meditation on the Word, and attendance of public service. In Melanchthon is found not a great, impressive personality, winning its way by massive strength of resolution and energy, but a noble character hard to study without loving and respecting.
72 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Philipp Melanchthon, was mentored by his uncle, Johann Reuchlin, below:
Johann Reuchlin (January 29, 1455 - June 30, 1522), was a German humanist and a scholar of Greek and Hebrew. For much of his life, he was the real centre of all Greek and Hebrew teaching in Germany. He was born at Pforzheim in the Black Forest, where his father was an official of the Dominican monastery. According to the fashion of the time, his name was graecized by his Italian friends into Capnion, a nickname which Reuchlin used as a sort of transparent mask when he introduced himself as an interlocutor in the De Verbo Mirifico. He remained fond of his home town; he
constantly calls himself Phorcensis, and in the De Verbo he ascribes to Pforzheim his The University of Basel inclination towards literature. Here he began his Latin studies in the monastery school, and, though in 1470 he was a short time in Freiburg, that university seems to have taught him little. Reuchlin's career as a scholar appears to have turned almost on an accident; his fine voice gained him a place in the household of Charles I, Margrave of Baden, and soon, having some reputation as a Latinist, he was chosen to accompany Frederick, the third son of the prince, to the University of Paris. Frederick was some years his junior, and was destined for an ecclesiastical career. This new connection did not last long, but it determined the course of Reuchlin's life. He now began to learn Greek, which had been taught in the French capital since 1470, and he also attached himself to the leader of the Paris realists, Jean à Lapide (d. 1496), a worthy and learned man, whom he followed to the vigorous young university of Basel in 1474.
At Basel Reuchlin took his master's degree (1477), and began to lecture with success, teaching a more classical Latin than was then common in German schools, and explaining Aristotle in Greek. His studies in this language had been continued at Basel under Andronicus Contoblacas, and here he formed the acquaintance of the bookseller, Johann Amerbach, for whom he prepared a Latin lexicon (Vocabularius Breviloquus, 1st ed, 1475-76), which ran through many editions. This first publication, and Reuchlin's account of his teaching at Basel in a letter to Cardinal Adrian (Adriano Castellesi) in February 1518, show that he had already found his life's work. He was a born teacher, and this work was not to be done mainly from the professor's chair.
73 Reuchlin soon left Basel to seek further Greek training with George Hieronymus at Paris, and to learn to write a fair Greek hand that he might support himself by copying manuscripts. And now he felt that he must choose a profession. His choice fell on law, and he was thus led to the great school of Orléans (1478), and finally to Poitiers, where he became licentiate in July 1481. From Poitiers Reuchlin went in December 1481 to Tübingen with the intention of becoming a teacher in the university, but his friends recommended him to Count Eberhard of Württemberg, who was about to journey to Italy and required an interpreter. Reuchlin was selected for this post, and in February 1482 left Stuttgart for Florence and Rome. The journey lasted but a few months, but it brought the German scholar into contact with several learned Italians, especially at the Medicean Academy in Florence; his connexion with the count became permanent, and after his return to Stuttgart he received important posts at Eberhard's court.
About this time he appears to have married, but little is known of his married life. He left no children; but in later years his sister's grandson Philipp Melanchthon was like a son to him till the Reformation estranged them. In 1490 he was again in Italy. Here he saw Pico della Mirandola, to whose Cabbalistic doctrines he afterwards became heir, and made a friend of the pope's secretary, Jakob Questenberg, which was of service to him in his later troubles. Again in 1492 he was employed on an embassy to the emperor Frederick at Linz, and here he began to read Hebrew with the emperor's Jewish physician Jakob ben Jehiel Loans. Loans's instruction laid the basis of that thorough knowledge which Reuchlin afterwards improved on his third visit to Rome in 1498 by the instruction of Obadja Sforno of Cesena. In. 1494 his rising reputation had been greatly enhanced by the publication of De Verbo Mirifico.
In 1496 Eberhard of Württemberg died, and enemies of Reuchlin had the ear of his successor, Duke Eberhard. He was glad, therefore, hastily to follow the invitation of Johann von Dalberg (1445-1503), the scholarly bishop of Worms, and flee to Heidelberg, which was then the seat of the "Rhenish Society." In this court of letters Reuchlin's appointed function was to make translations from the Greek authors, in which his reading was already extremely wide. Though Reuchlin had no public office as teacher, he was for much of his life the real centre of all Greek and Hebrew teaching in Germany. To carry out this work he provided a series of aids for beginners and others. He never published a Greek grammar, but he had one in manuscript for use with his pupils, and also published several little elementary Greek books. Reuchlin, it may be noted, pronounced Greek as his native teachers had taught him to do, i.e. in the modern Greek fashion. This pronunciation, which he defends in Dialogus de Recta Lat. Graecique Serm. Pron. (1519), came to be known, in contrast to that used by Erasmus, as the Reuchlinian.
At Heidelberg Reuchlin had many private pupils, among whom Franz von Sickingen is the best known name. With the monks he had never been liked; at
74 Stuttgart also his great enemy was the Augustinian Conrad Holzinger. On this man he took a scholar's revenge in his first Latin comedy Sergius, a satire on worthless monks and false relics. Through Dalberg, Reuchlin came into contact with Philip, Count Palatine of the Rhine, who employed him to direct the studies of his sons, and in 1498 gave him the mission to Rome which has been already noticed as fruitful for Reuchlin's progress in Hebrew. He came back laden with Hebrew books, and found when he reached Heidelberg that a change of government had opened the way for his return to Stuttgart, where his wife had remained all along. His friends had now again the upper hand, and knew Reuchlin's value. In 1500, or perhaps in 1502, he was given a very high judicial office in the Swabian League, which he held till 1512, when he retired to a small estate near Stuttgart.
For many years Reuchlin had been increasingly absorbed in Hebrew studies, which had for him more than a mere philological interest. He was interested in the reform of preaching as shown in his De Arte Predicandi (1503)—a book which became a sort of preacher's manual; but above all as a scholar he was eager that the Bible should be better known, and could not tie himself to the authority of the Vulgate.
The key to the Hebraea veritas was the grammatical and exegetical tradition of the medieval rabbis, especially of David Kimhi, and when he had mastered this himself he was resolved to open it to others. In 1506 appeared his epoch-making De Rudimentis Hebraicis—grammar and lexicon—mainly after Kimhi, yet not a mere copy of one man's teaching. The edition. was costly and sold slowly. One great difficulty was that the wars of Maximilian I in Italy prevented Hebrew Bibles coming into Germany. But for this also Reuchlin found help by printing the Penitential Psalms with grammatical explanations (1512), and other helps followed from time to time. But his Greek studies had interested him in those fantastical and mystical systems of later times with which the Cabbala has no small affinity. Following Pico, he seemed to find in the Cabbala a profound theosophy which might be of the greatest service for the defence of Christianity and the reconciliation of science with the mysteries of faith, a common notion in that strange time of ferment, whatever may have developed in fact. Reuchlin's mystico-cabbalistic ideas and objects were expounded in the De Verbo Mirifico, and finally in the De Arte Cabbalistica (1517).
Many of his contemporaries thought that the first step to the conversion of the Jews was to take away their books. This view was advocated by Johannes Pfefferkorn. Pfefferkorn's plans were backed by the Dominicans of Cologne; and in 1509 he obtained the emperor's authority to confiscate all Jewish books directed against the Christian faith. Armed with this mandate, he visited Stuttgart and asked Reuchlin's help as a jurist and expert in putting it into execution. Reuchlin evaded the demand, mainly because the mandate lacked certain formalities, but he could not long remain neutral. The execution of Pfefferkorn's schemes led to difficulties and to a new appeal to Maximilian.
75 In 1510 Reuchlin was summoned in the name of the emperor to give his opinion on the suppression of the Jewish books. His answer is dated from Stuttgart, October 6, 1510; in it he divides the books into six classes-apart from the Bible which no one proposed to destroy—and, going through each class, he shows that the books openly insulting to Christianity are very few and viewed as worthless by most Jews themselves, while the others are either works necessary to the Jewish worship, which was licensed by papal as well as imperial law, or contain matter of value and scholarly interest which ought not to be sacrificed because they are connected with another faith than that of the Christians. He proposed that the emperor should decree that for ten (10) years there be two (2) Hebrew chairs at every German university for which the Jews should furnish books.
76 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Johann Reuchlin, above, was taught by Johann Heynlin, below:
Johann Heynlin (variously spelled Heynlein, Henelyn, Henlin, Hélin, Hemlin, Hegelin, Steinlin; and translated as Jean à Lapide, Jean La Pierre (Lapierre, De la Pierre), Johannes Lapideus, Johannes de Lapide) (c. 1425 – March 12, 1496) was a German-born scholar, humanist, and theologian who introduced the first printing press to Paris (and France in general) in the late fifteenth century. Born in Stein am Rhein (from Stein, meaning "stone" in German, are derived his translated Latinized surname Lapideus and Gallicized surnames La Pierre or à Lapide), Heynlin may have
been of Swabian origin. On the completion of his academic studies in Germany, presumably at Leipzig and Freiburg, he The University of Basel proceeded to Paris to pursue the study of philosophy and theology.
Here he came in contact with the foremost representatives of Realism, who, recognizing Heynlin's abilities and probable future influence, exerted their powers to the utmost to mould his mind after their own and thus make him like themselves a bitter opponent of Nominalism. Their efforts were successful.
In 1464 Heynlin went to the University of Basel and applied for admission to the professorial faculty of arts. The old controversy regarding the nature of Universals had not yet subsided and in the university of Basel Nominalism held sway. Hence in view of this and the maintenance of peace within the institution, the admission of Heynlin to the faculty was not accomplished without a most vigorous opposition.
Once a member of the faculty he hoped to rid it of all Nominalistic tendencies nor was he disappointed in his expectation. In 1465 he became dean of the faculty of arts and in this capacity he revised the university statutes and thus brought about a firmly established curriculum of studies. In 1466 he returned to Paris, obtained the doctorate in theology, was in 1469 elected rector of the university and became professor of theology at the Sorbonne.
Heynlin's most noteworthy achievement was the establishment of the first printing-press in Paris. Heynlin worked closely with Guillaume Fichet (1433-ca.
77 1480), another professor at the Sorbonne, who had also come from abroad: from Le Petit-Bornand-les-Glières, in Savoy.
Heynlin brought Swiss workmen to install this press in the buildings of the Sorbonne at the end of 1469 or the beginning of 1470: Ulric Gering (Guerinch or Guernich) (1445-1510), Michel Friburger, and Martin Crantz (or Krantz). Ulric Gering may have come from Münster, Friburger from Colmar, and Crantz may have also come from Münster or Strasbourg. Heynlin gave valuable pecuniary aid to their undertakings, especially for the printing of the works of the Church Fathers. King Louis XI granted letters of naturalization to all three workmen in 1475.
Their first publication with this press, and the first book printed in France, was a collection of letters by the fifteenth century grammarian Gasparinus de Bergamo (Gasparin de Pergame). The Epistolae Gasparini (1470) were intended to provide an exemplar for students for the writing of artful and elegant Latin. Their second work was a translation of Sallust (1470-1471), the third the Orationes of Bessarion (1471), and the fourth was a translation of Aristotle's Rhetoric (1471) by Fichet himself. The number of the works which they published from 1470 to 1472 amounts to some thirty works.
At the end of 1472 or at the beginning of 1473, Heynlin and Fichet left the Sorbonne to settle on Rue Saint-Jacques. Two of their apprentices, Pierre de Kaysere (Petrus Caesaris) and Jean Stoll, established around the same time and on the same street their own competing printing press, with the emblem of the Soufflet-Vert.
In 1478 he was called to teach theology in the newly founded University of Tübingen, where his learning, eloquence and reputation secured for him the same year the rectorship. The opposition, however, he met from the Nominalists Gabriel Biel, Paul Scriptoris, and others, rendered his service here of short duration. He severed his connexion with the university, proceeded to Baden- Baden and thence to Berne, where he engaged in preaching. Dissatisfied with Berne he returned to Basel, and tired of wandering, he entered in 1487 the Carthusian Monastery of St. Margarethenthal to spend his declining years in prayer and literary work.
78 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Johann Heynlin, above, was tutored in the school of Realism, founded by William of Champeaux:
William of Champeaux was a twelfth-century Scholastic, philosopher, and theologian, b. at Champeaux, near Melun, in the neighbourhood of Paris, about the year 1070; d. at Châlons-sur- Marne, 1121. After having been a pupil of Anselm of Laon, he began in 1103 his career as teacher at the cathedral school of Paris. In 1108, owing chiefly to Abelard's successful attempts to criticize his realistic doctrine of universals, he retired to the Abbey of St. Victor and there continued to give lessons which, no doubt, influenced the mystic school known as that of St. Victor. In 1114 he was made Bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne. Portions of his work "De origine animae" and of a "Liber sententiarum", as well as a dialogue entitled "Dialogus seu altercatio cujusdam Christiani et Judaei", have come down to us. Cathedral School of Paris
On the problem of universals William held successively a variety of opinions. All of these, however, are on the side exaggerated Realism and opposed both to the Nominalism of Roscelin and to the modified Nominalism of Abelard. In his treatise on the origin of the soul he definitely rejects the theory known as Traducianism and maintains that each and every human soul originates from the creative act of God. Among his contemporaries he enjoyed a very great reputation for learning and sanctity. Among his contemporaries he enjoyed a very great reputation for learning and sanctity. He was, moreover, looked upon by the conservative thinkers of that age as the ablest champion of orthodoxy. His creationist doctrine is his chief title to distinction as a Scholastic philosopher.
79 New York Alpha’s intellectual, William of Champeaux, above, was tutored in the school of Anselm of Laon, below:
Anselm of Laon (died 1117) was a French theologian. Born of very humble parents at Laon before the middle of the 11th century, he is said to have studied under Saint Anselm at Bec. In about 1076 he was teaching with great success at Paris, where, as the associate of William of Champeaux, he upheld the realistic side of the scholastic controversy. Later he moved back to his place of birth and was Master of Laon, with his brother Ralph, from about 1090 until his death. His school for theology and exegetics rapidly became the most famous in Europe. In 1113 he expelled Pierre Abélard from his school. He was dean and chancellor of Laon from about 1109 and archdeacon from 1115. The Liber Pancrisi (c. 1120) names him, with Ivo of Chartres and William of Champeaux, as one of the three modern Abbey of Bec masters. Anselm's greatest work, an interlinear gloss on the 'Scriptures', was one of the great intellectual authorities of the Middle Ages. It has been frequently reprinted. The significance of the gloss, which was continued after Anselm's death by figures such as Gilbert de la Porrée, is that it marked a new way of learning - it represented the birth of efforts to analyze and systemize scripture rather than merely accepting it at face value. This theme was subsequently adopted and extended by the likes of Hugh of St. Victor, Peter Lombard and later Thomas Aquinas, who gave us 'handbooks' for what we would now call theology.
Other commentaries apparently by Anselm have been ascribed to various writers, principally to the great Anselm. A list of them, with notice of Anselm's life, is contained in the Histoire littéraire de la France, x. 170-189.
The works are collected in Migne's Patrologia Latina, tome 162; some unpublished Sententiae were edited by G Lefevre (Milan, 1894), on which see Barthélemy Hauréau in the Journal des savants for 1895.
80 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Anselm of Laon, above, was tutored in the school of Anselm of Canterbury, below:
Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033 – April 21, 1109) was an Italian medieval philosopher, theologian, and church official who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. Called the founder of scholasticism, he is famous as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God and as the archbishop who openly opposed the Crusades. Anselm was born in the city of Aosta in the Kingdom of Burgundy (currently the capital of Aosta Valley region of northern Italy). His family was noble, and owned considerable property. Gundulph, his father, was by birth a Lombard, and seems to have been a man of harsh and violent temper. His mother, Ermenberga, was known as a prudent and
virtuous woman, and gave the young Benedictine Abbey of Bec Anselm careful religious training.
At the age of fifteen, Anselm desired to enter a monastery, but he could not obtain his father's consent. Disappointment brought on an apparent psychosomatic illness, and after he recovered, Anselm gave up his studies for a time and lived a more carefree life. During this period his mother died, and his father's harshness became unbearable. In 1059 he left home, crossed the Alps, and wandered through Burgundy and France. Attracted by the fame of his countryman Lanfranc, then prior of the Benedictine Abbey of Bec, Anselm entered Normandy. The following year, after spending some time at Avranches, he entered the abbey as a novice at the age of twenty-seven.
In 1063, Lanfranc was made the abbot of Caen, and Anselm was elected prior of Bec. He held this office for fifteen years until, in 1078, the death of the warrior monk, Herluin, founder and first abbot of Bec, resulted in Anselm's election to abbot. Under his jurisdiction, Bec became the first seat of learning in Europe, although Anselm appears to have been less interested in attracting external students to it. It was during these quiet years at Bec that Anselm wrote his first philosophical works, the Monologion and Proslogion. These were followed by The Dialogues on Truth, Free Will, and the Fall of the Devil.
The monastery grew in wealth and reputation, and after the Norman Conquest, acquired a large amount of property in England. As abbot, Anselm had a duty to visit this property occasionally. He became popular among the
81 citizens of England because of his mild temper and unswerving rectitude, and he was considered by many to be a natural successor to Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury. Upon Lanfranc's death, however, King William II seized the possessions and revenues of the see, and made no new appointment. In 1092, at the invitation of Hugh, Earl of Chester, Anselm crossed to England. He was detained there by business for nearly four months, and when about to return to Bec, he was refused permission by the king. In the following year, King William fell ill. He was eager to make atonement for his failure to appoint a new archbishop, and he nominated Anselm to the vacant see. After a great struggle with Anselm, King William compelled him to accept the pastoral staff of office. After obtaining dispensation from his duties in Normandy, Anselm was consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093.
For his retaining office, Anselm demanded certain conditions of King William: that he return the possessions of the see, accept Anselm's spiritual counsel, and acknowledge Urban II as pope, in opposition to Antipope Clement III. He only obtained a partial consent to the first of these demands, and the last involved him in a serious difficulty with the king. The Church's rule stated that metroplitans could not be consecrated without receiving the pallium from the hands of the pope. Anselm, accordingly, insisted that he must proceed to Rome to receive the pall. King William would not permit this, however; he had not acknowledged Urban as pope, and he maintained his right to prevent a pope's acknowledgment by an English subject without his permission. A council of churchmen and nobles was held to settle the matter, and it advised Anselm to submit to the king. However, Anselm remained firm and the matter was postponed. During this time, William privately sent messengers to Rome, who acknowledged Urban and prevailed on him to send a legate to the king bearing the archiepiscopal pall. Anselm and King William partially reconciliated, and the matter of the pall was decided. It was not given by the king, but was laid on the altar at Canterbury, where Anselm received it.
Over a year later, Anselm encountered more trouble with King William, and resolved to proceed to Rome and seek the counsel of the pope. He obtained with great difficulty King William's permission to leave, and in October 1097 he set out for Rome. William immediately seized the revenues of the see, retaining them until his death. Anselm was received with high honour by Urban at the Siege of Capua, where he garnered high praise also from the Saracen troops of Count Roger I of Sicily. The pope, however, did not wish to become deeply involved in Anselm's dispute with William.
At a great council held at Bari, Anselm was asked to defend the doctrine of the procession of the Holy Ghost against the representatives of the Greek Church. Anselm left Rome, and spent some time at the little village of Schiavi, where he finished his treatise on the atonement, Cur Deus homo, and then retired to Lyons. When he attempted to return to England, King William would not allow him to enter the country.
82 King William was killed in 1100 and his successor, Henry I, invited Anselm to return to England under certain conditions. He demanded that Anselm receive from him, in person, investiture in his office of archbishop. The papal rule, however, stated that all homage and lay investiture were strictly prohibited. Henry refused to relinquish the privilege possessed by his predecessors, and proposed that the matter should be laid before the pope. Two embassies were sent to Pope Pascal II regarding Henry's legitimacy of investiture, but he reaffirmed the papal rule both times. However, Henry remained firm, and in 1103, Anselm himself and an envoy from the king set out for Rome. Paschal II again ruled in favor of the papal rule, and passed a sentence of excommunication against all who had infringed the law, except King Henry.
Because he was forbidden to return to England unless on the king's terms, Anselm withdrew to Lyons after this ruling and waited for further action from Pope Paschal. In 1105, Paschal did act, and excommunicated King Henry. Henry, seriously alarmed, responded by arranging a meeting with Paschal and a reconciliation was established. In 1106 Anselm was permitted to cross to England, with authority from the pope to remove the sentence of excommunication from the illegally invested churchmen.
By 1107 the long dispute regarding investiture was finally settled with a compromise in the Concordat of London. In this, Henry relinquished his right to invest his bishops and abbots, but reserved the custom of requiring them to do homage for the "temporalities" (the landed properties tied to the episcopate). The remaining two years of Anselm's life were spent in the duties of his archbishopric. He died on April 21, 1109.
Anselm is considered by many to be the first scholarly philosopher of Christian theology. His only great predecessor, Scotus Eriugena, was more speculative and mystical in his writings than what is considered scholarly. Anselm's writings represent a recognition of the relationship of reason to revealed truth, and an attempt to elaborate a rational system of faith.
Anselm sought to understand Christian consciousness through reason, and to develop intelligible truths interwoven with the Christian belief. He believed that the necessary preliminary for this is the possession of the Christian consciousness. He wrote: "Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. Nam et hoc credo, quia, nisi credidero, non intelligam." ("Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this too I believe, that unless I first believe, I shall not understand.") According to Anselm, after faith is found, the attempt must be made to demonstrate by reason the truth of what is believed.
The groundwork of Anselm's theory of knowledge is contained in the tract De Veritate, where he affirms the existence of an absolute truth, in which all other truth participates. This absolute truth, Anselm argues, is God, who is therefore
83 the ultimate ground or principle both of things and of thought. By this, the notion of God becomes the foreground of Anselm's theory; it is necessary, then, to first make God clear to reason and be demonstrated to have real existence.
Anselm wrote many philosophical proofs within his works, Monologion and Proslogion. In the first proof, Anselm relies on the ordinary grounds of realism, coinciding to some extent with the theory of Augustine. Anselm argues that “things” are called good in a variety of ways and degrees, and this would be impossible if there were not some absolute standard, some good in itself, in which all relative goods participate. Similarly, with such adjectives as great, just, etc.; things involve a certain greatness and justice. Anselm uses this thought process to state that the very existence of things is impossible without some one Being, by whom they come to exist. This absolute Being, this goodness, justice, greatness, is God. Anselm is not thoroughly satisfied with this reasoning, however, because it begins from a posteriori grounds, meaning that the reasoning is inductive. The philosophy also contains several converging lines of proof.
Anselm desired to have one short demonstration, which he presents in his Proslogion. The Proslogian is his famous proof of the existence of God, referred to as the ontological argument - a term first applied by Kant to the arguments of seventeenth and eighteenth century rationalists. Anselm's defined his belief in the existence of God using the phrase, “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”. He reasoned that if “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” existed only in the intellect, it would not be “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”, since it can be thought to exist in reality, which is greater. It follows, according to Anselm, that “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” must exist in reality. The bulk of the Proslogion is taken up with Anselm's attempt to establish the identity of that than which nothing greater can be conceived as God, and thus to establish that God exists in reality.
Anselm's ontological proof has been the subject of controversy since it was first published in the 1070s. It was opposed at the time by the monk Gaunilo, in his Liber pro Insipiente, on the ground that humans cannot pass from intellect to reality. Anselm replied to the objections in his Responsio. The same criticism made by Gaunilo is made by several later philosophers; among them are Aquinas and Kant. Anselm also authored a number of other arguments for the existence of God, based on cosmological and teleological grounds.
The "Shield of the Trinity" or "Scutum Fidei" diagram of traditional Western Christian symbolism.
In Anselm's other works, he strove to state the rational grounds of the Christian doctrines of creation and the Trinity. He discusses the Trinity first by stating that human beings cannot know God from himself, but only through analogy. The analogy he uses is the self-consciousness of man. The peculiar
84 double nature of consciousness, memory and intelligence, represent the relation of the Father to the Son. The mutual love of these two (memory and intelligence) proceeding from the relation they hold to one another symbolizes the Holy Spirit. The further theological doctrines of man, such as original sin and free will, are developed in the Monologion and other treatises.
In Cur Deus Homo ("Why did God become Man?"), Anselm undertook to explain the rational necessity of the Christian mystery of the atonement. His philosophy rests on three positions: first, that satisfaction is necessary on account of God's honor and justice; second, that such satisfaction can be given only by the peculiar personality of the God-man Jesus; and third, that such satisfaction is really given by the voluntary death of this God-man Jesus.
Anselm expounds on these three positions by beginning with the statement that all actions of men are for the Glory of God, and if sin exists (if God's honor is wounded), man himself can give no satisfaction. But God's justice, according to Anselm, demands satisfaction. However, because God is infinite, any wound to his honor must also be infinite, and it follows that satisfaction must also be infinite, i.e., it must outweigh all that is not God. Because humans are not infinite, such an act of satisfaction can only be paid by God himself, and, as a penalty for man, it must be paid under the form of man. By this, Anselm reasons that satisfaction is only possible through the sinless God-man. Because he is exempt from the punishment of sin; the God-man's passion is voluntary. The merit of the act is therefore infinite, God's justice is thus appeased, and His mercy may extend to man.
This theory has exercised immense influence on church doctrine, providing the basis for the Roman Catholic concept of the treasury of merit and the evangelical doctrine of penal substitution as developed by John Calvin. Anselm's philosophy is very different from older patristic philosophies, insofar as it focuses on a contest between the goodness and justice of God, rather than a contest between God and Satan. However, critics of Anselm assert that he puts the whole conflict on a merely legal footing, giving it no ethical bearing, and neglects altogether the consciousness of the individual to be redeemed. In this respect it contrasts unfavorably with the later theory of Peter Abélard.
Anselm wrote many letters to monks, male relatives and others that contained passionate expressions of attachment and affection. These letters were typically addressed "dilecto dilectori," sometimes translated as "to the beloved lover." While there is wide agreement that Anselm was personally committed to the monastic ideal of celibacy, some academics, including Brian P. McGuire and John Boswell have characterized these writings as expressions of a homosexual inclination. Others, such as Glenn Olsen and Richard Southern describe them as representing a "wholly spiritual" affection, "nourished by an incorporeal ideal" (Southern).
85 He was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1494 by Alexander VI. The anniversary of Anselm's death on 21 April is celebrated in the Roman Catholic Church, much of The Anglican Communion, and the Lutheran Church as Anselm's memorial day. Anselm was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1720 by Pope Clement XI. Eight hundred years after his death, on 21 April 1909, Pope Pius X issued an encyclical Communion Rerum praising Anselm, his ecclesiastical career, and his writings. His symbol in hagiography is the ship, representing the spiritual independence of the church.
In the Middle Ages, Anselm's writings did not receive the respect they later would. This may have been due to their unsystematic character, for they are generally tracts or dialogues on detached questions, not elaborate treatises like the works of Aquinas, Albert of Aix, and Erigena. Proponents of his writing, however, enjoy what they call his freshness and philosophical vigor.
86 New York Alpha’s intellectual, Anselm of Canterbury, above, was tutored in the school of Lafranc, below:
Lanfranc (c. 1005 – 1089) was Archbishop of Canterbury, and a Lombard by extraction. He was born in the early years of the eleventh century at Pavia, where later tradition held that his father, Hanbald, held a rank broadly equivalent to magistrate. His was orphaned at an early age. Lanfranc was trained in the liberal arts, at that time a field in which northern Italy was famous. (There is little or no evidence to support the myth that his education included much in the way of Civil Law, and none that links him with Irnerius of Bologna as a pioneer in the
renaissance of its study.) For unknown University of Pavia reasons at an uncertain date, he crossed the Alps, soon taking up the role of teacher in France and eventually in Normandy.
About 1039 he became the master of the cathedral school at Avranches, where he taught for three years with conspicuous success. But in 1042 he embraced the monastic profession in the newly founded Bec Abbey. Until 1045 he lived at Bec in absolute seclusion.
He was then persuaded by Abbot Herluin to open a school in the monastery. From the first he was celebrated (totius Latinitatis magister). His pupils were drawn not only from France and Normandy, but also from Gascony, Flanders, Germany and Italy. Many of them afterwards attained high positions in the Church; it is possible that one, Anselm of Badagio, became pope under the title of Alexander II. In this way Lanfranc set the seal of intellectual activity on the reform movement of which Bec was the centre. The favourite subjects of his lectures were logic and dogmatic theology. He was therefore invited to defend the doctrine of transubstantiation against the attacks of Berengar of Tours. He took up the task with the greatest zeal, although Berengar had been his personal friend; he was the protagonist of orthodoxy at the councils of Vercelli (1050), Tours (1054) and Rome (1059).
To his influence we may attribute the desertion of Berengar's cause by Hildebrand and the more broad-minded of the cardinals. Our knowledge of Lanfranc's polemics is chiefly derived from the tract De corpore et sanguine Domini, which he wrote many years later (after 1079), when Berengar had been finally condemned. Though betraying no signs of metaphysical ability, his work was regarded as conclusive and became for a while a text-book in the schools. It
87 is often said to be the place where the Aristotelian distinction between substance and accidence was first applied to explain Eucharistic change. It is the most important of the surviving works attributed to Lanfranc; which, considering his reputation, are slight and disappointing.
In the midst of his scholastic and controversial activities Lanfranc became a political force. Later tradition told that while he was prior of Bec he opposed to the uncanonical marriage of Duke William with Matilda of Flanders (1053) and carried matters so far that he incurred a sentence of exile. But the quarrel was settled when he was on the point of departure, and he undertook the difficult task of obtaining the pope’s approval of the marriage. In this he was successful at the same council which witnessed his third victory over Berengar (1059), and he thus acquired a lasting claim on William's gratitude. In assessing this story it may well be relevant that no reputable source can tell what the exact impediment to marriage was. In 1066 Lanfranc became the first abbot of St Stephen's at Caen, a house which the duke had supposedly been enjoined to found as a penance for his disobedience to the Holy See.
Henceforward Lanfranc exercised a perceptible influence on his master's policy. William adopted the Cluniac programme of ecclesiastical reform, and obtained the support of Rome for his English expedition by assuming the attitude of a crusader against schism and corruption. It was Alexander II, possibly a pupil of Lanfranc's and certainly a close friend, who gave the Norman Conquest the papal benediction--a notable advantage to William at the moment, but subsequently the cause of serious embarrassments.
When the see of Rouen next fell vacant (1067), the thoughts of the electors turned to Lanfranc. But he declined the honour, and he was nominated to the English primacy as soon as Stigand had been canonically deposed on August 15, 1070. He was speedily consecrated on August 29, 1070. The new archbishop at once began a policy of reorganization and reform. His first difficulties were with Thomas of Bayeux, archbishop elect of York, (another former pupil) who asserted that his see was independent of Canterbury and claimed jurisdiction over the greater part of midland England.
Lanfranc, during a visit which he paid the pope for the purpose of receiving his pallium, obtained an order from Alexander that the disputed points should be settled by a council of the English Church. This was held at Winchester in 1072. At this council Lanfranc obtained the confirmation of primacy that he sought; nonetheless he was never able to secure its formal confirmation by the papacy, possibly as a result of the succession of Gregory VII to the papal throne in 1073.
Lanfranc assisted William in maintaining the independence of the English Church; and appears at one time to have favoured the idea of maintaining a neutral attitude on the subject of the quarrels between papacy and empire. In the
88 domestic affairs of England the archbishop showed more spiritual zeal. His grand aim was to extricate the Church from the fetters of corruption. He was a generous patron of monasticism. He endeavoured to enforce celibacy upon the secular clergy.
He obtained the king's permission to deal with the affairs of the Church in synods. In the cases of Odo of Bayeux (1082) (see Trial of Penenden Heath) and of William of St Calais, bishop of Durham (1088), he used his legal ingenuity to justify the trial of bishops before a lay tribunal.
He accelerated the process of substituting Normans for Englishmen in all preferments of importance; and although his nominees were usually respectable, it cannot be said that all of them were better than the men whom they superseded. For this admixture of secular with spiritual aims there was considerable excuse. By long tradition the primate was entitled to a leading position in the king’s councils; and the interests of the Church demanded that Lanfranc should use his power in a manner not displeasing to the king. On several occasions when William I was absent from England Lanfranc acted as his vicegerents.
Lanfranc's greatest political service to the Conqueror was rendered in 1075, when he detected and foiled the conspiracy which had been formed by the earls of Norfolk and Hereford. Waltheof, 1st Earl of Northumberland, one of the rebels, soon lost heart and confessed the conspiracy to Lanfranc, who urged Earl Roger to return to his allegiance, and finally excommunicated him and his adherents. He interceded for Waltheof’s life and to the last spoke of the earl as an innocent sufferer for the crimes of others; he lived on terms of friendship with Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester.
On the death of the Conqueror (1087) he secured the succession for William Rufus, in spite of the discontent of the Anglo-Norman baronage; and in 1088 his exhortations induced the English militia to fight on the side of the new sovereign against Odo of Bayeux and the other partisans of Duke Robert. He exacted promises of just government from Rufus, and was not afraid to remonstrate when the promises were disregarded. So long as he lived he was a check upon the worst propensities of the king’s administration. But his restraining hand was too soon removed. In 1089 he was stricken with fever and he died on May 24 amidst universal lamentations. Notwithstanding some obvious moral and intellectual defects, he was the most eminent and the most disinterested of those who had co-operated with William I in riveting Norman rule upon the English Church and people. As a statesman he did something to uphold the traditional ideal of his office; as a primate he elevated the standards of clerical discipline and education. Conceived in the spirit of popes such as Leo IX, his reforms led by a natural sequence to strained relations between Church and State; the equilibrium which he established was unstable, and depended too much upon his personal influence with the Conqueror.
89 The efforts of Christ Church Canterbury to secure him the status of 'blessed' seem to have had only spasmodic and limited effect beyond English Benedictine circles. However, Lanfranc was honoured some 900 years later by a school bearing his name being opened in Croydon, where he resided at the Old Palace. He is also remembered in road names in London and Worthing, West Sussex.
Conclusion of the Leiden intellectual line
So what is the lesson of the Leiden line’s intellectual legacy within New York Alpha?
Leiden brings is two important legacies. First, it ties New York Alpha to the Dutch Revolt which produced the colonial impetus to found the colony of New Amsterdam, New Amsterdam producing the culture which informed the arts and letters of New York Alpha’s first intellectual, Washington Irving, so celebrated by the Irving Literary Society out of which New York Alpha was founded. Second, the Leiden gives us a tie to the culture of European arts and letters south of the Alps, in medieval Italy. Appendix Theta is technically an extension of Appendix Gamma, and will follow next. Through Theta, New York Alpha retains a legal of multi-culturalism offered by the lessons of late Roman culture, the Greek philosophers, a couple of Egyptian priests and the Assyrian empire.
Hoya Sargon !
The Leiden intellectual line is part of New York Alpha’s local Chapter lore, first recorded by brother Cadwalader E. Linthicum (1885)(1889) and preserved by Walter Sheppard (’29)(’32) and Fred E. Hartzch (’28)(’31).
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