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There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029077893 ESSAYS AND ADDRESSES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION ESSAYS &> ADDRESSES ON THE PHILOSOPHY o/RELIGION BY BARON FRIEDRICH von HUGEL, LL.D., D.D. MCMXXI LONDON y TORONTO &' J. M. DENT SONS LIMITED NEW YORK : E. P. BUTTON & CO. ^' ^/ / '"/,'//X All rights reserved D3 TO THE IMMORTAL MEMORY OF DANTE, WHO DIED SIX HUNDRED YEARS AGO TO-DAY, IN LIVELY GRATITUDE FOR INSPIRATION AND SUPPORT THROUGHOUT SOME SIXTY YEARS OF SPIRITUAL STRESS; FROM THE WRITER, HIS FELLOW FLORENTINE. September itfh, igai. PREFACE The following collection of some dozen papers arose in a very simple way. About half of these essays, ever since their several appearances in print, have been a good deal sought after. Hence I have thought it well, pending the re-issue of my Mystical Element of Religion and the completion and publication of a new large work on religious fundamentals, to publish in book-form, from amongst my accumulated papers, such studies as appear to possess some abiding interest. One of the papers given here (as No. 3) has already appeared in a collective volume of essays ; and Nos. 2, 3, 6, 9 have previously been published in magazines. But foiur papers (Nos. I, 4, 5, and 10) are quite new to print. Yet all the papers were written, in part also spoken, at the invitation of single persons or of societies ; and all have benefited by questions and criticisms raised on occasion of their first com- munication. They have thus had some good chances of a certain maturity. There is, assuredly, not a paper here which does not raise more questions than it solves ; nor a piece which could not be improved considerably even by myself. But life is short at sixty-nine, and my remaining strength is required for larger tasks. Also such freshness as these essays may possess would doubtless largely fade away in the process of any considerable re-writing of them. I have, then, restricted myself simply to the formal improvement of my texts, especially in the second Troeltsch article, and to the silent withdrawal or correction of some half-dozen errors of fact. Perhaps the chief formal defect now remaining is a certain repetition. But this I trust may help to drive home one or the other conviction which might otherwise fail to impress the reader. —;: viii PREFACE The Roman Church congregations hold a valuable distinction between the private intention of a writer and the public meaning of his writings. The intention of the writer, what he meant to say, is known in full to God alone and at all adequately only to the writer himself. The meaning of the writings, what as a matter of fact they say, falls outside the jurisdiction of the writer. Not the writer, but the competent and careful students of the writings, decide, in the long run, upon the significance (both as to meaning and as to worth) of any literary production, now become an entity possessed of a life, influence and meaning of its own. Juvenal intended to write poetry, and thought he had written poetry ; mankind has decided that what he wrote is not poetry but splendid rhetoric. Dr. Johnson thought that his tragedy Irene was his masterpiece ; the unanimous verdict of some six competent judges settled the question to the contrary, on the very night of the first production of the play, and this also for the heroically docile great doctor himself. And a scholarly parish priest in the Black Forest told me, out there, years ago, how, in the winter-time, he had only one University trained parishioner who could help him a little with his manuscripts a Government forester. He, the priest, had submitted to this forester an elaborate refutation of von Hartmann's Philosophy of the Unconscious. The forester studied the manuscript long and minutely ; and then returned it with the words " Admirable ! so thorough, so clear ! But on which side of the argument are you yourself, Herr Pfarrer ^ " I cannot turn these poor papers into rich and living wisdom, if they are but thin and dead elucubrations. I cannot even mould them into the best that I have written. But I can try and make more clear perhaps here than in the essays themselves—^in writings of various dates and very various occasions—what I have mainly intended to transmit and to illustrate. I will, then, first point out certain convictions which constitute the centres of the several sections and I will afterwards attempt to mark what it is that specially holds the three sections together—^what, I trust, gives a certain definite and stimulating character to the book as a whole. In Section I., concerning Religion in General and Theism, the twin papers numbered two strive specially to bring out the always double apprehension, feeling, conviction at work in every PREFACE ix specifically religious act and state. There is the sense of a Reality not merely human—of a real experience of this Reality; and there is, at the same time, the sense that this real experience is imperfect, that it is not co-extensive with the Reality experi- enced, that it does not exhaust that Reality. Nowhere, at no time, does the apprehending soul, if at a stage of fairly full religious awareness, identify the apprehension, however real this apprehension may appear to this soul, with the Reality apprehended. We have here a strong presumption in favour of the fundamental sanity and of the evidential worth of the religious apprehension in general and we thus ascertain a fact, characteristic of religion in all its stages, which we should never forget. In Paper No. 3 I have striven to make clear how slow and how difficult at one time, how swift and how spontaneous at another time, how intermittent and how rarely simply abreast of the growths in the other insights—artistic, sodal, even moral —are the gifts and the growths of the fuller religious insights and forces of man in his long past ; and how costly will doubt- less always remain, in man's earthly future, the maintenance, and still more the further deepening, of these insights or revela- tions. Especially have I striven to discriminate between the directly religious insights, with the occasions and the pace of their growth, and the apprehensions primarily ethical and political, with the circumstances and the rate of their develop- ment. Thus especially the temper, the very idea, of toleration have developed only tardily : there have existed true Saints of God, genuine reformers of religion, who were without the temper or idea of toleration. Thus King Josiah indeed saved the Old Testament faith and morals, (the highest then extant upon earth and the eventual root and nidus of Christianity) from irretrievable dissolution in Canaanitish superstition and impurity, but he did so by slaughtering, say, a thousand priests of the High Places and was nerved to so doing by the most complete belief that God Himself demanded this slaughter from him. True, Our Lord rebuked the vindictive zeal of His apostles, based though it was upon the precedent of the great prophet Elijah who called down fire from Heaven upon the worshippers of Baal ; and by this reproof Jesus condemned religious persecution. And indeed the X PREFACE Christian Church, for well over the first three centuries of her existence, left all the killing to her persecutors and herself per- sisted and prevailed " not by killing but by dying." Nevertheless, we shall do well, I think, not to deny that even the persecutions tolerated or encouraged by later Church authorities, have con- tributed, in certain times and places, to the real consolidation of Christendom. And especially we shall be wise if we tio not insist upon any sense, innate in all human hearts, of the essential heinousness of all persecution. And in Paper No. 4 I have attempted to show how the reality of Evil is beyond any direct explanation by anyone—^the true state of affairs here is not that believers can explain and that unbelievers cannot explain, still less that Christians cannot explain but that sceptics can. No : but that Christianity does, if something other, yet something more than explain Evil. Christianity has immensely increased the range and depth of our insight as to Evil ; and, at the same time, Christianity alone has given man the motives and the power not only to trust on, unshaken, in the spiritual sun, in God, in spite of these sun spots of Evil, but to transform Evil into an instrument of Good.

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