The Theologian of the Second Reich

 

Thoughts on the Biography of Adolf von Harnack

 

1936

 

Translated by Matthew C. Harrison

 

In his memorial lecture for Adolf von Harnack, in the Prussian Academy of Science in the year 1931, Hans Lietzmann spoke of the famous lectures held a generation ago on the "The Essence of Christendom." He asserted how inadequate the view of the Christian faith developed therein appears to the present generation. And he added the remark: "But let he who is of this view, willingly survey this image a while. The rays reflect the evening radiance of the beautiful sunny day, which God in the 19th century allowed to ascend and descend over the German Nation." Not only is that book strikingly characterized with these words, but at the same time Harnack's entire life's work. When the famous theologian of the era of Wilhelm died on the 10th of June, 1930, the last absolutely great proponent of the nineteenth century left us. The splendor, which shone about his life and work, was the splendor of the nineteenth century, the happiest era of German history. Born in the middle of the century, he was one of the heirs of the great intellectual world of German Idealism from the first third of the century. He carried this heritage over into the time of German Realism, which we might describe as the era of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, so fortuitous in external matters, and so inwardly impoverished. To understand Harnack he must be viewed against the backdrop of this heritage of Idealism. In the universality of his scholarly interests and in the manner of his dealing with the world, but also in his impetus to translate knowledge to deed, he is the successor of Leibniz and Goethe. That he became an historian was a necessity. For only in the areas of historical scholarship was Idealism still able to live on in the second half of the century. That he became a theologian was really a mistake, even if a productive one. For what theology is in its deepest essence, Harnack never understood, though he could have learned it from his father, Theodosius Harnack, who was a real theologian. The tragedy of his life is in the fact that he who studied so many theologians of all eras, of whom he possessed an intimate and personal knowledge, never was able to grasp what makes a theologian a theologian, and distinguishes him from a scholar of religion. Perhaps one needs to have been his student, and have experienced for years the charm of his personality, the brilliance of his thought, and his gift for teaching, in order to understand the depth of this tragedy. Thus he will not live on as a theologian - what remains of his work are important historical discoveries, but all his theological ideas are today already antiquated. He will live on much more so as his students guard his countenance in their memory. He will live on as the Goethian man - none of our contemporaries was as similar to Goethe as he - for whom the history of Christendom became the object of scholarly investigation, and thereby also the stuff for the construction of his intellectual world. Thus the scholarly work of his life belongs not so much to the history of theology as to the chapter of the German intellectual history, which bears the inscription: "The end of German Idealism." Yes, one may say that Harnack's work played no small role in this. For the collapse of the great intellectual world of German Idealism was completed in three stages. The first was the catastrophe of the collapse of German philosophy, in the generation after the death of Hegel. At that time philosophy lost not only its position as the intellectual leader of culture [Volk], which it had enjoyed at the beginning of the century, but also the leading position in science. The second was the collapse of modern Protestant theology, which began in the years of the [First] World War. Idealism, which had long since been routed in all other areas of life, had in modern theology fled to the church. Here Lessing and Kant, Fichte and Schleiermacher, Goethe and Hegel were still taken seriously. They had taken their asylum in the halls of theology until, in the years after the World War, a new generation replaced them. The third stage of that collapse is the dissolution of the German university of the nineteenth century. In it German Idealism had once created its means for influencing a nation. After the scholarly presuppositions upon which this great institution rested, such as the idea of presuppositionless scholarly investigation and the idea of the unity of all disciplines of scholarly study (the universitas litterarum) had already long since fallen into decline, in the years after the world it began its irretrievable fall. One must view the scholarly life's work of Adolf von Harnack in this connection in order to understand how "it reflects the evening radiance of the beautiful sunny day, which God in the 19th century allowed to ascend and descend over the German Nation."

 

Something of this "brilliance" shines about the biography of Adolf von Harnack, for which we owe the pen of his daughter Agnes von Zahn-Harnack (Hans-Bott-Verlag, Berlin-Tempelhof, 1936, 579 pp.). It is certainly a risky undertaking when a daughter attempts to present the life of her father, especially when the father was such a publicly controversial personality, with such a rich and in every way significant life, such as is the case with Harnack. But the risk paid off. This biography of Harnack is not only an historical execution based upon careful use of all the available sources, it is - much like English biography - also a humanly significant and literary work of high standing, one of the most beautiful German biographies of recent times. Memoirs, letters and biographies have become very popular again in our time in Germany, and thus this book will also find many thankful readers, who trace the unspeakably full and happy life of Harnack, from his days as a child in Dorpat and Erlangen, to his years of study in Dorpat and Leipzig, until the great scholarly life's work in Giessen (since 1879), Marburg (1886) and Berlin (1888), and see him climb to the highest levels of life and scholarship. To be sure, one should not seek in this book anything other than a portrait of the man Harnack. The theologian Harnack can only be presented by a theologian, and this the author is not. Thus, for instance, the relationship to his student, friend and later, Berlin colleague Karl Holl, so rich and informative for [understanding] the theological position of Harnack, is so keenly depicted as to its human dimension. But where the difference of character and world-view produced opposition [between the men], is not dealt with in the book. As keenly as the atmosphere of Dorpat, Erlangen and Liepzig on the one hand, is depicted over against Giessen, Marburg and Berlin, the book has nothing to say regarding the ecclesial and theological views, which finally separated these two worlds. It is to be acknowledged that the author makes a serious attempt to avoid simply taking the view of the "Berlin Daily" and the "Christian World" in her presentation of the great church-political struggles, in which Harnack was a central figure, such as the controversy regarding the Apostle's Creed of 1892, or others in which he took part, such as the case of Jatho and that of Traub. Those papers portrayed these as cases where the evil orthodox were persecuting the pious liberals, and wanting to burn them at the stake. But because there is finally no attempt to get at the basic motives of the opponents of Harnack, the ecclesial and intellectual reasons for these struggles remain hidden. The incentive to clarify his motives could have been given by the generational problem, important for every attempt at biography. This problem became evident in the conflict with his father, the faithful guardian of the Lutheran tradition at Erlangen and Dorpat, and with his student, Karl Barth. Notably, in the book the father is the only "orthodox" individual who, in his opposition to Harnack's theology, is credited with pure motives: "Theodosius Harnack always struggled with his son against subjectivism and for the church, which he himself had served his whole life, with all his might." After the appearance of the first volume of The History of Dogma, the elder Harnack wrote to his son in Marburg: "Our difference is not theological, but rather one which is profoundly and directly Christian. Thus if I would ignore it, I would deny Christ as He who views the resurrection as you do, is in my view no longer a Christian theologian." This too was the view of the Evangelical High Consistory, when it in accordance with its duty, protested against Harnack's call to Berlin. At best this attempt, for once, of the highest church authorities of Old Prussia, at church governance, undertaken with insufficient means, can be described with the words which King Ludwig II applied to his Munich Arch Bishop: "The flesh was willing, but the spirit was weak." But finally the High Consistory was right. And he who is willing to grant only a qualified correctness to the judgment of Theodosius Harnack regarding the theology of his son can not hold that the protest of the Old Prussian church leadership was unjustified. The biography, which is here before us, does not give, nor can give answers to any of the questions here raised. Here it needs supplementation. But since a presentation of the theology of Harnack will presumably never be written, simply because he was never a real theologian in the strict sense, it will be the task of a history of the nineteenth century to produce this supplementation. It will have to give the great ecclesial, intellectual and historical background to the human portrait, which Agnes von Zahn-Harnack's book paints.

 

No German theologian since Schleiermacher has had such a profound affect upon intellectuals as has Adolf von Harnack. When one recalls how deep the cleft between church and intellectual world [Bildung] was in the years between 1870 and 1900 - never has Germany had such an unintellectual pastorate and never such an unchurchly intellegentia as then - then one can grasp the affect which resulted from Harnack. "A man such as Mommsen," recounts Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, "experienced in Harnack theology as science - a connection which he had never encountered in such a radical way. He experienced in him religious character, and through it was profoundly influenced in his view of Christendom as an historical phenomenon." Gustav Schmoller, the national economist, who confessed of himself that he was swept up in the intellectual breeze of David Friedrich Strauss, and that he ever recoiled at "what the common pastors presented," wrote regarding "The Nature of Christendom," to Harnack, that the lectures of this book meant for him "an edification, a confirmation of things hoped and inklings had, a dispelling of doubt - indeed, I might say, a revelation - the revelation of the historical Christ, in the only way in which he is a possibility today for the intellectual and scholar." There are men yet living among us who after the turn of the century were torn way from the superficial materialism of that day by Harnack's famous lectures, and led again to a higher view of the world. For the first time they encountered again Jesus Christ, to be sure, a Jesus "only possible today for the intellectual and scholar," that is, as he was comprehensible at that time to the cultured citizen. The discovery Jesus freed from the veil of dogmatic conceptions and from all the super-human and miraculous elements, was perceived as a new Reformation. Otto Harnack, the literary historian, called his brother to the reformational act during the controversy over the Apostles' Creed, to the complete denial of the Creed. Harnack, however, felt himself neither then or later called to be a reformer, and in many questions took a mediating position, which to radical Liberalism always appeared as a denial of the acknowledged truth. Finally it was indeed his Erasmus-nature which shunned tumult, which only hoped for a gradual cure, brought about by wise pedagogical methods, which kept him from drawing the consequences from his views. For these views, if they are really thought through to the end, necessarily lead to the destruction of dogma and the destruction of the church. That was the flip-side of his missiological effectiveness among the intellectuals. The fate of so many apologists was repeated in him: He won men. But he gave up that for which he desired to win them. He won the intellectuals at the cost of dogma and the church. And this price was too high.

 

Therein is also the profound tragedy of his life. The famous scholar of the history of dogma came to the conclusion that dogma does not belong to the essence of Christendom - in the early church there was as yet no dogma, and since the Reformation it really no longer exists - rather that it was a sort of transitory necessary evil. The famous church historian ended with the conviction that there is no "church," rather only "churches," which are not comparable to each other, and that the "misleading colloquial use of the term 'church'" should really be done away with. The author of "The Essence of Christendom" who would, through a return to original Christendom, establish what the Christian religion properly is, and in so doing sought the historical Jesus and his Gospel, found a Jesus who is no longer the coming Messiah, and a gospel which in its primary form should no longer contain the message regarding the Son of God - a view, which today no serious historian would any longer dare to advocate. Everything which falls in the sphere of Harnack's thought, be it the greatest reality, was changed into a mere concept, dispelled like a puff of smoke. That is a sure sign that his thought is an ill, a false thought. This became particularly clear as soon as it dealt with practical questions. On July 1st, 1911, Harnack wrote to Gustav Krueger in a discussion of the Spruchkollegium among other things: "The time will certainly finally come when also the positive [conservative Christians], such as in Switzerland will come to see that they do not betray the most holy cause, if they remain in an external church fellowship, which desires to embrace everything which is religion among us, so far as it is not Catholic or Jewish. But at the present time we are not so far advanced." One can only read such a sentence with profound alarm. The sergeant major of our company had this view of the Evangelical Church when he had the Catholics step out to the right, and the Jews to the left, and let all who remained, including the Baptists and dissidents, march off to the Evangelical divine service. One does not need to have studied theology for forty years, or to have written the most famous history of dogma in four editions in order to have this view of the church! And is then such a church really such a high ideal so worthy of effort that one must regrettably maintain that the state of affairs is not yet achieved "that the territorial church is no longer a confessional church"? For Harnack it was self-evident that this state of affairs would finally come about: "The Prussian Territorial Church stood with Hengstenberg in 1866, with Koegel in 1890, and with Goltz in 1900, and now it stands with Dryander, Kahl and Kaftan. That is a powerful advance, and the wheels of history can not be driven faster." No, it really does not move so quickly. For "God's millstones grind slowly, but exceedingly fine; what in patience he leaves, he mills again through harshness." In 1930 the Prussian Church stood with the students of Adolf von Harnack. In 1933 it stood with Ludwig Mueller and Joachim Hossenfelder. It is scarcely conceivable that the "powerful advance" will proceed much further in this direction.

 

Two generations ago Friedrich Nitzsche wrote his untimely treatment "Of the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life," in which he perceptively depicted the dangers of "historical sickness." Is any one really surprised that the disciples of a theology can learn to believe nothing more from the history of the church, when their master has learned so little from it? What sort of illness has become evident in this failure of historical theology at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries? It has to do not only with the theology of Harnack, but with the entirety of that theology whose greatest advocate he was, next to Ernst Troeltsch. After Troeltsch's death, the historian Friedrich Meinecke wrote the words which apply to all the great historians of the last generation, and also to Harnack. They are perhaps the best description of the illness of "historicism": "His friends, who in him have lost one of the strongest sources of light of their life, must often admit when sharing impressions about him amongst themselves, that his positive and furtive thoughts and goals stood in a certain disjointed relationship to the phenomenal richness of his sublime historical views. His great ability to express matters verbally strangely enough often failed when it was needed finally to develop his own will and thoughts without doubt. (Cited in Deutsche Nation, March 1923, by Fr. Von Huegel, in the introduction to Ernst Troeltsch, Historicism and Its Demise, 1924). But how is this failure, this illness, to be explained? It can not be explained on the basis of the mistakes and weaknesses of one particular man, it must rather be rooted deep in the essence of modern history, and along with it, in modern historical theology. That became completely clear in the entirety of Harnack's work. For him history is what, for theologians of previous generations, was dogmatics. Harnack demanded from theologians above all knowledge of ancient church history, "otherwise the theologian gets lost in his evaluation of later history, as soon as he must explain it theologically, that is, from a position of original Christendom." Theological judgements are for him - in the same way they once were for Erasmus - thus historical judgements, because that is theologically correct which is consistent with original Christianity. The impossible undertaking to set forth "The Essence of Christendom" by means of historical treatment is understood on this basis. This valuing, or over-valuing of history, corresponds to the despising of metaphysics, which Harnack shared with his teacher of dogmatics, Albert Ritschl. But, furthermore, it corresponds with the devaluation of all genuine dogmatics. "We relegate the dogmaticians to the sphere of beautiful literature," he said to the students who helped him unpack his library in Giessen. Today the dogmaticians exact their revenge from him when they relegate "The Essence of Christendom" to the realm of the devotional literature of Liberalism. Yes one could very often also think that Harnack deliberately intended precisely to reverse that, for him unbearable, claim of Cardinal Manning that one must overcome history through dogma.

 

Here now the most profound reason for the mistakes of the theology of Harnack becomes clear. All history is based upon dogmatics. For all historical perceptions and judgements presuppose norms, which determine the selection and point the way for the investigation. Otherwise the vastness of historical investigation is simply beyond our grasp. The historian is like a seafarer, who travels across a seemingly endless and trackless sea. All about him it is night. For history is in and of itself, dark. Therefore he needs the stars which shine above the surging sea, unmoved by the storms of this earthly world. The historian who forsakes dogmatic norms, and in the place of these, establishes his own norms by which he will direct himself, drawing only from history itself, is like the seafarer who fastens a lantern on the bow of his ship and now steers with it. He does not know where he will end. He does not know whether or not he travels in a circle. He never reaches his destination. Here lays the most profound reason for the mistake of Harnack's theology and that of those of like mind. We have something to learn from their fate. But it would not suffice for us to think that the historian or church historian must have a dogmatics. He must have the correct dogmatics. It would not suffice to fix one's gaze at a favorite star. For even the stars travel their course, move, and disappear over the horizon. We need Him who in the Holy Scriptures is called "the Bright Morning Star."

 

Friedrich von Huegel, the Catholic philosopher of religion in England, recounted how his friend Ernst Troeltsch in 1901 informed him that in his life and thought as a German philosopher of religion there was a salto mortale, that is, based upon the presuppositions of his thought, he was not able to come to certain conclusions in a normal and logical manner. But certain truths of the faith were so evident that he dared make the leap, which could be so deadly for a philosopher. The great and venerable thinker here points to a uniqueness of all genuine theological thought. The most basic theological knowledge is not gained on the paths of normal scholarship, neither that of history, nor philosophy or philosophical dogmatics. To understand a theologian means that one must understand his "leap of death" [Salto mortale]. It means to grasp where and why he, contrary to all demands of reason and all philosophical presuppositions, dares to make the leap into the bottomless, indeed, to fall into the arms of God. Where is this point with Adolf von Harnack? It is there, where he, to the greatest vexation of his theological friends, and against his own theoretical convictions, during a sermon [which he preached], cited the verse:

 

The ground on which I'm grounded

Is Christ and His blood.

This makes it that I find,

The true, eternal Good.

For my life and me, there is nothing on this earth.

What Christ to me has given,

That is love's worth.

 

It is a verse from his favorite hymn, as he then finally lived from the hymns of Paul Gerhardt. The confession of his church, in which he was baptized, the church in which he was confirmed, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of his fathers and his father above all, who is one of the great, unforgettable theologians of Lutheranism - his great works on the doctrine of Luther and his writing on church governance have been republished in our times - he had lost, so far as it was deposited in the symbolical books. But the confession of this church, as it lives in the hymns of the confessor, Paul Gerhardt, had not died in him. He lived from this.

 

And yet something else was there. In his "Marcion" (1921) he put forth the untenable thesis: "The rejection of the Old Testament in the second century was a mistake Its maintenance in the sixteenth century was a fate But to continue to preserve it in the nineteenth century as canonic document in Protestantism, is the result of a religious and ecclesiastical paralysis." But in stating this he did not at all draw the consequences of this thesis for himself. On his last birthday [celebration], May 7, 1930, as the countenance of death was about him, as the heaviest struggles over his last great achievements were occurring, regarding the Kaiser-Wilhelm Society for the Promotion of Sciences, he conducted the evening devotion in his home on the great text from Isaiah 40:27-29. This text speaks of the Creator and Lord of the world, who gives strength to the weary and power to those grown faint. "But how deeply his soul was stirred," recounts his daughter of this final struggle-filled birthday, "we came to know only after his death. For in the bible, which he used for this devotion, he had written at this passage: "I know not, for great sorrow, where to turn."

 

God is greater than our heart! And the Word of our God remains forever (Isaiah 40:8)! All theology ends with this realization.