Reformation(en) und Moderne: Philosophisch-theologische Erkundungen [1 ed.] 9783737007283, 9783847107286

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Religion and Transformation in Contemporary European Society

Band 12

Herausgegeben von Kurt Appel, Christian Danz, Isabella Guanzini, Richard Potz und Sieglinde Rosenberger

Die Bände dieser Reihe sind peer-reviewed.

Hans Schelkshorn / Herman Westerink (Hg.)

Reformation(en) und Moderne Philosophisch-theologische Erkundungen

V& R unipress Vienna University Press

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet þber http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. ISSN 2198-5235 ISBN 978-3-7370-0728-3 Weitere Ausgaben und Online-Angebote sind erhÐltlich unter: www.v-r.de Verçffentlichungen der Vienna University Press erscheinen im Verlag V& R unipress GmbH. Gedruckt mit freundlicher Unterstþtzung des Titus Brandsma Instituts (Nijmegen) und des Rektorats der UniversitÐt Wien.  2017, V& R unipress GmbH, Robert-Bosch-Breite 6, D-37079 Gçttingen / www.v-r.de Alle Rechte vorbehalten. Das Werk und seine Teile sind urheberrechtlich gesch þtzt. Jede Verwertung in anderen als den gesetzlich zugelassenen FÐllen bedarf der vorherigen schriftlichen Einwilligung des Verlages. Titelbild: RaT-Logo (Gerfried Kabas, Wien).

Inhalt

Hans Schelkshorn / Herman Westerink Einleitung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

7

Hans Schelkshorn Anbruch einer Zweiten Achsenzeit. Renaissance-Humanismus und „christliche Reform“ im Diskurs über die Moderne . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

Christian Danz Die Realisierung des religiösen Heils in der Geschichte. Anmerkungen zur Transformation des Gottesgeistes zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung . .

45

Gerrit Steunebrink Hegel’s Cultural-Protestantism as a Remedy against Schizophrenia and Hypocrisy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

61

Herman Westerink Modernity as the Variety of Hermeneutics of the Self: Faith and Despair in the Tragic History of Francesco Spira . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

91

Ronald K. Rittgers Suffering and Consolation in the Age of Reform: Reflections on the Origins of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 Inigo Bocken The Idea of Reform in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola . . . . 135 Juan Antonio Senent de Frutos Ignatian Modernity as another Kind of Modernity . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Autoren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173

Hans Schelkshorn / Herman Westerink

Einleitung

Seit dem 19. Jahrhundert ist das neuzeitliche Geschichtsbewusstsein Europas durch zwei folgenreiche Weichenstellungen geprägt worden: Auf der einen Seite sah Hegel bereits in Luthers Theologie einen entscheidenden Durchbruch zum neuzeitlichen Subjekt, der mit Descartes besiegelt worden sei. Auf der anderen Seite stellte Jacob Burckhardt den Renaissancehumanismus, in dem sich die säkulare Entdeckung des Menschen und der Welt vollzieht, als entscheidende Wurzel der Moderne heraus. In diesem Sinn werde auch in aktuellen Debatten, sowohl im akademischen als auch im öffentlichen Bereich, Renaissance und Reformation immer wieder als „Großereignisse“ (Habermas) im Übergang zur Neuzeit beschworen. In jüngster Zeit ist vor allem in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem politischen Islam die Forderung nach einer islamischen Reformation im Sinne Luthers erhoben worden. Die stereotypen Bilder von der säkularen Renaissance und der lutherischen Reformation sind jedoch bereits seit Längerem durch historische Forschungen aufgebrochen worden. Die Renaissance erscheint heute als eine Epoche mit extrem vielfältigen geistigen Aufbrüchen, die keineswegs einen „säkularen“ Block gegenüber dem Christentum bilden, sondern in vielfacher Weise mit christlichen Reformbewegungen verbunden sind. Auch das lange Zeit auf Luther fixierte Bild von der Reformation ist bereits seit dem Historismus immer wieder revidiert worden. Die reformatorischen Bewegungen des 16. Jahrhunderts erscheinen heute eher als Klimax einer beinahe unüberschaubaren Vielfalt an christlichen Reformbewegungen seit dem 12. Jahrhundert. In diesem erweiterten Blickfeld verwischen sich nicht zuletzt auch die Grenzen zwischen Reformation und katholischer Gegenreformation. Vor diesem Hintergrund erklären sich die zentralen Anliegen des vorliegenden Sammelbandes, der auf ein Symposium zurückgeht, das von der Forschungsplattform „Religion and Transformation in Contemporary European Society“ (Wien) und dem Titus Brandsma-Institut (Nijmegen / Nimwegen) im Juni 2015 an der Universität Wien veranstaltet wurde: Erstens möchten wir gerade im Lutherjahr 2017 den Blick bewusst auf die Variationen christlicher

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Reform vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum 16. Jahrhundert lenken. Da die historische Forschung die traditionellen konfessionellen Gräben längst relativiert hat, werden sowohl Interpretationen zur den protestantischen Reformationen als auch Studien über die Ignatianische Spiritualität im Kontext der Moderne vorgestellt, und zwar mit dem Ziel, neben den unterschiedlichem Merkmalen vor allem gemeinsame Fragestellungen und Probleme offen zu legen. Dadurch soll ein Anstoß für weitere interdisziplinäre Forschung jenseits konfessioneller Positionen gegeben werden. Angesichts der Vielfalt christlicher Reformbewegungen und ihrer Verschränkungen mit dem Renaissancehumanismus gilt es zweitens die Verhältnisbestimmungen zwischen Reformation und Moderne neu zu bestimmen. Der Brennpunkt der Arbeiten liegt daher nicht in historischer oder kirchengeschichtlicher Forschung. Das Ziel ist vielmehr eine systematische, primär philosophisch orientierte geschichtliche Reinterpretation christlicher Reformbewegungen im Kontext eines offenen Diskurses über die Moderne. Im einleitenden Beitrag „Anbruch einer Zweiten Achsenzeit. RenaissanceHumanismus und ,christliche Reform‘ im Diskurs über die Moderne“ gibt Hans Schelkshorn zunächst einen groben Überblick über die unterschiedlichen Bezugnahmen von philosophischen Modernetheorien auf die Renaissance und die christlichen Reformbewegungen seit dem späten Mittelalter. Je nachdem ob die Moderne als Zeitalter der Aufklärung, der Vorherrschaft instrumenteller Vernunft oder bloß als ein europäisches kulturelles Projekt verstanden wird, erscheinen Renaissance und Reformation jeweils in einem anderen Licht. So kann Luther sowohl als Promotor (Hegel) als auch als Hemmschuh der Aufklärung (Nietzsche) ins Blickfeld rücken. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird abschließend mit dem Konzept einer „Zweiten Achsenzeit“ ein alternativer geschichtsphilosophischer Rahmen vorgeschlagen, in dem die Vielfalt sowohl des Renaissancehumanismus als auch der reformatorischen Bewegungen der frühen Neuzeit jenseits eingefahrener Frontlinien situiert werden können. Christian Danz geht in seinem Beitrag „Die Realisierung des religiösen Heils in der Geschichte. Anmerkungen zur Transformation des Gottesgeistes zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung“ von Ernst Troeltschs Diagnose aus, dass bereits im 18. Jahrhundert zentrale Prämissen der reformatorischen Theologien im Rahmen der Rationalitätsdebatten der Aufklärungsphilosophie in radikaler Weise transformiert worden sind. Den von Troeltsch anvisierten Übergang vom Alt- zu Neuprotestantismus illustriert Christian Danz am instruktiven Beispiel der Pneumatologie, deren Wandlungen von Luther über Lessing zu Hegel nachgezeichnet werden. Gerrit Steunebrink beschreibt in seinem Aufsatz „Hegel’s Cultural-Protestantism as a Remedy against Schizophrenia and Hypocrisy“, wie und warum Hegel das Christentum mit der Moderne versöhnen konnte, nachdem er an-

Einleitung

9

fänglich in der Spur von Rousseau und den Romantikern (Hölderlin, Gebrüder Schlegel, Schleiermacher) von der Diagnose ausging, dass Philosophie, Kunst, Religion und Ethik in der modernen Gesellschaft nicht mehr im Einklang mit einander stehen. Vor allem bei Hölderlin, aber auch bei Schleiermacher sah Hegel jedoch in der Folge einerseits „schizophrene“ Implikationen ihrer Kritik an der Neuzeit, andererseits eine problematische Idealisierung utopischer Gehalte. Vor diesem Hintergrund kann nach Steunebrink Hegels Denken über Religion und Christentum als eine Alternative zur Zeitdiagnose der Romantik verstanden werden, in der schließlich das Christentum als Quelle und Grundlage für die moderne Gesellschaft und Kultur identifiziert wird. Im Zentrum des Beitrags von Herman Westerink „Modernity as the Variety of Hermeneutics of the Self: Faith and Despair in the Tragic History of Francesco Spira“ steht eine Fallstudie, nämlich die tragische Geschichte von Francesco Spira, einem italienischen Protestanten, der in tiefster Verzweiflung über seine mögliche Verwerfung durch Gott Monate lang mit Freunden über seine geistliche Lage diskutiert und schließlich 1548 stirbt. Westerink zeigt, wie die Geschichte von Francesco Spira in der frühen Neuzeit verortet werden kann. Im Konkreten deutet Westerink die Verzweiflung von Francisco Spira als eine neue Form der „Sorge um sich“ (Michel Foucault), die sich in einem Zeitalter der Hinwendung zum religiösen Subjekt, das von tiefen theologischen und spirituellen Krisen geprägt ist, herausbildet. Ronald K. Rittgers situiert in seinem Aufsatz „Suffering and Consolation in the Age of Reform: Reflections on the Origins of Modernity“ die verschiedenen Reformationen in einem „Zeitalter der Reform“, das vor allem von der Entwicklung neuer pastoraler Praktiken und Themenfelder im Rahmen der modernen Verinnerlichung geprägt ist. Am Beispiel der Leidens- und Trostliteratur wird gezeigt, dass die Moderne und die Hinwendung zur modernen „Innerlichkeit“ nur im Kontext der Entwicklungen in der theologischen und pastoralen Literatur und Praxis verstehbar sind. Darüber hinaus weist Rittgers auf, wie gerade die pastorale Literatur letztendlich auch zu Säkularisierungsprozessen beigetragen hat. In seinem Beitrag „The Idea of Reform in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola“ situiert Inigo Bocken die Geistlichen Übungen von Ignatius von Loyola einerseits im weiten Kontext frühmoderner Reformbewegungen, andererseits in einer Philosophie der Reform, die einen wesentlichen Aspekt der christlichen Tradition bildet, im Konkreten die Lehre von der Imago-Dei und die persönliche Suche nach einer Wiederherstellung der Gottebenbildlichkeit des Menschen. Im Zentrum der Geistlichen Übungen von Ignatius steht nach Bocken die Frage, wie eine Reform des Selbst zu denken sei. In der Beantwortung dieser Frage entwickelt Ignatius, wie Bocken in seinem Beitrag aufzeigt, eine neue Form phi-

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losophischen Denkens, die in der Folge einen großen Einfluss auf die Entwicklung des neuzeitlichen Denkens ausüben sollte. In seinem Beitrag „Ignatian Modernity as Another Kind of Modernity“ stellt Juan Antonio Senent de Frutos die Ignatianische bzw. Jesuitische Spiritualität als eine weithin verschüttete geistige Quelle der Moderne heraus. Im Gegensatz zur säkularen, d. h. an Descartes orientierten Selbstauslegung der Moderne, in der der Mensch von den tragenden Beziehungen zu Gott, zur Natur und zu den anderen entfremdet ist, entwickelt Ignatius ein Konzept von Subjektivität, in dem einerseits die anthropozentrische Wende der Renaissance aufgegriffen, andererseits der Solipsismus, Atheismus und die einseitige Objektivierung der Natur durch moderne Technik und Ökonomie überwunden werden. Darüber hinaus hat nach Senent de Frutos die jesuitische Theologie inmitten des frühneuzeitlichen Kolonialismus einen Geist der Interkulturalität entwickelt, der sowohl die Öffnung für fremde Religionen und Philosophien (Roberto de Nobili, Mateo Ricci) als auch gesellschaftliche Alternativen zur kolonialen Gewalt (Jesuiten-Reduktionen in Amerika) inspirierte. Als Herausgeber möchten wir uns bei allen, die die Veröffentlichung dieses Sammelbandes ermöglicht haben, bedanken. Unser Dank gilt vor allem Prof. Dr. Inigo Bocken, dem Direktor des Titus-Brandsma-Instituts, und Prof. DDr. Kurt Appel, dem Koordinator der Forschungsplattform „Religion and Transformation in Contemporary European Society“ (RaT, Wien), für ihre vielfältige Unterstützung. Wir bedanken uns für die Aufnahme in die Buchreihe der Forschungsplattform RaT, bei Herrn Oliver Kätsch für die Betreuung durch den Verlag Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht und beim Rektorat der Universität Wien für den großzügigen Druckkostenzuschuss. Wir danken Frau Teresa Blom für die Korrekturen der englischen Texte. Nicht zuletzt gilt unser Dank dem Management von RaT, Prof. DDr. Isabella Guanzini, P. Dr. Jakob Deibl, Frau Isabella Bruckner und Herrn Daniel Kuran, sowie Frau Mag. Agnes Leyrer vom Institut für Christliche Philosophie für ihre umfassende Betreuung des Projekts bis hin zur Erstellung des Layouts. Herman Westerink und Hans Schelkshorn

Hans Schelkshorn

Anbruch einer Zweiten Achsenzeit. Renaissance-Humanismus und „christliche Reform“ im Diskurs über die Moderne

Renaissance und Reformation nehmen im Selbstverständnis der europäischen Moderne seit langem einen prominenten Platz ein. Die „Großereignisse“1 im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit waren allerdings stets Gegenstand heftiger Kontroversen. Während Hegel Luther als einen Wegbereiter neuzeitlicher Freiheit rühmt, deutet Nietzsche das konfessionelle Zeitalter als einen fatalen Rückfall in ein religiöses Bewusstsein. Im 19. Jahrhundert standen einander der aufklärerische Protestantismus und der antimodernistische Katholizismus oft unversöhnlich gegenüber. Die konfessionellen Frontlinien haben sich im 20. Jahrhundert deutlich verschoben. Einerseits öffnete sich die katholische Kirche im Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil der Kultur der Moderne, andererseits stellen sich heute vor allem in den USA evangelikale Christen gegen die moderne Wissenschaft, insbesondere die Evolutionstheorie. Auch in der historischen Forschung lassen sich die Begriffe „Renaissance“, „Reformation“ und „Gegenreformation“, die erst im 19. Jahrhundert als Epochenbegriffe2 eingeführt worden sind, kaum mehr auf homogene, klar abgrenzbare geistige Bewegungen beziehen. Die „Reformation“ erscheint heute eher als eine späte Entwicklung innerhalb eines breiten Stroms christlicher Reformbewegungen, die seit dem Hochmittelalter in immer neuen Wellen in der lateinischen Christenheit aufbrechen. In dem historisch erweiterten Blickfeld wird schließlich auch die katholische Gegenreformation, die lange Zeit als ein Antipode zur Reformation galt, in das Tableau spätmittelalterlicher Reformprozesse eingefügt.3 „Statt von Reformation müsste man“ – so Peter Marshall – „eigentlich von Reformationen reden, von vielen theologischen und politischen Einzelbewegungen, alle mit ureigenen Zielen und Ausrichtungen.“4 1 2 3 4

Habermas 1985, S. 13. Vgl. dazu Kluetin 2011, S. 19ff.; Le Goff 2016, S. 53–69. Vgl. dazu etwa Chaunu 1975. Marshall 2014, S. 12.

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Auch das Bild der Renaissance hat sich seit dem 19. Jahrhundert massiv gewandelt. Jacob Burckhardt beschrieb die Renaissance als ein Zeitalter der Entdeckung des Menschen und der Welt.5 Ein Jahrhundert später verweist Jan Huizinga auf die zahllosen „Wendungen und Schwankungen, Übergänge und Vermischungen von Kulturelementen“ in der Kultur der Renaissance. „Wer in ihr eine unbedingte Einheit des Geistes sucht, die er in einer einzigen Formel ausdrücken kann, wird sie“ – so Huizinga – „nie in all ihren Äußerungen verstehen können. Vor allem muß man bereit sein, sie zu erfassen in ihrer Kompliziertheit, in ihrer Heterogenität, ihrer Gegensätzlichkeit, und auf die Fragen, die sie stellt, eine pluralistische Behandlung anzuwenden. Wer ein Einheitsschema als Netz auswirft, um diesen Proteus darin zu fangen, der wird sich selbst in diesen Maschen verstricken.“6 Auch Michel Foucault beschrieb die Renaissance als eine „dreilappige Epoche“, genauer als einen „freizügige(n) Ort einer Gegenüberstellung von Treue gegenüber der Antike, dem Geschmack am Wunderbaren und einer bereits erwachten Aufmerksamkeit für jene souveräne Rationalität, in der wir uns wiedererkennen.“7 In jüngerer Zeit hat Peter Burke sowohl die geografischen als auch chronologischen „Grenzen“ der Renaissance deutlich ausgeweitet. Während Burckhardt primär auf Italien fixiert war, lenkt Burke den Blick auch auf die „Peripherien“ der Renaissance-Kultur (Ungarn, Kroatien, Nordeuropa, iberische Halbinsel), und auf die oft vernachlässigten Einflüsse von Byzanz und al-Andalus.8 Die zeitlichen Eckdaten der Renaissance liegen nach Burke bei Petrarca und Descartes. Während „Renaissance“ und „Reformation“ ihre festen Konturen erst in jüngerer Zeit verloren haben, ist der Begriff der „Moderne“ bereits seit Längerem geradezu ein Synonym für semantische Unbestimmtheit. Geschichtswissenschaft, Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften, Ästhetik und nicht zuletzt die Philosophie füllen den Begriff der Moderne jeweils mit unterschiedlichen Inhalten, aus denen sich unterschiedliche Deutungen über ihren Beginn und ihr mögliches Ende und nicht zuletzt auch verschiedene Bilder über die Renaissance und die Reformation ergeben. Vor diesem Hintergrund droht jeder Versuch, Renaissance, Reformation und Moderne in eine Beziehung zu setzen, in der Polysemantik der Relata zu versinken. Um einen vorläufigen Überblick über einige geschichtswirksame Konstellationen der Trias „Renaissance – Reformation(en) – Moderne“ zu gewinnen, möchte ich in einem ersten Schritt drei Paradigmen im philosophischen Diskurs über die Moderne unterscheiden (Kap. 1), aus denen sich, wie an einzelnen 5 6 7 8

Burckhardt 1995, S. 280–345. Huizinga 1952, S. 60. Foucault 1971, S. 63. Burke 1998.

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Beispielen gezeigt werden soll, jeweils bestimmte Perspektiven auf die Renaissance und die Reformation ergeben (Kap. 2–4). In einem zweiten Schritt möchte ich mit dem Konzept einer „Zweiten Achsenzeit“ eine neue Theorie der Moderne grob umreißen, in der die Vielfalt, Überlappungen und Ambivalenzen von Renaissance und „christlicher Reform“ angemessen situiert werden können (Kap. 5).

1.

Drei Paradigmen des „Diskurses über die Moderne“

Im Zuge der Erosion der christlichen Geschichtstheologie, die bereits im 16. Jahrhundert einsetzt, entsteht in der europäischen Philosophie das Bewusstsein, in einer radikal neuen Zeit zu leben. Die Deutung der „Neu-Zeit“ wird, wie der Streit zwischen Fortschrittstheoretikern und Rousseau zeigt, spätestens im 18. Jahrhundert zu einem zentralen Thema der Philosophie. Da die Selbstvergewisserung der „neuen Zeit“ bzw. der „Moderne“ von Anfang an kontroverse Debatten ausgelöst hat, ist es angebracht, von einem „Diskurs über die Moderne“ und nicht einfach von „der“ Moderne zu sprechen.9 Im 19. Jahrhundert führen die Romantik, der Historismus und nicht zuletzt Nietzsche die Kritik an der aufklärerischen Fortschrittsphilosophie fort. Erst in dieser Zeit werden von Jacob Burckhardt und Leopold von Ranke „Renaissance“ und „Reformation“ als Epochenbegriffe etabliert. Nach den beiden Weltkriegen und der Shoa bricht schließlich in der europäischen Philosophie eine radikale Fortschrittskritik auf, in der die Aufklärung selbst unter Totalitarismusverdacht gestellt wird. Vor diesem Hintergrund können in grober Vereinfachung drei große Paradigmen des philosophischen Diskurses über die Moderne unterschieden werden.10 Aufklärerische Modernetheorien deuten die neuzeitliche Entwicklung primär als einen Prozess der fortschreitenden Durchsetzung der Vernunft bzw. als Rationalisierungsprozess, der einerseits eine methodisch orientierte Wissenschaft, andererseits eine rationale Rechtfertigung normativer Geltungsansprüche umfasst. Da sich Aufklärungsprozesse jeweils an religiös-metaphysischen Weltbildern abarbeiten, ist die Säkularisierungsdebatte ein spezieller Strang des aufklärerischen Diskurses über die Moderne. Seit Nietzsche sind in der europäischen Philosophie machttheoretische Modernetheorien entstanden. Vor allem Heidegger, aber auch die „Dialektik der Aufklärung“ von Horkheimer und Adorno und in jüngerer Zeit Michel Foucault dechiffrieren in den Spuren von Nietzsche Rationalisierungsprozesse als 9 Vgl. dazu Habermas 1985, S. 7–33; Foucault 2005. 10 Vgl. dazu Schelkshorn 2009, S. 25–85; ders. 2012, S. 222–224.

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Machtsyndrome. Bei Heidegger und Horkheimer & Adorno stehen moderne Wissenschaft und Technik, bei Foucault hingegen die Disziplinarinstitutionen im Zentrum der Kritik an der Moderne. Außereuropäische Philosophien nutzen hingegen das machttheoretische Instrumentarium für eine Kritik der kolonialen Moderne, deren Gewaltpotential seit dem 16. Jahrhundert die Völker Amerikas, Afrikas und Asiens erfasst. In Fortführung von Herders Kulturphilosophie und des Historismus sind im 20. Jahrhundert kulturalistische Modernetheorien entstanden, in denen die universalistischen Ansprüche neuzeitlichen Denkens in radikaler Weise zurückgestuft werden. Trotz aller Globalisierungsprozesse bleibt in dieser Deutungsrichtung die Moderne letztlich eine partikulare Kultur neben anderen. Kulturalistische Modernetheorien finden sich heute vor allem in bestimmten Strängen des Kommunitarismus, in der philosophischen Postmoderne, den Kulturwissenschaften und in anschaulicher Simplifizierung in Huntingtons These vom „clash of civilisations“.11

2.

Renaissance und Reformation im aufklärerischen Diskurs über die Moderne

2.1.

Luther als Protagonist der Aufklärung?

Die französischen Begründer der Fortschrittsphilosophie sehen die Anfänge der Neuen Zeit vor allem in den Pionieren der modernen Wissenschaft (Bacon, Descartes, Galilei, Hobbes) und in technischen Innovationen (Kompass, Buchdruck, Schießpulver).12 In der deutschen Aufklärungsphilosophie tritt hingegen seit Herder auch Luther als „Lehrer der deutschen Nation, ja als Mitreformer des ganzen jetzt aufgeklärten Europa“13 in den Blick. Denn Luther griff nach Herder „den geistlichen Despotismus, der alles freie gesunde Denken aufhebt oder untergräbt, als ein wahrer Herkules an und gab ganzen Völkern, und zwar zuerst in den schwersten, geistlichen Dingen den Gebrauch der Vernunft wieder. Die Macht seiner Sprache und seines biedern Geistes vereint sich mit den Wissenschaften, die von und mit ihm auflebten […]“14 Im Gefolge der Lutherischen Reformation sind zwar, was Herder nicht entgeht, auch „zahlreiche Sekten der Wiedertäufer und anderer Irrlehrer entstanden“; doch die Rückfälle in religiö11 Vgl. Huntington 1996. 12 Vgl. dazu etwa Condorcet 1975, S. 123ff.; S. 137ff.; Hegel 1986, XX, S. 61–266. 13 Herder 1968, XVII, S. 87. Für einen Überblick über Herders Beziehungen zu Luther vgl. Embach 1987. Zum Lutherbild in der deutschen Geistesgeschichte ist noch immer Bornkamm 1972 eine vorzügliche Quelle; einen aktuellen Überblick bietet Assel 2014. 14 Herder 1968, XVII, S. 87.

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sen Dogmatismus können nach Herder nicht Luther angelastet werden. Denn: „Geist ist Wesen des Luthertums, wie Geist das Wesen des Christentums ist; freie Überzeugung, Prüfung und Selbstbesinnung.“15 In diesem Licht werden manche Züge Luthers, die sich nur schwer in das Bild der „Aufklärung“ einfügen lassen, wie z. B. die Mahnung zum Gehorsam gegenüber der Obrigkeit, relativiert: „Wäre man seinem Geist gefolgt und hätte in dieser Art freier Untersuchung auch Gegenstände beherzigt, die zunächst nicht in seiner Mönchs- und Kirchensphäre lagen“16, würde nach Herder Luthers Beitrag zum aufgeklärten Europa in noch größerem Glanz erstrahlen. An dieser Stelle öffnet Herder sein Lutherbild vorsichtig zum Humanismus hin. Da Luther ein „Starrkopf“ war, war es „fast unentbehrlich, daß ihm zur Seite der feinere, unterscheidende, furchtsam hellere Melanchthon stand“. Kurz: Luther bedurfte mancher Klärungen durch den humanistisch gebildeten Melanchthon, der „das größere Werk Gottes in Luther erkannte“ und „ins Hellere brachte“.17 In einem völlig anderen systematischen Rahmen würdigt Hegel Luther als einen Mitbegründer der Neuzeit. Da die Renaissance als Epochenbegriff noch nicht etabliert ist, ordnet Hegel das „Wiederaufleben der Wissenschaften“ noch der Philosophie des Mittelalters zu. Allerdings fehlen nach Hegel dem Denken von Pomponatius bis Petrus Ramus „die Frische und Eigentümlichkeit höherer Prinzipien“. Kurz: „sie ist eigentlich nicht wahrhafte Philosophie.“18 Der Übergang zur neuzeitlichen Aufklärung ist, wie Hegel in einer überraschenden Wende betont, vor allem durch Martin Luther vorbereitet worden. „Die Hauptrevolution ist in der Lutherischen Reformation eingetreten.“19 Wie Herder so würdigt auch Hegel Luther als einen Wegbereiter des neuzeitlichen Prinzips der Freiheit; mit Luther habe „die Freiheit des Geistes, im Kerne“20 angefangen. Dennoch vermeidet auch Hegel eine kurzschlüssige Synthese von lutherischer und neuzeitlicher Freiheit. Zwar habe Luther das Religiöse in aller Radikalität im Geist, genauer in der Innerlichkeit, verankert: Der „Mensch müsse selbst Buße […] tun, und sein Herz müsse erfüllt sein vom heiligen Geist. So ist hier das Prinzip der Subjektivität, der reinen Beziehung auf mich, die Freiheit, nicht nur anerkannt, sondern es ist schlechthin gefordert, daß es darauf ankomme in Kultur, in der Religion.“21 Die geschichtliche Bedeutung 15 16 17 18

Herder 1968, XIX, S. 52. Herder 1968, XVII, S. 87. Herder 1889, VII, S. 257. Hegel 1986, XX, S. 15. Vgl. dazu auch a.a.O., S. 48: „Aber indem sie nicht die höchste Frage, die die Philosophie interessiert, zum Gegenstand ihrer Untersuchungen machen und nicht aus dem Gedanken räsonieren, so gehören sie nicht eigentlich der Geschichte der Philosophie an.“ 19 A.a.O., S. 49. 20 A.a.O., S. 50. 21 A.a.O., S. 51.

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von Luthers Theologie stellt Hegel noch über die transozeanische Expansion Europas. „Während die übrige Welt hinaus nach Ostindien, Amerika – aus ist, Reichtümer zu gewinnen, eine weltliche Herrschaft zusammenzubringen“, „erkennt, verfolgt und zerstört“ nach Hegel ein „einfacher Mönch“ die Veräußerlichung des christlichen Glaubens durch die mittelalterliche Christenheit.22 Allerdings hat sich in der lutherischen Reformation, wie Hegel kritisch moniert, „das subjektive Prinzip von der Philosophie getrennt“. Der Durchbruch zur neuzeitlichen Subjektivität blieb auf den Bereich des Religiösen beschränkt. In der katholischen Kirche ist zwar nach Hegel die „Verbindung der Philosophie mit der Theologie des Mittelalters der Hauptsache nach erhalten worden“23, so dass durch „die Erbschaft von der Philosophie der alexandrinischen Schule […] viel mehr Philosophisches, Spekulatives als in dem protestantischen Lehrbegriff“ präsent ist. Doch der Katholizismus hat sich dem subjektiven Prinzip der Religion verweigert. Aus diesem Grund ist nach Hegel trotz aller Vorbereitungen durch Luther der entscheidende Durchbruch zur neuzeitlichen Freiheit erst durch Ren8 Descartes vollzogen worden. „Wir kommen eigentlich jetzt erst zur Philosophie der neuen Welt und fangen diese mit Cartesius an.“24 Das Bild einer Einheit von Reformation und Aufklärung, in der das Denken der Renaissance noch deutlich im Hintergrund bleibt, war allerdings im frühen 19. Jahrhundert keineswegs unumstritten. Erste Zweifel an Luthers Beitrag zum aufklärerischen Vernunftbegriff finden sich bereits bei Johann Gottlob Fichte. Zwar rühmt auch Fichte in den Reden an die deutsche Nation (1808) Luthers Kampf für die religiöse Freiheit.25 Im protestantischen Schriftprinzip, in dem „ganz förmlich ein geschriebenes Buch als höchster Entscheidungsgrund aller Wahrheit […] aufgestellt“26 werde, liegt jedoch für den Geist der Aufklärung, wie Fichte in den Vorlesungen über die Grundzüge des gegenwärtigen Zeitalters (1801) ausführt, ein ernsthaftes Problem. Allerdings hat das dogmatische Schriftprinzip, obwohl es mit der Autonomie neuzeitlicher Vernunft schwer verträglich ist, die Aufklärung dennoch realgeschichtlich befördert. Denn mit dem Schriftprinzip wurde die Literalität zu einer Bedingung wahrhaften Christseins, mit der Konsequenz, dass von nun an die Bibel dem Volk zugänglich gemacht wurde, was wiederum die Volkserziehung und die Allgemeinheit des Lesens und Schreibens beförderte.27 22 23 24 25 26

Hegel 1986, XII, S. 494. Hegel 1986, XX, S. 54f. A.a.O., S. 120. Vgl. dazu Fichte 1965, VII, S. 344–358. A.a.O., S. 102. Darüber hinaus liegt im Schriftprinzip nach Fichte eine Inkonsequenz, da die Bibel letztlich „auf mündlicher Tradition und auf der Unfehlbarkeit des Konziliums, welches unseren Kanon sammelte und schloß“ (ebd.), aufruht. 27 A.a.O., S. 103ff. Fichtes These, dass Luthers Reformation gleichsam unbewusst moderne

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In der Frühromantik, in der der Rationalismus der Aufklärung selbst ins Visier der Kritik rückt, verschiebt sich unumgänglich auch der Blick auf die Reformation. Novalis sieht in Europa und die Christenheit (1799) das Abendland in einem umsichgreifenden Atheismus versinken. Da die abstrakte, berechnende Verstandeskultur der Aufklärung sämtliche Quellen des religiösen Sinns austrocknet, nähert sich nach Novalis die Zeit „einer gänzlichen Atonie der höhern Organe, der Periode des praktischen Unglaubens.“28 In dieser Perspektive erscheint Luther nicht mehr als Retter, sondern als Zerstörer religiöser Innerlichkeit. Denn Luther behandelt „das Christentum überhaupt willkürlich, verkannte seinen Geist, führte einen andern Buchstaben und andere Religion ein, nemlich die heilige Allgemeingültigkeit der Bibel, damit wurde leider eine andere, höchst fremde irdische Wissenschaft in die Religionsangelegenheit gemischt – die Philologie – deren auszehrender Einfluß von da an unverkennbar wird.“29 Darüber hinaus hat die konfessionelle Spaltung, die auf beiden Seiten zu einem unchristlichen Staatskirchentum führte, die Selbstzerstörung des Christentums in Europa eingeleitet. „Mit der Reformation wars“ – so Novalis – um die Christenheit gethan. Von nun an war keine mehr vorhanden. Katholiken und Protestanten oder Reformirte standen in sectirerischer Abgeschnittenheit weiter voneinander, als von Mohamedanern und Heiden. Die übriggebliebenen katholischen Staaten vegetirten fort, ohne den schädlichen Einfluß der benachtbarten protestantischen Staaten unmerklich zu fühlen. Die neuere Politik entstand erst in diesem Zeitpunkt, und einzelne mächtige Staaten suchten den vakanten Universalstuhl, in einen Thron verwandelt, in Besitz zu nehmen.30

Trotz des nostalgischen Rückblicks – „Es waren schöne glänzende Zeiten, wo Europa ein christliches Land war“31 – sucht Novalis das Heil der Christenheit keineswegs im mittelalterlichen Katholizismus, sondern in einem Christentum, das aus dem Geist der Freiheit neu geborenen wird und die ästhetischen Tiefendimensionen des Menschen erfasst. Darüber hinaus fließen in die Vision einer ästhetischen Wiedergeburt des Christentums untergründig zentrale Motive der Renaissance, insbesondere die Idee der schöpferischen Freiheit und des uomo universale, ein. „Eine Vielseitigkeit ohne Gleichen […] reiche kräftige Phantasie findet man hie und da […] Eine gewaltige Ahnung der schöpferischen

28 29 30 31

Entwicklungen befördert habe, hat in jüngster Zeit unter Reformationshistorikern wieder eine Konjunktur erlebt. Vgl. dazu Marshall 2014, S. 191: „Die Reformationen – die protestantische und die katholische – haben die moderne Welt geschaffen, aber eben wider Willen. Ihre Gründerväter hätten das Endergebnis nicht erwartet, und sie würden es auch nicht begrüßen.“ Novalis 1978, S. 739. A.a.O., S. 737. A.a.O., S. 738. A.a.O., S. 731.

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Willkür, der Grenzenlosigkeit, der unendlichen Mannigfaltigkeit, der heiligen Eigenthümlichkeit und der Allfähigkeit der innern Menschheit scheint überall rege zu werden.“32

2.2.

Renaissance und Reformation im Kontext des Historismus

In der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts, das bereits vom Kampf der Ideologien geprägt ist, entsteht ein vielschichtiger Disput über das Verhältnis von Renaissance, Reformation und neuzeitlichem Denken. Das breite Spektrum divergierender Deutungen kann an zwei Denkern schlaglichtartig illustriert werden: Während Feuerbach Luther in die Geschichte des neuzeitlichen Atheismus einordnet, bringt Kierkegaard den religiösen Kern der lutherischen Theologie in neuer Form zur Geltung.33 Im Kontext des Historismus werden, wie mit Skizzen zu Nietzsche, Dilthey und Troeltsch gezeigt werden soll, durch eine vertiefte Kenntnis der Quellen die Beziehungen zwischen Renaissance, Reformation und Aufklärung neu bestimmt. Friedrich Nietzsche baut in seiner Deutung der Renaissance bereits auf Jacob Burckhardt auf. Durch die Diagnose vom „Tod Gottes“ erscheinen bei Nietzsche Renaissance und Reformation plötzlich in einem scharfen Gegensatz.34 So schlägt Nietzsche sämtliche Errungenschaften der Neuzeit, die seit Herder und Hegel immer wieder auf die Reformation zurückgeführt worden sind, der von Burckhardt eben erst entdeckten Epoche der Renaissance zu. Die italienische Renaissance barg in sich alle die positiven Gewalten, welchen man die moderne Kultur verdankt: also die Befreiung des Gedankens, Mißachtung der Autoritäten, Sieg der Bildung über den Dünkel der Abkunft, Begeisterung für die Wissenschaft und die wissenschaftliche Vergangenheit der Menschen, Entfesselung des Individuums, eine Glut der Wahrhaftigkeit und Abneigung gegen Schein und bloßen Effekt […] ja, die Renaissance hatte positive Kräfte, welche in unserer bisherigen modernen Kultur noch nicht wieder so mächtig geworden sind. Es war das goldene Zeitalter dieses Jahrtausends, trotz aller Flecken und Lastern.35

In einem zweiten Schritt degradiert Nietzsche die lutherische Reformation zu einem „Bauernaufstand des Geistes“, der aus dem barbarischen Norden Europas 32 A.a.O., S. 745. 33 Vgl. dazu Bayer 1981; Steffes 2008. 34 Jacob Burckhardt hatte hingegen manche christliche Reformbewegungen noch der Renaissance zugerechnet. Mehr noch, „die Renaissance“ hätte nach Burckhardt „binnen kurzem“ mit den kirchlichen Missständen, insbesondere der Bettelmönche, „aufgeräumt“, „wenn nicht die deutsche Reformation und die Gegenreformation darüber gekommen wäre.“ Burckhardt 1995, S. 462f. 35 Nietzsche 1988, II, S. 199f. (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Nr. 237).

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die zivilisierte Mittelmeerwelt überfallen hat.36 Allerdings spricht Nietzsche in seinem Spiel der Perspektiven Luther zuweilen auch „positive“, d. h. religionskritische Leistungen zu, wie z. B. die Kritik an den geistlichen Gütern, wodurch der Weg zu einer unchristlichen vita contemplativa in Europa wieder zugänglich geworden“37 sei. Mehr noch: Da die heiligen Schriften in die Hände der Philologen, „das heißt der Vernichter jeden Glaubens, der auf Büchern ruht“, gerieten, habe Luther ungewollt die Selbstauflösung des Christentums vorangetrieben.38 Aufs Ganze hin betrachtet war jedoch nach Nietzsche die Reformation ein Unfall der Geschichte, genauer ein epochaler Aufschub des Anbruchs eines atheistischen Zeitalters. Reformation und auch die Gegenreformation, „das heißt ein katholisches Christentum der Nothwehr […] verzögerten um zwei bis drei Jahrhunderte […] das völlige In-Eins-Verwachsen des antiken und des modernen Geistes“, möglicherweise „für immer“. Ohne Luther, der nur durch politische Zufälle dem Schicksal von Jan Hus entronnen ist, wäre nach Nietzsche „die Morgenröthe der Aufklärung vielleicht etwas früher und mit schönerem Glanz, als wir jetzt ahnen können, aufgegangen.“39 In diesem Kontext wertet Nietzsche die von Luther bekämpften Renaissancepäpste in provokanter Weise auf. Das verweltlichte Papsttum hätte beinahe selbst den „Tod des christlichen Gottes“, auf den nach Nietzsche die abendländische Geschichte zuläuft, herbeigeführt. „Cesare Borgia als Papst […] Versteht man mich? […] Wohlan, das wäre der Sieg gewesen, nachdem ich heute allein verlange –, damit war das Christentum abgeschafft! – Was geschah? Ein deutscher Mönch, Luther, kann nach Rom.“40 Die Aufwertung der Renaissance erfolgt jedoch bei Nietzsche nicht im Zeichen der Vernunft, sondern des Willens zur Macht. Die Renaissance hatte nach Nietzsche bereits die überfällige Umwertung der Werte, d. h. die Aufwertung der vornehmen Werte, vollzogen. Denn mit den Renaissancepäpsten saß nach Nietzsche nicht mehr das Christentum auf dem Stuhl Petri, „Sondern das Leben […] das grosse Ja zu allen hohen, schönen, verwegnen Dingen!“41 Im schroffen Gegensatz zu Nietzsche begreift Wilhelm Dilthey Renaissance und Reformation als eine große Epoche, die die freudige Bejahung des Lebens und der Welt, das künstlerische Schaffen, aber auch das Unabhängigkeitsbewusstsein der religiösen Person mitsamt der Loslösung von Papsttum und Scholastik in sich vereint. „Lionardo, Raffael, Michel Angelos, Dürer, Ariost, Copernicus, Erasmus, Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Calvin, Hans Sachs, Tizian, 36 37 38 39 40 41

Nietzsche 1988, III, S. 602ff. (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 358). Nietzsche 1988, III, S. 82 (Morgenröte, § 88). Nietzsche 1988, III, S. 603 (Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, § 358). Nietzsche 1988, II, S. 199f. (Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Nr. 237). Nietzsche 1988, VI, S. 251 (Der Antichrist, Nr. 61). Ebd.

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Rabelais, Camoens, Tasso, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Lope gehören“ – wie Dilthey programmatisch verkündet – „diesem einen, unermeßlichen Jahrhundert an.“42 Dilthey nimmt zwar wie Nietzsche eine deutliche Aufwertung der Renaissance gegenüber der Reformation vor, grenzt sich allerdings von Nietzsches atheistischer Deutung entschieden ab.43 Nicht die Selbstabschaffung des Christentums, sondern die christliche Reform aus dem Geist des Humanismus prägt nach Dilthey das Zeitalter der Renaissance. Daher ist für Dilthey nicht Cesare Borgia, sondern Erasmus, der „Voltaire des 16. Jahrhunderts“, vollkommener Repräsentant der Kultur der Renaissance. In innigster Verbindung mit der antiken Philosophie, der selbst Offenbarungscharakter zugesprochen wird, unterwirft Erasmus sämtliche Fragen des religiösen Lebens der kritischen Vernunft. Inhaltlich verteidigt Erasmus nach Dilthey einen bereits im Umkreis von Friedrich II. entwickelten „religiös-universalistischen Theismus“, genauer die Lehre, „daß die Gottheit in den verschiedenen Religionen und Philosophen gleicherweise wirksam gewesen sei und noch heute wirke.“44 Die Hochschätzung des Renaissance-Humanismus, die sich vor allem an Erasmus orientiert, wird bei Dilthey zum Kriterium für die Bewertung der reformatorischen Aufbrüche. So würdigt Dilthey zwar Luthers machtvollen Aufweis der Transzendenz und Unverfügbarkeit der göttlichen Freiheit45, lehnt jedoch Luthers Rechtfertigungslehre, die der Vernunft nicht zugemutet werden könne, strikt ab.46 Aus diesem Grund wertet Dilthey Melanchthon, Zwingli oder Sebastian Franck, die jeweils vom Humanismus beeinflusst sind, deutlich auf. Dies bedeutet: Der Übergang zur Neuzeit ist nach Dilthey vor allem von Erasmus vollzogen worden, dessen universalistischer Theismus bei Goethe, Schiller, Fichte bis hin zu Carlyle und Emerson fortwirke. Die Reformation war hingegen für Dilthey nur insofern ein Wegbereiter für die Moderne, als sie den Geist des christlichen Humanismus in die Volksmassen hineingetragen hat.47 Die Abwertung der Reformation im Licht des Renaissancehumanismus blieb nicht auf die Philosophie beschränkt, sondern ist, wie ein Blick auf Ernst Tro42 Dilthey 1929, S. 246. 43 Vgl. dazu a.a.O., S. 54: „Und zwar sind die großen Veränderungen im sittlichen Leben stets mit denen des religiösen verbunden. Die Geschichte spricht nirgends bisher für das Ideal der religionslosen Moral.“ 44 A.a.O., S. 45. 45 Luthers Theologie ist daher nach Dilthey auch innerhalb der christlichen Theologie ein Novum und nicht bloß eine Aktualisierung urkirchlicher oder augustinischer Theologie. Denn Luther wendet sich sowohl gegen die griechische, am Kosmos orientierte Theologie als auch gegen die römische Theologie, die das Christentum mit der imperialen Machtstruktur verbunden hatte. Vgl. dazu a.a.O., S. 57ff. 46 Die Rechtfertigungslehre setzt nach Dilthey den Opfertod Jesus – „dieser dem sittlichen Gefühl härteste Teil des ganzen Dogmas“ (a.a.O., S. 57) voraus. 47 Vgl. dazu a.a.O., S. 243.

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eltsch zeigt, auch von der protestantischen Theologie selbst vorgenommen worden. Da der Katholizismus durch seinen aggressiven Antimodernismus sich selbst aus der neuzeitlichen Kultur Europas gleichsam ausgeklinkt hat, liegt nach Troeltsch die Zukunft des Christentums fortan ausschließlich in den Händen der protestantischen Kirchen. Das Bekenntnis zum Protestantismus geht jedoch bei Troeltsch nicht mit einer ungebrochenen Treue zur Reformation einher. Im Gegenteil, das konfessionelle Zeitalter stellt, wie Troeltsch konzediert, gegenüber dem Renaissance-Humanismus in gewisser Hinsicht sogar eine Regression dar. Wenn man überlegt, daß die konfessionelle Epoche der europäischen Geschichte, das Zeitalter der sogenannten Gegenreformation, fast einen Rückfall in das Mittelalter und seine kirchliche Zwangskultur bedeutet, daß vorher bereits eine geistige Freiheit und Beweglichkeit, eine politische, wirtschaftliche und künstlerische Kulturbewegung erreicht worden war, die durch das neueintretende religiöse und kirchliche Zeitalter aufgehalten worden ist, dann sind solche Bedenklichkeiten wohl verständlich.48

Wie Dilthey so hebt auch Troeltsch die christlichen Motive des Renaissancehumanismus, die mit Ficinos Hinwendung zu Paulus einsetze, hervor. Im Geist des Humanismus entsteht nach Troeltsch ein Laienchristentum, das zahlreiche Motive der Reformation, insbesondere die Kritik am mittelalterlichen Sakralwesen, vorwegnimmt. Wie Dilthey so weist auch Troeltsch Erasmus eine zentrale Stellung in der frühen Neuzeit zu. Im Streit zwischen Erasmus und Luther stand „nicht bloß der Konflikt religiösen Tiefsinns und moralistischer Flachheit“ zur Debatte, „sondern der Konflikt des werdenden modernen antisupranaturalistischen und universalen Religionsgedankens und des schroff erneuerten mittelalterlichen Supranaturalismus und Dualismus.“49 Die Zeitgenossen, die vom humanistischen Laienevangelium oft unmittelbar zum reformatorischen Bibellesen gewechselt sind, haben allerdings nach Troeltsch die religionsphilosophische Bedeutung von Erasmus nicht erkannt. Der Renaissancehumanismus wurde zwar durch Luther entscheidend geschwächt, wirkte jedoch nach Troeltsch im Antitrinitarismus und Sozianismus fort, die nun auf einen weitaus schärferen Widerstand durch die rekatholisierten Länder stießen. So fanden die späten Nachfahren von Erasmus paradoxerweise in den protestantischen Universitäten eine Zuflucht.50 Die Bedeutung der Reformation für die Moderne wird zwar von Troeltsch nicht negiert, sie darf jedoch, wie im historischen Rückblick anhand von vier Themen (Glaubensreligion versus Sakramentsreligion; religiöser Individualismus; Gesinnungsethik; Weltoffenheit) erläutert wird, auch nicht überschätzt werden. Kurz: Die Reformation ist für Troeltsch eine ambivalente Epoche, mit 48 Troeltsch 2001, S. 66. 49 Troeltsch 2004, S. 140. 50 Vgl. dazu a.a.O., S. 140ff.

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bedeutenden Aufbrüchen, aber auch fatalen Rückfällen in mittelalterliche Kirchendisziplin und Gehorsamsethik.51 Die Zukunft des Christentums liegt daher für Troeltsch im Neuprotestantismus, d. h. der Rekonstitution protestantischer Theologie durch die Philosophie der Aufklärung, wie sie vor allem von Lessing, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel und Goethe grundgelegt worden ist. Auch wenn die moderne Weltoffenheit „vielfach den altprotestantischen Ideen“ entgegengesetzt ist, so ist nach Troeltsch das moderne religiöse Denken trotz der historischen Distanz zu den Reformatoren „auf diese Bahn gewiesen und darf sich auf dieser Bahn angeschlossen fühlen an die großen tragenden Kräfte der Vergangenheit, an die Grundkräfte der Reformation.“52 Die entscheidende Zäsur der Neuzeit verortet Troeltsch – in sachlicher Übereinstimmung mit Max Weber – im 18. Jahrhundert, in der der religiöse Sinnhorizont, der das Zeitalter der Reformation noch überspannte, durch die Autonomisierung von Politik, Wirtschaft, Kunst und Wissenschaft aufgebrochen wird.53

3.

Renaissance und Reformation in machttheoretischen Modernediskursen

Im 20. Jahrhundert geraten aufklärerische Modernetheorien in die Defensive. Angesichts der Gewaltexzesse in den beiden Weltkriegen erscheint die Aufklärung nicht mehr als selbstverständlicher Garant für Emanzipation und Freiheit, sondern steht nun selbst im Verdacht, ein Motor von Machtsyndromen zu sein, die die Menschheit und die Natur als ganze bedrohen. Die machttheoretische Kritik der Aufklärung spaltet sich in zwei Hauptstränge auf: einerseits in die Kritik an der Dominanz instrumenteller Vernunft, in der ein Raum für alternative Vernunftkonzepte zumindest offen bleibt; andererseits in eine totale Vernunftkritik, die mit Nietzsche Vernunft und Macht identifiziert. In den machttheoretischen Diskursen über die Moderne verschieben sich auch die 51 Vgl. dazu Troeltsch 2001, S. 68ff. 52 A.a.O., S. 89. 53 A.a.O., S. 87: „Erst die Abschwächung des alles überragenden religiösen Interesses, die Wiedererhebung der natürlichen politischen und wirtschaftlichen Interessen des modernen Staates, das Hereinfluten der erneuerten Renaissancebildung und der wissenschaftlichen Aufklärung hat hier eine tiefgreifende Änderung hervorgebracht, aber eben damit auch eine gründliche Verschiebung der Interessen. Der rein weltlich souveräne Staat, die rationelle merkantilistische und darum naturgemäße Wirtschaft, vor allem die freie kritische Wissenschaft und eine völlig neue Gestaltung des Lebensgefühls in der Kunst, all das bedeutet nicht bloß eine Akzentuierung, sondern überhaupt neue Werte, eine Betonung der weltlichen Interessen um ihrer selbst willen und eine Vergöttlichung und Verklärung der Welt in Kunst und Wissenschaft, die das Gegenteil der alten ,innerweltlichen Askese‘ sind.“

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Deutungen von Renaissance und Reformation. Ich muss mich in diesem Zusammenhang wieder auf wenige Hinweise, die das Diskursfeld grob umreißen, beschränken. Martin Heidegger bettet seine machttheoretische Kritik der Moderne in eine Destruktion der Geschichte der Metaphysik ein. In der mit Platon anhebenden Frage nach einem letzten Grund des Seienden ist nach Heidegger bereits eine technokratische Vernunft wirksam, die in der modernen, mathematisierten Wissenschaft zur vollen Entfaltung gelangt. Heidegger sieht wie Hegel in Descartes den eigentlichen Durchbruch zur neuzeitlichen Vernunft. Das cartesianische cogito markiert jedoch nicht den Anfang einer emanzipatorischen Vernunftgeschichte, sondern ist, wie Heidegger mit Nietzsche betont, von einem volo, genauer vom Willen zur Macht, getragen. Das neuzeitliche Subjekt stellt das Seiende im Ganzen vor sich, um sich seiner zu bemächtigen. Die Genese neuzeitlicher Vernunft wird daher von Heidegger als eine Geschichte planetarischer Machtentfaltung dechiffriert, die in den Kampf um die Erdherrschaft und die Zerstörung der Natur einmündet.54 Im weiten Horizont der abendländischen Seinsgeschichte treten bei Heidegger sowohl Renaissance als auch Reformation deutlich in den Hintergrund. Denn die Verwindung der Metaphysik erfolgt durch einen Rückgang auf das Seinsdenken der frühen Griechen, in der die Wahrheit noch nicht als Richtigkeit, sondern als Unverborgenheit (a-letheia) verstanden wird.55 Der RenaissanceHumanismus, in dem die römische humanitas wieder zur Geltung kommt, ist hingegen bei Heidegger gleichsam ein Scharnier für die problematischen Humanismen der Moderne von Marx bis Sartre. Denn: „Jeder Humanismus gründet in einer Metaphysik“, indem „das allgemeine ,Wesen‘ des Menschen als selbstverständlich“, nämlich als animal rationale, je schon vorausgesetzt wird.56 So wie der Humanismus die „Frage nach dem Bezug des Seins zum Menschenwesen […] weder kennt noch versteht“, so blockt nach Heidegger auch die christliche Schöpfungstheologie die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein durch die Antwort des ens creatum vorweg kategorisch ab. Daher ist nach Heidegger die Seinsverlassenheit „vielleicht am meisten“ durch das „Christentum und seine verweltlichten Nachfahren“ „verhüllt und verneint“ worden.57 Inmitten des Antihumanismus und der radikalen Kritik am Christentum finden sich allerdings bei Heidegger auch positive Bezüge zur Reformation und indirekt wohl auch zur Renaissance. Vor allem in den frühen religionsphilosophischen Vorlesungen, die den Weg zur Existenzialanalyse von Sein und Zeit 54 55 56 57

Vgl. dazu Heidegger 1998, II, S. 154–161. Heidegger 1994, S. 357ff. Vgl. dazu Heidegger 1996, S. 319. Heidegger 1994, S. 115.

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(1927) vorbereiten, wird Heidegger Luther zum Geleit.58 Denn Luther hat in seinem Kampf gegen die Überlagerungen des christlichen Glaubens durch die griechische Philosophie nach Heidegger „ein neues Verständnis des Urchristentums eröffnet.“59 Im Unterschied zu Herder, Dilthey oder Troeltsch sieht Heidegger den wachsenden Einfluss des Humanismus auf die protestantische Theologie nicht als eine positive Entwicklung, sondern als einen problematischen Rückfall in die überlieferte Metaphysik. Erst recht markiert, wie Heidegger im offenen Widerspruch zu Hegel moniert, der Weg von Luther zu Descartes geradezu einen fatalen Wendepunkt in der geschichtlichen Entfaltung der Machtlogik der Metaphysik. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird verständlich, dass für Heidegger Luther zu einer Inspirationsquelle für die De-struktion der abendländischen Metaphysik geworden ist.60 So wie Luther durch die Kritik an der metaphysischen Gefangenschaft des christlichen Glaubens eine neue Ära des Christentums eröffnete, so versucht auch Heidegger durch eine Verwindung der Metaphysik einen anderen Anfang der Seinsgeschichte vorzubereiten. Während Heidegger seine Beziehungen zu Luther zuweilen offen anspricht, bleiben die Einflüsse des Renaissancehumanismus auf sein Denken eher verdeckt. Eine sachliche Konvergenz zum humanistischen Denken dürfte, wie Ernesto Grassi aufgewiesen hat, in der weltbildenden Macht der Sprache bestehen, die nach Heidegger vor allem in der Dichtung wirksam ist.61 Heideggers Weg von Luther zu Hölderlin62 scheint somit untergründig durch den Einfluss des Sprachdenkens der Renaissance mitermöglicht zu sein. Wie Heidegger so entwerfen auch Horkheimer und Adorno in der Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947) ein düsteres Bild des europäischen Zivilisationsprozesses.63 Die Machtbesessenheit neuzeitlicher Vernunft sehen Horkheimer und Adorno nicht erst bei Descartes, sondern bereits bei Bacon angelegt. „Trotz seiner Fremdheit zur Mathematik hat Bacon die Gesinnung der Wissenschaft, die auf ihn folgte, gut getroffen […] Das Wissen, das Macht ist, kennt keine Schranken, weder in der Versklavung der Natur noch in der Willfährigkeit gegen

58 Vgl. dazu Lehmann 2007, S. 149–166; Fischer 2013, S. 411ff. 59 Heidegger 1995, S. 281f. 60 Vgl. dazu Lehmann 2007, S. 159; vgl. dazu auch Derrida 2007, S. 79. Auch Heideggers Kritik an der christlichen Philosophie als einem „hölzernen Eisen“ steht wohl unter dem Einfluss Luthers. 61 Grassi 1983. 62 Pöggeler 2007, S. 167–187. 63 Horkheimer und Adorno „verwinden“ zugleich das marxistische Bild von Luther, der die bürgerliche Revolution religiös begleitet, jedoch die revolutionären Bauern verraten habe. Daher steht in der marxistischen Sicht der Reformation nicht Luther, sondern Thomas Müntzer im Vordergrund, eine Deutung, die von Ernst Bloch fortgeführt worden ist. Vgl. dazu als Überblick Brady 2014.

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die Herren der Welt.“64. Anders als Heidegger erkennen Horkheimer und Adorno in der lutherischen Theologie keine Unterbrechung der Machtlogik der Moderne. Im Gegenteil, mit dem Bild von der „Hure der Vernunft“ ebnet Luther den Weg zur Dominanz der instrumentellen Vernunft, die sich bereitwillig in den Dienst verschiedener Mächte stellt. „Macht und Erkenntnis sind synonym. Das unfruchtbare Glück aus Erkenntnis ist lasziv für Bacon wie für Luther.“65 Über Heidegger hinausgehend führen Horkheimer und Adorno die instrumentelle Vernunft bis ins mythische Zeitalter, konkret zu Homers Odyssee, zurück. In diesem weiten Horizont verwischen sich vor allem in der politischen Theorie die Konturen von Renaissance und Reformation.So wie Machiavelli die „Herbeiführung und Aufrechterhaltung eines starken, zentralisierten Staats als Bedingung bürgerlichen Wohlergehens“ zum höchsten Gut erhebt, so führt nach Horkheimer Luthers Trennung der christlichen Religion von der Philosophie zu einer Vergottung des Staates.66 Der machttheoretische Diskurs über die Moderne wird in den 1970er Jahren vor allem von Michel Foucault fortgeführt. In historisch weit ausholenden Studien über verschiedene Machtpositive der Moderne greift Foucault auf seine frühe Rekonstruktion über die unterschiedlichen Epistemen neuzeitlicher Vernunft zurück. Der Rationalismus des 17. Jahrhunderts ist nach Foucault nicht bloß eine Fortsetzung aufklärerischer Aufbrüche in der Philosophie der Renaissance, sondern markiert einen Bruch, in dem die Episteme der Ähnlichkeit durch die Episteme der Repräsentation ersetzt wird. Trotz der Destruktion kontinuierlicher Geschichtslinien kehren nach Foucault bestimmte Momente der Renaissance, insbesondere die Erfahrung der Materialität der Sprache, in der modernen Literatur des 19. Jahrhundert in verwandelter Form wieder.67 Im Zentrum der machttheoretischen Analysen Foucaults stehen die Disziplinargesellschaften, die Foucault auf die christliche Pastoralmacht zurückführt. Das Machtsyndrom der cura pastoralis, deren Wurzeln in der frühchristlichen Mönchsbewegung im 3. und 4. Jahrhundert liegen, beschränkt sich nach Foucault nicht auf eine äußere Lenkung des Menschen, sondern dringt in die Seelen der Individuen, denen die Kompetenz der Selbstentzifferung abgesprochen wird, ein. Was im frühen Christentum auf kleine Mönchsgemeinschaften beschränkt blieb, wird im Hochmittelalter zu einer umfassenden Strategie der Disziplinierung der Gesamtgesellschaft. Die jährliche Beichte, zu der 1215 im IV. Laterankonzil alle Christen verpflichtet werden, „schafft“ nach Foucault einen bestimmten Typ des Individuums.68 In ähnlicher Weise werden im 17. und 64 65 66 67 68

Horkheimer / Adorno 1987, S. 26. A.a.O., S. 27. Vgl. dazu Horkheimer 1987, VII, S. 190. Foucault 1971, S. 746f. Foucault 1983, S. 76; ders. 2006, S. 279ff.

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18. Jahrhundert die säkularen Disziplinarinstitutionen, insbesondere Benthams Panoptikum, zu einer Produktionsstätte des modernen Subjekts.69 Durch den Fokus auf die Pastoralmacht rücken bei Foucault mittelalterliche Reformbewegungen, Reformation und Gegenreformation zu einem einheitlichen und zugleich extrem ambivalenten Geschichtsprozess zusammen. Die Aufbrüche zu einer christlichen Reform verstärken einerseits die Kontrollmechanismen über die Individuen, ein Prozess, der bereits in der prosaischen Welt der Renaissance einsetzt. Denn Giovanni Botero entwickelt bereits im 16. Jahrhundert die Theorie der Staatsräson, auf der in der Folge die Manuale der Gouvernementalität aufbauen.70 Die Machtdispositive des Pastorats lösen andererseits auch vielfältige Gegenbewegungen aus. Die Kämpfe gegen die Allmacht des geistlichen Hirten nehmen nach Foucault mindestens fünf Formen an: asketische Bewegungen; die Zurückweisung des obersten Hirten als Antichrist; die Mystik; die Rückkehr zur Schrift und eschatologische Bewegungen.71 In jüngerer Zeit hat vor allem Charles Taylor Foucaults Analyse der Disziplinarinstitutionen aufgegriffen und in seine eigene Theorie der Moderne integriert. Taylor fasst unter dem Begriff der „REFORM“ (bewusst in Großbuchstaben gesetzt) die mittelalterlichen und humanistischen Reformbewegungen, die Reformation und Gegenreformation als eine epochale Bewegung zusammen. Die christlich-humanistische REFORM, der nach Taylor für die Genese der Moderne eine Schlüsselfunktion zukommt, vollzieht einerseits eine Entsakralisierung sowohl der magischen Welt des Mittelalters als auch der antiken Kosmosidee, und fördert andererseits eine Kultur der Innerlichkeit, die von Augustinus inspiriert ist. Mit Foucault sieht Taylor in den unterschiedlichen Reformbewegungen eine „Ordnungswut“ am Werk, die sich sowohl in der Kontrolle des religiösen Lebens, vor allem durch die Beichte, als auch im humanistischen Ideal der Zivilität, prototypisch repräsentiert durch Justus Lipsius, manifestiert.72 Eine Besonderheit des lateinischen Christentums liegt jedoch in dem zunehmenden Interesse an der REFORM, in dem Drang, die ganze Gesellschaft auf höhere Standards zu trimmen. Ich werde nicht so tun, als könne ich diese ,Ordnungswut‘ erklären, doch nach meinem Eindruck ist die ,Wut‘ ein Faktum das sich im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit nachweisen läßt und das überdies in dem zum Teil weltlichen Ideal der ,Zivilisation‘ bis in die Moderne hinein nachwirkt.73 69 Foucault 1975, S. 78f.: „Die schöne Totalität des Individuums wird von unserer Gesellschaft nicht verstümmelt, unterdrückt, entstellt; vielmehr wird das Individuum darin dank einer Taktik der Kräfte und der Körper sorgfältig fabriziert.“ 70 Foucault 2006, S. 345f. 71 A.a.O., S. 296ff. 72 Taylor 2009, S. 203–208. 73 A.a.O., S. 115.

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Durch den Kampf gegen geistliche Hierarchien und die Aufwertung des Alltagslebens bereiten nach Taylor christliche Reformbewegungen paradoxerweise den Aufstieg des säkularen Humanismus der Moderne vor, in dem die christliche Agape, d. h. die durch göttliche Gnade ermöglichte Hingabe an andere, durch eine Ethik der Selbstvervollkommnung und des gegenseitigen Vorteils verdrängt wird. In dieser Perspektive erscheint die Moderne, wie Taylor mit einem Blick auf Ivan Illich betont, als Säkularisierung eines verfälschten Christentums, die sowohl von christlichen als auch humanistischen Reformbewegungen vorbereitet und befördert worden ist.74 Im Rückblick auf die betörende Vielfalt christlicher und/oder humanistischer Reformbewegungen seit dem 13. Jahrhundert muss nach Taylor die Fokussierung auf Descartes als „dem“ Begründer der Neuzeit aufgegeben werden. Die neuzeitliche Subjektphilosophie hat nach Taylor mit Montaigne gleichsam einen zweiten Urvater. Während das cartesianische Subjekt über Kant, Husserl bis hin zu Sartre fortlebt, wirkt nach Taylor Montaignes Konzeption der experimentellen Selbsterkundung im modernen Roman, der Romantik und der Existenzphilosophie fort.75 Mit der Aufwertung von Montaigne als gleichrangigem Begründer neuzeitlicher Subjektivität neben Descartes bekräftigt Taylor zugleich die Bedeutung der Renaissance für die Moderne.

4.

Renaissance und Reformation im kulturalistischen Diskurs über die Moderne

Die Universalität der Moderne blieb sowohl in aufklärerischen als auch machttheoretischen Diskursen über die Moderne bis in die jüngere Vergangenheit hinein weithin unhinterfragt. Frühe Diagnosen über die Krise Europas, vor allem im Historismus oder bei Kierkegaard und Nietzsche standen bis zur Jahrhundertwende im Schatten eines evolutionistischen Fortschrittsdenkens. Erst die Wirren des Ersten Weltkriegs und der Verlust der globalen Hegemonie Europas erschütterten nachhaltig das universalistische Selbstverständnis der Moderne. Zwar halten wichtige Stränge der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts von Husserl bis zum frühen Habermas weiterhin an der Universalität der Moderne fest. Dennoch erheben sich bereits unmittelbar nach dem Großen Krieg auch Stimmen, die zu einer Selbstbescheidung Europas aufrufen. „Nie mehr wieder wird“ Europa, wie Max Scheler bereits 1918 hellsichtig diagnostiziert, eine „absolute Pionierstellung“ in der Weltzivilisation „wiedergewinnen“76. Im 74 Vgl. dazu a.a.O., S. 126ff. 75 Vgl. dazu Taylor 1996, S. 262ff. (Descartes); S. 319ff. (Montaigne); Taylor 2009, S. 900. 76 Scheler 1960, S. 185.

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„Zeitalter des Ausgleichs“77 muss sich nach Scheler Europa sowohl in machtpolitischer als auch philosophischer Hinsicht in eine polyzentrische Weltgesellschaft einfügen. Auch Heidegger verweist vorsichtig auf „andere Anfänge“ des Denkens, die trotz der globalen Ausbreitung der technisch-industriellen Moderne alternative Wege der Verwindung der europäischen Metaphysik eröffnen könnten. Noch entschiedener fordert Karl Jaspers nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg das Ende des „Hochmuts Europas“. Denn auf „die Jahrtausende gesehen wird uns“, wie Jaspers in der Theorie der Achsenzeit ausführlich darlegt, „das hohe Menschsein von China bis zum Abendlande gleichwertig.“78 In den Peripherien des europäischen Imperialismus (China, Japan, Lateinamerika, Russland), aber auch innerhalb des kolonialen Systems (Teile der islamischen Welt, Indien) stehen allerdings die universalistischen Ansprüche der „europäischen“ Moderne bereits seit der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts auf dem Prüfstand. In den außereuropäischen Modernediskursen wird die „europäische“ Moderne zunächst als eine fremde, zumeist imperiale Kultur wahrgenommen. Nichtsdestotrotz verbinden sowohl neohinduistische und islamische Philosophien als auch die Kyoto-Schule in Japan und die filosof&a americana im südlichen Amerika emanzipatorische Stränge der europäischen Moderne in kreativer Weise mit ihren eigenen kulturellen Traditionen. In den außereuropäischen „Verwindungen der Moderne“ werden „Renaissance“ und „Reformation“ plötzlich zum Objekt transkultureller geschichtsphilosophischer Reflexionen. Aus der Fülle an divergierenden Deutungen kann in diesem Rahmen wieder nur auf einige Beispiele kurz verwiesen werden. Im späten 19. Jahrhundert leitete Dschamal ad-Din al-Afghani eine moderne Re-interpretation des Islam ein, die einerseits auf eine Aussöhnung mit der modernen Wissenschaft abzielte, andererseits einen panislamischen Widerstand gegen den europäischen Imperialismus in Gang brachte. Al-Afghani, der als Begründer der Nahda-Bewegung, d. h. der „Renaissance“ des Islam, gilt, stützte sich auf FranÅois Guizot, der in der Reformation das entscheidende Ereignis für den Fortschritt der europäischen Zivilisation erblickte.79 Mit Guizot sieht al-Afghani Luther zunächst als Vorkämpfer für eine aufgeklärte Religion, die den blinden Gehorsam gegenüber religiösen Autoritäten durch eine theologische Reflexion überwindet.80 So wie Luther die Kirchen seiner Zeit durch eine Rückbesinnung auf das ursprüngliche Christentum kritisierte, so hält alAfghani der islamischen Welt des 19. Jahrhunderts ein Idealbild des ursprüng-

77 78 79 80

Scheler 1976. Jaspers 1947, S. 8. Vgl. dazu Guizot 1885. al-Afghani 1968, S. 171f.

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lichen Islam entgegen.81 Eine zentrale Aufgabe wahrer Religion besteht nach alAfghani in der Förderung der Vollkommenheit aller Menschen, eine Aufgabe, die nur durch einen offenen Wettstreit um die höchste Tugend erfüllt werden kann. An dieser Stelle zeigt sich für al-Afghani die Überlegenheit des Islam. Denn die Brahmanen unterdrückten den ethisch-spirituellen Wettstreit durch das Kastensystem, die Juden durch den Anspruch der exklusiven Erwählung und die Christen durch die Übermacht der Priester gegenüber den anderen Gläubigen. Al-Afghani sieht daher in Luthers Kampf für ein allgemeines Priestertum eine sachliche Konvergenz mit dem Islam. „Luther, the leader of the protestants, who rejected this rule, in opposition to the Gospels, was following the example of the Muslims.“82 Al-Afghanis Reform des Islam zielt allerdings nicht nur auf eine religiöse Erneuerung, sondern auch auf eine kulturelle und machtpolitische Selbstbehauptung aller Muslime von Indien bis zum Maghreb gegenüber dem westlichen Imperialismus. In Lateinamerika, das während der Jahrhunderte langen Kolonialherrschaft vom Katholizismus geprägt worden ist, entwickelt sich im 19. Jahrhundert noch vor Max Weber eine Debatte über eine „konfessionelle“ Umorientierung hin zum Protestantismus. Nach dem Sieg der Republikaner und der Hinrichtung von Maximilian von Österreich 1867 fordert Melchior Ocampo eine Protestantisierung Mexikos, um die postkolonialen Gesellschaften im südlichen Amerika auf den Weg des Fortschritts zu bringen. In diesem Sinn soll Justo Sierra zufolge Benito Juarez, der erste indigene Präsident in Mexiko, gefordert haben, „dass der Protestantismus sich mexikanisiert und die Indios erobert; diese brauchen eine Religion, die sie verpflichtet zu lesen und nicht ihre Ersparnisse in Altarkerzen für Heilige zu investieren.“83 Die Modernisierung nach dem Vorbild der USA, die in der positivistischen Diktatur von Porfirio D&az mit harter Hand vorangetrieben wird, gerät um 1900 zunehmend in die Kritik. In der intellektuellen Bewegung „Ateneo“, die von der Lebensphilosophie inspiriert ist, sind die USA nicht mehr unhinterfragt die zivilisatorische Vorhut der Moderne, sondern nur mehr der mächtige Vorposten der „angelsächsischen“ Kultur. In diesem Kontext nimmt Jos8 Vasconcelos wie viele andere Intellektuelle seiner Zeit eine Rehabilitierung der romanischen Kultur unter Einschluss des Katholizismus vor. „Das, was wir ,[liberale] Reform‘ nennen ist nichts anderes als eine Episode des europäischen Religionskrieges zwischen Protestanten und Katholiken, ein exotischer Krieg in unserer Mitte,

81 Vgl. dazu Keddie 1968, S. 82: „The favorable reference to the founders of Protestantism is one of several such references by Afghani, who seems to have hoped to play the role of a Muslim Luther.“ 82 al-Afghani 1968, S. 171. 83 Zitiert nach Zea 1987, S. 63 (Übersetzung H. Sch.).

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der nur möglich war, weil wir uns zuvor in ein Protektorat [der USA] verwandelt hatten.“84 Die universale Strahlkraft der europäischen Moderne verblasst nicht nur an den transozeanischen Peripherien der europäischen Kolonialmächte. Um 1900 bricht auch innerhalb Europas eine Debatte über die kulturellen Grenzen der Moderne auf. Vor allem in Spanien entbrennt Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts ein heftiger Streit über unterschiedliche Modernisierungsstrategien. Während die Regenerationisten für eine Europäisierung Spaniens, d. h. für die Übernahme der industriellen Moderne, eintreten, ruft Miguel de Unamuno in dem berühmten Essay Sobre la europeizacijn (1906)85 zu einer Rückbesinnung auf die spanische Volkskultur und zu einer Aufwertung des gegenreformatorischen Katholizismus gegenüber Renaissance und Protestantismus auf. Der abstrakte Rationalismus und Technokratismus der Moderne versetzt – so die Diagnose von Unamuno – den Menschen in eine sinnentleerte Welt. Aus diesem Grund muss nach Unamuno die Kultur der Moderne, die bisher einseitig von Deutschland und Frankreich, genauer durch die Reformation und die Renaissance, bestimmt worden ist, um die Weisheit der spanischen Volkskultur, die noch ein Wissen um den Tod, und – mit Teresa von Avila und Johannes vom Kreuz – auch eine Mystik enthält, erweitert werden.86 Eine ähnliche Debatte bricht Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts auch in Russland auf, in der die Slawophilen (Chomjakow, Kirijewski, Aksakow, Samarin) gegenüber den Modernisierungsstrategien der sogenannten „Westler“ (Belinski, Herzen) die russische Volkskultur und das orthodoxe Christentum beschwören. In ihrer Kritik am industriellen Europa zeichnen die Slawophilen ein düsteres Bild der Geschichte des lateinischen Christentums, das bereits mit der Konstantinischen Wende auf die Bahn eines fatalen Säkularisierungsprozesses abgedriftet sei. Renaissance und Reformation hätten die konstantinische Verweltlichung des Christentums noch einmal verschärft und auf diese Weise den Boden für die Französische Revolution und den Marxismus bereitet. Vor dem dunklen Hintergrund des dekadenten, gottlosen Europa erstrahlt in der Sicht der Slawophilen die mystische Dimension der russischen Orthodoxie und der russischen Volksfrömmigkeit in neuem Glanz. Die Rehabilitierung der russischen Orthodoxie gegenüber der Kritik der Westler war allerdings in der Folge in der russischen Philosophie keineswegs unumstritten. Bereits Dostojewski suchte einen Weg zwischen den verhärteten Frontlinien. Am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts entwickelt Wladimir Solowjew eine 84 Vasconcelos 1998, S. 287 (Übersetzung H. Sch.). 85 Vgl. Unamuno 1950. 86 Vgl. dazu Unamuno 1925 (bes. Kap. 11 und das Schlusskapitel über Don Quijote).

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radikale Kritik der slawophilen Ideologie, die weder Russland noch dem westlichen Europa gerecht werde. Darüber hinaus entwirft Solowjew die Vision einer ökumenischen Einheit der Christen, in der sich die drei Konfessionen ergänzen und korrigieren: Die Stärke des Katholizismus liegt nach Solowjew im Streben nach einer realgeschichtlichen Verwirklichung des Reiches Gottes; der Protestantismus verteidige vor allem die Freiheit des Glaubens; und die russische Orthodoxie hat nach Solowjew die meditativ-mystische Dimension des Christentums bewahrt.87 Im Ersten Weltkrieg geraten kulturalistische Modernediskurse – darauf sei hier abschließend noch verwiesen – in das Fahrwasser nationalistischer Propaganda. In den zahllosen Kriegsschriften erscheinen Eckhart und Luther plötzlich als Heroen der „deutschen Innerlichkeit“, Nikolaus von Kues als Vordenker eines „deutschen“ Unendlichkeitsdenkens.88

5.

Renaissance und Reformation als Anbruch einer „Zweiten Achsenzeit“

Die Hauptparadigmen des Diskurses über die Moderne heben jeweils eine Dimension neuzeitlichen Denkens in pointierter Form heraus.89 Aufklärerische Modernetheorien verweisen zu Recht auf die spektakulären Durchbrüche der neuzeitlichen Vernunft (moderne Wissenschaft, demokratischer Rechtsstaat, Völkerrecht). Doch unter dem Banner von Freiheit und Vernunft sind in der Moderne – dies kann nach den humanitären Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts nicht mehr geleugnet werden – auch totalitäre Machtsyndrome entstanden. Umgekehrt droht die machttheoretische Modernekritik die emanzipatorischen Errungenschaften der Neuzeit zu verdrängen. Vor allem Heidegger ordnet moderne Wissenschaft, Technik, Marktwirtschaft, Kulturpolitik und die Demokratie ohne substantielle Differenzierungen pauschal den „Machenschaften“ bzw. dem „Ge-stell“ neuzeitlicher Rationalität zu. Darüber hinaus bleibt im Furor einer radikalen Selbstkritik des okzidentalen Logos offen, auf welche Vernunft sich die Kritik an den Machtsyndromen der neuzeitlichen Ratio noch stützen kann.90 Kulturalistische Modernetheorien wiederum decken zwar die partikularistischen Elemente der Kultur der Moderne auf, unterschätzen jedoch 87 Sylkarski 1972, S. 217ff. 88 So z. B. Eucken 1914. Vgl. dazu Flasch 2000, S. 27ff. Der nationalistische Rückblick auf Luther knüpft vor allem an Fichte und Treitschke an. 89 Vgl. dazu Schelkshorn 2009, S. 18–24. 90 Die Verwobenheit von rationalen und kulturellen Komponenten findet sich bereits in den Kernbereichen der Moderne, insbesondere in der modernen Wissenschaft und der Subjektphilosophie. Vgl. dazu Schelkshorn 2009, S. 345–407; S. 411–470.

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die universalistischen Errungenschaften neuzeitlicher Aufklärungsprozesse, die sich längst globalisiert haben. Aus diesem Grund arbeiten seit dem 19. Jahrhundert außereuropäische Philosophien intensiv an einer Unterscheidung zwischen den rationalen und kulturellen Komponenten der Moderne. Die Paradigmen des Diskurses über die Moderne präfigurieren, wie gezeigt worden ist, jeweils bestimmte Bilder über die Renaissance und die Reformation(en). Obwohl kulturhistorische Forschungen inzwischen manche klischeehaften Bilder über „die“ Renaissance bzw. „die“ Reformation zurechtgerückt haben, bleiben Deutungen historischer Epochen letztlich von umfassenden Theorien der Moderne abhängig.91 Vor diesem Hintergrund möchte ich abschließend mit dem Konzept einer „zweiten Achsenzeit“, das in kritischer Weise an Jaspers anknüpft,92 einen erweiterten geschichtsphilosophischen Rahmen skizzieren, in dem die geistigen Aufbrüche, die rückblickend mit dem Epochenbegriffen „Renaissance“ und „Reformation“ zusammengefasst werden, in ihrer heterogenen Vielfalt situiert werden können. In der Zeit zwischen 800 und 200 v. Chr. entsteht – so Jaspers’ bekannte These – nicht nur im Abendland, sondern auch in China und Indien eine radikale Kritik an mythischen Weltbildern, die einen „Streit der Schulen“ entfesseln, in dem „alle philosophischen Möglichkeiten bis zur Skepsis und Materialismus, bis zur Sophistik und zum Nihilismus“93 ausgelotet werden. Die Theorie der Achsenzeit umfasst bei Jaspers sowohl religiöse als auch philosophische Aufbrüche,94 die sich auf unterschiedlichen Reflexionsstufen bewegen. So werden z. B. in der griechischen Philosophie spätestens seit Sokrates sämtliche Wahrheitsansprüche, auch jene, die sich auf eine göttliche Inspiration oder Sendung berufen, zu argumentativer Rechenschaft aufgefordert.95 Aus diesem Grund sah sich das Christentum bereits in früher Zeit zu einer philosophischen Reinterpretation ihrer Tradition gezwungen. In der Achsenzeit entstehen nach Jaspers „die Grundkategorien“, „in denen wir bis heute denken“.96 Da die frühen geistigen Aufbrüche immer wieder neu an91 So kann z. B. die Kontroverse, ob Cusanus bereits dem neuzeitlichen oder noch dem mittelalterlichen Denken zuzuordnen ist, letztlich nicht durch eine objektivierende historische Forschung, sondern nur im Licht einer normativen Modernetheorie entschieden werden. 92 Jaspers’ Theorie der Achsenzeit ist inzwischen zum Gegenstand einer weitverzweigten kultur- und religionshistorischen Debatte geworden, auf die hier nicht näher eingegangen werden kann. Zur Kritik von Jan Assmann an der Theorie der Achsenzeit vgl. Schelkshorn 2015. 93 Jaspers 1983, S. 20. 94 Im Konkreten nennt Jaspers unter anderem Konfuzius, Mo-Ti, Buddha, Zarathustra, die alttestamentlichen Propheten, Homer, die Tragiker, Parmenides, Heraklit, die Sophisten, Sokrates, Platon und Aristoteles; vgl. dazu Jaspers 1983, S. 20. 95 Vgl. dazu Platon: Apologie, 21e–22c. 96 Jaspers 1983, S. 20.

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geeignet, modifiziert und transformiert werden, sind nach Jaspers „Renaissancen“ und „Reformen“ ein Merkmal achsenzeitlicher Kulturen. Nach Jaspers entstehen nach der Achsenzeit neue Großreiche, die sich nun nicht mehr auf mythische Traditionen, sondern jeweils auf eine achsenzeitliche Bewegung stützen.97 In Indien wird unter Ashoka der Buddhismus, in der HanDynastie der Konfuzianismus zur Staatsdoktrin; in Europa rückt hingegen unter Konstantin das Christentum zur Staatsreligion auf. Obwohl die metaphysischen bzw. kosmologischen Legitimationsgrundlagen eine Resakralisierung politischer Herrschaft vollziehen, können die neuen Imperien die achsenzeitliche Dynamik kritischer Selbstreflexion nicht mehr vollständig eindämmen. Aus diesem Grund treten den neuen Weltherrschern jeweils institutionalisierte Instanzen einer moralischen Kritik (konfuzianische Gelehrte, christliche Theologen, buddhistische Mönche) gegenüber. Die Moderne erhebt sich – dies ist meine zentrale These – aus dem Auflösungsprozess der geistigen und politischen Fundamente der achsenzeitlichen Großreiche, ein Prozess, der zunächst im lateinischen Christentum einsetzt. Die geistigen Aufbrüche, die in Europa rückblickend mit den Epochenbegriffen „Renaissance“ und „Reformation“ zusammengefasst werden, bilden die Übergangsphase zwischen der Epoche achsenzeitlicher Großreiche und der Moderne. Der Aufstieg Europas seit dem 15. Jahrhundert erfolgt paradoxerweise nicht aus einer Position der Stärke. Im Gegenteil: Im Unterschied zu Byzanz oder China war in der lateinischen Christenheit der machtpolitische Wirkungsraum des Kaisers durch rivalisierende Könige, ein politisch mächtiges Papsttum und seit dem 12. Jh. auch durch die aufstrebenden Handelsstädte deutlich eingeschränkt. Neben den fragilen Herrschaftsstrukturen ist das lateinische Christentum seit dem Frühmittelalter durch eine heterogene geistige Landschaft geprägt. Im nördlichen Europa stoßen die griechische Philosophie und das Christentum zum Teil noch auf vorachsenzeitliche Gesellschaften. Da sich darüber hinaus antike Philosophie und christliche Religion von ihren Ursprüngen her auf unterschiedlichen Reflexionsniveaus bewegen, überlagern sich seit dem 6. Jahrhundert im lateinischen Christentum zwei spannungsreiche Prozesse, einerseits die kulturelle Transformation vorachsenzeitlicher Gesellschaften, die vor allem durch die christliche Missionierung vorangetrieben wird, andererseits die Reinterpretation christlicher Religion im Medium der Philosophie, die an den neu gegründeten Universitäten im Streit der Theologien ausgetragen wird. In diesem Kontext kommt es seit dem Hochmittelalter sowohl in den christlichen Reformbewegungen als auch in den Zentren des Studiums der antiken Quellen zu einer explosionsartigen Pluralisierung von Reflexionsformen. 97 A.a.O., S. 26.

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So wie die Aristotelesrezeption durch die Scholastik den Streit der Theologien verschärfte, so führt die humanistische Hinwendung zur antiken Kultur, aber auch der Einfluss der islamischen Kultur von al-Andalus, in der spätmittelalterlichen Christenheit zu zahllosen Innovationen, die von der Poetik über die Philosophie bis hin zur Jurisprudenz und Medizin reichen. Eine ähnliche Dynamik zeigt sich auch in den christlichen Reformbewegungen seit dem 13. Jahrhundert. Der Rückgang auf originär religiöse Quellen schafft keine Eindeutigkeit, sondern führt zur Bildung je neuer religiöser Gemeinschaften, die wiederum den Disput zwischen den Theologien verstärken. Nicht zuletzt erschüttern die Begegnungen mit bislang unbekannten Völkern und Sitten im Zuge der transozeanischen Expansion Europas die moralisch-politischen Fundamente der lateinischen Christenheit, insbesondere die christliche Naturrechtslehre und die Geschichtstheologie.98 Dies bedeutet: Die christlichen Reformbewegungen und die geistigen Aufbrüche des Renaissance-Humanismus entfachen seit dem 14. Jahrhundert einen neuen „Streit der Schulen“, der in der spanischen Kolonialdebatte bereits eine globale Dimension annimmt. Darüber hinaus entstehen aus den frühneuzeitlichen geistig-politischen Aufbrüchen zentrale Elemente der Kultur der Moderne, insbesondere die moderne Wissenschaft und Technik, der transkontinentale Handel, die Menschenrechtsethik und das Völkerrecht, die seit dem 16. Jahrhundert Schritt für Schritt alle Völker und Kulturen sowohl zu einer kulturellen als auch einer wirtschaftlichen und politischen Selbstbehauptung zwingen. Da inzwischen alle Völker vor der Aufgabe stehen, sich in der von Europa inaugurierten Weltgesellschaft zu situieren, und diese Aufgabe, wie außereuropäischen Philosophien spätestens im 19. Jahrhundert bewusst geworden ist, eine Auseinandersetzung mit den neuzeitlichen Philosophien Europas impliziert, kann die Moderne – mit und gegen Jaspers – als eine „Zweite Achsenzeit“ bezeichnet werden.99 Wie sehr der entfesselte „Streit der Schulen“ die frühneuzeitliche Kultur Europas prägt, kann prototypisch an zwei zentralen Gestalten des RenaissanceHumanismus illustriert werden: Noch vor der Entdeckung Amerikas sucht Pico della Mirandola eine pax philosophica, in der alle Philosophenschulen, einschließlich der arabischen Philosophie und des Hermetismus miteinander 98 Mit der realgeschichtlichen und geistigen Öffnung auf die Globalität löst sich die Renaissance endgültig von der mittelalterlichen Welt. Aus diesem Grund halte ich gegen Le Goff am Epochenbegriff der „Renaissance“ fest, ohne die vielfältigen mittelalterlichen Ursprünge der Moderne zu leugnen. Zur Auflösung der „Renaissance“ in einem „langen Mittelalter“ vgl. Le Goff 2016, S. 115–156. 99 Jaspers selbst qualifiziert die Neuzeit primär als wissenschaftlich-technische Zivilisation, deren spirituelle Verarmung in der Zukunft durch eine zweite Achsenzeit überwunden werden muss. Vgl. dazu Jaspers 1983, S. 127ff.

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versöhnt werden.100 Ein knappes Jahrhundert spiegelt sich die Pluralisierung von Denk- und Lebensformen in den experimentellen Selbsterkundungen von Michel de Montaigne. Die humanistische Rückwendung zur Antike konfrontiert den Menschen, wie Montaigne mit Varro betont, mit zumindest zweihundertachtzig Lehren über das höchste Gut.101 Darüber hinaus sieht sich Montaigne mit konfessionellen Spaltungen innerhalb des Christentums und nicht zuletzt durch die Reiseberichte über die Sitten der neu entdeckten Völker herausgefordert. Im Unterschied zu Pico zielen Montaignes Essais nicht mehr auf eine Versöhnung der Vielfalt, sondern inszenieren im Geist der Skepsis ein komplexes Spiel der Perspektiven. Mit dem Konzept einer „Zweiten Achsenzeit“ fällt auch ein neues Licht auf die unterschiedlichen Bilder von „Renaissance“ und „Reformation“, wie sie in den drei Hauptparadigmen des Modernediskurses entworfen werden. Dies möchte ich abschließend anhand von vier Themenfeldern exemplarisch verdeutlichen.

a)

Christliche Reformbewegungen und die Falle der Disziplinierung

Christliche Reformbewegungen sind kein Spezifikum des Mittelalters, sondern bereits ein Phänomen der antiken Christenheit, in der die Konstantinische Wende vor allem monastische Reformbewegungen auslöste. Nach dem Zusammenbruch des Weströmischen Reiches sucht das Christentum darüber hinaus nach einer neuen sozialen Gestalt. Konkret kommt es zu Synthesen mit dem Feudalismus, zu brüchigen Beerbungen der römischen Reichsidee und zur Entstehung des Kirchenstaats. Diese Entwicklungen riefen bereits im Hochmittelalter vielfache Kritik hervor, die in Luthers Verdikt über die Papstkirche einen vorläufigen Kulminationspunkt erreichen. Der von Foucault und Taylor diagnostizierte Drang zur Disziplinierung des/ der Einzelnen ist allerdings kein selbstverständliches Element innerchristlicher Reformbemühungen, sondern stellt eine besondere Entwicklung dar, die erst vor dem Hintergrund des Zusammenpralls zwischen Stammeskulturen und achsenzeitlichen Bewegungen im lateinischen Christentum des frühen Mittelalters verständlich wird. Da in vorachsenzeitlichen Gesellschaften das Bewusstsein von individueller Verantwortlichkeit noch nicht ausgebildet ist, erfolgt der Übertritt zum Christentum, wie bei Chlodwig anschaulich sichtbar wird, durch eine Kollektivtaufe.102 Aus diesem Grund sah sich die christliche Reform vor die paradoxe Aufgabe gestellt, bereits getaufte Christen allererst zu einem individuell verantworteten christlichen Leben hinzuführen. Die vom IV. Laterankonzil 100 Farmer 1998. 101 Montaigne 1998, S. 288. 102 Vgl. dazu Dhondt 1968, S. 189ff.; Angenendt 1984, S. 165–186.

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eingeführte Pflicht zur jährlichen Beichte zielt in gewisser Hinsicht tatsächlich, wie Foucault betonte, auf die „Fabrikation“ des Subjekts. Kurz: Als achsenzeitliche Religion, die sich bereits auf die Philosophie eingelassen hatte, standen christliche Bewegungen plötzlich vor der Herausforderung, eine Gesellschaft, in der noch vorachsenzeitliche Strukturen präsent waren, zum Objekt disziplinärer Maßnahmen zu machen, um magische Praktiken, den Glauben an Geister u. a. zurückzudrängen. Die „Ziele der Zivilität und der (sei’s protestantischen oder katholischen) religiösen Reformen“ lassen sich zwar – wie Taylor zu Recht betont – definitorisch „klar auseinanderhalten, doch in der Praxis gehen sie oft nahtlos ineinander über.“103 Dennoch ist das mittelalterliche Subjekt nicht einfach das Produkt eines Machtsyndroms missionarischer Praktiken der Disziplinierung. Trotz des problematischen soziokulturellen Kontextes entwickelt sich bereits im 12. Jahrhundert in den Klöstern und in den urbanen Zentren eine reiche und vielschichtige Kultur der Verinnerlichung und Individualisierung, ohne die Luthers Ringen um einen gerechten Gott, aber auch Picos Bild des schöpferischen Menschen, unverständlich bliebe.104

b)

Aufbruch in ein globales Zeitalter: Martin Luther, Antonio de Montesinos und Bartolomé de las Casas

Das Konzept der Zweiten Achsenzeit, das den Anbruch eines globalen Zeitalters beschreibt, ermöglicht eine Erweiterung des Blickfelds über die Grenzen Italiens (Quattrocento) und Deutschlands (Reformation) hinaus.105 Im Zuge der transozeanischen Expansion der iberischen Mächte überschreiten sowohl die Renaissancekultur als auch christliche Reformbewegungen die Grenzen Europas. Neben punktuellen Kontakten zu Indien und China wird im 16. Jahrhundert vor allem Amerika zu einem Ort kreativer Modifikationen der Kultur der Renaissance und christlicher Reformbewegungen. Die Reihe der Symbolfiguren für die christlichen Reform im 16. Jahrhundert ist daher über Luther, Erasmus und Ignatius von Loyola hinaus durch Antonio de Montesinos und Bartolom8 de las Casas zu ergänzen. So wie Luther mit dem Thesenanschlag in Wittenberg, so hat Antonio de Montesinos mit seiner Ad103 Taylor 2009, S. 182. 104 Morris 1972; Hamm 2010, S. 3ff.; Schelkshorn 2009, S. 163–204 (zu Pico). 105 Vgl. dazu Bethencourt 2007, S. 118: „The Renaissance cannot be reduced merely to philological literary, artistic, and scientific innovations that took place over the geographical axis Italy – France – Germany – Flanders – the Low Countries – England from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries. The traditional approach excludes not only much of the continent (Iberia, Scandinavia, central and Eastern Europe, and the Ottoman Empire), but also the decisive role of overseas expansion towards other continents.“

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ventspredigt, in der die koloniale Gewalt in Amerika mit scharfen Worten verurteilt wird,106 über Jahrzehnte hinweg sowohl theologisch-philosophische Kontroversen als auch politische Auseinandersetzungen ausgelöst. Während Luther zahlreiche reformatorische Bewegungen inspirierte, initiierte Bartolom8 de las Casas eine Jahrzehnte lange Kolonialdebatte, von der wiederum vielfältige Impulse für das moralische und politische Denken der Neuzeit ausgehen. Um nur zwei Beispiele zu nennen: Las Casas und die Schule von Salamanca entwickeln erste Ansätze einer Menschenrechtsethik und Völkerrechtslehre.107 In den Spuren von Las Casas legt Bernadino de Sahagffln durch seine methodisch angelegte Erforschung der Kultur der Azteken den Grundstein für die ethnologische Anthropologie der Neuzeit.108 Auch der Geist der Disziplinierung der Gesellschaft findet in Amerika vielfältige Praxisfelder. Wie in Europa so greifen in Amerika christliche Reform und das Renaissance-Ideal der Zivilität ineinander. Antonio de Nebrija setzte sich das Ziel, durch eine spanische Grammatik einerseits das Imperium im Inneren zu stabilisieren, andererseits die Barbaren der Neuen Welt zu zivilisieren. Die koloniale Sprachpolitik löst in Mexiko eine Debatte aus, in der die traditionelle Hierarchie der Sprachen (Hebräisch, Griechisch, Latein) in Frage gestellt und die indigenen Sprachen aufgewertet werden.109 In der Missionierung der indigenen Bevölkerung werden vor allem durch die Institution der Visitationen die europäischen Strategien spiritueller Überwachung perfektioniert. Die koloniale Gewalt provoziert allerdings auch Gegenbewegungen. Vasco de Quiroga, der von der „Utopia“ von Thomas Morus inspiriert ist, gründet im Norden Mexikos autonome Dorfgemeinschaften (hospitales de pueblo), in denen Spanier_innen und Indigene friedlich miteinander leben. Gleichwohl lebt in den später gegründeten Jesuitenreduktionen – wie schon bei Morus selbst – der Geist der Disziplinierung weiter.

c)

Der Streit über die philosophische Reinterpretation des Christentums: Erasmus und Luther

Einen Höhepunkt der geistigen Auseinandersetzungen des 16. Jahrhunderts bildet ohne Zweifel die Debatte zwischen Erasmus und Luther. In manchen Modernediskursen werden Erasmus und Luther zuweilen als Symbolfiguren stilisiert, in denen der säkulare Renaissancehumanismus und die christliche Reformation gleichsam in persona einander gegenübertreten. Diese Bild ist in 106 107 108 109

Zur Adventspredigt von Antonio de Montesinos (1511) vgl. Delgado1991, S. 72–74. Vgl. dazu Cavallar 2002. Vgl. dazu Pagden 1982; Miguel Lejn-Portilla 2002. Vgl. dazu Mignolo 1995.

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mehrfacher Hinsicht schief. Denn auch Erasmus verfolgt das Projekt einer christlichen Reform; umgekehrt ist Luther als Lehrer an einer Universität selbst von philosophischen Traditionen geprägt. Im Streit zwischen Luther und Erasmus bricht vielmehr das im Abendland seit der Achsenzeit virulente Problem der unterschiedlichen Reflexionsstufen zwischen den biblischen Quellen und der griechischen Philosophie in neuer Schärfe auf. Das Christentum hat sich zwar bereits im Zuge der Ausbreitung in die hellenistisch-römische Welt immer wieder im Medium der Philosophie reinterpretiert. Übersetzungen sind jedoch stets kreative Prozesse, in denen einerseits Neues entsteht, andererseits auch manche Gehalte verloren gehen. Daher haben philosophische Reinterpretationen des Christentums stets Gegenreaktionen ausgelöst. So kritisieren z. B. Duns Scotus und Bonaventura die intellektualistische, zu eng an Aristoteles angelehnte Theologie von Thomas von Aquin. Doch der Streit der christlichen Theologien beschränkt sich nicht auf den „Konflikt der Interpretationen“ (Ricœur). Vielmehr nutzten manche christlichen Theologien den Offenbarungsanspruch der Bibel und die Erbsündenlehre auch als Instrument für eine Übermächtigung der Philosophie durch die Theologie. In diesem Kontext entsteht eine merkwürdige Spannung: einerseits wird der Vernunft, sofern sie in statu corruptionis verharrt, die Kompetenz als Richterin von Wahrheitsansprüchen abgesprochen; andererseits bewegt sich die Kritik an „der“ Philosophie, sofern sie argumentativ vorgebracht wird, selbst im Medium philosophischer Reflexion. Aus diesem Grund geht es im Streit zwischen Erasmus und Luther nicht bloß um Fragen einer adäquaten Selbstauslegung des Christentums, sondern zugleich um die Frage, ob die Philosophie die letzte Metaebene für die Klärung religiöser Geltungsansprüche ist. Erasmus, der die Philosophie als Forum für die Prüfung unterschiedlicher christlicher Selbstauslegungen verteidigt und manchen Philosophien sogar einen „Offenbarungscharakter“ zuspricht, bekennt sich zur sokratischen Skepsis. Luther hingegen stellt in der Debatte über den freien Willen das Forum der Vernunft, auf dem sich die Kontroverse de facto bewegt, selbst in Frage. Denn: „Der heilige Geist ist kein Skeptiker, er hat nichts Zweifelhaftes oder unsichere Meinung in unsere Herzen geschrieben, sondern feste Gewißheiten, die gewisser und fester sind als das Leben selbst und alle Erfahrung.“110 Da der Mensch, wie Luther im Hinblick auf die Sündenverfallenheit des Menschen betont, entweder von Gott oder vom Satan besessen ist, steht nicht nur die Lehre, sondern letztlich die Integrität von Erasmus als Diskurspartner in Frage.111 Vor diesem Hintergrund wird verständlich, dass auch protestantische

110 Luther 1983, S. 160. 111 Vgl. dazu a.a.O., S. 196. Vgl. dazu Obermann 1981.

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Theologen wie Ernst Troeltsch der Renaissance den Vorzug gegenüber der Reformation gegeben haben. d)

Die offene Frage nach einer alternativen sozialen Ordnung

Die Achsenzeit ist an der Frage, wie der Streit der Schulen in eine stabile gesellschaftliche Ordnung eingebettet werden kann, gescheitert. Die griechische Aufklärung mündet in das Römische Reich, die chinesische Achsenzeit in die Han-Dynastie, die den „Streit der Schulen“ jeweils deutlich einschränken. Ein ähnliches Bild zeigt sich am Beginn der Zweiten Achsenzeit. Renaissance und Reformation entfesseln zwar einen neuen „Streit der Schulen“, ohne jedoch, worauf bereits Dilthey in aller Klarheit hinwies, eine politische Philosophie zu entwickeln, die die soziale Anarchie überwinden könnte. Und dennoch hat dies große Jahrhundert in dem Humanismus und der Reformation nicht die zureichenden Mittel besessen, die schweren Probleme zu lösen, welche nach dem Untergang der Feudalität, der katholischen Einheit und der kirchlichen Vernunftwissenschaft der europäischen Gesellschaft aufgegeben waren. Der Humanismus zerfloss in haltlosem Literatentum, konsolidierte sich als Altertumswissenschaft oder vermischte sich mit der protestantischen Bewegung. Diese aber hatte ihr Ziel einer einmütigen Reform der christlichen Kirche nicht erreicht; Spaltungen, konfessioneller Hader, Sekten- und Religionskriege erfüllten Europa.112

Zwar bilden sich bereits im 16. Jahrhundert erste Konturen der späteren Nationalstaaten heraus, die Legitimation politischer Herrschaft folgt jedoch, wie der Augsburger Religionsfriede zeigt, weiterhin dem Modell der nachachsenzeitlichen Großreiche: Der Staat muss auf einer achsenzeitlichen Bewegung, genauer einer Konfession, aufruhen. Auch in der Suche nach einer neuen Sozialgestalt entwickeln die christlichen Kirchen zwar zahlreiche Experimente, die von Calvins Genfer Gemeinde bis zu den Jesuitenreduktionen in Amerika reichen. In der Hauptbahn begeben sich jedoch die christlichen Konfessionen jeweils in neue Formen eines Staatskirchentums, die noch vom Geist der Konstantinischen Wende getragen sind. In diesem Kontext bauen, wie Foucault und Taylor aufgezeigt haben, sowohl kirchliche als aus staatliche Institutionen die Disziplinarinstitutionen aus. Erst im 17. Jahrhundert wird die Einhegung des „Streits der Schulen“, in dem nach Hobbes die Ursache für die frühneuzeitlichen Bürgerkriege liegt,113 zur zentralen Aufgabe der politischen Philosophie. Der übermächtige Leviathan droht jedoch die seit der Achsenzeit freigesetzte Pluralität von Reflexionsformen durch eine autoritäre Ordnung zu ersticken. Die politische Philosophie der 112 Dilthey 1929, S. 246. 113 Vgl. dazu Schelkshorn 2009, S. 471–528.

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Neuzeit kreist daher um das Problem, wie dem „Streit der Schulen“ – und später auch der modernen Ideologien – ein Raum eröffnet werden kann, ohne in einen Bürgerkrieg abzudriften, ein Problem, für das bekanntlich erst durch die Konzeption eines demokratischen Rechtsstaates eine praktikable Lösung gefunden worden ist, in die gleichwohl auch Elemente des politischen Denkens der Renaissance und Reformation einfließen.114

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114 Vgl. dazu Skinner 1979.

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Horkheimer, Max: „Die Anfänge der bürgerlichen Geschichtsphilosophie“, in: ders.: Gesammelte Schriften. Herausgegeben von Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, Band 2. Frankfurt am Main 1987, S. 178–268. Huizinga, Jan: Das Problem der Renaissance. Darmstadt 1952. Huntington, Samuel P.: Der Kampf der Kulturen. Die Neugestaltung der Weltpolitik im 21. Jahrhundert. München / Wien 1996. Jaspers, Karl: Vom europäischen Geist. Vortrag gehalten bei den Recontres Internationales de GenHve September 1946. München 1947. Ders.: Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte. München 1983. Keddie, Nikki R.: An Islamic Response to Imperialism. Political Writings of Sayyid Jamal ad-Din „al-Afghani“. Berkeley / Los Angeles 1968. Kluetin, Harm: Luther und die Neuzeit. Darmstadt 2011. Le Goff, Jacques: Geschichte ohne Epochen? Ein Essay. Darmstadt 2016. Lehmann, Karl Kardinal: „,Sagen, was Sache ist‘: der Blick auf die Wahrheit der Existenz. Heideggers Beziehung zu Luther“, in: Fischer, Norbert / Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm von (Hg.): Heidegger und die christliche Tradition. Annäherungen an ein schwieriges Thema. Hamburg 2007, S. 149–166. Lejn-Portilla, Miguel: Bernhardino de Sahagun. The First Anthropologist. Oklahoma 2002. Luther, Martin „Vom unfreien Willen“, in: Aland, Kurt (Hg.): Die Werke Martin Luthers in neuer Auswahl für die Gegenwart, Band 3. Göttingen 1983. Marshall, Peter : Die Reformation in Europa. Stuttgart 2014. Mignolo, Walter : The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor / Michigan 1995. Montaigne, Michel de: Essais. Erste moderne Gesamtübersetzung von H. Stilett. Frankfurt am Main 1998. Morris, Colin: The Discovery of the individual 1050–1200. London 1972. Nakamura, Hajme: Ansätze modernen Denkens in den Religionen Japans. Leiden 1982. Nietzsche, Friedrich: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe. Herausgegeben von Giorgio Colli / Mazzino Montinari. München u. a. 1988. Novalis, Werke. Tagebücher und Briefe Friedrich von Hardenbergs, Band 2: Das philosophisch-theoretische Werk. Herausgegeben von Hans-Joachim Mähl. Darmstadt 1978. Obermann, Heiko: Luther. Menschen zwischen Gott und Teufel. Berlin 1981. Pagden, Antony : The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of comparative Ethnology. Cambridge 1982. Pöggeler, Otto: „Heideggers Weg von Luther zu Hölderlin“, in: Fischer, Norbert / Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm von (Hg.): Heidegger und die christliche Tradition. Annäherungen an ein schwieriges Thema. Hamburg 2007, S. 167–187. Scheler, Max: „Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft“, in: ders.: Gesammelte Werke VIII:Die Wissensformen und die Gesellschaft. Herausgegeben von Maria Scheler. Bern 2 1960. Ders.: „Der Mensch im Weltalter des Ausgleichs“, in: ders.: Gesammelte Werke IX: Späte Schriften. Herausgegeben von Manfred S. Frings. Bern / München 1976. Schelkshorn, Hans: Entgrenzungen. Ein europäischer Beitrag zum philosophischen Diskurs über die Moderne. Weilerswist 2009, S. 25–85.

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Ders.: „Entgrenzungen als Signatur der Moderne“, in: ders. / Ben Abdeljelil, Jameleddine (Hg.): Die Moderne im interkulturellen Diskurs. Perspektiven aus dem arabischen, lateinamerikanischen und europäischen Denken. Weilerswist 2012, S. 222–224. Ders.: „Religio triplex. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Jan Assmann über den ,Ort‘ der Religion in der globalen Moderne, in: Tück, Jan-Heiner (Hg.): Monotheismus unter Gewaltverdacht. Zum Gespräch mt Jan Assmann. Freiburg im Breisgau 2015, S. 148–177. Skinner, Quentin: Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Band 1: The Renaissance; Band 2: The Age of Reformation. Cambridge 1979. Steffes, Harald: „Luther und Kierkegaard oder : der Reformator und das Polizeitalent“, in: Danz, Christian / Leonhardt, Rochus (Hg.): Erinnerte Reformation. Studien zur LutherRezeption von der Aufklärung bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin / New York 2008, S. 169–201. Sylkarski, Wladimir : „Solowjews Weg zur Una Sancta“, in: ders.: Deutsche Gesamtausgabe der Werke, Band 4. München / Freiburg 1972, S. 153–296. Taylor, Charles: Quellen des Selbst. Die Entstehung der neuzeitlichen Identität. Frankfurt am Main 1996. Ders.: Ein säkulares Zeitalter. Frankfurt am Main 2009. Troeltsch, Ernst: „Luther und die moderne Welt“, in: ders.: Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Band VIII. Herausgegeben von Trutz Rendtorff. Berlin / New York 2001, S. 59–97. Ders.: „Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der Neuzeit“, in: ders.: Kritische Gesamtausgabe Band 7. Herausgegeben von Volker Drehsen. Berlin / New York 2004, S. 81–504. Unamuno, Miguel de: „Sobre la europeizacijn. Arbitrariaridades“, in: ders.: Obras completas. Band III. Madrid 1950, S. 783–801. Unamuno, Miguel de: „Das tragische Lebensgefühl“, in: ders.: Philosophische Werke. Das tragische Lebensgefühl. Die Agonie des Christentums. Leipzig 1925. Vasconcelos, Jjse: Breve historia de M8xico. M8xico 1998. Weber, Max: Die protestantische Ethik und der „Geist“ des Kapitalismus. Vollständige Ausgabe. Herausgegeben von Dirk Kaesler. München 22006. Zea, Leopoldo: La filosof&a de la historia americana. M8xico 1987.

Christian Danz

Die Realisierung des religiösen Heils in der Geschichte. Anmerkungen zur Transformation des Gottesgeistes zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung

In seinen Schriften zur Genese der modernen Welt hat Ernst Troeltsch auf die Differenz aufmerksam gemacht, die den Protestantismus der Reformationszeit von dem seiner eigenen Gegenwart trennt. Die Moderne, so die These des prominenten Theologen, habe einen völlig neuen Typus des Protestantismus hervorgebracht, dessen Wurzeln weniger in der Reformation, sondern, vorbereitet durch Täufer, Spiritualisten und andere Gruppen, in der Aufklärung liegen und der erstmals von Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Johann Salomo Semler sowie John Locke und Pierre Bayle formuliert wurde. Sein normativer Gehalt sei „die Freiheit des Geistes und Gewissens, die persönliche Gefühlsreligion, die Unabhängigkeit von Dogma und Theologie, die Erprobung des Religiösen im Sittlichen, die ewige Gegenwart der religiösen Wahrheit und ihre Freiheit gegenüber allem Geschichtlichen“.1 Gegenüber der Reformation und dem Protestantismus des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts stelle diese neue Form einen Bruch dar, der das Ende des mittelalterlichen Ideals einer kirchlich geleiteten Kulturidee in Folge der englischen Revolution und ihres misslungenen Versuchs, einen christlichen Staat zu errichten, zur Voraussetzung hat und der „Sebastian Franck näher als seinem Helden Luther“ steht.2 Um die Entwicklungsgeschichte des Protestantismus verstehen zu können, müsse zwischen Alt- und Neuprotestantismus unterschieden werden. Letzterer sei, wie es in Troeltschs großer Untersuchung Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der Neuzeit heißt, „dem Altprotestantismus gegenüber ein vielfach grundverschiedenes Gebilde, das daher auch im Namen als Neuprotestantismus unterschieden werden muß und das die schwere Frage der religiösen Zukunft der europäisch-amerikanischen Völker immer deutlicher aus sich heraus entwickelt, je mehr der Katholizismus in seine mittelalterliche dogmatisch-philosophische Tradition sich wieder einspinnt und nur für Zwecke politischer Machtgewinnung sich modernisiert.“3 1 Troeltsch 2004, S. 193. 2 A.a.O. 3 A.a.O., S. 134. Vgl. hierzu auch Nipperdey 1986, S. 31–43.

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Um 1800 kam es in der Tat zu vielfältigen, sich wechselseitig überlagernden Transformationen und Neudeutungen der überlieferten christlichen Religion, deren soziokulturelle Voraussetzungen nicht minder vielschichtig sind als die Formen, in denen die Religion sich Ausdruck verschaffte. Die einsetzende gesellschaftliche Modernisierung führte dazu, dass für die Gebildeten die überlieferten Begriffe der Gottheit nicht mehr zu genießen waren,4 da sie sich nicht mehr mit dem sich wandelnden kulturellen Selbstverständnis vermitteln ließen. Durch einlinige Deutungsmuster wie Säkularisierung oder Entkirchlichung etc. können die Transformationen religiöser Semantiken sowie die vielfältigen religiösen Erneuerungsbewegungen in der Sattelzeit der Moderne nicht angemessen erfasst werden. Sodann sind deren Deutungen umstritten. Handelt es sich bei der Umformung der christlichen Religion in der Moderne um die Vollendung der Reformation oder um deren Auflösung und Verflüchtigung? Die schon im 19. Jahrhundert diskutierten Alternativen repräsentieren dabei keineswegs Konfessionsgegensätze von Protestanten und Katholiken. Vielmehr gehen die unterschiedlichen Deutungen durch die Konfessionen quer hindurch.5 Mit der von Troeltsch diagnostizierten Umformung des Protestantismus in der Aufklärung, der Unterscheidung von Alt- und Neuprotestantismus, ist der problemgeschichtliche Horizont der nachfolgenden Überlegungen angedeutet. Am Schicksal der Lehre vom Heiligen Geist wird die Transformation des Protestantismus in den Blick genommen. Wird die Pneumatologie aufgelöst und gleichsam funktionslos, wenn die Voraussetzungen der Geistlehre zerbrochen sind, die der Reformator noch fraglos in Anspruch genommen hat? Oder ändert sich lediglich deren Funktion im Zeitalter der Aufklärung? Aber worin besteht diese? Um den angedeuteten Fragen nachzugehen, ist im ersten Abschnitt Martin Luthers Neubestimmung des Heiligen Geistes zu rekonstruieren. Sodann wird die Neuformulierung der Geistlehre im Zeitalter der Aufklärung anhand Lessings Erziehungsschrift sowie Hegels Reformulierung des Heiligen Geistes im Horizont seiner Geistphilosophie dargestellt. Abschließend kann die Funktion des Lehrstücks für die Reflexion der Religion benannt werden.

4 Die Formel wurde bekanntlich von Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi geprägt, der sie Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in den Mund legte. Vgl. Jacobi 2000, S. 22: „Die orthodoxen Begriffe von der Gottheit sind nicht mehr für mich; ich kann sie nicht genießen.“ Vgl. hierzu Essen und Danz 2012. 5 Vgl. hierzu Nipperdey 1986, S. 168: „Die Auseinandersetzung über die Frage, ob die Reformation Ursprung der Revolution sei, so die konservativen Katholiken ebenso wie dann die Linken, oder gerade die Befestigung der Gegenrevolution, so die protestantischen Konservativen, oder aber die Eröffnung eines dritten Weges der Reform, so Hegel und die Liberalen“ war im bis in die Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts hoch umstritten. Vgl. hierzu auch Danz 2014.

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1.

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Aneignung des Heils: Martin Luthers Neudeutung des Gottesgeistes

Die Reformation führte auch zu einer Neubestimmung der überlieferten Lehraussagen zum Heiligen Geist.6 Das ist die Konsequenz von Luthers Deutung des Christentums im zweiten Jahrzehnt des 16. Jahrhunderts. Mit ihr ist eine Fokussierung der Religion auf die Innerlichkeit des Gewissens verbunden, der gegenüber die äußeren Handlungen völlig zurücktreten.7 Das findet seinen Ausdruck in Luthers Glaubensbegriff. Das Gottesverhältnis des Glaubens ist bereits die ganze Religion, so dass es für dessen Zustandekommen weder irgendwelcher kultisch-sakramentaler Zeremonien noch ethischer Handlungen bedarf.8 Für den Begriff des Glaubens ist die strikte Unterscheidung von Werk und Glauben konstitutiv, die zu wissen für den Christen schlechterdings notwendig ist.9 Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Neubestimmung der christlichen Religion reformulierte Luther die ihm überkommenen Lehraussagen zum Heiligen Geist. Dieser steht für das Wissen des Glaubenden, dass der Glaube nicht durch sein Handeln zustande kommt.10 Der Wittenberger Theologe bindet den Gottesgeist, wie seine Erklärung des dritten Artikels des Glaubensbekenntnisses im Kleinen Katechismus unterstreicht, an die Christologie. „Ich gläube, daß ich nicht aus eigener Vernunft noch Kraft an Jesum Christ, meinen Herrn, gläuben oder zu ihm kommen kann, sondern der heilige Geist hat mich durchs Evangelium berufen, mit seinen Gaben erleuchtet, im rechten Glauben geheiliget und erhalten.“11 Der Heilige Geist, der Christus in der Geschichte vermittelt, wird soteriologisch bestimmt. Allerdings beschränkt sich Luthers Verständnis des Gottesgeistes nicht auf dessen soteriologische Funktion der Heiligung. In dem seiner wichtigen Abendmahlsschrift Vom Abendmahl Christi von 1528 beigefügten Bekenntnis geht er der Reihe nach die ihm überlieferten Lehraussagen durch. In diesem

6 Vgl. Häring 1922, S. 545: „Die Reformation war von Hause aus Wiederentdeckung und neues Verständnis des dritten Glaubensartikels.“ 7 Vgl. nur die bekannte Stelle aus dem Freiheitstraktat von 1520: „So ists offenbar / das keyn eußerlich ding mag yhn [sc. den inneren Menschen] frey / noch frum machen / wie es mag ymmer gennet werden / denn seyn frumkeyt vÇ freyheyt / widerumb seyn boeßheyt vnd gefenckniß / seyn nit leyplich noch eußerlich.“ Luther 1967, S. 11. Grundlegend hierzu ist nach wie vor Holl 1932, S. 1–110; Hirsch 1998. Vgl. auch Barth 2015, S. 129–153. 8 Vgl. A.a.O., S. 14: „glaubstu so hastu / glaubstu nit / so hastu nit“. 9 Vgl. Luther, WA 18; S. 605. 10 Luthers Anschauung vom Heiligen Geist ist in der einschlägigen Forschung umstritten. Vgl. hierzu den Überblick bei Lohse 1995, S. 248–256. Aus der älteren Forschung sind zu vgl. Otto 1898. Vgl. neuerdings auch Dietz 2015. 11 Luther 1982, S. 511f.

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Zusammenhang kommt er auch auf die Aussagen zum Heiligen Geist zu sprechen. Hierzu heißt es: Zum dritten / gleube ich an den heiligen geist der mit Vater und son / ein warhafftiger Gott ist / vnd vom Vater vnd son ewiglich kompt / doch ynn einem go(e)ttlichen wesen vnd natur ein vnterschiedliche person. Durch den selbigen / als eine lebendig / ewige / go(e)ttliche gabe vnd geschencke / werden alle gleubigen mit dem glauben vnd andern geistlichen gaben gezieret / vom tod auff erweckt / von sunden gefreyt / vnd fro(e)lich vnd getrost / frey vnd sicher ym gewissen gemacht / Denn das ist vnser trotz / so wir solches geists zeugnis ynn vnserm hertzen fulen / das Gott will vnser Vater sein / sunde vergeben / vnd ewiges leben geschenckt haben.12

Der Gottesgeist wird von dem Wittenberger Theologen in einen trinitarischen Rahmen eingefügt und Gott insgesamt soteriologisch als Sich-Geben verstanden.13 Die Funktion des Heiligen Geistes ist es, ebenso wie in den Katechismen, das von Christus erwirkte Heil dem Menschen zu vermitteln, da diese „gnade niemand nu(e)tze were / wo sie so heymlich verborgen bliebe / vnd zu vns nicht kommen ku(e)ndte“.14 Der Geist wirkt jedoch nicht nur innerlich, indem er den Glauben beim Einzelnen hervorbringt, sondern auch äußerlich „durchs Euangelion / durch die tauffe / vnd sacrament des altars“.15 Die soteriologische Deutung des Gottesgeistes markiert lediglich einen Aspekt von Luthers Anschauung des Heiligen Geistes. Hinzu kommt eine äußerliche Dimension, so dass der Gottesgeist bei dem Reformator eine doppelte Thematisierung erfährt. Er wirkt äußerlich und innerlich. „Spiritus sancti duplici modo est in hominibus. Primo generali quandam actione, qua conservat eos et ceteras creaturas Dei. Deinde datur etiam piis Spiritus sancti a Christo“.16 Ebenso wie Gottes Schöpfungs- und Erhaltungshandeln, demzufolge aufgrund seiner Alleinwirksamkeit kein Blatt ohne sein Wirken vom Baum fällt, so sind auch Christus und der Geist unabhängig vom Glauben in ihrer Göttlichkeit zu erkennen. Das setzt Luther ebenso fraglos voraus wie die göttlich inspirierte Heilige Schrift. Der Heilige Geist vermittelt dem Einzelnen das durch Christus bewirkte Heil, welches ohne jenen nutzlos und verborgen bliebe. Grundlegend für die Konstruktion des Gottesgeistes ist die Gegenläufigkeit von Werk und Glaube. Das Heil des Glaubens kommt nicht durch das Handeln des Menschen zustande, sondern durch den Glauben. Das ist bereits der Gehalt des Christusbildes. Luther versteht, wobei er durchweg den Menschen Jesus als den vom Himmel gekom12 13 14 15 16

Luther 1986, S. 251. Vgl. hierzu Seils 2015, S. 154–169. Luther 1986, S. 251. A.a.O., S. 252. Luther, WA 39 II; 239, S. 29–31. Vgl. hierzu Wittekind 2014, S. 16–20.

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menen Gottessohn voraussetzt, Christus selbst als Bild des Glaubens von sich selbst.17 In der Anschauung des auf den Kreuzestod zugespitzten Christusbildes kommt die Antinomie von Gesetz und Evangelium zur Darstellung. Diese bildet der Heilige Geist in das Herz des Menschen, so dass der innere Mensch, also die Seele, mit dem Wort Gottes von Christus gleich wird.18 Die Pneumatologie ist damit parallel zur Christologie konstruiert. Der Glaubende wird auf diese Weise seinem Nächsten selbst zum Bild Christi.19 Die christologische Anbindung des Geistes hat Luther nicht erst in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit den Schwärmern in den 1520er Jahren vorgenommen. Sie ist grundlegend für seine reformatorische Neudeutung des Glaubens. Die Seele hat „keyn ander dinck / widder yn hymel noch auff erden / darynnen sie lebe / frum / frey / vnd Christen sey / den das heylig Eua(n)gelij / das wort gottis von Christo geprediget“.20 Das Wirken des Geistes ist durch die Christologie bestimmt. Der Geist bildet das Bild Christi in das Herz des Menschen ein und normiert auf diese Weise das, was religiöser Glaube allein bedeuten kann. Das Wirken des Gottesgeistes ist an das äußerliche Wort der Schrift gebunden und findet sein Ziel in der inneren Umwandlung des menschlichen Herzens. Das innerliche Handeln des Geistes zeichnet sich somit nicht durch außergewöhnliche Wirkungen oder seine Intensität aus. Es ist durch das Christusbild des Glaubens normiert.21 Der Heilige Geist steht in der Theologie des Reformators für die Aneignung Christi durch den Einzelnen und damit für die Realisierung des Heils des Glaubens in der Geschichte. In der Fokussierung der Pneumatologie auf die Aneignungsthematik liegt der Gehalt von deren Neudeutung. Der Glaube ist ein menschlicher Vollzug, der einerseits an die äußeren Medien des Wortes sowie der Sakramente gebunden ist und andererseits vom Menschen nicht hergestellt werden kann. Der Heilige Geist ist gleichsam die Aneignung des Heils durch den Menschen, aber eben so, dass die Aneignung Christi nicht als ein Werk des Menschen intendiert werden kann. Der Gottesgeist repräsentiert eine reflexiv gewordene Religion, die nur als nicht vom Menschen selbst herstellbarer Akt in ihm wirklich ist. Zur christlichen Freiheit des Glaubens gehört damit notwendig das Wissen um die Unfreiheit des Willens. Zusammenfassend lässt sich festhalten: Der Heilige Geist steht für die An17 Zur Christologie Luthers vgl. Danz 2013, S. 77–87. 18 Vgl. Luther 1967, S. 13: „Drumb solt das billich aller Christen eynigs werk vnd u(e)bung seyn / das sie das wort vÇ Christu wol ynn sich bildeten / solch glauben stetig vbeten vÇ sterckte. Den keyn ander werck / mag eynen Christen machen.“ 19 Luther überträgt die christologischen Aussagen aus Phil 2,5–7 auf den Christen. Vgl. hierzu Luther, WA 2; S. 145–153, bes. S. 147f.; Luther 1967, S. 24f. 20 A. a. O, S. 12. 21 Vgl. hierzu Slenczka 2007; Wittekind 2014, S. 16–20.

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eignung des Heils im Glauben. Er ist durch die Christologie normiert und stets an die äußeren Medien des Wortes und der Sakramente gebunden. Die innere Normierung des Glaubens durch das Christusbild in der Gegenläufigkeit von Gesetz und Evangelium, also die reflexive Struktur religiöser Selbsterschlossenheit, als Vollzug der Aneignung nicht vom Menschen herstellbar zu sein, überträgt Luther auf die äußeren Medien.

2.

Das ewige Evangelium: Lessings Umdeutung der Geistlehre

Luthers Umbildung der Geistlehre, die Zuspitzung des Gottesgeistes auf die Aneignung des Heils im Glauben sowie dessen Anbindung an den Buchstaben der Schrift, hatte um 1800 ihre Plausibilität verloren. In seiner im Kontext des Fragmentenstreits verfassten Schrift Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft führt Gotthold Ephraim Lessing die apologetischen Argumente für die Wahrheit der christlichen Religion ad absurdum.22 Jener Beweis, so heißt es hier, habe „weder Geist noch Kraft mehr“, da er „zu menschlichen Zeugnissen von Geist und Kraft herabgesunken ist“.23 Im Unterschied zu Luther hatte freilich, das wird an Lessings Ausführungen deutlich, der Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft im 18. Jahrhundert eine andere Funktion erhalten. Hier gilt er – was dem Reformator noch völlig fern lag – als Bestandteil einer rationalen Begründung der Wahrheit des Christentums in Auseinandersetzung mit der deistischen Kritik. Vor dem Hintergrund der sich etablierenden historischen Kritik an der Bibel fungierten Wunder und Weissagungen als rationale Argumente in einem Diskurs für die Wahrheit der christlichen Religion.24 Die Überzeugungskraft dieser Argumente bestreitet der Wolfenbütteler Bibliothekar. Sowohl eine rationale Begründung der Wahrheit der christlichen Religion durch den Wunder- und Weissagungsbeweis als auch historische Beweise vermögen gegenüber der historischen Kritik nicht mehr zu überzeugen. Das Christentum, so Lessings Überzeugung, können ebenso wenig wie jede andere geschichtliche Religion auf eine rationale Weise begründet werden. Allein die Vernunftreligion, die von den geschichtlichen Religionen unterschieden ist und als deren übergeordnete Begründungsinstanz dient, scheint einer rationalen Begründung fähig zu sein. Aber welche Bedeutung haben dann die geschichtlichen Religionen und ihre inhaltlichen Bestandteile? In der Schrift Über den Beweis des Geistes und er Kraft heißt es dazu: „Die Menge aber auf etwas aufmerksam zu machen, heißt, den gesunden Menschenverstand auf die Spur helfen. Auf die kam er ; auf der ist er : 22 Lessing 1981, S. 29–34. 23 A.a.O., S. 30. 24 Vgl. Stemmer 1983. Vgl. hierzu auch Danz 2016a.

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und was er auf dieser Spur rechts und links aufgejaget, das, das sind die Früchte jener Wunder uns erfüllten Weissagungen.“25 Doch was bedeutet das für das Verständnis des Heiligen Geistes? Inwiefern hilft er dem gesunden Menschenverstand auf die Spur? In seiner Erziehungsschrift von 1777/1780 kommt Lessing auf „gewisse Schwärmer des dreizehnten und vierzehnten Jahrhunderts“ zu sprechen und erwähnt deren Lehre vom „dreifache[n] Alter der Welt“.26 Allerdings geht der Wolfenbütteler Liebhaber der Theologie in seinen Ausführungen nicht explizit auf den Heiligen Geist ein. Er spricht vom ewigen Evangelium.27 Es ist der Zielpunkt der religionsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung und beinhaltet eine autonome Vernunftreligion. Um Lessings Konstruktion der Religionsgeschichte beurteilen zu können, sind deren Voraussetzungen und ihre systematische Funktion in den Blick zu nehmen. Die Erziehungsschrift steht im Kontext des Fragmentenstreits, also der Kontroverse über die von Lessing selbst zwischen 1774 und 1778 publizierten Fragmente aus Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ Abhandlung Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes.28 Im Unterschied zu dem Hamburger Orientalisten unterscheidet Lessing zwischen natürlicher Religion und Vernunftreligion.29 Während jene mitgeteilt ist, also zur gleichsam natürlichen Ausstattung des Menschen gehört, ist diese das Resultat der religionsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung.30 Zwischen beiden steht die Geschichte der Religionen, die in der Erziehungsschrift anhand der alt- und neutestamentlichen Religion ausgeführt wird. Die Vernunftreligion, das Ziel der religionsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung, ist erworben. Sie bildet sich in der Auseinandersetzung der Vernunft mit den geschichtlichen Religionen heraus. In diesem Prozess wird die Vernunft sich selbst als solche inne. Doch in Lessings Konstruktion der Religionsgeschichte wird die Vernunft nicht mehr durch eine göttliche Offenbarung belehrt.31 Wohl aber erfasst sich die Vernunft in Aus25 Lessing 1981, S. 34. 26 Lessing 1981, S. 100 (§ 87), S. 101 (§ 88). Zu Lessings Bezug auf die Weltalter-Lehre von Joachim von Fiore vgl. Vollhardt 2011. 27 Vgl. Lessing 1981, S. 100 (§ 86). Auch in seinen Bemerkungen zur Trinitätslehre im Paragraphen 73 der Erziehungsschrift berücksichtigt Lessing den Heiligen Geist nicht (S. 97 (§ 73)). 28 Reimarus 1972. Vgl. hierzu Klein 2009. 29 Lessing arbeitet diese Differenzierung in den Eingangsparagraphen der Erziehungsschrift heraus. Vgl. hierzu Cyrinka 2005, S. 355–363. 30 Vgl. Lessing 1981, S. 82 (§ 6): „Wenn auch der erste Mensch mit einem Begriffe von einem Einigen Gotte sofort ausgestattet wurde: so konnte doch dieser mitgeteilte, und nicht erworbene Begriff unmöglich lange bestehen.“ (Hervorhebung C. D.). 31 Vgl. a.a.O., S. 82 (§ 4). Damit stehen auch der Paragraph 77 nicht im Widerspruch (vgl. S. 99 (§ 77)). Hier geht es um die inhaltlichen Bestandteile der geschichtlichen Religion. In der Auseinandersetzung mit ihnen bildet sich die Vernunftreligion heraus. Vgl. hierzu Cyranka 2005, S. 253–405.

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einandersetzung mit den ihr bereits vorgegebenen geschichtlichen Religionen des Alten und Neuen Testaments. Darin besteht ihre systematische Funktion. Lessing bietet, wenn man so will, in dem Streit über natürliche und geoffenbarte Religion eine funktionale Rehabilitierung der Offenbarungsreligion.32 Die geschichtlichen Religionen des Alten und des Neuen Testaments haben keine begründungslogische Funktion mehr. Zwar fehlen der alttestamentlichen Religion die Merkmale der Religion, der transzendentale Begriff von Gott und die Lehre von der unsterblichen Seele, aber das ist, wie Lessing in der Auseinandersetzung mit Reimarus und William Warburton deutlich macht, weder ein Beweis gegen noch für die Offenbarungsqualität der israelitischen Religion.33 Das Alte Testament repräsentiert das Stadium der religionsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung auf der Stufe der Kindheit des Menschengeschlechts. Der göttliche Erzieher konnte dem israelitischen Volk keine andere Religion lehren als die, die seinem Auffassungsvermögen adäquat war. Andernfalls würde er den „Fehler des eitlen Pädagogen“ begehen, den Zögling zu „übereilen“.34 Demzufolge ist das Ausfallen der Seelenlehre im Alten Testament auch kein Beweis mehr für die göttliche Sendung Moses, wie Warburton argumentierte.35 Erst im Exil in Babylon bei den weisen Persern erwachte die Vernunft bei den Israeliten und ward fähig, den Gedanken der Einheit Gottes zu erfassen. Die Unsterblichkeit der Seele blieb der alttestamentlichen Religion jedoch fremd. Darin besteht seine religionsgeschichtliche Grenze. Sie wird erst auf einer neuen und höheren Stufe der religionsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung erreicht, die das erste Elementarbuch, das Alte Testament völlig hinter sich lässt. Es kam ein „beßrer Pädagog“, Christus, „der erste zuverlässige, praktische Lehrer der Unsterblichkeit der Seele“.36 Der bessere Pädagoge führte die Vernunftreligion und ihre autonome Moral in die Geschichte ein. In ihr treten die äußeren Antriebe zur Sittlichkeit, Belohnung und Strafe, allmählich zurück. Allein, die Vernunft lässt in ihrem Selbstbildungsgang zunehmend auch das zweite Elementarbuch

32 Das deutet Lessing bereits in dem der Erziehungsschrift vorangestellten Vorbericht des Herausgebers an. Hier heißt es: „Warum wollen wir in allen positiven Religionen nicht lieber weiter nichts, als den Gang erblicken, nach welchem sich der menschliche Verstand jedes Orts einzig und allein entwickeln können, und noch ferner entwickeln soll; als über eine derselben entweder lächeln, oder zürnen?“ (Lessing 1981, S. 81). Das ist auch die Pointe der oben zitierten Passage aus der Schrift Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft. Vgl. oben Anm. 25. 33 Die ersten 53 Paragraphen der Erziehungsschrift hatte Lessing bereits in den Gegensätze[n] zum vierten Fragment des Ungenannten mitgeteilt. 34 Vgl. a.a.O., S. 84 (§ 17). 35 Warburton 1765. Zu Lessings Auseinandersetzung mit Warburton vgl. Lessing 1981, S. 86–89 (§§ 24–33). 36 A.a.O., S. 93 (§ 53), S. 94 (§ 58).

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hinter sich.37 Im Zielpunkt der religionsgeschichtlichen Entwicklung, wenn die Zeit des ewigen Evangeliums anbricht, benötigt die Vernunft auch die christliche Religion nicht mehr. Die Vernunftreligion entwickelt sich aus dem Christentum heraus, aber eben auch über es selbst hinaus. Das Zeitalter des Geistes, auf das Lessing mit seinem Verweis auf die mittelalterlichen Schwärmer anspielt, ist von der Christologie unabhängig. Der Heilige Geist ist nicht mehr wie noch bei Luther durch Christus und die Schrift normiert. Das ist auch gemeint, wenn der Wolfenbütteler Bibliothekar seine eigene Zeit in einen Zusammenhang mit der Reformation bringt und geradezu einen neuen Reformator herbeisehnt. Luther habe die Menschheit vom Joch der Tradition befreit, nun müsse es aber darum gehen, „uns von dem unertrüglichern Joche des Buchstabens“ zu erlösen. „Wer bringt uns endlich ein Christentum, wie du es itzt lehren würdest; wie es Christus selbst lehren würde!“38 Die autonome Vernunftreligion ist von dem Christentum unabhängig. In ihr wird das Gute getan, weil es das Gute ist.39 Äußere Antriebe zum sittlichen Handeln treten ebenso zurück wie der Bezug auf die Religion. Letzteres wird zumindest von Lessing in der Erziehungsschrift nicht weiter diskutiert. Die Allgemeinheit der Vernunft stellt die alleinige Geltungsdimension dar. Der Heilige Geist wird in sie überführt und lässt die geschichtliche Religion, um deren geschichtliche Wahrheit es nicht gut bestellt ist, hinter sich. Normiert ist die Vernunft nicht durch die Partikularität der Geschichte, sondern allein durch die allgemeine autonome Tugendethik.

3.

Heiliger und absoluter Geist: Hegels Reformulierung des Gottesgeistes

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel hat nicht nur mehrfach auf die epochale Bedeutung der lutherischen Reformation hingewiesen, er hat sich selbst im Horizont der Luthertums verortet und in seinen Berliner Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion den Versuch unternommen, die Dogmen der christlichen Religion im Medium der spekulativen Philosophie zu reformulieren.40 37 Vgl. a.a.O., S. 97 (§ 72): „So wie wir zur Lehre von der Einheit Gottes nunmehr des Alten Testaments entbehren können; so wie wir allmählig, zur Lehre von der Unsterblichkeit der Seele, auch des Neuen Testaments entbehren zu können anfangen“. 38 Lessing 1982, S. 442. 39 Lessing 1981, S. 100 (§ 85). 40 Vgl. nur Hegel 1966, S. 178: „Dieses Vernehmen seiner selbst ist das, was man Glaube nennt. Es ist aber nicht so ein schlechter, bloß geschichtlicher Glaube, wie der der ehemaligen Kirche; sondern wir Lutheraner glauben besser. Im Glauben verhalten wir uns zu dem göttlichen Geist als zu uns selbst.“

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Normative Grundlagen seines Rehabilitierungsversuchs sind auch bei ihm nicht mehr die positiven Religionen und die Schrift. An deren Stelle tritt die Vernunft bzw. der absolute Geist. Hegel teilt die Voraussetzungen von Lessings Umformulierung der überlieferten Geistlehre, den Plausibilitätsverlust des Beweises des Geistes und der Kraft. Anders als bei dem Bibliothekar spielt jedoch bei dem Berliner Philosophen die Christologie eine wesentlich stärkere Rolle. Christus ist die Manifestation des absoluten Geistes in der Geschichte. So formuliert es Hegel bereits in seiner frühen Phänomenologie des Geistes. „Dies, daß der absolute Geist sich die Gestalt des Selbstbewußtseins an sich und damit auch für sein Bewußtsein gegeben, erscheint nun so, daß es der Glauben der Welt ist, daß der Geist als ein Selbstbewußtsein d. h. als ein wirklicher Mensch da ist, daß er für die unmittelbare Gewißheit ist, daß das glaubende Bewußtsein diese Göttlichkeit sieht und fühlt und hört.“41 Wie aber nimmt Hegel die überlieferte Lehre vom Gottesgeist auf, und in welchem Verhältnis steht sie zum absoluten Geist? Die Grundlage von Hegels Deutung des Gottesgeistes bildet auch in der Phänomenologie der absolute Geist.42 Die Struktur des Geistes besteht in dem Wechselverhältnis von Selbst- und Anderssein.43 Der Geist ist „Reflexion im Anderssein in sich selbst“.44 Das Andere ist Bestandteil des Eigenen und vice versa. Die Selbsterfassung des absoluten Geistes in der Selbstentfaltung des Bewusstseins ist das Thema der Phänomenologie. Die bestimmte Negation bildet das Movens der Entwicklung des Bewusstseins durch seine verschiedenen Stufen hindurch.45 In diesen Prozess der Selbsterfassung des absoluten Geistes im Wissen ordnet Hegel die Religion ein. Die Religionsgeschichte hat ihren Zielpunkt in der offenbaren Religion. Der Übergang zur ihr ist vermittelt durch die Stufen der natürlichen Religion und der Kunstreligion. In der Letzteren ist das Selbst das absolute Wesen, und das Wesen der Substanz ist das Akzidentielle. In der offenbaren Religion hingegen ist das absolute Wesen individuelles Selbstbewusstsein. Die Extreme der Natur- und der Kunstreligion sind in ihr vermittelt. Der absolute Geist gibt sich die Gestalt

41 Hegel 1988, S. 494. 42 Zu Hegels Geistbegriff in der Phänomenologie vgl. Barth 2014. Zur Genese von Hegels Geistbegriff in den Jenaer Vorlesungen vgl. Schmidt 2007. 43 Vgl. Hegel 1988, S. 14: „Sie [sc. die lebendige Substanz] ist als Subjekt die reine einfache Negativität, ebendadurch die Entzweiung des Einfachen, oder die entgegengesetzte Verdopplung, welche wieder die Negation dieser gleichgültigen Verschiedenheit und ihres Gegensatzes ist; nur diese sich wiederherstellende Gleichheit oder die Reflexion im Anderssein in sich selbst – nicht eine ursprüngliche Einheit als solche, oder unmittelbare als solche, ist das Wahre.“ 44 A.a.O., S. 14. 45 Vgl. a.a.O., S. 21: „Dies Werden der Wissenschaft überhaupt, oder des Wissens, ist es, was diese Phänomenologie des Geistes, als der erste Teil des Systems derselben darstellt.“

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des Selbstbewusstseins an sich und damit auch für sein Bewusstsein.46 Das sei aber, wie Hegel in diesem systematischen Zusammenhang ausdrücklich betont, der Glaube der Welt, also die Perspektive der Gemeinde, für die Gott als einzelner Mensch erscheint: zunächst auf der Ebene der sinnlichen Anschauung und sodann auf der der Vorstellung. Erst durch das Verschwinden des sinnlich wahrnehmbaren Menschen – den Tod Jesu am Kreuz – konstituiert sich das Bewusstsein als geistiges und erfasst sich selbst als Geist. Hegel erörtert die Christologie auf dem Boden der Gemeinde und damit im Horizont der Pneumatologie.47 Für die Gemeinde – das Selbstbewusstsein des absoluten Geistes – ist Jesus der Gottmensch, die Manifestation des absoluten Geistes. Die Gemeinde ist das Selbstbewusstsein Gottes oder, wie es in den späteren Vorlesungen über Philosophie der Religion heißt, Gott als Gemeinde existierend.48 Hegel verlagert die Christologie in die Pneumatologie und führt diese als Soteriologie und Ekklesiologie durch. Der Heilige Geist fungiert gleichsam als die Selbsterfassung des absoluten im individuellen Geist sowie als deren Realisierung in der Geschichte.49 Die christliche Gemeinde ist auf diese Weise das Selbstbewusstsein des absoluten Geistes. Allein, sie ist dies in der Form der Vorstellung. „Indem ansich diese Einheit des Wesens und des Selbsts zu Stande gekommen, so hat das Bewußtsein auch noch diese Vorstellung seiner Versöhnung, aber als Vorstellung. Es erlangt die Befriedigung dadurch, daß es seiner reinen Negativität die positive Bedeutung der Einheit seiner mit dem Wesen äußerlich hinzufügt; seine Befriedigung bleibt also selbst mit dem Gegensatze eines Jenseits behaftet. Seine eigne Versöhnung tritt daher als ein Fernes in sein Bewußtsein ein, als ein Fernes der Zukunft, wie die Versöhnung, die das andere Selbst vollbrachte, als eine Ferne der Vergangenheit erscheint.“50 Durch die Vorstellungsform, welche für die christliche Gemeinde wie die Sphäre der Religion insgesamt konstitutiv ist, also die Differenz von Vorstellendem und Vorgestelltem, verfehlt das religiöse 46 Vgl. die oben Anm. 41 zitierte Passage aus der Phänomenologie. Vgl. aber auch a.a.O., S. 513. 47 Vgl. hierzu Dierken 1996, S. 203–307 (bes. S. 285–307). 48 Vgl. Hegel 1988, S. 509: „Der Geist ist also in dem dritten Element, im allgemeinen Selbstbewußtsein gesetzt; er ist seine Gemeinde.“ 49 Vgl. die Bestimmung in den späteren Vorlesungen über Religionsphilosophie: Hegel 1986, S. 305: „So ist diese Liebe der Geist als solcher, der Heilige Geist. Er ist in ihnen, und sie sind und machen aus die allgemeine christliche Kirche, die Gemeinschaft der Heiligen. Der Geist ist die unendliche Rückkehr in sich, die unendliche Subjektivität, nicht als vorgestellte, sondern als die wirkliche, gegenwärtige Göttlichkeit, – also nicht das substantielle Ansich des Vaters, nicht das Wahre in dieser gegenständlichen Gestalt des Sohnes, sondern das subjektiv Gegenwärtige und Wirkliche, das eben selbst so subjektiv gegenwärtig ist als die Entäußerung in jene gegenständliche Anschauung der Liebe und ihres unendlichen Schmerzes und als die Rückkehr in jener Vermittlung. Das ist der Geist Gottes oder Gott als gegenwärtiger, wirklicher Geist, Gott als in seiner Gemeinde wohnend.“ 50 Hegel 1988, S. 514.

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Bewusstsein sich selbst.51 Das, was es ist, die Einheit von Gott und Mensch, vermag es lediglich als etwas äußerliches und anderes als es selbst für sich selbst darzustellen: Als die Geschichte des Gottmenschen sowie seiner eschatologischen Wiederkehr. Um die Religion zu der Wahrheit zu bringen, die sie bereits ist, muss die Form der Vorstellung folglich in die des Begriffs aufgehoben werden.52 Nur im absoluten Wissen entsprechen sich Inhalt und Form. Die Wahrheit der Religion, Selbstbewusstsein des absoluten Geistes zu sein, und damit die Wirklichkeit der Versöhnung, kann nur so zur Geltung gebracht werden, wenn jene in die Philosophie und ihr absolutes Wissen, in dem sich Inhalt und Form entsprechen, aufgehoben wird. Damit wird aber auch von Hegel die Religion überwunden. Sie ist, wie alles Konkrete und Einzelne in der Geschichte ein bloßes Durchgangsmoment im Prozess der Selbstentfaltung der Idee. Die Philosophie, so sehr der Weg des absoluten Geistes zu seiner Selbsterfassung im absoluten Wissen durch die Religion hindurchgeht, lässt diese Gestalt des Geistes ähnlich wie Lessings ewiges Evangelium hinter sich. Die Änderung der Form durch die Aufhebung der Vorstellung in den Begriff verändert auch den Inhalt. Eine Identität des Inhalts in den unterschiedlichen Formen von Religion und Philosophie kann Hegel nämlich nur aus der Perspektive von dieser, nicht aber von jener behaupten.53 Das hat Konsequenzen für das Verständnis des Heiligen Geistes. Als zur Sphäre der Vorstellung gehörig kann der Gottesgeist nicht mit dem absoluten Geist identisch sein. ****

Ernst Troeltsch hatte, wie eingangs erwähnt, auf die triefgreifenden Transformationen des Protestantismus im Zeitalter der Aufklärung hingewiesen. Das schlägt sich wie in der Anschauung des Gottesgeistes auch in anderen Lehrgehalten der theologischen Dogmatik nieder. Luthers Bindung des Heiligen Geistes an die Christologie und das Wort der Schrift wird von Lessing und Hegel aufgelöst. Beide Voraussetzungen der Geistlehre des Reformators, die kirchliche Christologie und die Überzeugung von der göttlich inspirierten Heiligen Schrift, sind im Zeitalter der Aufklärung unwiederbringlich zerbrochen. Sie werden durch Konstruktionen des Geistes bearbeitet, dessen Geltungsgrundlage die Vernunft darstellt. Den inhaltlichen Bestandteilen der christlichen Religion kommt, so sie beibehalten werden, ein funktionaler Status zu. Der Geist steht für 51 Vgl. a.a.O., S. 498f. 52 A.a.O., S. 516: „Der Inhalt des Vorstellens ist der absolute Geist; und es ist allein noch um das Aufheben dieser bloßen Form zu tun, oder vielmehr weil sie dem Bewußtsein als solchem angehört, muß ihre Wahrheit schon in den Gestaltungen desselben sich ergeben.“ 53 Zu Hegels Figur der Aufhebung der religiösen Vorstellung in den philosophischen Begriff vgl. Wagner 1989.

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die Verwirklichung der Vernunftautonomie in der Geschichte, sei es das Zeitalter des ewigen Evangeliums oder die Einsicht der Vernunft in ihre eigene innere Struktur. Man kann die Ablösung des Gottesgeistes von der Christologie als Auflösung der Pneumatologie verstehen, man kann diese Transformation aber ebenso als konstruktive Neufassung der überlieferten Lehrgestalt deuten. Die Voraussetzungen von Luthers Anschauung des Heiligen Geistes sind unter den Bedingungen des modernen Denkens in der Tat nicht mehr zu rehabilitieren. Sowohl die Schriftlehre des alten Protestantismus als auch die metaphysische Konstruktion der Christologie sind durch die historische und die erkenntnistheoretische Kritik aufgelöst worden. Welche Konsequenzen ergeben sich daraus für die Lehre vom Gottesgeist? Sie thematisiert die Einbindung der religiösen Kommunikation in eine inhaltlich bestimmte Tradition. Das wird schon an Luthers Deutung des Gottesgeistes und seiner Anbindung an das Wort der Schrift deutlich. Das religiöse Heil verdankt sich stets einer religiösen Kommunikation die schon geschichtlich bestimmt ist. Auch wenn sich die von Luther und dem alten Protestantismus vorgenommene Auszeichnung der Bibel als ein der Geschichte enthobenes göttliches Offenbarungsdokument nicht mehr aufrechterhalten lässt, so ist doch jede religiöse Selbst- und Weltdeutung in eine konkrete Kulturgeschichte eingebunden. Das wird noch an Lessings und Hegels Umdeutungen der Geistlehre deutlich. Die Aufgabe einer Pneumatologie besteht demzufolge in der Reflexion der Einbindung jeder religiösen Kommunikation in eine Tradition. Religion tritt stets nur als Aneignung und Transformation von bereits vorgegebenen symbolischen Formen auf, da jene allein als eine Form symbolischer Selbstdarstellung existiert. Als Wissen der Religion um ihre eigene Abhängigkeit von religiöser Kommunikation und deren transformierende Aneignung im Akt der Selbstdeutung ist die Pneumatologie ein notwendiger Bestanteil einer Religionstheorie.54

Literatur Barth, Ulrich: „Systematische und werkgeschichtliche Überlegungen zu Hegels Geistbegriff“, in: Danz, Christian / Murmmann-Kahl, Michael (Hg.): Zwischen Geistvergessenheit und Geistversessenheit. Perspektiven der Pneumatologie im 21. Jahrhundert. Tübingen 2014, S. 69–81. Ders.: „Die Entdeckung der Subjektivität des Glaubens. Luthers Buß-, Schrift- und Gnadenverständnis“, in: Danz, Christian (Hg.): Martin Luther. Neue Wege der Forschung. Darmstadt 2015, S. 129–153. Cyranka, Daniel: Lessing im Reinkarnationsdiskurs. Eine Untersuchung zu Kontext und Wirkung von G.E. Lessings Texten zur Seelenwanderung. Göttingen 2005. 54 Vgl. hierzu Danz 2016, S. 213–234.

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Danz, Christian: Einführung in die Theologie Martin Luthers. Darmstadt 2013. Ders.: „The State as ,a Consequence of the Curse of Humanity‘: The Late Schelling’s Philosophy of Religion and of the State“, in: Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte (21) 2014, S. 28–46. Ders.: Systematische Theologie. Tübingen 2016. Ders.: „Können geoffenbarte Religionen vor der Vernunft bestehen? Lessings Deutung der Religionsgeschichte“, in: Tück, Jan-Heiner / Langthaler, Rudolf (Hg.): „Es strebe von euch jede um die Wette“. Lessings Ringparabel – Paradigma einer Verständigung der Religionen heute? Freiburg im Breisgau 2016a, S. 202–222. Dierken, Jörg: Glaube und Lehre im modernen Protestantismus. Studien zum Verhältnis von religiösem Vollzug und theologischer Bestimmtheit bei Barth und Bultmann sowie Hegel und Schleiermacher. Tübingen 1996. Dietz, Martin: De libertate et servitute spiritus. Pneumatologie in Luthers Freiheitstraktat. Göttingen 2015. Essen, Georg / Danz, Christian (Hg.): Philosophisch-theologische Streitsachen. Pantheismusstreit – Atheismusstreit – Theismusstreit. Darmstadt 2012. Häring, Theodor : Der christliche Glaube. Dogmatik. Stuttgart 21922. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie. Herausgegeben von Johanne Hoffmeister. Berlin (Ost), 1966. Ders.: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion II. Frankfurt am Main 1986. Ders.: Phänomenologie des Geistes. Herausgegeben von Hans-Friedrich Wessels / Heinrich Clairmont. Hamburg 1988. Hirsch, Emanuel: Drei Kapitel zu Luthers Lehre vom Gewissen. Lutherstudien Band 1. Waltrop 1998. Holl, Karl: „Was verstand Luther unter Religion?“, in: ders.: Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, Band 1: Luther. Tübingen 61932, S. 1–110. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich: Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn. Herausgegeben von Klaus Hammacher / Irmgard-Maria Piske. Darmstadt 2000. Klein, Dietrich: Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). Das theologische Werk. Tübingen 2009. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Freimäurergespräche und anderes. Ausgewählte Schriften. Leipzig / Weimar 1981. Ders.: „Eine Parabel“, in: ders.: Werke in drei Bänden, Band 3: Geschichte der Kunst, Theologie, Philosophie. Herausgegeben von Herbert Georg Göpfert. München / Wien 1982, S. 433–443. Lohse, Bernhard: Luthers Theologie in ihrer historischen Entwicklung und in ihrem systematischen Zusammenhang. Göttingen 1995. Luther, Martin: „Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen“, in: ders.: Luthers Werke in Auswahl, Band 2: Schriften von 1520–1524. Herausgegeben von Otto Clemen. Berlin 1967. Ders.: Weimarer Ausgabe. Ders.: „Kleiner Katechismus“, in: Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche. Göttingen 91982. Ders.: „Vom Abendmahl Christi, Bekenntnis“, in: ders.: Studienausgabe, Band 4. Herausgegeben von Hans-Ulrich Delius. Berlin (Ost) 1986.

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Nipperdey, Thomas: Nachdenken über die deutsche Geschichte. Essays. München 21986. Otto, Rudolf: Die Anschauung vom Heiligen Geist bei Luther. Eine historisch-dogmatische Untersuchung. Göttingen 1898. Reimarus, Hermann Samuel: Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (Hg.: G. Alexander). Frankfurt am Main 1972. Schmidt, Steffen: Hegels System der Sittlichkeit. Berlin 2007. Seils, Martin: „Die Sache Luthers“, in: Danz, Christian: Martin Luther. Neue Wege der Forschung. Darmstadt 2015, S. 154–169.

Gerrit Steunebrink

Hegel’s Cultural-Protestantism as a Remedy against Schizophrenia and Hypocrisy

It is a well-known fact that Hegel at a certain moment in his life decided to turn his back on his romantics friends and their criticism of modernity he joined with them from old times. The reason for this is also well known. Hegel came to know that the presupposition of that criticism was the idea of a perfect, unspoiled world was not valid, that romantic thought was self-contradictory and that, in the end, the Romantics projected contradictions on reality, in as far they constructed an absolute duality of an ideal reality and the factual ‘bad’ reality. Hegel’s dialectic has its origin in showing that this absolute duality is impossible, and that it is based on the denial of finitude as a reasonable moment within the sphere of absoluteness and infinity. It is our aim to show that the development of this dialectic not only has a theoretical dimension, but that it is rooted in an attempt to solve an existential problem. An essential element of this solution is the acceptance of Protestant Christianity as an answer to the problems of modernity. For Hegel modernity as the development of social, intellectual and cultural potentiality in a secular way is the sphere of finiteness as such. The problem of this sphere is that it can isolate itself, becomes totalitarian, quasi infinity in itself. But by relating this bad infinity to the totality and infinity in the right way, modernity can be and has to be accepted. It is an authentic realization of the infinite, in as far as it represents explicitly the element of freedom in it. By analysing this move we discover the existential dimension of Hegel’s speculative thinking. It was a matter of survival for an intellectual that wanted to be authentically himself in modern times. It became clear to him, especially through the fate of his friend, the poet Hölderlin, that non-acceptance would lead to a schizophrenic position. The thoughts of other Romantics like Schleiermacher, Novalis, and especially the Schlegel brothers, showed to Hegel that it would be difficult, or even impossible to keep up moral and intellectual honesty by refusing to accept modernity. Therefore we will analyse the whole complex in terms of fear for schizophrenia and hypocrisy. Protestantism, as the latest development of Christianity at the

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beginning of modern times, provided the means to accept modernity and in this acceptance it took the shape of cultural Protestantism. In this way, he could accept modern secular reality as a genuine Christian reality. Of course, in a theological perspective, one can criticize this endeavour very much, but for Hegel this gave him the means to analyse modern secular culture in a Christian way and so to solve a personal existential problem.

1.

Criticism of modern culture and Rousseau

For Kant, the Romantics, and for Hegel the source of all criticism of modern culture is the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (Discours sur l’origine de l’in8galit8) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.1 Especially Hölderlin’s relation to modern culture is especially determined by Rousseau’s principles, and Hölderlin’s way of thinking makes clear what Hegel at the end could no longer accept. Hegel’s criticism of modernity and, of Hölderlin and other Romantics, takes as a point of departure the problems of ‘civilization’, which in German translates as Bildung, as they are introduced in the intellectual European world by Rousseau.2 Bildung means both culture and development at the same time and it is the element of development that was highly controversial for the thinkers about culture in that time. According to Rousseau the character of modern culture is determined by the fact of the infinite proliferation of human needs on all levels, especially physical and intellectual. He describes this proliferation as a consequence of the fact that the human being left behind its original state by starting to develop. This development, that is the essence of Rousseau’s essay, is no longer guided by a natural teleology, following from the essence or the ‘nature of man’ in an Aristotelian sense of the word. Not only can this teleology no longer be discovered in the modern developments of man, but this idea of a teleological nature of humanity has no place in Rousseau’s own intellectual framework. So there is no essence of humanity that says: it is enough, stay within your limits. Through civilization, humanity creates needs for which satisfaction must be found, but the means by which humanity satisfies its needs create new needs beyond themselves and so on. The medicine becomes a part of the disease. That is the history of human civilization as an on-going process of differentiation. Rousseau formed this theory about cultural development as leaving a state of nature towards limitless differentiation in a conscious analogy to the Christian stories 1 Rousseau 1976. As an English translation I used, Discours on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men 2004. See especially part II, section 1. 2 See Jamme 1983, p. 12; p. 22ff.

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about paradise and the Fall.3 This field of problems also determines Rousseau’s ideas about child psychology and individual development in his famous Pmile. This book is focussed on the problem of how one can be a ‘natural’ self within society as the man-made world in which one enters. This book opens with the famous sentence: ‘everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man.’4 These works and ideas greatly influenced Kant, Hegel and Hölderlin. In ‘Fragment from Hyperion’ Hölderlin, who dedicated a poem to Rousseau, gives some theoretical reflections about his idea of ‘development’. There are two ideals of human existence. The first one is the situation of the utmost simplicity (Einfalt) in which all of our needs, all our capabilities and everything we are connected with, are in harmony with themselves and with each other, just by the organisation of nature alone, without any contribution from ourselves. The second ideal is that of the ideal of the utmost development (Bildung), where there would be the same harmony, but now produced by ourselves, by infinitely multiplied and reinforced needs and capabilities. This eccentric course of a human being is, in both directions, essentially the same, but Hölderlin adds some words of warning: Man wants to be both in everything and above everything at the same time. The epitaph of St. Ignatius ‘Not to be confined by the greatest, yet to be contained by the smallest, is divine’ is interpreted by Hölderlin as the double aspect of human potential mentioned above. The ‘smallest’ here is the situation of original harmony. In the epitaph ‘the smallest’ means the coffin or the grave! ‘Not to be limited by the greatest’ is interpreted by Hölderlin not as the idealism of the faith, but as greed, everything represented by the utilitarian and oppressive side of humanity. Humanity has to make a choice through exercising free will.5 So here we see a conflict between harmony and endless development. In his famous poem, Hyperion’s song of Destiny, the conflict between harmony and development shows itself again. Here we see the doubt, whether infinite development can ever find its way back to the utmost simplicity and harmony. It is this poem that makes so very clear what Hegel did not want. (We give the German text and the English translation.) Hyperions Schicksalslied Ihr wandelt droben im Licht Auf weichen Boden, selige Genien Glänzende Götterlüfte Rühren euch leicht,

3 Comp. Starobinski 1971, p. 340. 4 Rousseau 1979, p. 37. 5 Hölderlin 1969, I, p. 439–440.

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Wie die Finger der Künstlerin Heilige Saiten. Schicksallos, wie der schlafende Säugling, atmen die Himmlischen; Keusch bewahrt In bescheidener Knospe, Blühet ewig Ihnen der Geist, Und die seligen Augen Blicken in stiller Ewiger Klarheit. Doch uns ist gegeben, Auf keiner Stätte zu ruhen, Es schwinden, es fallen Die leidende Menschen Blindlings von einer Stunde zur andern, Wie Wasser von Klippe Zu Klippe geworfen, Jahr lang ins Ungewisse hinab.6 Hyperion’s Song of Destiny Holy Spirits, you walk up there In the light on soft earth. Shining god-like breezes Touch upon you gently, As a woman’s fingers Play music on holy strings. Like sleeping infants the gods Breathe without any plan; The spirit flourishes continually In them, chastly kept, As in a small bud, And their holy eyes Look out in still Eternal clearness. A place to rest Isn’t given to us. Suffering humans Decline and fall

6 Ibid., p. 44–45.

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From one hour to the next, Like water thrown From cliff to cliff, Year after year, Down into the Unknown.7

Understanding this poem is essential for understanding Hegel, and why he turned his back on Romanticism. Hegel never criticized Hölderlin openly, and he never mentions him in his criticism of Romanticism. There is a great deal of discussion about why Hegel never mentions him directly. Perhaps it is out of piety or respect for what befell his old friend. Hölderlin became mentally ill and never recovered. Hölderlin could no longer seriously answer any objection, but one can feel, especially, in formulations of the Differenzschrift that Hegel wants to say that the worldview, expressed in this poem, makes you insane, schizophrenic at the end. In ‘Hyperion’s Song of Destiny’ Hölderlin constructs two worlds. The first world, present in the first two strophes, is the world of the Greek gods and genii living in their brilliantly shining and ‘soft’ world. They live like innocent babies. Their spirit flourishes eternally in the bud. So the Gods represent the world of harmony and of non-development. Their spirit does not develop itself, nor does it decay. Compared to a flower, their spirit is fully present already in the form of the bud and never ceases blossoming but stays eternally in the bud. The spirit is chaste, does not go outside, and does enter into relation with the outside world. Their eyes always look towards eternal clarity. The Greek gods are conceived in the Rousseauian idolisation of childhood and nature, as it is continuously present in Hölderlin’s novel Hyperion. In the final strophe Hölderlin presents the human world. It is not given to human beings to rest in one place. The suffering humans live like water thrown from cliff to cliff into uncertainty. This is the world of endless human development without any internal teleology, the world of endless new finite situations, without any direction. The life of human beings does not flourish within itself but is determined by the outside world, and that implies suffering. At the end no satisfaction is guaranteed. In his youth, Hegel himself shared some utopian thoughts with Hölderlin. Together they idolised the Greek world and the Greek religion. For in that world there was a unity of ethics, art and religion, while in the modern European world those dimensions fell apart. Especially Christianity in its ecclesiastical form outside the social-political world could not satisfy the Romantic’s desire for wholeness. They were looking for a new mythology that could inspire and express the dreams of a whole nation! So they were looking for a solution in another world, the world of the past. Greece was not the only representation of 7 Hölderlin 2007, p. 34.

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that world. For some it was India, and for others the Catholic Middle Ages. Hegel’s most cherished enemies, the Schlegel brothers, started in Greece, then looked to India which they discovered as the origin of Greek and Indo-European culture and then ended in the Catholic Middle Ages. Hegel does part from this utopia because it cannot deal with the here and now. It makes you live in two worlds, and it makes you schizophrenic so to speak. What Hegel essentially wanted was to reintegrate the split dimensions of Hölderlin’s poem. The spirit blossoms only by development, by going outside of itself, by realizing itself in the world by which it is determined. The infinite potentiality of the mind realizes itself within the chain of endless situations. The Greek gods were not able to symbolize that life of the spirit. Hegel embraces at the end Christianity, because the Christian God is precisely God by incarnating himself into the world. He represents fully the life of the spirit as going outside of itself. At the end it is therefore only Christian religion that can cope with modernity and development, partly because it is itself the origin of it. Let us have a look at another romantic Hegel quarrelled with: Schleiermacher. Schleiermacher wrote a famous book that is translated into English as: On Religion. Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, 1799).8 What is translated into English as ‘cultured’ is in German gebildet. We meet the German word Bildung again. It is important to see that Bildung does not only mean education, but development, differentiation and multiplication. Bildung here has the same meaning as in Hölderlin and stems again from Rousseau’s criticism of development, and differentiation of human needs. Reading English words like culture, cultured and cultivated, one should be conscious of these meanings. We discover this world immediately on page one of the first Speech. There Schleiermacher describes the situation of his developed, cultivated audience. Especially now the life of cultivated people is removed from everything that would in the least way resemble religion. I know that you worship the Deity in holy silence just as little as you visit the forsaken temples, that in your tasteful dwelling there are no other household gods than the maxims of the sages and the songs of the poets, and that humanity and fatherland, art and science (for you imagine yourselves capable of all of this) have taken possession of your minds so completely, that no room is left for the eternal and holy Being that for you lies beyond the world, and that you have no feelings for and with it. You have succeeded in making your earthly lives so rich and manysided, that you no longer need the eternal, and after having created a universe for yourselves, you are spared from thinking of that which created you. You are agreed, I know, that nothing new and nothing convincing can be said any more about this matter, which has been sufficiently belaboured in all directions by philosophers and prophets and, if only I might not add, by scoffers and priests. Least of all-something that cannot 8 Schleiermacher 1996.

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escape no one- are you inclined to listen to something on the this subject from the last mentioned, who have since long made themselves unworthy of your trust […].9

Schleiermacher gives a perfect description of the world of culture, of Bildung, as Hegel also understands it: differentiation, many-sidedness, variety, richness on every level. The differentiation of needs does not restrict itself to the material sphere. The cultivated people are not egoistic materialists. On the contrary, they take their responsibility and are engaged socio-politically in service of the Fatherland and of humanity as a whole. They choose, with good taste, the right literature and therefore can be inspired by beautiful texts of wise authors and poets. They are involved in art and sciences. The interjection between brackets ‘You imagine yourselves capable of all this’, is a very precise and ironic reaction by Schleiermacher to the endless differentiation, and many-sidedness of Bildung, of culture. This culture is a new world created by man himself upon the natural world as it is created by God. But this created world of culture makes humanity forget that it is also a creature. This cultivated man is not interested in God anymore, because he thinks that God is a being somewhere outside the world. He does not trust religious institutions, the church and its priests, because they represent the ruins of the original faith. It is against the background of this cultural analysis that Schleiermacher wants to develop his concept of religion. Religion is presented as the way to overcome the endlessness, in Hegelian terms the ‘bad infinity’, of human culture. Like nature, a human being is characterized by two opposing drives. The first drive is to draw everything that surrounds it into itself, absorbing it. The second drive is to extend oneself, to permeate the outside world. In the human being the first tendency is the enjoyment of the world, the second tendency despises enjoyment and tries to overcome the resistance of the outside world by realizing ideals such as freedom, justice, reasonableness in political institutions and so on. Those tendencies are interrelated in the human consciousness, and through those tendencies all human beings are related to each other and to nature. But in both drives there is a kind of endlessness through which humanity never will know in reality its fellow beings and what unites them. There is endless egoistic sensitivity on the one hand, that never sees things and other human beings as they are because it is driven by consumption. On the other hand there is the empty journey of one ideal to the other. Those two tendencies should be integrated, ‘brought together in order to shape the long series into that closed ring that is the symbol of eternity and perfection’.10 Overcoming oppositions, stopping the endless series of differentiation ‘like water from cliff to cliff ’, mediating them in a conception of totality is the point of 9 Ibid., p. 3–4. 10 Ibid., p. 6.

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departure of Schleiermacher’s conception of religion as intuition (Anschauung) and feeling (Gefühl) of the universe, the totality that is present in all opposing forces, all individual elements of nature and the history of humanity. Taste and sense for the infinite! That feeling is what Schleiermacher wants to offer to modern humanity, for it is not outside all cultural endeavours, but within it. No priest and dogma, not even God and morality, but first of all that an all-permeating basic feeling of cosmic togetherness and harmony. This point of departure unites Schleiermacher with Hegel; in their solution they part ways. Hegel does not agree with Schleiermacher’s use of feeling and intuition. Immanuel Kant would not agree with it either. Schleiermacher uses the word Anschauung in a way that Kant explicitly refuted. He uses it to overcome a Kantian dichotomy in a way that is inacceptable for Kant. According to Kant, we have a sensuous intuition, sense experiences only of phenomena that we can unite through the categories of understanding into causal relations. That means, we have a sensuous intuition only of an endless series of events, never of a whole a totality. Totality, the universe is not given in sense-experience. There is no sensuous intuition of a whole, the only intuition in which a totality could be given is an intellectual intuition, but that intuition is no longer human. Schleiermacher says that it can be experienced by a special faculty of humanity that is feeling. A feeling of the harmony of the universe is possible according to Kant, but as an aesthetic feeling mixed with moral perspectives that can accompany scientific knowledge, without being itself scientific knowledge. But Schleiermacher isolates all intellectual and moral aspect of this sense, feeling, taste of the universe. For Hegel, therefore Schleiermacher’s solution ends again in a split-up world, a dualistic universe. There is the irrational feeling of totality on the one side, and on the other side rational understanding that can never reach the ultimate goal of its will to understand: the universe as a meaningful totality. Man again lives in a kind of alienation. By understanding and reflection he essentially partializes and distorts that sense of unity. Hegel does not accept Schleiermacher’s solution. He criticizes both Kant and Schleiermacher. He criticises Kant’s opinion that through reasonable understanding a human being can never reach infinity and totality, that he can only think those ideas, but never know them. At the same time he criticizes Schleiermacher’s opinion that we can indeed reach infinity and totality, but only through a special feeling that in its irrationality transcends all rational understanding. Hegel first makes his turn to the overcoming of the dualistic world in his Jena period in his essay ‘The Difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy’ from 1801. In the introduction he mentions Schleiermacher’s On Religion positively. Although the book is not real ‘speculative philosophy’ according to Hegel, its reception and especially the importance that is attached to art and poetry by modern human beings shows a need for a philosophy that is

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speculative, which means a philosophy that unites nature and reason again after Kant and Fichte. So there is a kind of ‘need’ for this type of philosophy. That Hegel mentions art here together with the reception of Schleiermacher’s book shows that Hegel still partially stays within the world of Hölderlin, but at the same time he prepares here his departure from Hölderlin.11 In the next chapter Hegel pays a lot of attention to the phenomenon ‘need for philosophy’ as a sign of the will to overcome a dualistic worldview. Dualism is the source of the need for philosophy. This dualism is given to philosophy as the ‘culture’, the Bildung of a period. How does Hegel understand cultural development, Bildung, here? In Bildung that which is a phenomenon, a manifestation or an appearance of the Absolute isolates itself and makes itself into something substantive in its own right. Because of their origin in the Absolute, the phenomena have a tendency towards the Absolute, but this Absolute is constructed in the wrong way by human understanding (Verstand). It is constructed as the world of mutually determining and limiting phenomena. Understanding does so because it conceives of the transition from and the difference the finite and the infinite as the transition and the difference of one finite thing to another. Therefore he creates an endless totality of finite things, which in so far it is a totality is in contradiction with itself and with true totality and infinity. It becomes a second false totality against true infinity and totality. Therefore a great rift, rupture or duality (Entzweiung) comes up that is destructive for human life, because of this rupture, the power of reunion in life disappears and the opposing parts lost their relation and interaction and became independent. The more culture flourishes, the more developed the products of life become, the greater becomes the dual opposition. It is essential to see that in his analyses Hegel combines Rousseau’s idea of endless cultural production with Kant’s idea of an endless human understanding of finite things that never reaches the finite. The world of Kantian philosophy is the intellectual parallel of the cultural world of Rousseau. A new turn is essential. It is no longer merely a complaint about something that happened. There is something necessary in it that should be understood in its own right. There are two moments: First the totality or the absolute is always there and second, therefore, human reason can see and transcend finiteness. This totality is present in the religion of the normal people as well! It is present in the everyday reason of human beings, in ‘common sense’. In common sense there is always the relation between the finite world and the infinite, but common sense does not understand this relation very well. Speculative reason understands common sense better than it understands itself. Common sense would protest against the conceptions of God as totality and related infinity of speculative reason. Spec11 Hegel 1986a, p. 20ff.; Vosskuhler 1996, p. 51ff.

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ulative reason thinks that this totality and relatedness is present through feeling (Gefühl) and intuition (Anschauung). Those concepts are, according to Hegel, synthetic concepts. But this synthesis is unconscious for common sense in its first understanding. Therefore this unity with the infinite stays empty and the unconscious is misunderstood. If the common sense protests against the speculative concept of God saying that: God is a being that transcends everything, all of our understanding, then it stresses the idea of ‘faith’ (Glaube). This was a concept cherished by Hegel’s opponent Jacobi. According to Hegel, Glaube is no longer a synthetic concept. For, although it wants to deny all reasonableness with regard to God, it is a reflexive concept, because it is built in relation to reason. It stresses the distance, but that distance itself is a work of reason. In this sense, faith or Glaube, is a self-restriction of reason that at the end only can be understood from the point of view of reason itself as absolute.12 Here Hegel develops the intellectual instruments with which he overcomers the Entzweiung, the fundamental diremtion in existence. This diremtion or rift, the opposition between endless limited beings and the totality that unites them, between finitude and infinity, between conditioned being and unconditional absoluteness. The diremtion is a part of the life of the absolute itself. It is a fact that should be overcome, but it also had to be there. It is overcome by reflection itself. Previously reflection was the way of creating a diremtion and it was the opposite of thinking totality. In Schleiermacher’s the unity present in feeling and intuition was destroyed by an attempt to understand it. That understanding could never reach the original intuition in which totality, the universe, was given. For Hegel, in this text, feeling and intuition are concepts that are already synthetic, that means a synthesis of reason. Only reason understands it by reflection, which is also the dissection of that unity. But otherwise than by means of faith, Glaube, that is a result of this reflection, reason overcomes this reflective opposition by reflection itself, by a reflection that knows what it is doing, that recognizes the diremtion as its own work. Through this reflection of the reflection the unity is restored. Feeling and Anschauung, rightly understood, were already syntheses of reason! Hegel now is able to give a positive meaning to the world of finite knowledge of Kant and of endless cultural development of Rousseau. Both are ways of and towards freedom. In the form of understanding (Verstand), reason liberates itself from its original totality, from unconscious unity, to become conscious. The step outside this unity by the opposition between subject and world, finite world and the infinite is a necessary act, by which knowledge becomes possible. The world of (reflexive) understanding has its own rights. The next step is the reflection of the reflection that made the opposition and by that totality comes back in a 12 Ibid., p. 32–33.

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restored way and takes final shape. Finite knowledge as the world of liberty and free research. Rousseauian culture is a movement of liberation as well. This liberation is a freedom that should rightly understood. In the chapter on Bildung in the Phenomenology of Spirit he criticizes the Bildung of the French Enlightenment culture in relation to the French Revolution, the world of Rameau and of Rousseau,13 but he did not criticize Bildung as such. For Bildung here is freedom, but because this kind of culture understood its freedom in an incorrect way. Hegel wants to place culture, Bildung, within a Kantian normative concept of freedom.14 In his philosophy of law Hegel gives ‘culture’ a place in ‘civil society’ in the state as the normative reality of freedom. ‘Civil society’ is within the state as a whole the place of individual freedom, of individual activities and individual morality. Hegel is the first philosopher that philosophically and juridically conceptualized the phenomenon of ‘civil society’ as a state-independent sphere; within the state the sphere of individual freedom that wants to realize itself. This is the sphere of culture. It is the world of social associations based on individual relations and the cultural reality of reflection between the family as the sphere of immediate unity and the state mediated unity. The state itself is not a product of Bildung, of individual relations as contracts. The state is a pre-individual, prearbitrary union, that gives in itself space to individual cultural and moral behaviour.15 Now in the sphere of civil society and its organisations Hegel can give a place to the development of all human talents from economic to artistic, scientific, management qualities, and all social forms that belong to it. In this way, Hegel positively integrated the level of diremtion in the whole of human society, but he does not restore Aristotelian teleology. There is no inner limit to the development of all kinds of cultural products in the sphere of ‘civil society’. It is all a matter of personal freedom. So the development of luxury belongs to it. The limit can be set by moral/ethical decisions of individuals that can decide together to invest their wealth in organizations for charity.16 This is the way Hegel could accept modernity : No modern schizophrenia. He accepted modern freedom. The world of two opposing totalities broke down. Hegel conceives of self-realization as going outside an original totality into the world of given finite possibilities and realities. The world of Hölderlin’s Greek gods, should be left behind. In the chapter about ‘the beautiful soul’ (die schöne Seele) in the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel discusses and criticizes the refusal to 13 Hegel 1988, p. 342ff. 14 See for this aspect the lemma ‘Bildung’ in Cobben 2006, p. 168. 15 See for Hegel’s theory of the State and his practical philosophy in general, the excellent book of Peperzak 2001, p. 474ff.; p. 489. 16 Hegel 1952, p. 128; p. 154.

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leave the inner self. Several Romantics like Novalis, Jacobi, and the Schlegel brothers are also criticized here, without being mentioned. When Hegel uses the word ‘madness’ (Verrücktheit) it seems that he is speaking of Hölderlin.17 Some, like Immanuel Hirsch, say that this is a harsh and disrespectful condemnation of an old friend, but it is far more likely to be a sign of how hard Hegel’s struggle with himself has been, a struggle that Hirsch hints at too faintly. It shows what he himself was existentially frightened of. In his criticism of the beautiful soul and his conception of real acting, going outside the inner self he has even therapeutical intentions, for he has the pretention to be able to heal the necessary wound of the spirit without leaving any scar.18 But in Hegel, so we will see in his Lectures on Aesthetics, the traces of that struggle continue to manifest themselves.

2.

Romanticism and hypocrisy

Not only the schizophrenia of people like Hölderlin prompted Hegel to accept modernity. The phenomenon of hypocrisy (Heuchelei), which comes from the difference between inner intention and the practical act in the given world, was one of the reasons too.19 Hegel existentially discovered that one cannot radically deny the reasonableness of modern society without becoming hypocrite in as far modern society is the condition of the possibility of that life. This hypocrisy becomes more manifest if the critics of modernity themselves live in a very modern way. From this perspective, Hegel criticizes the romantic tendency to live either in the past or in the future. The presence is for them in this sense not ‘the real thing’. It is a transition to it. For the Romantics like Hölderlin, Novalis, and Schlegel the future was represented by the past. Like the young Hegel, the Romantics thought that present reality is not as it has to be (sein soll). For Hölderlin and young Hegel this was Greece. For Novalis it was the Catholic Middle Ages. For the Schlegel brothers, first Greece, then India, and at the end the Catholic Middle Ages, all in service of the criticism of the modern stage. The Romantics, the Schlegels, do not criticize modern Europe from the perspective of another culture. And when Hegel refuses their criticism, he is not criticizing from the perspective of another culture as a kind of ethno-centrist. The Schlegel brothers, the first chair holders in Indology (Indologie) in Germany, considered the old Indian Sanskrit culture not as a different culture, but as the first stage of European culture, preceding 17 Hegel 1988, p. 440. 18 Ibid., Hirsch 1973, p. 261; p. 265. See also Schmauss 2009, p. 143. 19 See Hegel 1988, p. 435.

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Greece that became relativized this way. For them, modern culture of differentiation and empiricism should go back for inspiration and regeneration to its origin, in India, in which poetry, ethics, mythology, religion, and philosophy functioned together in an undifferentiated unity.20 Hegel takes exactly the opposite approach to come to an accurate understanding of the present. History is a history of differentiation (Bildung) of art, religion, and philosophy. It is a history in which different religions develop as expressions of human self-understanding. In this history, Christianity is the final stage, which in its latest form, the Reformation, essentially formulates the self-understanding of man in modern times as individual freedom. To this context belongs the Hegel’s famous dictum in his Philosophy of Right that ‘What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’.21 It is the defence of the presence against Romantics like Fries, it is again the defence of the rational as well against one-sided reflection as against feeling. Related to this criticism was Hegel’s conviction that it does not make sense to go back to times with a so-called substantielle Weltanschauung, a period with a worldview that was collectively shared and understood, for such a worldview no longer exists in modern times of individual freedom. In Hegel’s view this criticism is particularly pertinent for Romantics like the Schlegel brothers, who both lived like modern individuals. They glorified personal love relations above marriage. Denying all substantial ties in modern times, they longed for a return to a ‘substantial world view’. What especially earned Hegel’s scorn was the principle of ‘irony’. The principle of irony was developed by the Schlegel’s as a part of an aesthetic theory. It means that the artist should always be aware of his subjective conditions in shaping the objective reality of a piece of art. Art in this sense is always reflective art: art about art. In a broader sense, it means that one should always be aware of the restricted, fragmentary perspective in which one thinks about totality and the absolute. Therefore one should always be open and never absolutize this finite perspective. Hegel sees an existential threat in this principle. For him it represents a kind of mauvaise foi. For it says that one never takes responsibility for the finite realization of one’s freedom, within a concrete situation. Hegel interprets it as pretext to be totally oneself in the wrong way of always being new in every situation. Today I am totally myself in my marriage, tomorrow totally myself with my new girlfriend.22 As a result of the struggle with the worldview of Hölderlin, for Hegel incarnating oneself in a specific situation, in a finite situation, is the realization of the infinite that binds oneself absolutely to a certain 20 Schlegel 1995, p. 205ff. 21 Hegel 1952, p. 10. 22 Hegel 1998, I, p. 64–69; p. 153–156.

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context. When you always keep yourself at an ironical distance from every specific, finite situation, you place yourself in a sphere of abstract freedom, in which you can never be serious. Hegel probably exaggerates very much the romantic position of irony, but that is precisely because it represents an existential threat to him. Now of course, Hegel does not want to absolutize a finite situation. But he develops his own principle of humour as a competing principle with that of irony in order to cope with the relation of freedom in finitude. In his Aesthetics, he opposes the principle of irony to that of humour. First of all, this is an element of aesthetic theory too, but, as the principle of irony, it also reveals a more general background. The principle of humour belongs to the sphere of the comical and it always appears in art and art history as the specific content of a culture or a period is ‘lived through’, so that the ‘ins and outs’ of it manifest themselves, with the result that a human being can transcend it. It supposes a tranquillity of mind that knows about its own contribution, mistakes and so on. For modern, times Hegel speaks here about ‘a deeper wealth and inwardness of humour’.23 Shakespeare’s comedies are an example of it. In modern times the element of subjectivity, of the skill and the inventiveness of the artist enters the field, but in a different way compared to the ironical subjectivity. The artist in its humoristic attitude does not stay outside the world. In the attitude of humour a human being enters the world, identifies himself with a finite situation, a content, and reproduces it again through its own subjectivity. It is a kind of interiorization within the object, the content. Hegel here speaks about objective humour. Its master is the old Goethe of the ‘West-östlicher Divan’. This work has an inwardness and joy that does lift up the soul above all ‘painful entanglement in the restrictions of the real world’.24 The attitude of serious play, being within things and above them, and this belongs to modern art as Christian art according to Hegel. It is not so far-fetched as it seems to be at first sight. The theme of ‘humour’ as a religious and Christian attitude is developed by others after Hegel, like the religious philosopher Kierkegaard and the sociologist Peter Berger. According to the philosopher Erich Heintel, the concept of humour in philosophy has its precursor in Luther’s concept of das fröhliche Handeln, of ‘cheerful acting’ as acting in freedom of and engagement in all things at the same time. It is accompanied by lächeln, by ‘smiling’. For Heintel this humour belongs structurally to humanity as a unity of facticity and transcendence, as ‘existing understanding’ (existierender Begriff, ‘existing concept’).25 That is, in fact, how Hegel uses this concept in his Aesthetics against the principle of ‘irony’. 23 Ibid., p. 1235. 24 Ibid., p. 611. 25 Heintel 1968, p. 760.

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The return of Protestant Christianity

Protestant Christianity returns for Hegel as an aspect of modern society. Only in this way he could avoid or transcend inner division and a divided world. In his younger years, Hegel had utopian graecophile dreams just like Hölderlin. In his Christian feelings of his younger years, Hegel could interpret Jesus positively as a kind of ‘beautiful soul’!26 But in his mature works, Hegel conceives of Christianity as Protestantism and as a religion that belongs to modern society. It is the religion of the present. You do not go back to the past to get inspired! Christianity is not the religion of the beginning; it is the religion of the end of historical development, specifically its Protestant form. The Reformation is, for Hegel, the beginning of the modern times that amongst others resulted in the French Revolution. So Christianity in its Protestant form is the historical root of modern culture as the culture of individual freedom. Hegel adheres to a neo-orthodox Protestantism.27 It is not the young Luther and his hatred towards philosophy that inspirers Hegel. It is far more the Lutheranism from Melanchthon to Leibniz that again integrated a great deal of scholasticism. Probably he was educated in this tradition in the Tübinger Stift. Hegel defends the intellectual tradition of Protestantism against the emotional subjectivist belief of his time. So Hegel uses Protestantism not only for the purpose to be in harmony with his time, with the latest fashions so to speak, but at the same time to criticize those fashions as wrong understandings of modern Christianity and as incorrect understandings of freedom. Hegel stresses the importance of the classical dogmas of Christianity : The trinity and incarnation. He defends them against the abstract deism of the Enlightenment. He also defends them against a kind of pantheistic romantic Spinozism that was very seductive for Hegel as well. But it is an intellectual Christianity that is itself already reinterpreted in the light of modern culture and its problems. For example, Hegel reinterprets therefore the traditional stories and dogmas of creation, paradise, and the Fall in the perspective of a criticism of Rousseau, who had used that model for his theory of development. According to Rousseau, humanity was created as good by God, but humanity spoiled everything through self-development. Hegel turns the story about Paradise and the Fall upside down. Paradise is good, but it is there to be left. Only animals can live in paradise and in immediate unity with God. A human being as a spiritual being has to realize himself through knowledge. Eating form the tree of knowledge, the sin, was therefore a necessary step. Only in that way can humanity live in a spiritually mediated knowledge of the world and God. If that is a sin, that sin is a 26 Hegel 1971, p. 274–218; p. 349ff.; p. 399ff. See also Hirsch 1973. 27 See for Protestantism also Peperzak 2001, p. 633.

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happy one, the precondition for all human self-realization.28 Or, the other way around, when Christianity says that as a result of original sin, humanity by nature is bad, it wants to say that humanity must leave that pre-given situation of nature. In this way, Hegel integrated his reception and his criticism of Rousseau in a Christian answer to the problems of Hölderlin’s ‘beautiful soul’. Hegel’s reinterpretation of the central dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity can be or should be read in this same light. Hegel promised in the Phenomenology of Spirit that the beautiful soul would heal its wounds and its pain without leaving any scars. He does this through the Christian conception of God that integrates suffering into Godself. The pain (Schmerz) belongs to the life of the Spirit itself, and it is to a certain extent the characteristic of its divinity. Going outside itself and returning to itself, going outside itself and remaining at the same time within itself is the life of the Absolute, of the divine spirit itself. Christianity at the end of the history of religions understood this in its messages of incarnation, passion, and resurrection.29 Only this is how the wound is cured without leaving any scar, for in the pain of self-realization nothing occurs that is alien to the life of the spirit. To the contrary, it is the essence of spiritual life. This position was prepared in the ‘Differenzschrift’ and Hegel continues to espouse it. In this conception of divine/human self-realization through Incarnation in the world, Hegel comes very close to the famous words of Goethe in the ‘Westöstlicher Divan’, or the Goethe that Hegel loves so much in the poem ‘Die and become’ (Stirb und Werde).30 What Goethe wants to say is that one can only reach a higher level of self-realization by dying to earlier realizations. If you cannot do that then you are just a gloomy guest on this earth, someone that cannot live, because he cannot die and vice versa. Life is a life of transformations. Hegel’s idea of self-realization therefore implies that death and resurrection do not happen after this life, but within this life. After this life dying and resurrecting is over. For Hegel, death means the negation by the subject itself of its natural givenness, its finitude at the service of the realization of freedom, which is at the same time the realization of the divine in humanity!31 It is a notorious problem in Hegel studies whether Hegel held to the idea of personal immortality. Hegel kept silent about it, but he did not deny it.32 There is a well-known biographical anecdote that, when his wife asked him about the immortality, Hegel silently pointed to the bible.33 So modern individual self-realization as leaving oneself, going into the world 28 29 30 31 32 33

Hegel 1994, II, p. 423ff. See also Hegel 1970a, p. 389. Hegel 1970b, III, p. 381–384. See especially the oral additions Hegel 1998, I, p. 519ff. Goethe 1999. Hegel 1998, p. 522. Cobben 2006. Czakj 2015, p. 114.

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of nature and given social relations is religiously justified for human beings, because it is the divine life itself that one moves within. The world outside oneself is not totally different from oneself, just as God’s world is his own world. In this context the Christian concept of ‘reconciliation’ (Versöhnung) between God and humanity takes a very prominent place in Hegel’s technical vocabulary as the reconciliation of humanity with itself and our place in the world! Here in Christianity Hegel found the ‘collective’ ethos of modern individual freedom. Therefore there is no need any more for a new mythology, for that concept is related to premodern, pre-individualistic times. This ‘divine’ freedom is realized in the man-made institution of the state in which there is a place for individual self-realization in civil society. Here we meet the Hegelian presupposition of nineteenth-century Protestant culture in Germany, that says that Christianity is present not so much as a separate institution in modern culture, but in the institutions themselves. This position has been highly criticized and we will come back to it. We have to see how Hegel integrated individual freedom in this state and what the place of the Christian church in it is. In the perspective of Hegel’s development, one must say that it is an authentic solution of a great intellectual and existential problem to be oneself in modern times while avoiding schizophrenia and hypocrisy. That is the existential background of Hegel’s turn towards the acceptance of modernity. A closer look at Hegel’s treatment of modern art reveals this existential struggle in a special way. For here we meet, especially in the chapter about the ‘undeveloped (unausgebildet) character’ (Hölderlin), the unity of speculative content and existential content of Hegel’s speculative concept of self-realization in a very beautiful way.

4.

Christianity and the acceptance of secular reality in art

At the end of his Lectures on Aesthetics Hegel describes and accepts modern art as the individual representation and sublimation in the form of an image of humanity’s self-realization in and appropriation of the given natural and social world. As such it is a way of expressing self-understanding in the form of an image, be it a literary, pictorial, or a musical one. But this is again the result of wrestling with the traditional idea of art as expressing and representing in an image a collective worldview an image, as did Greek mythology or traditional Christian religion. In modern times, however, art is the interiorization of every possible situation in nature and culture by the artist as a specifically gifted subject to discover and to communicate what is universally human in it with

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everyone who can recognize himself in it,34 but Hegel had always problems with its relevance. What is the relevance of communicating your vision on a beautiful sky with the utmost subjective skill, as did the Dutch paintings of landscapes that Hegel loved so much? For Hegel it is a representative of Christian art that at the same time is the end of art. In Greek mythology, according to Hegel, religion was communicated in such a way that religion and its representation in art even coincided. Therefore you can speak of Kunstreligion or ‘art religion’. It is the highest form of art that is possible. There is a difference in Christianity between religion and art, but of course the content of the Christian religion can be represented in art as well. In this way, art has been always a representation of a common worldview. The mythological heroes as well as the Christian saints were embodiments of collectively recognized virtues. In modern times this is not possible anymore to a certain extent. Here we once again meet the problem of Bildung. In modern civil society, the individual is submerged in many activities that relate the individual to a lot many other individuals. The individual is not a heroic individual, neither as a kind of patriarchal centre of one’s own life nor as embodiment of a special virtue. The modern individual is not visible as a unity and centre in modern ‘prosaic’ society! The individual is submerged, so to speak, in activities and relations in civil society. You feel the difficulties Hegel has with the modern individual who has a place in civil society. Therefore Hegel praises the neoclassical attempts of Goethe and Schiller to return to a heroic individual! He sometimes expresses nostalgia for the times in which art represented common ideals, since this was always the function of art, even in Christian times! But from the other side, in modernity the human being is also understood as subjectivity, which means as an infinitely rich inner world that always transcends every expression of it in reality. The modern individual is infinite, in so far as it has a differentiated inner world of feelings. Law and ethos therefore only partially appear in his activities and only partially represent him.35 This fact determines the reality of modern art as Christian art. It is always in tension with every finite realization. That means, that it is not only because of the cultural situation that modern humanity can no longer be gathered in a universal view, to be represented in an work of art, but because of the principle of subjectivity itself. So the turn that Hegel had to make towards the acceptance of modern individual freedom returns in his Lectures on Aesthetics. It always returns, but it is

34 Hegel 1998, I, p. 607. 35 Ibid., p. 192ff. See also Steunebrink 2013.

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always accompanied by criticism of and feelings of reservation about that modern individual. The whole construction shows how deep the changes of modernity affected all the dimensions of life. Especially both religion and art as common worldviews were threatened in their right of existence, in their own truth-value, by the development of modern sciences and modern ideals of individual self-realization and its realization in modern law. Again, Hegel has to undertake a reevaluation of the world from the principle of subjectivity itself by showing that science and individual self-realization belong essentially to subjectivity, but do not tell the whole story. In so far as art itself is the realization of the ideal reality in an individual, this individual cannot be definitely represented in art, as was the case in Greece according to Hegel. Art in this way lost its character of ‘art religion’, which means, according to Hegel, that art does no longer fulfil the highest needs of the human mind. Christianity brings another worldview. In this sense Christian art is always art after the end of art, which also says that all modern art is ‘art after the end of art’. Here, we meet Hegel’s famous theory about the end of art as the end of art religion through Christianity. But at the same time it means that the end of art as expression of common worldviews. And, not surprisingly, this also turns out to be Christian!36 For at the end it is Christianity that makes possible art, not only as the representation of common virtues but as the representation of an individual character and individual appropriation of the lived world. What is the advantage of this Christian art compared to Greek ‘art religion’? How can we understand the transition? The transition is the transition of a new and better self-understanding of humanity that man wants to see reflected by his god. The Greek gods are human indeed, anthropomorphic, but not anthropomorphic enough! The statues of the Greek Gods shows them, as Hölderlin say, as eternally young, without the pain of growing and suffering. They are complete from the beginning. Therefore a human being cannot recognize himself in them, for they not have any affinity with finiteness and deficiency.37 That, of course, is different from the Christian God. See a Pieta or a cross. In Christian art, as in Christianity as such, negativity is integrated as an essential element not only in human life but also in divine life. Incarnation, suffering, death and resurrection is the process of life itself, it is in itself divine. The universals of human life are the basic qualities of divine life at the same time. Christianity conceives the Absolute as reconciling Love.38 36 But this is not the proper place to expose all the dimensions and difficulties of Hegel’s famous conception of the end of art. See, ibid. 37 Hegel 1998, I, p. 532. 38 Ibid., p. 539ff.

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Now this principle of divine/human subjectivity gives Hegel the instrument for a positive treatment of modern art of his time. It was not self-evident to call this modern art, that is, in Hegel’s times, Christian art since the seventeenth century. For example, why should landscapes be Christian art? Weren’t they the product of the emancipation of modern art from Christianity? Hegel followed Schelling and the Schlegel brothers in calling all European art after the GraecoRoman period, from early Christian times until their own time, ‘Christian art’.39 In this way, it became possible to interpret modern art that seemed to emancipate itself from traditional Christian art, not as a rupture but as a consequence of Christianity. Christian art started with the painting of scenes of the life of Christ and its saints and finds its fulfilment in the modern paintings of landscapes, interiors of houses, portraits and so on, the world of the modern individual that became possible through Christianity. And love is a central theme of Christian art, connect the love of Christ and his mother to the love of normal people. Hegel explores the dynamics of the modern individual in the phenomenon of the portrait, the emancipation of the landscape and the representation of an individual life in theatre, poetry, and the novel. All those phenomena show the necessity of the acceptance of modern secular reality as Christian reality. As in his ‘philosophy of right’ and of history one can see in his lectures on Aesthetics how essential it was for Hegel to interpret modernity not as a break with Christianity, but as a true realization of it.

5.

The life of the individual as the subject of Christian art

For Hegel, painting, music and individual poetry, the novel and theatre, especially Shakepeare’s plays as an example of modern tragedy, belong to the arts of the modern world and therefore to the Christian world. This does not mean that painting and music were not present in ancient Greece. Of course they were. But they were not the arts that optimally expressed the Greek worldview. That was sculpture, and as symbol of the inner tensions of the Greek worldview, the tragedy. As Hegel shows in a strikingly accurate comparison, the difference between the Greek worldview and Christianity becomes clear in the difference between a sculpture and a painting of a human being. The Greek sculpture presents the beautiful body, that means the shape of man in general, humaneness as such as the embodiment of general virtue, that is, the Greek God. But the weak point of a sculpture, because of the hardness of the material, the stone, are the eyes. They do not have an individual expression. The painted portrait, because of the flexibility of the matter, especially its receptivity 39 Schulz 2008, p. 15.

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of light, is able to give an individual expression to the eyes according to Hegel. Because of this fluidity and this flexibility the painting is able to offer all kinds of individual characteristics, all aspects that deviate from the general image of the human being. It accepts even to a certain extend ugliness as a characteristic. In this way, it becomes clear that the depth of individual subjectivity is always greater than its expression. There can even be a tension between the appearances of a good character in an ugly face. That is impossible in Greek art, where the beautiful shape of the human body is in harmony with the general idea of the humane-divine heroism that it expresses. Painting and the portrait are therefore essentially as Christian as sculpture and statues are essentially Greek. Modern art is, therefore, integrated into Christian art. The portrait is essentially Christian art. Hegel does the same with landscape and interiors of houses. Hegel’s interpretation of Dutch painting is very relevant here. He enters into a discussion with some traditional classicists of his time about the value of Dutch painting. The classicists criticized Dutch painting for being trivial: there were no mythological subjects that confronted man with the lofty themes of heroism, specific virtues, love for you fatherland, and so on. No saints manifesting the value of self-sacrifice! Hegel attacked this kind of criticism in his defence of Dutch painting with the help of Christianity. The Dutch were brave Calvinists that created themselves as an independent country in their struggle against the Spanish Catholic dictator. As a result they had the freedom to appropriate their secular reality as a reality in which they incarnated their freedom. That freedom is Christian freedom. In the shape of Calvinism, therefore, Christianity and secularity go together in the idea of reality as the receptacle of incarnating, self-realizing freedom. This world can be clearly seen in landscapes and household interiors!40 The expression of the principle of ‘subjective humour’ for modern painting uses the subjective perspective, and the subjective developed technical skill, to reveal the valuable, ‘humane’ content of every situation. The novel is Christian, because it is not, as the classical epic, a story about a hero trying to live up to the official collective worldview, but a story based on the experiences of individuals trying to realize their own individual lives in their individual ways. Especially in Hegel’s treatment of educational novel or the novel of personal development (Bildungsroman) and the plays of Shakespeare, you find Hegel’s personal attempt to find an answer to the questions of Hölderlin and other romantics from the point of view of his new perspective on the modern subject. Both the novel and the plays of Shakespeare are marked by the problems of an individual course of life of an individual character looking for his or her personal 40 Hegel 1998, I, p. 597ff.

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way of life. The word ‘character’ is important here! The problem of the beautiful soul is presented as a developmental disorder of modern youth that manifests the existential positive value of full development, Bildung and reflection!

6.

The modern individual and its development (Bildung)

Like his romantic opponents Hegel admires Shakespeare very much. He is important for the determination of the essence of modern art, because he had nothing to do with neoclassicism that tried to live according Greek standards. Especially his combination of tragic and comical elements, his use of normal people and not only kings and heroes, places Shakespeare outside that neoclassicism. Shakespeare was the battlefield for both Hegel and the Schlegel brothers, for where the Schlegel brothers see in Shakespeare’s combination of tragedy and comedy a sign of irony, it is for Hegel an expression of his deep humour.41 Although Shakespeare’s plays do not have specific religious subjects, his plays, with their stress on the subsistence of a individual character could only appear within the Christian world, in which the non-divine world, the specific humanity, achieves its full legitimacy. In his treatment of Shakespeare, Hegel pays some special attention to the character as an inner, but undeveloped (unausgebildete) totality. Here, in this chapter about the problems of modern subjectivity and its self-realization, Hegel thinks about the problems of Hölderlin without mentioning his name. He talks about characters of great richness and depth that stay within themselves and keep all kind of ‘reflection’ about realization in finite ends at a distance. But in the life of such a character ‘a time must come when it is touched at one specific point of its inner life, when it throws its undivided force into one feeling determining its life, clings to it with undispersed strength, and is fortunate or else, lacking an attitude of stable selfcontainment (Haltung), perishes. For a stable attitude of self-containment man needs the developed breadth of an ethical substance which alone supplies objective firmness.42 Hegel states clearly that only by the development of the necessary breadth of ethical experience and substantiality one can realize an attitude, which gives firmness in life. Not by staying within oneself, in the abstract conscience, but by going outside into the world of shared behaviour and ethics. Inner fullness, although on the 41 Ibid., p. 592. 42 Hegel 1986b, II, p. 205ff.; Hegel 1998, I, p. 581ff. I use this translations, but add my translation if the Knox translation is inadequate, as in this case. The English text translates Haltung incorrectly with ‘support’ and incorrectly adds ‘the state’ after ‘ethical substance’ between brackets. We translate Haltung here as ‘stable attitude’ or ‘containment’. ‘Composed behavior’ can also be an alternative.

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one hand always richer than any particular manifestation, on the other hand, it realizes itself only in particular situations, lived together with others. Hegel thinks here of Juliet in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. One can interpret Juliet, Hegel says, as a young girl who lived in naivety, not spoiled by reflection.43 All of a sudden, touched by love, she has to manifest herself, comes out of herself, as a rose that suddenly begins to flourish ‘like the first blossoming of a whole rose at once in all its petals and folds’ […]. previously there was no inner differentiation, formation and development (gebildet, Bildung). A hitherto self-enclosed spirit […] which stands there unexpectedly in full bloom, but the quicker it unfolds, the quicker too does it droop, its petals gone’.44 Hölderlin used the image of the bud in his poem of Hyperion too for the Greek Gods. There spirit flourished eternally within the blossom. What Hegel with his image of the bud and the rose wants to say, that such a divine character in human beings, is a naive character that, coming out, flourishes and dies immediately at the same time without having the opportunity to realize itself. Hegel elaborates on this theme in German folk poetry, in Goethe and in Schiller. Very relevant here is the analyses of a character in Goethe’s poem ‘Der König von Thule’, ‘The King of Thule’: ‘But such a deep and tranquil heart, which keeps its energy of soul pent up like the spark in a flint, which does not give itself outside form which does not develop (ausgebildet, Bildung) its existence and reflection (Reflexion) has after all not freed itself through this development (Bildung). When the discord of misfortune resounds through its life, it remains exposed to the grim contradiction of having no skill, no bridge to reconcile its heart with reality and so to ward off external circumstances, to maintain itself stable against them (gehalten zu sein) and to stay self-contained (an sich zu halten)’45 Hegel also applies this characterization to Hamlet. By using ‘beautiful soul’ for this type of character, one knows that it also becomes applicable on Hölderlin. Again Hegel stresses the existential necessity of Bildung, of ‘development’ as the only way to realize and to maintain oneself. In the Bildungsroman the educational or ‘development novel’ the prosaic side of modern self-realization is presented, the necessity of becoming embedded in the conditions of life. The ‘mother’ of all such novels is Rousseau’s Pmile. Hegel 43 See note 11. One should compare again the English translation with the German text. It translates doch Julia kann noch anders genommen werden wrongly with ‘Julia cannot otherwise be taken as’. 44 See note 11. 45 Ibid., p. 207. The English translation on page 583 again is totally inadequate. It translates ausgebildet, which stems from ‘bilden’ meaning ‘forming’, with ‘imagery’. The reason is that Bild means ‘image’ in English. But in the German text has the word ausgebildet, that means developed here. The translation of Haltung and its variations with ‘support’ is also inadequate.

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thinks about Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjare). This embedding is conceived in terms of Bildung again as hineinbilden, that is ‘to bring’, or ‘to form yourself into’. The development novel is for Hegel about the idealistic young man that wants to life his own personal life, to realize his own ideals and therefore often deplores that things like the family, civil society and the state exist and demand attention. He wants to change the world, to breach this order of things, but those fights belong in the modern world to the years of apprentice in which this young man will find his proper place. Hegel concludes with a very beautiful description of such an apprenticeship: For the end of this apprenticeship consists in this that the subject sows it wild oats, builds himself (hineinbildet) in harmony with subsisting relationships and their rationality, enters the concatenation of the world and acquires for himself an appropriate attitude to it. However much he may have quarrelled with the world, or been pushed about in it, in most cases at last he gets his girl and some sort of position, marries her and becomes as good a Philistine as others. The woman takes charges of household management, children arrive, the adored wife, at first unique, an angel, behaves pretty much as all other wives; the man’s profession provides work and vexations, marriage brings domestic affliction-so here we have all the headaches (Katzenjammer = ‘cats wail’) of the rest of married folk.46

That is the completion of an incarnated life. But ‘becoming a philistine as others’, having all the ‘headaches of the rest of married folk’, ‘that the adored wife, an angel, behaves pretty much as all other wives’, does this describe Christianity, is that the Kingdom of God? Yes, one must say according to Hegel, for it is incarnation, implantation in and the acceptance of the real conditions of life! The divine life of ‘Stirb und Werde’ is nothing more than realism. Coming to terms with reality in the development novel is a parallel to what is presented in Dutch painting and in the inner determination of some characters in Shakespeare. But this acceptance of reality itself does not make one a philistine. It happens, as we said, in the attitude of humour. Now humour is not superficial, it has its own depth. It is a sign of acceptance and transcendence above all of the crude aspects of life. In this respect, Hegel refers from Goethe. Not to the younger Goethe, but the older Goethe of the ‘West-östlicher Divan’. This book is famous because of its fullness of experiences, the experiences of a whole life. For Goethe all the situations that he lived in, from Napoleon, the discovery of Islamic mystical poetry, to his personal love life, have become a kind of symbolic universe in which he walks around freely. He can play with it to a certain extent.47 For Hegel it reveals the essence of Christianity as the ability to abandon yourself to the world without losing yourself in it. 46 Ibid., I, p. 59. See also Hegel original, o.c. p. 220. 47 Hegel, o.c., p. 241–242, Hegel 1998, I, p. 610–611.

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Culture Protestantism: Secular culture as Christian culture

Hegel integrated the development of modern, secular art in the history of Christian art, as he integrated the modern political institutions in the history of Christianity as the religion of freedom. As a modern Christian you do not need special Christian subjects for your artistic inspiration. The Christian communication with the world happens in modern art as such. Modernity in its political sense is, for Hegel, represented by the French Revolution, but this revolution of the institutions presupposed a revolution in the mind, and that mental revolution was the Reformation. So it is Christianity in its Protestant form that is the realization and artistic inspiration of the freedom of humanity through personal individuality and the essence of the Christian religion.48 Hegel fosters the idea that Christianity is the father of modern, secular freedom, although it began with Judaism. With pain in his still old Graecophile heart he says, like Schiller, that in the Judaic idea of creation, nature lost its polytheistic poetry. Man and God are bereft of god. But the opposite side of this loss is that nature for the first time is normal secular reality and that humanity has a bit more independence. But with regard to God humanity is conscious of its nullity and the nothingness of all finite reality.49 In Christianity, the human being is an independent free being for the first time, because God created humanity by incarnating himself in what is human. Unlike in oriental religions like Islam, or even Judaism, humanity is not an unsubstantial accident of a totalitarian God, described in Spinozistic terms by Hegel, but in its finitude an essential free being, that can set his own purposes.50 This history of human freedom, in which God reveals Godself as much or much more than in nature, results in the reality of the modern state. The modern state is collectivity, the substantial tie in which the individuals are bound together.51 Therefore the modern state far better embodies the reality of Christianity than the church.52 Another special institution of Christianity that transcends culture, the Christian monastic life, no longer makes any sense for Hegel! Hegel criticizes the monastic vows of celibacy, poverty and obedience from the perspective of modern culture as a world of free self-realization through labour 48 49 50 51

Hegel 1970a, p. 492. Hegel 1998, I, p. 374ff. Hegel 2007, III, p. 24; p. 242–243/172. Compare also, Steunebrink 2012, p. 216. Provoking a lot of criticism or of misunderstanding, this relation between state and individual is described at a certain level as a relation between a substance, the state, and an accident, a moment, the individual. Comp. Hegel 1998, I, p. 258 (remark); p. 279. Also, Peperzak 2001, p. 489. That is not the way Hegel describes the Christian individual in his relation to God! Whether in the dialectical relation between God and man, both at the end become moments of each other, is another problem. 52 Ibid., p. 627ff.

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in civil society. The world has truth in itself.53 Therefore he says that Luther made the right decision in marrying. The ideal of poverty does not make sense in the modern world of labour, and obedience is in contradiction with the freedom of man. The diremtion of the churches showed to Hegel the necessity of the preponderance of the state over the churches.54 The church, essentially the Lutheran church, is a kind of Vestal Virgin of the state that keeps the flame of its principles burning, the freedom in its hearth, and in everyone’s heart. Therefore the modern state cannot be without religion. Secular freedom without Christianity would lose its basis. Hegel reinterprets and protects Christianity at the service of modern autonomy realized in the state. It is that state that regulates the dangers of the possibly unlimited freedom of the Bildung and binds the individuals together. At the level of the state a collective ethos is necessary in distinction from individual morality. Hegel talks about individual morality in civil society, but in the end, individual morality is there to internalize the collective ethos of the state as all individual contracts transcending reality. Art and religion, transcend the state, in so far as they provide the idea of totality as the unity of an ideal, and reality as it never can be realized by the state. Therefore they reconcile man with his finitude in the way described above. Hegel’s interpretation of Christianity is a real challenge. He declares that ‘we Europeans’ or ‘Western people’ are Christians in so far as we are Europeans, not in so far we are baptized members of the church as the community of believers. It was of course, criticized by theologians like Karl Barth, and evidently the model was unacceptable for Catholic thinkers. No one can deny the influence of Christianity on western culture. Culturally speaking, we are all Christians to a certain extent. But Hegel identifies our culture with the content of Christianity as such. His cultural history of Christianity is at the same time his ‘theology’. That is problematic of course, but it has a strong life, for this position comes back in modern hermeneutical thinkers under the title ‘our tradition’. Hegel’s problem with the relation between modern secular state and Christian religion is now essentially our problem as well. For on the one hand our state is a secular state, to whom citizens belong regardless of their religion and ethnicity. On the other hand, this secular state has its origin in a specific mode of Christian self-understanding, and the question is whether or not it needs to be reinvigorated or re-Christianised, or if it can emancipate itself from the past. The European Union presents with the latter option. The European Union wants to be a secular political unity to which Muslim citizens and a geographically European but Muslim country like Turkey (Hegel would not be 53 Hegel 1970a, p. 502. 54 Hegel 1998, I, p. 270; p. 174.

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able to imagine this possibility!) could have access too. In its charters it confesses that both the (Judaeo-) Christian value system and humanism belong to the ethical roots of the Union. Therefore, not only European Christians, but also European non-believers can deny a Muslim nation an access to the European Union because it does not participate in that Judaeo-Christian value system! The problems of Hegel’s Cultural-Protestantism are still alive and kicking in the identity problems of contemporary Europe. The problem is very much present in all kinds of debates about the realization of modern democracy in non-western, non-Christian countries. Can modern political culture be appropriated by non-Christian religions? For Hegel, nonChristian religions, including Islam, are pre-Christian religions that lost their potential for essential new historical developments.55 That answer is no longer valid for a world of plurality of existing religions, in which the dialogue between religions goes together with a dialogue about modernity, democracy, natural law and human rights. Karl Jaspers, Habermas, and Islamic thinkers like Abdullahi, Ahmed An-na’im, and Soroush have already made significant contributions in this area. The necessity of new kinds of cultural studies in combination with philosophy and theology shows itself here. But the topic in philosophy and theology is urgent since and because of Hegel! It includes the emergence of India and the Islamic world, and whether Hinduism and Islam themselves need a reformation! The example of Luther was well known among Muslim and Hindu reformation thinkers in the nineteenth century. Hegel is often called, not without good reasons of course, a Eurocentric philosopher, but when we see how difficult it was for him to reintegrate modern culture in Christianity, how painful sometimes the turn was that he had to make in order to accept modern individuality in art, religion and politics, we can also imagine the difficulties and pain of acceptance of modernity in non-European, non-Christian countries and which reinterpretations of their tradition they have to be prepared for in order to avoid schizophrenia and hypocrisy.

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Idem: Enzyklopaedie der Philosophischen Wissenschaften, I, II, III. Frankfurt am Main 1970b. Idem: ‘Der Geist des Christentums’, in: idem: Frühe Schriften, Werke I. Frankfurt am Main 1971. Idem: ‘Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie’, in: idem: Jenaer Schriften 1801–1807, Theorie Werk Ausgabe 2. Frankfurt am Main 1986a. Idem: Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, I, II, III. Frankfurt am Main1986b. Idem: Phänomenologie des Geistes. Hamburg 1988. Idem: Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, I, II, III. Hamburg 1994. Idem: Hegel’s Aesthetics, Lectures on Fine Art, I, II (Transl.: Thomas Malcolm Knox). Oxford 1998. Idem: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, I, II, II (Transl.: Peter C. Hodgson). Berkeley 2007. Heintel, Erich: Die beiden Labyrinthe der Philosophie. Vienna / Munich 1968. Hirsch, Emanuel: ‘Die Beisetzung der Romantiker in Hegels Phänomenologie’, in: Fulda, Hans Friedrich / Henrich, Dietrich (Eds.): Materialien zur Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Frankfurt am Main 1973, S. 245–275. Hölderlin, Friedrich: Werke und Briefe I, II, III (Eds.: Friedrich Bessner / Jochen Schmidt). Frankfurt am Main 1969. Idem: Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin (Ed. and Transl.: James Mitchel). San Francisco 2007. Jamme, Christoph: ‘Ein ungelehrtes Buch’, Die philosophische Gemeinschaft zwischen Hölderlin und Hegel in Frankfurt 1797–1800. Bonn 1983. Peperzak, Adriaan: Modern Freedom, Hegel’s Legal, Moral and Political Freedom. Dordrecht 2001. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Emile, or On Education (Transl.: Allan Bloom). New York 1979. Idem: ‘Discours sur l’in8galit8 parmi les hommes’, in: idem: Du contrat social. Paris 1976, S. 275–348 [Discours on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality among Men (Transl.: Ian Johnston). Nanaimo, BC 2004]. Schlegel, Friedrich: Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder. London 1995. Schleiermacher, Friedrich: On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (Transl.: Richard Crouter). Cambridge 1996. Schmauss, Marion: Psychosomatik: Literarische, philosophische und medizinische Geschichten zur Entstehung eines Diskurses. Tübingen 2009. Schulz, Gerhard: Romantik, Geschichte und Begriff. München 2008. Starobinski, Jean: ‘Le discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’in8galit8’, in: idem: Jean Jacques Rousseau: la transparence et l’obstacle, suivi de sept essais sur Rousseau. Paris 1971, p. 330–355. Steunebrink, Gerrit: ‘A Religion after Christianity? Hegel’s Interpretation of Islam between Judaism and Christianity’, in: Labuschagne, Barend / Slootweg, Timo (Eds.): Hegel’s Philosophy of the Historical Religions. Leiden 2012, p. 207–241. Idem: ‘Das Ideal der Unmittelbarkeit der Kunst und Hegels Schwierigkeit, die Eigenart der modernen Kunst zu bestimmen’, in: Gethmann-Siefert, Annemarie / Nagl-Docekal, Herta / Rjzsa, Ers8bet / Weisser-Lohmann, Elisabeth (Eds.): Hegels Ästhetik als Theorie der Moderne. Berlin 2013, p. 141–165.

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Herman Westerink

Modernity as the Variety of Hermeneutics of the Self: Faith and Despair in the Tragic History of Francesco Spira

Among some of the most important protagonists in the psychology of religion, one finds an interesting and inspiring perspective on how one could study religion and religious phenomena. According to William James in his famous The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), one should preferably study religion when it is in its most intense, extreme, and excessive forms. Religion, which essentially consists of ‘the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine’1, can be best studied in the most intense feelings, the most rigorous and extreme acts, and the most excessive experiences. James writes: I said in my former lecture that we learn most about a thing when we view it under a microscope, as it were, or in its most exaggerated form. This is as true of religious phenomena as of any other kind of fact. The only cases likely to be profitable enough to repay our attention will therefore be cases where the religious spirit is unmistakable and extreme.2

William James was most likely the first – though not the only one – who focused systematically on the significance of the extreme, the exaggerated, and in many ways the abnormal and the marginal, in order to further our understanding of religion. If one wants to understand religion in a certain cultural context or epoch, the best, and perhaps the only way to come to a profound understanding is through the study of its excessive forms. Prominent paradigmatic phenomena are cases of conversion and mysticism. Another major protagonist in the field of the psychology of religion is Sigmund Freud, and, although his evaluation of religion is quite different from James’, there is an interesting parallel. Like James, Freud also suggests that we study religion from the perspective of the abnormal. By this, he does not refer to 1 James 1902, p. 31. 2 Ibid., p. 39.

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the most extreme and intense forms of religious feelings, acts, and experiences as such, but to the psychopathologies that can serve as a model for understanding religion. According to Freud – and this is particularly evident in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality from 1905 – the only way to understand human nature and its psychical building blocks is through the study of the exaggerated forms we find manifesting in psychoneuroses. Thus, the best way to study human sexuality is through the study of hysteria and the perversions; the best way to study ambivalence of feelings is through the analysis of melancholia; the best way to understand the relation between aggression, guilt, and conscience is through the study of obsessional neurosis.3 It is from this perspective that we can understand the significance of Freud’s claim in Totem and Taboo (1912–1913) that ‘an obsessional neurosis is the caricature of a religion’.4 This should not be read – as is often done – as if Freud makes the negative claim that religion is a mental aberration. In fact, the claim expresses Freud’s pathoanalytic perspective to its ultimate consequences; that not only human nature, but also the cultural products and manifestations of human nature, can best be studied from the perspective of psychoneuroses. These psychoneuroses show the aspects and dynamics that structure and organize human psychic and cultural life in a magnified and intensified way. These introductory remarks are meant to provide a certain plausibility and legitimacy to the choice of material for this chapter. For, although this volume is concerned with the complex questions of the characteristics, specifics, and significance of modernity, the relation between modernity and religious reformation movements, and the relation between the processes of Christianization and secularization processes in the modern age, my starting point will not be taken from the grand theories on modernity or the analysis of the major historical developments. I will start at the margins of historical events, first focusing on the tragic history of an Italian Protestant named Francesco Spira who lived (and died) in the era of the Reformation, and whose story – which I will treat in the way Freud deals with case studies – that is, analyzing the individual story and then moving on to general theoretical remarks and implications. I will take this as the model for understanding religious subjectivity in early modernity.

3 On this issue and Freud’s so-called pathoanalytic approach see Van Haute 2005; Van Haute and Westerink 2015. 4 Freud 1955, p. 73.

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The Case of Francesco Spira

In May 1548 the roughly fifty-year-old civil lawyer, Francesco Spira, left his house in Citadella near Padua in order to travel to Venice and appear before the Inquisition.5 The Inquisition had put him under severe pressure, arguing that Spira was about to endanger himself, his family – consisting of a wife and eleven children – and his thus far successful career if he continued to espouse Protestantism. Apparently, Spira had been moved by the teachings of Luther some six years earlier, and had fully embraced the faith ‘that we must wholly and only depend on the free and unchangeable love of God, in the death of Christ, as the only sure way of salvation’.6 However, now under pressure and after undergoing severe doubts, he travelled to Venice where he publicly renounced his Protestant convictions and proclaimed his obedience to the Church of Rome at St. Mark’s in Venice. The Inquisition also demanded a second public renunciation in his hometown. However, on his way home he heard a voice – the voice of Christ – questioning his conscience, saying: ‘Thou wicked wretch, thou hast denied me, thou hast renounced the covenant of obedience; thou hast broken thy vow, hence apostate, bear with thee, the sentence of thy eternal damnation’.7 From that moment onwards, Spira became convinced that he had been forsaken, and was incapable of finding any peace of mind. He thus fell into despair. At this point in time, his friends appeared on the scene, a group of about thirty people – several of whom were eminent citizens of the region. These eminent friends were Pietro Paolo Vergerius, bishop of Capodistra, Matteo Gribaldi, a Catholic civil lawyer and professor in Padua, Henry Scrimger, an English diplomat, Sigismund Gelous, a Hungarian Protestant humanist, and Martin Borrhaus, a Protestant professor of Old Testament Studies. These friends tended to him during his deep despair which soon developed into a general suffering, including a period of selfstarvation, which resulted in his death only six months later. After his death, it is these friends that would write down their accounts and interpretations of the events in a series of letters that together make up Spira’s biography as first published in 1550 – with a preface written by John Calvin. By that time, Spira’s former Catholic friends had all converted to Protestantism. These friends’ intentions were first and foremost of a pastoral nature. They 5 De verschrickelijcke historie van Franciscus Spiera 1669. The original history was written in Latin but soon translated in various languages. On this history see, MacDonald 1992; Exalto 2005, p. 147–158; Westerink 2014. In this chapter I will occasionally quote from a late and transcribed account of the history originally composed and published by Nathaniel Bacon in 1637/1638 and later reorganized with added material on two other cases: A Relation of the Fearfull Estate of Francesco Spira 1770. 6 Ibid., p. 3. 7 Ibid., p. 14.

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tried their best to comfort Spira, and to convince him of an alternative selfjudgement through various strategies and interpretations of his condition. They considered, for example, the possibility of melancholy, and called upon physicians to investigate Spira’s condition, to purge his blood, et cetera, although it was all to no effect. At one point an exorcist arrived, as Spira had become convinced he was possessed by the devil. But whatever rituals the exorcist performed, they did not change Spira’s condition at all.8 The most important pastoral strategy, however, was that of discussion. The friends discussed with Spira the way he read and interpreted the bible, how he considered central doctrinal aspects, and how he applied them to his own state. There are many examples of this. When his friends asked him what he himself considered to be ‘the cause of his disease’ he replied with: ‘My sin is greater than the mercy of God’. To this the friends answer that the mercy of God is above all sin, and that God wants all men to be saved. When Spira calmly and brilliantly argued for his own damnation, regarding himself as a reprobate, ‘like Cain, or Judas, who casting away all hope of mercy fell into despair’, the friends sharply rebuked him, saying that Spira had not violated the mercy of God, and could thus still consider himself to be amongst the elect.9 At first glance, the discussions of certain biblical passages seem to concern the issue of exegesis and the proper application of biblical texts. Spira calls upon texts that support and justify his own convictions – his friends oppose these texts with other texts arguing for the contrary. But the intellectual debates are only the surface of a more subtle exchange of views. Francesco’s friends like Vergerius and Gribaldi consistently shifted attention away from the intellectual knowledge and exegesis of texts towards an underlying psychological motive. This motive can be defined as ‘care for oneself ’. That is, Spira’s deep concern over the state of his soul before the face of God. It is this motive that underlies both his interpretation of the Bible and his self-judgement as a reprobate. In the Protestant context of the letters about Spira’s history, this ‘care for oneself ’ is interpreted as a sign of faith that is not yet conscious. An example can be found in this history when Vergerius incites Spira to pray the Lord’s Prayer. After each sentence prayed Spira would comment. For example, when having uttered the words ‘Lead us not into temptation’ Spira would say : ‘Seeing, Lord that I am brought into temptation, help me, Lord, that I may escape; the enemy has overcome, help me, I beseech thee, to overcome this cruel tyrant’. Vergerius would immediately respond by saying ‘you know that none can call Christ Jesus, the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost: you must therefore think of yourself, according to their soft affec-

8 Ibid., p. 42–43. 9 Ibid., p. 19–21.

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tion, which you express in your prayers’.10 The friends’ strategy is to constantly articulate these ‘soft affections’ of care of the self before the face of God – a care that is a manifestation of faith. In other words, they seek out the signs of faith made manifest in Spira’s apparent and confessed unbelief and subsequent despair. In the background of this procedure we can recognize central elements of Luther’s thought. Firstly, there is the central place of spiritual struggle – Anfechtung – in Luther’s theology. This is, the spiritual despair resulting from the feeling of abandonment by God as a crucial aspect of what can afterwards be interpreted as imitatio Christi and the premise for true faith (trust) in salvation and justification.11 Secondly, there is the Lutheran notion of the revelatio Dei sub contrario specie, which states that God will only reveal himself in opposition to what we, sinners, naturally expect, think, and perceive. It is from this principle that unbelief and despair can be interpreted as manifestations of their opposites. From this we can extract the actual central problematics of the case history, namely the hermeneutical problem that appears in Lutheran thought, of how to interpret manifest convictions, self-judgements, and expressions when these can be (but not necessarily are) manifestations of opposite underlying – often ‘unconscious’ – truths. More concretely, Spira’s despair is a symptom or a sign, but of what exactly? In the narratives that together compose the history of Francesco Spira this question is explored in various directions. One of the questions is whether Spira’s spiritual state, his mental and physical condition, can be interpreted as caused by the interference of the devil. In this context the appearance of an exorcist is an important moment. The failed attempts to exorcize Spira were interpreted by his friends as proof that Spira was not bodily possessed by the devil. His melancholic mental state, which seems to point at some form of madness, should in fact be seen as resulting from a spiritual struggle in which the devil is indeed involved. Although not a force penetrating the body, the devil acts as a force that emphasizes the estrangement from God. In the background of the exorcist scene and its interpretation, we can recognize the Lutheran perspective on the work of the devil – the Trauergeist. For Luther, the devil is first and foremost the eternal opponent of God, seeking to further estrange man from God, casting him into despair and instilling in him a deep sense of abandonment. In Luther’s Table Talks we find a passage where Luther makes the distinction between bodily and spiritual possession. He argues that the first form has no influence on man’s spiritual state before the face of God, whereas the second form is very dangerous since here man is incited by the devil to further estrange himself from God. Spiritual possession, simply put, is a magnified existential dimension of unbelief and the awareness of sin. In other words, it is an aspect of 10 Ibid., p. 33–34. 11 See amongst others Bast 2004; Hamm 2010; Rittgers 2012; Westerink 2014.

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the Anfechtung, the spiritual struggle.12 With this background we can understand why the exorcist fails in his performance. His activities correspond to a form of possession that Spira is not suffering from. How did his friends know this? Their review of the scene was not based on the fact that the exorcism failed, but on a close reading of Spira’s symptoms and signs. If Spira had been bodily possessed by the devil, he would have behaved like a true and furious madman. But this was clearly not the case – Spira remained calm and reasonable throughout his period of ‘illness’. This brings us to another important line of inquest in the history, namely the question of whether or not Spira’s mental state can be seen as manifestation of melancholia. Highly relevant to this question is the appearance of two physicians from Padua. From their investigations, the two men concluded that Spira was not ‘physically ill’ but suffering from an ‘illness of the soul’ returning the following answer to the friends: […] that they could not discern that his body was afflicted with any danger, or distemper originally from itself, by reason of the over-ruling of any humour ; but that this malady of his, did arise from some grief or passion of the mind, which being overburdened, did so oppress the spirits, as they wanted passage; stirred up many ill humours, whereof the body of man is full; and these ascending to the brain, troubled the fancy, shadowed the seat of judgement, and so corrupted it.13

The crucial point in this passage is the differentiation between a primarily bodily illness, and a spiritual malady. In the first case, a physiological disturbance of the humours had an effect on mental states which resulted in what sixteenth-century medicine would call ‘melancholia’. In the second case, a spiritual issue – some grief or passion – could stir up the humours and result in a troublesome mental state. But how is one able to discern them from each other? Again crucial is the proper interpretation of symptoms. In Spira’s case, melancholia would be the wrong diagnosis, due to the lack of certain typical symptoms of melancholia, such as hallucinations and a severe disturbance of cognitive and intellectual capacities. That things are not always that easy and self-evident illustrated in other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century medical and religious literature on the topic. Various authors, in particular those set in a Puritan or Calvinist context, will argue that the difference between melancholia and spiritual despair are actually quite difficult to discern. In both cases the symptoms can be very similar. This leads some religious authors to argue that a melancholic disposition is a good precondition for faith,14 while other authors, such as the 12 Luther 1912, number 1170; Oberman 1982; Oberman 1986, p. 189–206; Westerink 2014, p. 22–23. 13 A Relation of the Fearfull Estate, p. 16. 14 See for example Bolton 1635, p. 211: ‘[Melancholicke men] have a passive advantage […] by

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famous Robert Burton, concluded from this remarkable fact that maybe certain forms of religiousness are fertile soil for melancholia.15 But whatever the later discussions on this issue and whatever the later interpretations of Spira – an exemplary Christian according to some Puritan and Calvinist authors,16 or a perfect example of religious melancholy according to Burton and others – it is clear that the physicians are of no help in Spira’s case. Do you think that this disease is to be cured by potions? It is neither plaisters nor drugs that can help a fainting soul, cast down with the sense of sin, and wrath of God; it is only Christ that must be the physician, and the gospel the soul’s antidote.17

A third and fundamental problem for the various witnesses and interpreters of Francesco Spira’s life has already been mentioned briefly, but deserves to be highlighted once more. This concerns the issue of how far and in what way Spira’s convictions are truthful and adequate: Is he really a reprobate and deserving of eternal damnation? In the original preface, Calvin is very clear on this issue. Yes, Spira is, as he himself thought, a most perfect and frightening example of an apostate deserving damnation. He has indeed rejected Christ and his true church. He placed himself outside of the community of the elect, and hence, is a reprobate. Vergerius and others are of a different opinion, and regard Spira’s conviction a truthful expression of a profound care for his own state before the face of God. His despair is then seen rather as a ‘spark of faith’ originating from God’s hidden works of grace in his soul. This history of Francesco Spira is less obscure than one might expect it to be. Soon after the original first edition in Latin in 1550, translations in German, Italian, and English were published. It is notable that in the seventeenth century, first in the context of English Puritanism, and then also in Dutch contra-remonstrant Calvinism, Spira’s history is repeatedly referred to in important rereason of their sad dispositions, and fearefull spirits, to be sooner affrighted, and dejected by comminations of judgments against sinne; more feelingly to take to heart the miseries, and dangers of their natural state; more easily to tremble and stoope under the mighty hand of God, and hammer of his Law, Guiltinesse, and horrour, damnation and hell beget in their timorous natures stronger impressions of feare: whereupon they are wont to taste deeplier of legall contrition, and remorse; and so proportionably to feele and acknowledge a greater necessity of Jesus Christ […] and at length to throw their trembling soules into his blessed bosome with more eagernesse.’ Also Schmidt 2007, p. 60–61. 15 In his famous The Anatomy of Melancholy from 1621 Robert Burton introduces the concept of ‘religious melancholy’ in order to describe the type of melancholic despair, grief and torment resulting from the ‘defect of the love of God’, i. e. the deep sense of estrangement from or abandonment by God causing ‘unspeakable miseries’ unto the point of extreme madness. Burton 2001. On this text see also Gowland 2006; Westerink 2014, chapter 5. 16 For example according to William Perkins – one of the most important protagonists of English Puritanism – and Gisbert Voetius – a leader of the Dutch counter-remonstrants. 17 A Relation of the Fearfull Estate, p. 17.

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ligious and medical literature, either as an argument against, or in favour of, a certain form of Protestant piety.18 The reasoning in the later religious literature is as follows: in Francesco Spira’s history one finds the significance of spiritual struggle expressed paradigmatically and magnified. The concern with one’s inner spiritual state before the face of God, the admonishing function of conscience, the anxiety of the reborn and elect, and the despair and humiliation of the sinner, all of which are the constitutive aspects of faith, are present. It is for this reason that William Perkins, the English Puritan, could refer to spiritual abandonment as a ‘sacred despair’.19 In this literature the original themes and issues are once again in focus: the question of and search for the hidden origins behind the apparent symptoms and signs – the devil and God, physical and/or mental illness, and reprobation or election. What started with Luther is here continued: the manifestations, convictions, and acts do not necessarily correspond to the nature of the hidden causes – despair can be a manifestation of election, unbelief an expression of faith, et cetera. From a broader perspective one can say that this concrete history connects to central issues in religious thought. This concerns, for example, the problem of how to relate humanity’s sinful nature to grace and justification. Related to this question, how and with which criteria can one distinguish faith from unbelief, sin from grace, or reprobate from elect? It is because of these issues and problems that Spira’s history remains a point of reference throughout the seventeenth century, only disappearing from the literature in the course of the enlightened eighteenth century. Before we further explore the significance and potential of Francesco Spira’s tragic history for our understanding of religiousness in early modernity, we first have to engage with a growing body of literature on modernity itself.

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Theoretical considerations, perspectives and problems

In the ‘classic’ perspectives and theories on the origins and character of modernity – concepts such as progress, advancement, development, growth, turning points, ruptures, liberation, emancipation, and enlightenment are central. According to Hegel, it was the Reformation, and Luther in particular, that marked Europe’s transition from the medieval to the modern era. Also according to Hegel, something of a revolution appeared with Luther. It was not in the form of a radical break, but in the first (albeit limited) shift from ascetic self-denial and the 18 For an overview of English issues see MacDonald 1992. As regards Dutch issues there is relatively short time span in which most issues are published – between 1644 and 1666 five editions translated from an English version are published; in 1669 a new translation of the original Latin text is published with a preface written by Voetius. 19 Perkins 1600, p. 589.

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attention for external material things as mediating the presence of God (‘the recognition of a sensuous object as God’) towards the internality of reason, faith, and the freedom of the human spirit relating the individual directly to God (‘man sustains an immediate relation him [Christ] in Spirit’).20 Hegel’s views were of fundamental importance to the classic take on modernity as characterized by emancipation and liberation. It is often the case that in this line of thought Ren8 Descartes’ turn to the reasonable, autonomous, and self-conscious subject is given a central position in the narratives concerning the origin of Enlightenment as the era of reason and the victory over the religious world view that depended on structures of authority, misconceptions, magic, and superstition. An influential book was Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History, published in 1949, in which an important secularization thesis was developed. Löwith argued that modernity was characterized by the secularization of Christian notions and ideals, hence began a process of secularism and the gradual decline of traditional religion. This process should not, however, simply be described in terms of emancipation through reason – Löwith wanted to understand secularism from the perspective of the dynamics within Christianity, that is to say, he interprets secularism as the outcome of the pursuit of the religious ideal to change the world and develop it into a better place. This gave rise to, for example, the struggle against superstition, modern science, humanist ideals, et cetera.21 Another influential book was Hans Blumenberg’s Die Legitimität der Neuzeit from 1966. In his view, modernity can best be understood as a unique, and original era that is characterized by the rediscovery and rehabilitation of classic theoretical curiositas. This rediscovery is situated in the context of a new self-consciousness of individuals, breaking away from the crises and the decline of the medieval world view – a decline set in motion by medieval nominalism. Modern self-consciousness could then be seen as a legitimate reaction against certain problematic developments in medieval theology, notably against nominalist theological voluntarism, relative to the thematics of contingent worldly events and the theodicy.22 Blumenberg is important in that he highlights the significance of nominalism for the emergence of modern thought. Recently, Michael Gillespie in The Theological Origins of Modernity called upon Blumenberg’s theses when arguing that modernity can be seen as the result of the intellectual crisis evoked by the nominalist focus on God’s absolute and free omnipotence. Gillespie also stresses that modernity should not be described in terms of emancipation from a 20 Hegel 2001, p. 434. In his lectures on philosophy of religion Hegel will argue that ‘religion is the relation of human consciousness to God’. The central idea of this definition is the immediate relation between the subject (as an absolutely free being not hindered by external necessities) and the object through consciousness. Hegel 2006, p. 76, p. 87–88. 21 Löwith 1949. 22 Blumenberg 1996.

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theological and religious worldview, but as a ‘realization of the metaphysical and theological possibilities left by the antecedent tradition’.23 According to Gillespie, it was nominalism that set the agenda for a variety of modern attempts to develop new metaphysical structures that could serve as answers to the crises evoked by nominalist thought. In short, modernity originates from a crisis in metaphysics and theology. The fundamental question concerning both Blumenberg’s and Gillespie’s position is whether an intellectual tradition such as nominalism is indeed the decisive factor in the emergence of the modern era. The implicit claim within these theories is that modernity can and should be explained via theoretical, i. e., intellectual sources and problems. In his Passage to Modernity from 1993, Louis Dupr8 has underscored not only the significance of nominalism, but equally so that of the renaissance and humanism. Modernity conceived of as ‘an event that has transformed the relation between the cosmos, its transcendent source, and its human interpreter’24 can be seen as partly resulting from the nominalist body of thought on the separation of God and nature. This is based on Ockham’s conceptualization of the distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata – creating a great niche for modern natural science on the collapse of the Platonic medieval systems of analogies. Modernity should also be understood as originating from the rediscovery of the classical era and people’s capacity to creatively design one’s own life. After all, the classic era of Greek and Roman thought shows that a civil and morally virtuous attitude can be developed without the support of a Christian worldview of the transcendent. There are various sources affecting the modern subject, says Dupr8, in that this subject is now both a ‘source of meaning’ and a ‘meaning-giving subject’. According to him, the modern subject is no longer situated in and no longer finds support in the medieval notion that all human concepts and interpretational frameworks are nothing but an innate or internalized divine reality and orientation. Instead, the modern subject is characterized by the awareness that they themselves must interpret, articulate, and realize their own individuality and societal life without relapsing into a predetermined system of meaning. On this issue Dupr8 writes that: ‘Renaissance philosophers carried the difference further, to a point out where the person as an independent power began to compete with nature or the Creator in constituting meaning and value’.25 Regarding Dupr8 we can say that the significance of nominalism for an understanding of the sources and origins of modernity has been rightly emphasized, and this is important not only to understand certain intellectual move23 Gillespie 2008, p. 12. 24 Dupr8 1993, p. 249. 25 Ibid., p. 113.

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ments, but, on a more fundamental level, to show us that modernity should not be seen as a radical departure from the medieval period. There is continuity between medieval thought (nominalism) and certain trends in modern thought (i. e. voluntarist models in theology and philosophy). The general trend in scholarship on modernity confirms this. In past literature Descartes was often referred to as the starting point for something completely new – an assessment that was largely based on Descartes’ own narrations in his Meditations which, after all, start with the idea of a radical break with traditional opinions and the attempt to found science and philosophy on a completely new foundation. However, Cartesian experts have rightfully pointed out the various theological sources from which Descartes draws his ideas. The influence of Augustine on the formulation of the cogito has been highlighted; the same goes for the influence of Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, and of his Jesuit education.26 The relationship between such an important protagonist in modern thought like Descartes, and a whole theological tradition is thus much more complex than one might first think. The theological sources of modernity cannot therefore be neglected or reduced to footnotes. This, however, does not mean that we have cleared away the significance of nominalism for modern thought, nor have we exactly located this significance. That is, which exact aspects of nominalism (or any other major theological tradition) are significant. Should we indeed focus on the intellectual and metaphysical aspects of nominalism, as Gillespie suggests? Is the ‘epochal question’ from which modernity originates a metaphysical, and hence intellectual question? Or is another perspective possible? When, for example, we consider nominalism and its intellectual body of thought as a manifestation of something more profound? But what can then be more essential and profound for nominalism other than its intellectual heritage? At this point one might consider the following hypothesis: nominalism is the intellectual, i. e. philosophical and theological, manifestation of a certain form of piety that we can identify as Franciscan spirituality. This thesis may at first sight sound counterintuitive – to relate nominalism to Franciscan spirituality is not a line of thought that is explored by many scholars, probably because of the usual focus on the importance of nominalism for the distinction between philosophy and theology. Nevertheless, our thesis has an important advantage. If one understands nominalism to be a manifestation of Franciscan spirituality in which the relation between God, man, and world is reconsidered and fundamentally redefined, we can shift our attention away from the metaphysical issues and questions towards a broader scope on the influence of various – and newly established – spiritual schools and their significance for further developments in early and later modernity. Louis Dupr8 is one of the few scholars who has 26 See amongst others Vendler 1989; Menn 2002; Brandhorst 2010.

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indicated a highly significant aspect of Franciscan spirituality that will have an impact on later developments.27 This concerns the redefinition of contemplation. The Franciscans no longer define contemplation in terms of knowledge of transcendent reality and the presence of that reality in this world via analogia, but instead connect contemplation to the experience of the actual love of God for every individual creature, and consequently see contemplation as a locus for a loving response to the received love of God. In terms of contemplation, one can thus recognize the shift from knowledge (insight, wisdom) towards the individual loving relationship. Dupr8 mentions some interesting effects of this shift. He points out the significance of the new form of piety and devotion, to which the individual is now central, including the representation of Christ as a (suffering) man (instead of Christ as an icon) which prepares the grounds for a later religious humanism. He also indicates the effect on an intellectual level, and the nominalist’s interest in the contingent and the particular. Particular things are no longer expressions of universal realities, but are truly something unique in and of themselves. The turn towards love already implies this, since love is per definitionem aimed at a particular and even an exclusive object. Concurrently, this turn to love and the individual/the particular is an attempt to more intimately connect fate to everyday practice. One can recognize the latter tendency in other late medieval spiritual movements as well, such as the Devotio moderna. This movement was solely concerned with relating spirituality to everyday practice. Reform movements such as these would have a strong influence and impact on later reform movements, be these Protestant (Reformation) or Catholic (Counter-Reformation) Writing in A Secular Age from 2007, Charles Taylor explicitly refers to the writings of Dupr8 when he discusses the strong ties between nominalism and Franciscan spirituality.28 Like others before him, Taylor stresses the continuity between premodernity and modernity at length. The secular practices, institutions, and worldviews in the modern age originate from the continuous pressure of reform in the Christian tradition, that is to say, the constant struggle within Christianity to purify faith of superstition, magic, the mythical, and certain ritualistic aspects. The history of Christianity consists of a long series of attempts to discipline, rationalize, and harmonize religious faith and practices. It is exactly this tradition in which the most authentic faith in the transcendental and the experience of fullness was promoted, which also undermined the faith of people living in an enchanted universe itself. The gradual inflation of this sense of enchantment and mystery through rationalization and discipline created the space into which the new humanist, immanent and mechanistic worldviews and 27 Dupr8 1993, p. 36–41. 28 Taylor 2007, p. 94; p. 144.

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structures could emerge.29 Taylor associates this gradual process of disenchantment with an epistemic anthropological shift that appears in early modernity. In order to describe this shift he introduces the concepts of a ‘porous self ’ and a ‘buffered self ’. The ‘porous self ’ indicates the premodern person who is not fully participating in a meaningful universe, but also as being literally porous, that is, without a boundary or buffer between inner self and outside world, thus being vulnerable to spirits, demons, and cosmic forces.30 The ‘buffered self ’ describes modern subjectivity – for, indeed modern man becomes a subject grounded in himself. The modern subject is capable of disengaging himself from everything external: ‘The buffered self is essentially the self which is aware of the possibility of disengagement’.31 It is the subject that no longer understands itself as being a participant in an enchanted universe, but instead positions himself as self-conscious and autonomous. It is the subject that positions itself by means of its rationality and autonomy as distanced from the external world, God, and one’s own inner life so as to be objectified, studied, and analyzed, thus also losing access to the experience of fullness. The buffered self is what Helmut Plessner would have called the subject’s eccentricity ; the subject being an observer of both the external and internal world.32 The question is whether or not this anthropological typology is adequate and useful. In my opinion, the distinction between the two types of self is problematic. Firstly, it is difficult to maintain that, in the premodern age, subjectivity was without any buffered aspects. It was, amongst others, Michel Foucault who highlighted the element of self-objectification through meticulous self-analysis and confession in the early Christian monastic movements. It is exactly in such an ascetic context that a premodern form of disengagement becomes clearly visible. Vice versa, it is difficult maintain that the porous self strictly belongs to the the premodern era. The emergence of modern mysticism, demonic possession, and witchcraft in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and also the rise in the nineteenth century of devotional sites and individual ecstasies, visions, and stigmatizations are indications that there is a strong cultivation of porousness. Secondly, one could argue that the notion of the buffered self is probably based on a traditional and problematic view of the Cartesian subject29 Concerning Christianity’s tradition of reform and purification Taylor’s views appear to be quite similar to Marcel Gauchet’s notion of the ‘religion departing from religion’, i. e. the continuous process from the axial period onwards of the religion becoming increasingly oriented towards the transcendental, thus creating the space for secular world views and secular political, societal and moral institutions, and sustaining the growing separation between church and state. Gauchet 1997; Cloots, Latr8 and Vanheeswijck 2012. 30 Taylor 2007, p. 38. 31 Ibid., p. 42. 32 Plessner 1975, p. 288ff. (originally published in 1928).

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object-dichotomy33 As the founding moment of enlightened modernity, it thus connects to a whole tradition in, for example, the phenomenology of religion that strongly favors premodern participation in a meaningful totality over modernity. In other words, in the background loom the substraction theories that Taylor wants to argue against.34 For indeed, it is difficult not to interpret the distinction between a porous self and a buffered self in terms of either having lost nor being liberated from a certain earlier form or framework. It is not without reason that Taylor uses words like dis-engagement or dis-enchantment to describe the buffered self and the immanent frame that characterizes its worldview. It is significant that Taylor highlights the melancholic and nostalgic aspect of modern subjectivity – he thus underscores the fact that the modern subject feels it has lost its participation in an enchanted universe, the engagement with the transcendental, and the experience of fullness. It is important, however, that Taylor stresses the significance of the experience of loss, estrangement, and distance, and the issue of melancholy in the early modern religious literature.35 Should this melancholy be strictly linked to the rational, autonomous, and disengaged buffered self ? Is there no other possible perspective on melancholy? In my view there is. As we have already seen, a close examination of the central notion of Anfechtung in Luther’s thought shows us that melancholic despair, the experience of loss, and the feeling of estrangement from God are seen as constitutive elements of faith, or rather, are essential aspects of the dialectical relation between indifferent sinfulness on the one hand and faith and justification on the other hand. Paradoxically, the relation between man and God is conceptualized via the awareness of estrangement and disengagement.36 We should not confine this new way of thinking about the relation between man and God to Lutheran theology alone. Michel de Certeau has put forward the thesis in his writings on modern mysticism that central to the mystic’s experiences is the awareness of loss which triggers a desire for the presence of the divine. The common denominator in modern mysticism is a certain melancholy. According to Certeau, the mystic discourse about the presence of God ‘emerges from a mourning, an unaccepted mourning that has become the malady of bereavement, perhaps akin to the ailment melancholia, which was already a hidden force in sixteenth-century thought’.37 Reformation and Counter-Reformation mysticism, spirituality, and piety evolve around this

33 As regards Descartes, one should not overlook the fact that already in the sixth of his Meditations and certainly also in Les passions des .mes Descartes nuances this dichotomy. 34 Taylor 2007, p. 22. 35 Ibid., p. 37–38. 36 Westerink 2014. 37 Certeau 1992, p. 1.

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profound lack of presence of the divine, producing new sites of experience and new forms of discourse, practices, and institutions. In Francesco Spira’s history we touch upon this issue of mourning and melancholy. But Spira can hardly be qualified as prototypical of a new, buffered self whose disengagement with the transcendent leads him to despair over the absence of God. Spira cannot simply be identified with the loss of meaning and the subsequent ‘malaises of modernity’. Rather, the history connects to another possible view of modernity that I would like to propose here. The relationship between man and God is no longer founded in a human reality that is naturally oriented towards the divine or is grounded in a reality that represents a divine order of meaningful ideas, and is expressed in a life of moral religious habits and regulations. Instead, this relation is now sought in a complex hermeneutics of the self that is focused on the often hidden traces of a both intimately present and absent God. The difference between pre-modernity and modernity is then not defined in terms of the shift from a worldview in which divine meaning is represented in the universal order towards the ‘immanent frame’ and its mostly closed, mechanistic descriptions of reality. What appears as the actual locus of modernity is the subject, not as the buffered self, but as the stage of a complex dynamics of faith that is subjected to the forces of disenchantment and in-depth Christianization processes. In other words, modern subjectivity is not only situated within the boundaries of a closed ‘immanent frame’38, but is between a variety of sometimes competing and sometimes complementary frames or discourses in which one can interpret and articulate oneself. Spira’s history is paradigmatic here as it shows the existence of and interactions between various religious interpretational models (Lutheran, Calvinist, Roman Catholic), and notably also between the religious and secular (medical) perspectives on his condition.39 In Spira’s history, various models of interpretation exist and operate side by side, while influencing each other in their interpretations. This story 38 According to Taylor, the modern immanent frame is not necessarily composed of a world view that excludes the transcendent. He writes the following on this: ‘And so we come to understand our lives as taking place within a self-sufficient immanent order ; or better, a constellation of orders, cosmic, social and moral […] these orders are understood as impersonal. This understanding of our predicament has as background a sense of our history : we have advanced to this grasp of our predicament through earlier more primitive stages of society and self-understanding. In this process, we have come of age. […] The immanent order can thus slough off the transcendent. But it doesn’t necessarily do so. What I have been describing as the immanent frame is common to all of us in the modern West, or at least that is what I am trying to portray. Some of us want to live it as open to something beyond; some live it as closed. It is something which permits closure, without demanding it’. Taylor 2007, p. 543–544. 39 One should not overlook here the fact that medicine in early modern times rapidly transforms from an art of prognosis into the science of diagnosis of both physical and mental processes.

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shows us a somewhat different picture of modernity compared to what Taylor suggested. We don’t have to assume that the dominance of buffered subjectivity and the closed immanent frame is causing the typical modern malaises and discontent about the lack of meaning. Instead, there rather seems to be a surplus of meaning due to the various competing frames and discourses that all ascribe meaning to the facts, but without being able to determine any ultimate meaning. What these frames or discourses offer is a variety of options for self-interpretation and self-articulation relative to the techniques, practices, concepts, and institutions imposed from the outside. It is in the context of the modern variety of interpretational models and frameworks that the rediscovery of the classical ‘care for the self ’ and the general conflict in early modern religious discourse against indifference and lack of concern can be situated. It also has its significance – the care for the self is the starting point from which the various frameworks and discourses are able to intervene and shape subjectivity.

3.

In-depth Christianization and the modern hermeneutics of the self

As I have already indicated, the central problem in Francesco Spira’s history appears to be a hermeneutical one. It is only at first glance that the story seems to be situated on an intellectual level, as a conversation between friends on how to interpret biblical stories and apply them to one’s own spiritual life. But the issue at stake in the story is not merely the interpretation of scripture. The same goes for dogma. Spira and his friends’ bedside talks are never about determining the correct understanding of protestant teachings – whatever these concretely might have been40 – nor the application of dogmas in real life. The relation between dogma and experience is in fact the reverse of this. Dogmatic concepts such as reprobation, mercy, faith, and possession receive their meaning in the context of the conversations. These are characterized by interpretations of Spira’s acts, thoughts, experiences, and judgements, followed by the subsequent pastoral interventions. This is where we can situate the real hermeneutical problem and question. How is one to interpret the actual manifestations, the ‘symptoms’, when there are competing hermeneutical models – medical and religious – and when, from a protestant perspective, the manifestations do not necessarily 40 Given Spira’s obsession with the notion of reprobation one might expect some conversation on the dogma. This, however, is not the case. One of reasons for this might be that at that point in history, 1548, Protestants had produced a number of views on the topic of predestination, election, and reprobation, but have not yet given it the central place in dogmatics that it will only get in the following decades through the late works of Calvin and his successors. On this issue see, amongst others, Brosch8 1978; Neuser 2008; Westerink 2014.

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correspond to one possible underlying motive or source. In comparison with the medieval period in which despair was always the expression of unbelief and, hence, could be assessed accordingly as sinful, Spira’s case confronts us with the newly introduced complexity of Protestant psychology and theology. Manifestations are not simply actualizations of identifiable potentialities, nor do manifestations necessarily correspond to one underlying ‘idea’. Good and bad actions and thoughts no longer reveal to a person their hidden origin or implications, for the love or hate of God does not depend on human moral acts and thoughts. In this context Luther’s notion of God presenting himself as contrary to human thoughts and representations (revelatio Dei sub contrario specie)41 had huge implications for the interpretation of spiritual life. In principle, despair could be the manifestation of both unbelief and faith, but also of a medical condition. A more thorough inquiry into spiritual life was therefore needed. It is in this context that the interactions between the various interpretational frames and discourses become important, not only as different perspectives and models, but also as engaged with the same mutual quest for the truth. The semiintellectual conversations on the readings and interpretations of scripture and the references to Protestant teaching serve a deeper purpose, namely the quest for the hidden motives and sources for the many symptoms – thoughts, acts, experiences, self-judgements. The pastoral interventions are concerned with these deeper, hidden forces that come to light in the manifestations – the care of the self, the desire for salvation, the stubbornness of convictions, the harshness of conscience, all indicating that Spira is not indifferent about his fate, and thus is already moved by faith. Indeed, in my opinion, one of the basic guiding ideas in early modernity is that faith is opposed to indifference, i. e. opposed to the attitude of the lack of care about one’s own spiritual life and, hence, about oneself. The history of Spira is essentially about exploring these hidden forces – the ‘soft affections’ expressed in his prayers and reasoning. It is exactly because of this complex interpretation and investigation of Spira’s inner life that the story can be seen as paradigmatic of early modernity itself, as the age in which not only the medieval universal order of ideas and representations crumbles apart and the impact of this on this and institutions, societal structures and the ordinary lives of people. It is above all, an age in which faith and lived religion loses its self-evidency, that is, being religious is no longer embedded in an innate moral religious orientation which expresses itself through habits. Faith needs to be repositioned and reinvented, but this time in a subject who has become more layered, ambiguous, and ambivalent in their 41 Luther 1961, p. 242 (written in 1515–1516): ‘For God’s working must be hidden and we cannot understand its way. For it is concealed so that it appears to be contrary to what our mind can grasp’.

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motives, thoughts, and actions. For this reason, Spira’s history is not about the relation between scripture and faith, nor of dogma and experience. Rather, it is a problem of the effective forces, motivations, and affections expressed in his actual thoughts and actions. What we have previously said about nominalism can also be said here about Protestantism. The doctrine of predestination, as a doctrine which maps and articulates forces underlying actual events, is the theological manifestation of a protestant spirituality obsessed with the hidden forces that not only determine inner life but above all give meaning to man’s relation to reality and God. It is because of this function that this doctrine gains so much weight in the Protestant theologies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spira’s personhood, characterized by the experiences of sin, despair, and reprobation, can be seen as the outcome of a protestant ‘space of possibilities’ which was opened for new forms of subjectivity.42 I am not claiming here that the experience of despair cannot also be found in Catholic spirituality (there is despair in Catholic mysticism, for example), but what I am saying is that Spira’s despair could only have taken the form that it had within this Protestant understanding of the human being, and its relation to the world and to God. And it is this space that results in – or produces – the actual tragic self-experiences of Francesco Spira. Spira’s personhood originates from the possibility for such a personhood in the specific milieu of his era. A space of possibilities for new religious subjectivities emerges from the spiritual, societal, and theological problems and crises of the early modern age, as well as from the various confessional (and other) attempts to confine, order, and structure this space. The interaction between spirituality and theology is important here, but, moreover, we should take note of the proper order of things. Doctrine is first of all, the expression of a certain lived religion and primarily tries to confine and structure the space of possible forms of religious subjectivity, thus supporting the consistency of these subjectivities by providing them with a framework for selfexperiences and self-articulations. These complex dynamics between the space of possibilities for religious subjectivity defined within a certain context – in this case an early modern protestant milieu – on the one hand, and the actual appearance of a religious subject on the other hand, can be described in terms of spirituality. I define spirituality – and here I follow a Foucauldian approach43 – as, firstly, the various 42 The term ‘space of possibilities’ is derived from Ian Hacking’s work on the productive effects of psychiatric categories and concepts for possibilities of personhood, i. e. the actual selfexperiences (kinds of thoughts, memories, temperaments, emotions, behaviors, et cetera) of being a certain kind of person. Hacking 2002, chapter 6; Hacking 2007. 43 According to Foucault spirituality can be defined as follows: ‘[…] We could call “sprituality” the search, practice, and experience through which the subject carries out the necessary

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practices, techniques, procedures, examinations and interventions through which the subject is transformed in its relation to whatever it considers to be the truth or the transcendent, and secondly, the never-stable yet final self-experience and lived spiritual practice that results from this transformation. In Spira’s case, the first aspect of spirituality corresponds to a series of events, starting with his appearance before the inquisition, onto his public confession, the inner accusation of apostasy, and the ongoing pastoral interventions and examinations beside his sickbed. The second aspect of spirituality corresponds to Spira’s self-experience as being a reprobate, and the specifically related form of despair and suffering. This definition of spirituality implies that spirituality is not limited to Christian spirituality. However, it has been one of Michel Foucault’s major contributions to the study of Western subjectivity that we now understand that the main characteristic of Christianity is neither its monotheism, its specific doctrinal and institutional organizations, nor its specific relation to politics and society, but is in fact located somewhere else. Namely, in the complex hermeneutics of the self and related self-experiences, practices, and procedures that evoke and structure these experiences.44 If one studies his writings, one finds that Foucault highlights two periods that are of particular import in the history of Christianity as a history of hermeneutics of the self. The first period is that of the emergence of the Christian monastic tradition – about 400 A.D. – the age of Cassian and Augustine. It is in this period that Foucault situates the epistemic shift from the Roman culture to a new Christian attitude towards the subject’s own body and inner life as the actual locus of sexuality in thoughts, feelings, dreams, sensations, and fantasies. From then on, self-knowledge and self-analysis, supervised in institutions by spiritual authorities submitting the person to the practice of confession, was aimed at the battle against the flesh, i. e. against the sensations and pleasures of the body and soul. The monastic rejection of the flesh and of everything worldly marks a withdrawal that, according to Foucault, ‘also reveals hidden depths within’. That is to say, previously non-existent depths in which the obscure movements of concupiscence, sexual thoughts and fantasies, and pleasurable bodily sensations lurk.45 The birth of asceticism concerns what Nietzsche described as the process whereby the soul takes on

transformations on himself in order to have access to the truth. We will call “sprituality” then the set of these researches, practices, and experiences, which may be purifications, ascetic exercises, renunciations, conversions of looking, modifications of existence, et cetera, which are, not for knowledge but for the subject, for the subject’s very being, the price to be paid for access to the truth’. Foucault 2005, p. 15. 44 On this issue see Vandermeersch 1985. 45 Foucault 1999, p. 188–197 (originally published in 1982).

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‘depth’ and is associated with ‘evil’.46 With asceticism, man retreats into an inner hostile world that is first established as such, during the retreat (or renunciation) itself. The second period is that of the sixteenth and seventeenth century ; the age of an in-depth Christianization through various reformations of religious life. It is during this period that we can observe the fragmentation of Christianity in the multitude of discourses, institutions, practices, and techniques that are all concerned with finding an in-depth alternative to the threat of indifference and its supposed subsequent moral and religious decay. This amounts to a multitude of attempts to tighten the grip on individual existence.47 This development is of crucial importance for the early modern period, and for later developments that concern modern Western subjectivity, particularly the inner movements of the soul and body as the bearer of pleasure: ‘The establishment of this immense total narration of existence within religious mechanisms is, I believe, the innermost core, as it were, of all the techniques of examination and medicalization that appear later’.48 The ‘looping effect’, as Hacking would call it, of this in-depth Christianization process augurs the emergence of new, intense and in many ways excessive forms of religiousness, notably modern mysticism49 and demonic possession. The investment in the religious subject results in new kinds of religious persons. The lives of these people become the theatrical stages on which the soul and body display their sensations, desires, and pleasures, and their innermost movements and thoughts. The corps des plaisirs of the mystics and the possessed is brought out by this Christianization processes of early modernity as the concrete effect of a new apparatus of spiritual direction and – one might add – as the locus of mystic speech, the awareness of estrangement and abandonment, and the desire to experience divine presence. On the one hand, Foucault regards as a crucial development in Christianity this organization of the flesh, the body of desire and pleasure, which becomes a medical object from the seventeenth century onwards. According to Foucault, this medicalization of the flesh – and notably the medical interest in the phenomenon of convulsions – 46 47 48 49

Nietzsche 1999, p. 266 (originally published in 1887). Foucault 2003, p. 177. Ibid., p. 184. Whereas medieval mysticism is primarily characterized by contemplation of God as represented in reality (f.e. in the Eucharist), modern mysticism is marked by intense examination of “the body of desire and concupiscence”. Drawing upon Michel de Certeau’s study of the famous case of collective demonic possession at Loudun and Joseph Surin’s interventions in this history, Foucault stresses the familiarity between mysticism and demonic possession as distinct phenomena that are both about the relation between body, desire and examination (spiritual direction). In La fable mystique and other writings Certeau will later further explore modern mysticism focusing amongst others on Teresa of Avila’s ecstatic mysticism of the furious desire for God, on Joseph Surin’s melancholy, and on the always dislocated desire of Jean de Labadie and his hate of the churches incorporating sin. Certeau 1986; 1992.

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should not be viewed in terms of liberation or emancipation from a religious world view. Instead he notably stresses the continuity of the issue of discipline through discourse and submission to examination. Foucault thus shows how the nineteenth century scientia sexualis, (the study of hysteria and psychoanalysis) all emerge from a Christian obsession with the body and its sensations, and disciplinarian examinations thereof. On the other hand, mysticism and possession not only reveal Christianity’s institutions, practices, and techniques of control and discipline. The mystic and the possessed are not only new kinds of people produced by this in-depth Christianization, new spiritual direction, and detailed investment in the body. They are also the result of subversion and protest against discipline and control. The convulsive flesh is at once the ultimate effect and the point of reversal of the mechanisms of corporeal investment that the new wave of Christianization organized in the sixteenth century. The convulsive flesh is the resistance effect of Christianization at the level of individual bodies.50

Foucault’s perspective in the 1970s is thus focussed on the issue of discipline and resistance. From this point of view one could read Spira’s history as being a paradigm case of the effects of the intensified forms of piety in the protestant Christianization process, the subversive reactions of the individual against these processes in general, against the disciplining force of the inquisition, and against the subtle pastoral interventions of his friends. Spira’s stubborn reasoning can then be seen as a reaction against any attempts at disciplining him. Spira’s suffering and death are then basically the implication of his protest against intervention and examination, and against any spiritual transformation evoked through submission to institutions, practices, and techniques of either brutal force or subtle suggestion. From this perspective, Spira’s ‘belief ’ in reprobation is resistance against discipline, and a refutation of any institution that incorporates this. But this is not the only Foucauldian perspective possible. In later lectures at the CollHge de France we can see a further exploration of the issue of resistance and subversion. Here Foucault no longer strictly relates this resistance to the disciplining force of institutions, but moves towards another approach: that resistance found in mystic, ascetic, and spiritual practices is related to the Christian ‘care of the self ’. Early Christian asceticism and monastic spirituality does not simply mark an epistemic shift of new hostility towards the flesh relative two the Greek and Roman practices of the body and its pleasures. Christian asceticism, mysticism, and spirituality are actually in sync with the classical forms of ‘care of the self ’. This new perspective becomes possible 50 Foucault 2003, p. 213.

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through Foucault’s interest in Greek cynicism as a practical philosophy concerned with truth-telling (parrhesia) as a mode of life without submission to convention, doctrinal mediation, fixated theoretical frameworks, or institutional discipline. Cynicism makes life into the manifestation of truth, and thus it is an ascetic way of being which does away with everything untrue and merely conventional.51 It is this cynicism that, according to Foucault, has persisted in various forms as an integral part of the history of Western thought, existence, and subjectivity.52 This, first of all, concerns the Christian practices of asceticism, not only in early Christianity, but also in medieval spiritual reform movements (like the Franciscans, Dominicans), and in the Reformation– the latter having the strong anti-ecclesiastical and anti-institutional traits one also finds in classical cynicism. Although Foucault does not explicitly mention Luther, we can think of Wittenberg’s former monk as paradigmatic of the reformation cynic attitude with its irruptive, violent, scandalous manifestation of the truth (against scholastic – Platonic and Aristotelian – thought; against pope and emperor ; against monasticism) – it is paradigmatic also of all later religious and secular revolutionary movements that aim at a fundamental transformation of individual and societal life.53 In the course of his explorations of Christian parrhesia, or truth-telling, Foucault distinguishes two main forms. The first form he identifies as anti-parrhesia as expressed by the ascetic tradition. Here ‘the truth can be established only in a relationship of fearful and reverential obedience to God’, i. e. the anti-parrhesiastic trait of asceticism is the mistrust and suspicion of oneself, one’s desires, and pleasures of the body. In the writings of Cassian, for example, this takes the form of a truthful battle against fornication by deciphering oneself. The second is the parrhesiastic tradition Foucault links to Christian mysticism. Around this conception of parrhesia [that is, the negative parrhesia characterized by confidence in God’s love and in how one will be received by Him, and the positive parrhesia of confidence in God enabling a person to speak the truth with which one has been entrusted] crystallized what could be called the parrhesiastic pole of Christianity, in which the relation to the truth is established in the form of a face-to-face relationship with God and in a human confidence which corresponds to the effusion of divine love. It seems to me that this parrhesiastic pole was a source of what could be called the great mystical tradition of Christianity.54

On the margins of anti-parrhesiastic asceticism, mysticism is a practice of truth and knowledge of oneself with the aim of purifiying the body and soul’s ca51 52 53 54

Foucault 2011, p. 165ff. Ibid., p. 174. Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 337.

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pacties in order to arrive at a relationship of confidence with God. The positive function of Christian parrhesia is thus exactly in the movement toward God. It is through these two parrhesiastic poles that Christianity modified ancient cynic asceticism. The question now remains whether this new evaluation of Christian asceticism and mysticism sheds new light on Spira’s history. In my view it does, namely when we focus on Spira’s draconic and scrupulous selfassessment coram Deo. Spira shows us the implications of the protestant care of the self that appears at the moment one can no longer be indifferent about one’s life of sin before God.55 His stubbornness and strong convictions are not only and simply reaction and resistance against disciplining interventions. They are, above all else, the consequence of the new protestant shape the poles of asceticism and mysticism are given: between the awareness of the necessity and yet impossibility of renunciation, and the truthful desire for God’s presence. The awareness of the impossibilties is evident; the consciousness of the desire for God’s presence is at stake, and it is the most fundamental topic in his history, constantly addressed by the caring friends. From the Jamesian and Freudian perspective this chapter began with, the history of Francesco Spira appears both extreme and yet paradigmatic. But what kind of ‘extreme’ is it relative to what kind of ‘commonplace’, and archetypal of what sort of general structure or development? Can we indeed use this history as a way to conceptualize events in early modernity’s turn to religious subjectivity? If the answer is yes, it is clear that we cannot understand Reformation’s turn as primarily ecclesiastical institutional reform, nor can we understand it as the result of an intellectual crisis regarding philosophical, theological, and doctrinal positions. Instead, we should focus on the issue of a renewed care of the self, the procedures for self-knowledge and the parrhesiastic and anti-parrhesiastic aspects of faith and unbelief. We are then looking at the relations between inner life, care, truth, unbelief, and the body at the surface of signs and expressions. The later writings of Foucault can serve as a good starting point for further exploring the modern reinvention of the ancient idea of care of the self. These can also serve to explore the transformation in spirituality (both on the level of practice and technique, and on the level of actual transformed individual lives) with regards to the variety of reformations in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

55 It is my hypothesis that a crucial factor in the in-depth Christianization processes of early modernity is – what I call – ‘the battle against indifference’. In the medieval religious worldview that is very much formulated by and for a religious elite, indifference (or unconcern) is hardly conceived as a problem. In the age of Reformation and the turn to masses, groups and individuals, the problem of indifference first gets its central place.

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Haute, Philippe Van: ‘Psychoanalysis and/as Philosophy : The Anthropological Significance of Pathology in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and in the Psychoanalytic Tradition’, in: Natureza Humana (7) 2005/2, p. 359–374. Haute, Philippe Van / Westerink, Herman: ‘Hysterie, Sexualität und Psychiatrie: Eine Relektüre der ersten Ausgabe der Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie’, in: Freud, Sigmund: Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905) (Eds.: Philippe Van Haute / Christian Huber / Herman Westerink). Vienna 2015, p. 9–56. Hegel, Georg W.F.: The Philosophy of History (Transl: John Sibree). Mineola (NY) 2001. Idem: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. The Lectures of 1827 (Ed.: Peter C. Hodgson). Oxford 2006. James, William: The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York 1902. Löwith, Karl: Meaning in History. Chicago / London 1949. Luther, Martin: Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Tischreden 1531–1546, Band 1. Weimar 1912. Idem: Lectures on Romans. Philadelphia 1961. MacDonald, Michael: ‘The Fearefull Estate of Francesco Spira: Narrative, Identity, and Emotion in Early Modern England’, in: Journal of British Studies (31) 1992/1, p. 32–61. Menn, Stephen: Descartes and Augustine. Cambridge 2002. Neuser, Wilhelm: ‘Predestinatie’, in: Selderhuis, Herman (Ed.): Calvijn Handboek. Kampen 2008, p. 353–365. Nietzsche, Friedrich: ‘Genealogie der Moral’, in: idem: Kritische Studienausgabe 5 (Eds.: Giorgio Colli / Mazzino Montinari). Berlin 1999. Oberman, Heiko A.: Luther. Mensch zwischen Gott und Teufel. Berlin 1982. Idem: Die Reformation von Wittenberg nach Genf. Göttingen 1986. Perkins, William: A Golden Chaine: or, The Description of Theologie, containing the order of the causes of Saluation and Damnation, according to Gods word. Cambridge 1600. Plessner, Helmut: Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Berlin / New York 1975. Rittgers, Ronald K.: The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany. Oxford 2012. Schmidt, Jeremy : Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England. Aldershot 2007. Taylor, Charles: A Sexular Age. Cambridge (MA) 2007. Vandermeersch, Patrick: ‘Michel Foucault: een onverwachte hermeneutiek van het christendom?’, in: Tijdschrift voor theologie (25) 1985/3, p. 250–277. Vendler, Zeno: ‘Descartes’ Exercises’, in: Canadian Journal of Philosophy (19) 1989/2, p. 193–224. Westerink, Herman: Verlangen en vertwijfeling. Melancholie en predestinatie in de vroege moderniteit. Amsterdam 2014.

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Suffering and Consolation in the Age of Reform: Reflections on the Origins of Modernity

Over the past decade or so I have been investigating the twin themes of suffering and consolation in the Age of Reform, focusing especially on pastoral theology, pastoral care, and lay piety. I should note at the outset that I do not use the term ‘Age of Reform’ as a synonym for ‘The Reformation’. This latter term is typically used as shorthand for the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century. ‘The Age of Reform’ is a more expansive term. It refers to the unprecedented and wide-ranging effort to reform church and society that began in the Middle Ages and continued into the seventeenth century. In other words, it includes but is not limited to the Protestant Reformation. On the European continent one could date the Age of Reform from the Investiture Controversy to the cessation of the Thirty Years War. Thus, I am using the term ‘Age of Reform’ in a way that is analogous to Charles Taylor’s use of the term ‘Reform’ in Part I of A Secular Age, where it refers to the effort to call the masses to a higher Christianity that began in the high Middle Ages and that found its ultimate expression in the Protestant Reformation.1 Already in 1980 my doctoral supervisor, Steven Ozment, entitled his religious history of late medieval and Reformation Europe The Age of Reform.2 I first turned to the themes of suffering and consolation because I found them to be ubiquitous in the sources I was studying as a Reformation scholar ; suffering and consolation permeate works of pastoral theology and devotion in the Age of Reform. I wanted to understand these themes better. I soon became convinced that the Protestant Reformation effected a profound change in the way Europeans sought to understand and cope with the suffering of body and soul that was so much a part of pre-modern existence. I also became newly persuaded that the human attempt to contend with suffering has profoundly shaped human culture. As Max Scheler once observed, ‘A doctrine on the 1 Taylor 2007, p. 77. 2 Ibid., p. 62–63; p. 68–69; Ozment 1980. It should be noted that I extend the chronological boundaries of the Age of Reform further than Ozment. I also extend them further than Thomas Brady in his recent German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650, 2009.

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meaning of pain and suffering was, in all lands, at all times, in the whole world, at the core of the teachings and directives which the great religious and philosophical thinkers gave to men. On this meaning was built an instruction and an invitation to encounter suffering correctly, to suffer properly […]’.3 Peter Berger has argued that such doctrines of suffering are essential to the construction and maintenance of human society ; we cannot live without some kind of theodicy – we need some nomos that provides us with meaning amidst the anomic forces that daily threaten to overwhelm us with meaninglessness.4 When it became clear to me that no one had studied the doctrines of suffering that were articulated, challenged, and reconceived in the Age of Reform in a systematic way, I decided to write a book on the topic: The Reformation of Suffering. I have remained largely within the confines of the Age of Reform in my work on this topic; that is, I have focused primarily on the doctrines of suffering of medieval and early modern Europe. In keeping with the theme of this volume, in this chapter I would like to relate my work on the Age of Reform to the shape of the modern world. After discussing some of the fruit of my research, I would like to suggest a few ways that changes in the Age of Reform’s doctrines of suffering have contributed to the origins of modernity, especially to what Charles Taylor in Sources of the Self has called ‘inwardness’.5 I think the emphasis on consolation in the Age of Reform, which grew directly out of the period’s deep engagement with suffering, is particularly helpful for understanding the ‘making of modern identity’. Scholars have not taken adequate account of the centrality of consolation in the Age of Reform, and therefore they have overlooked an important factor in the shaping of the modern world. I want to argue that important aspects of modernity may be traced, at least in part, to the emphasis on consolation in the Age of Reform. The chapter is divided into three parts: Late Medieval Christianity as a Religion of Consolation, The Protestant Reformation of Suffering, and Preparing the Ground for Modern Inwardness. In the interests of space and in keeping with my expertise, I will be limiting my examination of suffering and consolation in the Age of Reform primarily to the German-speaking lands.

1.

Late medieval Christianity as a religion of consolation

The later Middle Ages were a time of unprecedented suffering in Europe. War, plague, famine, and disease helped to produce widespread anxiety that was only intensified by the social, political, and ecclesial turmoil and upheaval of the 3 Scheler 1974, p. 121. 4 Berger 1967, chapter 3, The Problem of Theodicy. 5 Taylor 1989, Part II, Inwardness.

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period. The result for many was fear : fear of sudden death, of sin and its consequences, of disorder, of outsiders, of the body and its passions, of the devil and his minions, of divine judgment, and fear of the divine Judge Himself. The Latin church fostered such fear but also offered Christians numerous means of coping with it: processions, pilgrimages, sacraments and sacramentals, and the cult of the saints and their relics, to name but a few. There were also numerous means of dealing with suffering that fell outside the means approved by the church. But we miss something very important if we think of the later Middle Ages simply as a time of fear, anxiety, crisis, and ritualized or ‘superstitious’ responses to the same. It was also a time of reform, rebirth, and consolation. One of the most important developments in the pastoral theology of the high and later Middle Ages was the recovery of a ministry of verbal instruction and consolation, part of the larger effort to reform church and society that was already underway in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. This ministry had been important in the ancient period but had largely disappeared in the early Middle Ages.6 The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) played a key role in this recovery, effecting what some scholars have called a ‘pastoral revolution’ in Latin Christendom.7 Arguably the most important provision of Lateran IV for the subsequent history of pastoral care was Canon 21, which required annual communion and confession of every Christian, the first such provision of its kind to be universally binding throughout Latin Christendom.8 Canon 21 calls for parish priests to possess considerable skill as they listen to the confessions their parishioners. The confessor is to be ‘discerning and prudent, so that like a skilled doctor he may pour wine and oil over the wounds of the injured one’. The priest is to make a careful inquiry into the penitent’s sins and their circumstances, ‘so that he may prudently discern what sort of advice he ought to give and what remedy to apply, using various means to heal the sick person’.9 Leonard Boyle has commented on the important shift in expectations of both confessor and penitent in Canon 21. Both are required to be far more active and self-aware than was either necessary or possible in the Latin church’s approach to private confession in preceding centuries. The priest is no longer expected simply to apply in mechanical fashion the appropriate penance to the appropriate sin.10 Now he is called to be a doctor of souls who is involved in a very delicate operation. Similarly, the penitent can no longer be content with a listing of offenses. He is supposed to examine his conscience before coming to the 6 7 8 9 10

Rittgers 2012, p. 12–36. See Swanson 1995, p. 2. See Tanner 2000, p. 117. Tanner 1990, p. 245.1–23. Such penances originated in the early medieval penitential canons. For examples, see McNeill and Gamer 1938.

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Sacrament of Penance and must then open his conscience to his priest as together they search out hidden mortal sin to be excised through confession and healed through divine grace and penance. Boyle goes so far as to assert that this shift led to a ‘revolution in spirituality’.11 Owing to this new emphasis on introspection and personal agency in confession, Charles Taylor has argued that Canon 21 helped to promote the ‘individuation’ of the European laity.12 According to Taylor, the effort to discipline and console through sacramental confession contributed to the rise of inwardness. Late medieval confessors were certainly not all mercy and consolation; they could also be stern judges or inept doctors who could easily botch the spiritual surgery they were to perform;13 and, in any case, sacramental confession only took place once a year for most lay people and probably rarely in exactly the way prescribed by official ecclesiastical legislation.14 But there were other means through which the laity encountered a verbal ministry of instruction and consolation along with its individuating and interiorizing effects.15 Here the work of Berndt Hamm on late medieval Frömmigkeitstheologie is of particular importance for our purposes. As one scholar explains, Frömmigkeitstheologie is Hamm’s ‘designation for a genre of late-medieval writing and praxis, much of it derived from and directed toward pastoral care, which was especially concerned with the pursuit of an authentic Christian life as defined by the values and institutions of the day’.16 Frömmigkeitstheologie was a form of practical theology whose primary concern was spiritual edification and comfort, not speculation.17 The term indicates Hamm’s interest in the intersection between theology and lived experience and grows out of his work on figures such as Jean Gerson, Johannes Paltz, Johannes von Staupitz, and also Martin Luther. Hamm argues that rather than being characterized by threats of divine wrath and vengeance, late medieval pastoral care and preaching placed a strong emphasis on consolation, divine mercy, and 11 12 13 14 15

Boyle 1985, p. 37. Taylor 2007, p. 68. See Thayer 2000. Duggan 1984. In time, Renaissance humanists would argue that sacramental confession did not allow for adequate expression of consolation. McClure has the following to say about the medieval Latin church’s approach to consolation: ‘In a word, particularly once the penitential and sacramental tradition coalesced, medieval pastoral care did not fully cultivate the consolatory realm explored by the classical orators and moralists. In spiritual sensibility, as in the practical cura animarum, the remedies of sin took precedence over the remedies of sorrow (itself linked to sin). The identity of the pastor as healer and consoler focused on that contritional sorrow and guilt’. McClure 1991, p. 14. 16 See Bast 2004, p. xv. For Hamm’s own (translated) description of Frömmigkeitstheologie, see p. 18–24. See also Hamm 1999. 17 Bast 2004, p. 18–19.

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what Hamm calls die nahe Gnade. He acknowledges the presence of harsher views of God in the late medieval cura animarum; indeed, he argues that the increasing stress on the nearness of grace was a response to anxiety and fear of divine punishment, but he finally wishes to depict late medieval Christianity as a religion that was far more concerned with consolation and mercy than previous scholars have appreciated.18 One finds a very nice example of late medieval Frömmigkeitstheologie in Jean Gerson’s famous fifteenth-century treatise, De arte moriendi, which appeared in Latin French, and German.19 Gerson urges the dying person to pray the following prayer to Christ: Most sweet Jesus, because of the honor and strength of Your most blessed Passion, grant that I may be received into the number of Your elect. My Savior and my Redeemer, I give myself totally to You; may You not reject me. To You I come; may You not repel me. Lord, I ask for Your paradise not on account of the worth of my merits but in the strength and efficacy of Your most blessed Passion, through which You willed to redeem wretched me, and vouchsafed to purchase paradise for me with the price of Your blood.20

The clear emphasis here is on divine grace and the merit of Christ’s Passion, an emphasis that was widespread in late medieval pastoral and devotional literature. Charles Taylor has maintained that along with auricular confession, the late medieval ars moriendi tradition had an individuating effect on the European laity.21 Again, we see a connection between consolation and the growth of inwardness. I have emphasized the importance of a verbal ministry of instruction and consolation in the high and later Middle Ages because I wish to stress that late medieval Christianity was a religion of consolation. Europeans did not have to wait for Martin Luther to discover a God of mercy and grace; they heard sermons and read devotional literature about this God before Luther appeared on the scene. Viewing late medieval Christianity as a religion of consolation is important, not only because it corrects a one-sided and distorted view of the preReformation church that one still encounters today, but also because it allows 18 See especially, Friedrich and Simon 2011, p. 34–36, p. 547–559. 19 Gerson’s Opus tripartitum (manuscript, ca. 1404; incunabulum, 1467), which he wrote for simple priests, was one of his best known works in the later Middle Ages. (Part three of the Opus tripartitum addresses the art of dying, while parts one and two deal with the Ten Commandments and Confession, respectively. As was true of parts one and two, part three first appeared as a separate work and continued to be published on its own after the Opus tripartitum appeared.) Gerson’s De arte moriendi first appeared in French and then in Latin. La science de bien mourir may be found in Jean Gerson: Oeuvres ComplHtes, 1966, p. 404–407. 20 Ibid., col. 448. 21 Taylor 2007, p. 66.

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one to see that although Luther introduced important and even revolutionary changes into the theology and devotion of Christendom, he was participating in a theological and pastoral project that predated him by centuries. All theologians in the Age of Reform – both Catholic and Protestant – were engaged in a common project of trying to find solace in the midst of their uniquely anxious age. As Berndt Hamm has argued, the entire Age of Reform was characterized by a deep longing for clarity and certainty in the midst of deep fears of chaos, disorder, and destruction. There was thus a drive toward what Hamm calls ‘normative centering’ (normative Zentrierung) or ‘the alignment of both religion and society towards a standardizing, authoritative, regulating and legitimizing focal point’.22 Hamm argues that in the later Middle Ages, that focal point was the Passion. Late medieval Frömmigkeitstheologie, with its emphasis on the Passion, was an expression of normative Zentrierung; it was an effort to establish a new nomos, a new theodicy. The suffering God became the norm, the standard, the core principle to which people turned for comfort and consolation in the midst of suffering and chaos. The late medieval doctrine of suffering told them that suffering was actually a gift that accomplished many good and essential things in their lives: they conformed to the image of their suffering Savior, who knew their every pain; it provided them with an opportunity to atone for the penalty of sin and thus to reduce the duration of their stay in Purgatory ; and it provided a means through which at least some could become mystically united with their crucified God. The attempt here was to render suffering plausible as an expression of divine grace. The judging and punishing God was still very much part of the theology and devotion of the later Middle Ages, but the crucified and compassionate Savior was everywhere to be found.

2.

The reformation of suffering23

Martin Luther was deeply influenced by late medieval Frömmigkeitstheologie, but he also rejected certain crucial aspects of this theology in his efforts to find a new normative center for Christendom. (That center would become the solas of the Protestant Reformation – sola scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide.) Luther and his followers effected what I have called a ‘reformation of suffering’ in early modern Europe. The term refers not to a change in suffering itself, but rather to changes in the way Protestants sought to understand and cope with suffering. ‘The ref22 See Bast 2004, p. 3 (on demonic activity) and p. 6 (on normative centering). It should be noted that Hamm applies the term ‘normative centering’ to the later Middle Ages ‘with great caution and always with qualification’, as Christianity on the eve of the Reformation remained quite diverse. Ibid., p. 45. 23 This section draws on Rittgers 2012, chapters 4–5.

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ormation of suffering’ is shorthand for a reformation of attitudes toward suffering and means of dealing with suffering. The driving force behind the Protestant reformation of suffering was Luther’s new evangelical soteriology, according to which salvation was a gift of grace that took no account of human merit. Sinful humans beings made no contribution to justification; rather, they simply received it by faith, itself a divine gift, from the hand of the gracious God based on the merit and completed work of Christ. This meant that human beings neither could nor needed to do penance for the penalty for sin, for human beings were too sinful to contribute anything to their salvation and God was too sovereign and too generous to either need or require such a contribution. This meant, in turn, that Lutheran reformers rejected one of the most important explanations for suffering in the Latin church, namely, its ability to function as a penance for sin. The reformers still taught that suffering was a gift that produced much that was good in those who endured it patiently, especially by testing their faith in the merciful yet hidden God, but suffering was no longer salvific, certainly not in the way it was in the Latin church. Lutheran reformers thought that this decoupling of suffering and salvation was necessary in order to embrace the evangelical consolation they believed they had discovered in Scripture. The defining center of this consolation was certainty of forgiveness. Lutheran reformers believed that they had discovered a better way of understanding and coping with suffering, one that provided what they thought the Latin church never could – assurance of divine favor in the midst of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Luther believed that human beings were always tempted to conclude that God was against them when they faced suffering. The sense of divine abandonment and divine wrath that Luther himself had experienced in the midst of his Anfechtungen was the worst form of suffering he could imagine. His evangelical soteriology was designed to combat this despair by providing human beings with absolute certainty of divine favor in the face of seeming divine disfavor or divine absence. Luther thought that by basing salvation on the divine promise of grace in the Word, one could arrive at such certainty, for God could not lie and the passive human being could neither elicit nor diminish divine grace in any way. As Luther put it in For the Investigating of Truth and the Consoling of Fearful Consciences (Pro veritate inquirenda et timoratis conscientiis consolandis) (1518), ‘Therefore it is certain that sins are loosed if you believe they have been loosed, because the promise of Christ the Savior (Matt. 16: 19) is certain’.24 This certainty was supposed to change the way one understood suffering. As Luther put it in the same treatise, ‘The remission of guilt calms the heart and

24 WA 1: 631.17–18, thesis 15 (translation R. R.).

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takes away the greatest of all punishments, namely, the consciousness of sin’.25 Later Luther asserts, ‘Where guilt and conscience have been forgiven there is no pain in punishment (nulla pena est in pena), but there is joy in tribulations’.26 One could face suffering confidently and even joyfully if one was certain that it was not an expression of divine wrath. Luther made a radical claim regarding suffering, most notably in ‘Sermon on Indulgence and Grace’ (Ein Sermon von Ablaß und Gnade) (1518): as far as the justified Christian was concerned, suffering was not and could not be punitive, that is, it could not be a form of divine punishment; it was and could only be remedial – it could only be a means of testing and purification, for Christ had suffered the totality of divine wrath on the cross and the one who was united to Christ by faith was both covered and indwelt by the Savior and His righteousness.27 In sum, the Protestant reformation of suffering was based on the evangelical reformation of soteriology, at the heart of which was the new evangelical consolation and its claims of certainty. Luther hated uncertainty in spiritual matters. As he remarked in The Bondage of the Will (De Servo Arbitrio) (1525), ‘For what is more miserable than uncertainty?’ Later in the same treatise he concedes that even if it were possible for human beings to have free will in the matter of salvation, he would not want it because it would rob him of the certainty that comes with knowing salvation is entirely God’s good work.28 The Bondage of the Will is an important treatise for understanding Luther’s theology, and it contains a number of significant and even troubling doctrines or statements that are crucial to this theology (e. g. hidden and revealed God). But here it is important to note that relatively few of Luther’s contemporaries learned of his theology through treatises like The Bondage of the Will. This treatise appeared in ten editions between 1525 and 1526, eight of which were in Latin and two of which were in German. The aforementioned For the Investigating of Truth is extant in just three Latin editions.29 By way of contrast, Sermon on Indulgence and Grace is extant in twentythree editions, and Luther’s other works of devotion are similarly well attested: ‘A Meditation on Christ’s Passion’ (Ein Sermon von der Betrachtung des heiligen Leidens Christi) (1519) is extant in twenty-seven editions, and ‘A Sermon on Preparing to Die’ (Eyn Sermon von der bereytung zum sterben) (1519) is extant in twenty-four editions.30 The majority of Luther’s lay contemporaries knew him first and foremost as a pastor and a writer of devotional literature, not as a controversial theologian. Luther’s new Protestant Frömmigkeitstheologie, with 25 26 27 28 29 30

WA 1: 630.7–8, thesis 2 (translation R. R.). WA 1: 630.13–14, thesis 5 (translation R. R.). See Rittgers 2012, p. 105–106. Rupp and Watson 1969, p. 108; p. 328–329; WA 18: 604.33; 783.17–39. WA 18: 597–599. Rittgers 2012, p. 271.

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its emphasis on the consoling certainties of the evangelical gospel, clearly had the greatest impact on his contemporaries, helping to create an evangelical culture of consolation. The same is true of other Protestant reformers and their works. To cite but one example, the Augsburg reformer Urbanus Rhegius authored a pamphlet entitled ‘Soul-Medicine for the Healthy and the Sick in these Dangerous Times’ (Seelenärtzney für die gesunden und kranken zu disen gefärlichen zeyten) that first appeared in 1529. It went through an astounding 121 editions in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and was translated from the original High German into nine different languages.31 Devotional works comprised the largest portion of printed works in the sixteenth century, and the central purpose of this Erbauungsliteratur was consolation.32 There are mountains and mountains of such works in the research libraries of the German-speaking lands, which provides rather eloquent testimony to how belief in evangelical certainty greatly energized Protestants to write works of consolation. The emphasis on consolation is also present in lay sources, especially in socalled ego-documents. An especially rich example may be found in the autobiography of the Lutheran lawyer and humanist Lucas Geizkofler (1550–1620), who lived in Augsburg.33 Geizkofler and his wife, Katharina Hörmann von Guetenberg, lost their five-month old son Ludwig in March of 1591, just one year after they had married. A few weeks later Geizkofler was called to Prague on business. The Augsburg lawyer knew that his wife was suffering greatly from the death of their child, and he was clearly struggling with his own grief as well. On Palm Sunday of 1592 he wrote to Katharina, seeking to bring her some solace: To this point I have consoled myself by considering that the Founder of holy matrimony does not visit Christian married folk with the dear cross out of wrath, rather much more out of a fatherly inclination to test their patience and to bless them, and that all of His works are meant for our best, which they achieve. [This is] something that you, my beloved spouse, might also consider and console yourself with in a Christian manner. We should and indeed gladly wish to confess that we are great sinners and have certainly merited every manner of cross and suffering. But along with this we must remind ourselves in what way the same crosses and sufferings are sent to us Christians, [namely,] so that in this world we Christians do not allow ourselves to be taken in and tempted by the temporal and the worldly treasure, rather much more are moved to strive after the eternal and heavenly treasure. In the time that I have been absent from you and allowed myself to be too concerned with worldly business, such things, my beloved wife, have caused me to go into myself, and especially in this Lent to seek after an enduring consolation in our miserable life. In view of our sinful lives, we may seek 31 Franz 1973, p. 213–224; p. 266. 32 Ibid., p. 215. 33 See Rittgers 2012, p. 246–249.

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and find this [consolation] through no other means and through no one else than our Savior Jesus Christ and His bitter suffering and death, which according to ancient Christian usage is held up for our consideration especially in Lent and Holy Week.34

Here we see Geizkofler drawing on Luther’s theology to reassure himself and his wife that the death of their son was not a punishment for sin, even though he believed that they well deserved such punishment; rather, it was a fatherly test of their patience and a fatherly blessing that caused them to seek what was best for them, the true treasure in heaven. The Augsburg lawyer also stresses that the ground of Christian consolation is Christ Himself and the forgiveness He won for humanity on the cross. Geizkofler’s letter to his wife provides a very helpful example of the strong emphasis on self-consolation that Johann Anselm Steiger and others have found in early modern Lutheranism. Steiger has maintained that one of the hallmarks of the evangelical care of souls in this period was an emphasis on the obligation of laypeople to prepare themselves for difficult times through sustained meditation on Scripture. The clergy sought to teach the laity to become their own pastors by providing them with the ‘spiritual weapons’ (geistliche Waffen) they would need for their inevitable duels with adversity.35 Steiger links this emphasis on spiritual self-care with the stress on physical self-care in the medical literature of the period; doctors of souls and doctors of bodies both urged their patients to become their own (and each others’) physicians.36 Other scholars have noted how adept early modern families were at consolation.37 As Anna Carrdus ex34 “Ich selbs habe mich bishero getröstet, als ich betrachtet, daß der Stifter des heil. Ehestandes christliche eheleut mit dem lieben Kreuz nit aus zorn, sondern vielmehr aus väterlicher neigung zur prob ihrer geduld heimzusuchen und zu segnen pfleget, und daß alle sein werk uns zum besten gemeint seien und gereichen, welches du meine geliebte Ehegenossin gleichfalls betrachten und dich damit christlich trösten wollest. Wir sollen und wollen zwar gern bekennen, daß wir große sünder sind und allerlei kreuz und leiden wol verdienen; aber daneben haben wir uns zu erinnern, welchermassen dasselbe uns Christen zugeschickt wird, daß wir uns in dieser welt von dem zeitlichen und weltlichen nicht einnehmen und anfechten lassen sondern vielmehr bewegt werden, nach dem ewigen und himmlischen schatz zu trachten. Und solches, mein herzliebes Weib, hat mich diese zeit her, in welcher ich von dir abwesend und mir die weltlichen geschäft etwas zu hoch angelegen sein ließ, verursacht, in mich selbs zu gehen und sonderlich in dieser fastenzeit nach einem beständigen trost in unserem trübseligen leben zu trachten. Diesen mögen wir in erinnerung unserers sündlichen lebens durch kein ander mittel und durch niemand andern suchen und finden, als durch unseren seligmacher Jesum Christum und sein bitteres leiden und sterben, welches uns nach alter christlicher ordnung fürnemlich in diesen fasten und marterwochen zu bedenken vorgehalten wird.” Wolf 1873, p. 151–152. 35 See Steiger 1993, p. 75–76. On the importance of self-consolation in this period, see also Linton 2008, p. 43–45. 36 Steiger 2005, p. 106. On the importance of self-care in pre-Reformation vernacular medical literature, see Russell 1989, p. 286–287. 37 Carrdus 1996, p. 11.

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plains, ‘the traditional consolatory forms and remedies were an integral part of an Early Modern family’s day-to-day emotional and spiritual life […] they helped both parents and children to contain their fear and grief at times of almost unbearable crisis’.38 There is no reason to maintain that this tradition of self- and neighborconsolation, that this culture of consolation, was unique to Lutheranism or even to Protestantism. After all, its origins lie in the late medieval Catholic ars moriendi, and we know that there was a strong emphasis on consolation in early modern Catholic pastoral care.39 There are simply many more lay Lutheran sources to document such self-consolation than there are for the other Christian confessions in the early modern German-speaking lands. The entire Age of Reform, in addition to being an age of anxiety, discipline, control, and confessionalization, was also an age of consolation, and very deeply and broadly so. If we are to understand the impact of the Age of Reform on the shape of the modern world, we must attend to this undeniable fact. The Age of Reform marks what was arguably the most deliberate, sustained, widespread, and successful attempt in western history to that point to mold human beings into consolers of themselves and others. In a sense, the prescription of Lateran IV that priests become highly skilled doctors of souls was extended in the Age of Reform to the lay Christian population.

3.

Preparing the ground for modern inwardness

The emphasis on consolation in the Age of Reform contributed directly to the growth of inwardness that Charles Taylor has maintained was so important in the development of modern identity.40 In Sources of the Self, Taylor observes that people in the modern West have a sense of themselves as beings with inner depths who have selves in the same way they have heads, hands, and feet. He traces the growth of this inwardness from its origins in Augustine, with his emphasis on ‘radical reflexivity’, through its intensification and spread in the late medieval and early modern periods, and finally to its secularization in the modern period. While Taylor mentions the role of Protestant introspection, especially Puritan introspection, in the growth of inwardness,41 he makes relatively little of the Protestant Reformation as a whole in this part of his analysis, preferring to focus on Descartes, Montaigne, and Locke. Other scholars have 38 Ibid., p. 15. 39 See Bireley 1999, p. 105. 40 I am borrowing the idea of the intensification of Christian devotion preparing the ground for modernity from Taylor 2007, p. 145. 41 Taylor 1989, p. 184.

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made much more of the role of Protestantism in the emergence of the modern self, especially through the emphasis on conscience.42 But to my knowledge no one has taken account of how the twin themes of suffering and consolation have contributed to this emergence. Why did so many people turn inward in the Age of Reform? Was it not at least in part, arguably in large part, to find consolation? This was certainly true of Luther. It was also true of Lucas Geizkofler. He says in his letter to his wife that his time away from her along with their shared grief ‘have caused me to go into myself and especially during Lent to seek after an enduring consolation in our miserable lives’ (‘in mich selbs zu gehen und sonderlich in dieser fastenzeit nach einem beständigen trost in unserem trübseligen leben zu trachten’). Like Augustine, he turned inward to be drawn upward to God, although he lacked Augustine’s Christian-neoplatonic account of this upward drawing.43 When one thinks about the defining characteristics of modern inwardness, of the sense of being and having a self and of being aware of being and having a self, it becomes rather easy to see how the emphasis on consolation in the Age of Reform contributed directly to its development. The kind of consolation we have seen in the Age of Reform, especially the Protestant emphasis on inner certitude, both presupposes and encourages precisely this kind of inwardness. (The same could be said for St. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises.) When the clergy urged the laity to become their own and each others’ consolers they were encouraging them to develop the kind of radical reflexivity one sees in Augustine’s Confessions. They were encouraging the laity to engage in the kind of care or cultivation of the self that Foucault has examined in classical antiquity as part of his investigation of the history of human sexuality.44 The ministry of consolation assumes that one has a self with inner depths that can be full of pain and distress and which therefore must be carefully and individually plumbed if one is to find the appropriate solace in the midst of suffering. To become a doctor of one’s own soul is to become a person who is aware of being and having a self. Even if the source of consolation, as in the Lutheran case, comes from outside the self, via the Word, and is intended to draw the self out of itself, this consolation still assumes the existence of the self and this consolation must still be applied in a person-specific manner. Here it is interesting to note that despite his opposition to the Sacrament of Penance, Luther was a strong proponent of a reformed version of private confession, because he thought it was the single best way of applying the consoling 42 For example, see Bruce 1966, p. 3. 43 According to Taylor, Augustine turned inward to be drawn upward by and to God. See Taylor 1989, p. 134. 44 Foucault 1986, “Part Two, The Cultivation of the Self,” p. 37–68.

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certainties of the gospel directly to the troubled conscience. Private confession was a crucial part of Lutheran pastoral care and piety in the early modern period.45 As with its Catholic counterpart, it clearly encouraged the growth of inwardness. One advantage of considering the growth of inwardness from the perspective of consolation is that, owing to its ubiquity in the sources, one encounters in consolation a phenomenon that cuts across many social strata in the Age of Reform. When I read sociologists and philosophers and consider the connections they seek to make between the Age of Reform and modernity, I sometimes have the sense that I am watching a frog jump from one lily pad to the next. In this case the lily pads are ‘great men’, such as Erasmus, Luther, Calvin, Montaigne, and Descartes – scholars jump from one great man to the next in their attempt to assess the impact of the early modern period on the modern one. There is certainly a place for such intellectual leaping, but as a historian I find it somewhat problematic, because modernity is not simply a set of ideas passed on from one ‘thinking reed’ – to use Pascal’s designation for human beings – to another, no matter how important these reeds were. Modernity is a whole worldview and culture that permeates all we are and do. Taylor knows this and tries to avoid the Lilienauflage approach, spending a lot of time on literature and art, but his analysis, while remarkable in many ways, still does not plumb the watery depths of early modern culture in the way that a consideration of consolation does. Historians wish to see actual historical connections based on credible and representative historical sources; consolation fits these requirements admirably. What of attitudes towards suffering in the Age of Reform? How might they have contributed to the growth of modernity, especially of modern inwardness? Here I must stress that the Protestants and Catholics I have studied held a decidedly premodern view of suffering. Even the revolutionary changes introduced by Protestants still assumed that God was sovereign over suffering and accomplished much good through suffering, even if suffering itself was not held to be good. Therefore suffering was to be embraced, not shunned. By way of contrast, Taylor emphasizes that a central feature of modern identity is the desire to avoid and extinguish suffering whenever possible.46 The Protestant reformation of suffering certainly contributed to the gradual disenchantment of western culture. It reduced the points of contact between the natural and supernatural to a few biblically based instances, such as the Lord’s Supper, Scripture, and private confession, and thus caused the relationship between the natural and the supernatural to be less porous than in Catholicism. Beyond this, 45 See Rittgers 2004, p. 81–82. 46 Taylor 1989, p. 394.

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Protestants fostered a more individualistic approach to suffering by rejecting the possibility of communion between the living and the departed in the midst of adversity. One’s communion with those in the next life was limited to God and the angels. But the basic understanding of suffering itself in Protestantism was still thoroughly premodern. I think the consolation that emerged from the reformation of suffering – the very fact that so many were engaging in consolation of self and others (in addition to the content of this consolation) – is what truly helped to prepare the ground for modern inwardness. In conclusion I want to suggest a final way that consolation in the Age of Reform may have contributed to modernity, and here I want to comment on both modern inwardness and modern secularity, or the gradual decline of Christianity in many modern western lands.47 I want to do so by drawing attention to an important omission in the content of the consolation of this period, that is, I want to engage briefly in counter-factual history ; I want to draw attention to what the Christian consolation literature might have said that it did not say, an admittedly unusual perspective for a historian to adopt. There is no room for lament in the consolation of the Age of Reform; in fact, there is no room for lament in the entire pre-modern Christian consolation tradition. There is ample room for expression of sorrow, grief, and pain to God, but not for anguished cries of protest against God, as happens in portions of Job. There is no holding of God to accounts, even to His own accounts, as one sees in certain Psalms. No one has the chutzpah to say to God, ‘Rouse yourself! Why do you sleep, O LORD?’ (Ps. 44: 23a), or, ‘Lord, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David?’ (Ps. 89:49) or, ‘It is time for the LORD to act […]’ (Ps. 119: 126a). This exclusion of lament was only strengthened in the Protestant reformation of suffering, owing to the strong emphasis on divine sovereignty and human bondage to sin in Protestant theology. What has been the long-term impact of this rejection of lament on the subsequent course of western Christianity? What effect has this centuries-long rejection of lament had on the plight of Christianity in the modern western world? Might it have contributed to the ‘grave-digger’ effect that Jean Delumeau once accorded to early modern Christianity’s alleged focus on sin and guilt or that Charles Taylor has attributed to its preoccupation with a juridical-penal theory of the Atonement?48 Might the rejection of lament have been a factor in the secularization of western society?49 I think a case can be made for a positive response, although it must be made tentatively, because it is largely based on an argument from silence. 47 This concluding section draws on Rittgers 2012, p. 257–262. 48 Taylor 2007, p. 262–263; p. 652. 49 For recent discussions of the secularization thesis, see Bruce 1992; Berger 1999.

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The omission of full-bodied Biblical lament in the Christian consolation literature may have cut off a crucial portion of the ‘relational flow’ that according to at least some portions of the Hebrew Bible is supposed to exist between God and His covenant people. Perhaps in the (very) long run the insistence of the western churches that human beings must face suffering without the possibility of lament has worked to undermine the plausibility of traditional Christian faith, especially among certain populations of the modern West. And perhaps it is in our own day, in the widespread opposition to the idea of God having any causal relationship to suffering, that we are finally seeing the consequences of this ageold rejection. Charles Taylor has connected the demise of belief in this causal relationship to the modern conviction that God’s reason for being is to promote human flourishing.50 Taylor sees this conviction as following from the ‘anthropocentric turn’ and the ‘Providential Deism’ that he believes have been central to the western process of secularization.51 But perhaps the skepticism about a God who is sovereign over suffering that is so much a part of the modern secular outlook is also related to the rejection of lament, that is, to the rejection of the human creature’s ability – even obligation – to hold the Almighty to His own accounts as an act of deep faith and appropriate self-regard when life is badly out of joint and God appears to be absent. The traditional idea of God’s sovereignty over suffering is certainly easier to embrace if it is paired with the Biblical possibility of lament, for this possibility, however one seeks to make sense of it theologically, furnishes the suffering person with a crucial sense of agency before the Almighty, an agency that the God of the Bible appears to welcome, at least in some cases. Not so the reformers’ God. Perhaps the reformers’ rejection of lament helped to contribute to the secularization of the self with its purely immanent self-understanding that Taylor argues is so characteristic of modern identity. By placing such a radical stress on divine sovereignty and human sinfulness, reformers may have unwittingly deprived themselves, their contemporaries, and their posterity of a vital means of contending with suffering that human beings require as they struggle to believe in God amidst affliction. In this way, Christian consolation in the Age of Reform, which I have argued contributed directly to modern inwardness, may have also contributed to the

50 The fact that there is a fair bit of interest in the theme of lament in some circles today is no doubt partly attributable to the widespread belief in an infinitely compassionate and approachable God who is primarily interested in human thriving. But the term ‘lament’ actually seems to lose its meaning when paired with such a God, for how could this Deity ever allow a situation in which a human being would feel compelled to cry out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ 51 Taylor 2007, p. 649.

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slow demise of traditional Christianity in the modern western world by depriving it of a crucial element of biblical theodicy.52

Literature Bast, Robert J. (Ed.): The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety : Essays by Berndt Hamm. Leiden 2004. Berger, Peter : The Sacred Canopy : Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York 1967. Berger, Peter (Ed.): The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids 1999. Bireley, Robert: The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation. Washington 1999. Boyle, Leonard E.: ‘The Fourth Lateran Council and Manuals of Popular Theology’, in: Heffernan, Thomas J. (Ed.): The Popular Literature of Medieval England. Knoxville 1985, p. 30–43. Brady, Thomas: German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650. Cambridge / New York 2009. Bruce, Steve: Religion in the Modern World: From Cathedrals to Cults. New York / Oxford 1966. Bruce, Steve (Ed.): Religion and Modernization: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularization Thesis. Oxford 1992. Carrdus, Anna: ‘Thränen-Tüchlein für Christliche Eltern: Consolation Books for Bereaved Parents in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Germany’, in: German Life and Letters (49) 1996/1, p. 1–17. Duggan, Lawrence: ‘Fear and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation’, in: Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (75) 1984, p. 153–175. Foucault, Michel: The Care of the Self, Volume 3 of the History of Sexuality (Transl.: Robert Hurley). New York 1986. Franz, Gunter (Ed.): Huberinus – Rhegius – Holbein. Bibliographische und druckgeschichtliche Untersuchung der verbreitesten Trost- und Erbauungschriften des 16. Jahrhunderts. Nieuwkoop 1973. Friedrich, Reinhold / Simon, Wolfgang (Eds.): Berndt Hamm. Religiosität im späten Mittelalter. Spannungspole, Neuaufbrüche, Normierugen. Tübingen 2011. Geiler von Kaysersberg, Johannes: ‘Tötenbüchlein (Wie man sich halten sol by eym sterbenden menschen)’ (1480/81), in: idem: Sämtliche Werke. Erster Teil, Die Deutschen Schriften, Erste Abteilung: Die zu Geiler’s Lebzeiten erschienenen Schriften, Erster Band (Ed.: Gerhard Bauer). Berlin / New York 1989, p. 1–13. 52 Herman Westerink has written about how Luther engaged the hidden God’s alleged eternal hatred of humanity and humanity’s hatred of God in De servo arbitrio, linking it with Lacan analysis of the Wittenberg reformer. It is interesting to consider how the exclusion of lament from the Christian consolation tradition, which was intensified in the Age of Reform, may have contributed to this situation of mutual hatred. See Westerink 2012, p. 2; Westerink 2013, p. 150.

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Gerson, Jean: Oeuvres ComplHtes (Introduction, texte et notes par Mgr Glorieux). Paris / Tournai / Rome / New York 1966. Idem: ‘Opus tripartitum: Opus [or Opusclum] Tripartitum De Præceptis Decalogi, De Confessione & de Arte moriendi’ (Ed.: L. Ellies Du Pin), in: Johannes Gerson. Opera Omnia, Tomus Primus, Pars Tertia. Hildesheim / Zürich / New York 1987. Hamm, Berndt: ‘Was ist Frömmigkeitstheologie? Überlegungen zum 14. bis 16. Jahrhundert’, in: Nieden, Hans-Jörg / Nieden, Marcel (Eds.): Praxis Pietatis: Beiträge zu Theologie und Frömmigkeit in der frühen Neuzeit. Wolfgang Sommer zum 60. Geburtstag. Stuttgart 1999, p. 9–46. Linton, Anna: Poetry and Parental Bereavement in Early Modern Lutheran Germany. Oxford 2008. Luther, Martin: ‘Pro veritate inquirenda et timoratis conscientiis consolandis’, in: Martin Luthers Werke, Weimarer Ausgabe (WA), Band 1. Idem: De Servo Arbitrio, in: WA 18. McClure, George W.: Sorrow and Consolation in Italian Humanism. Princeton 1991. McNeill, John T. / Gamer, Helena M. (Eds.): Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales. New York 1938. Ozment, Steven: The Age of Reform, 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. New Haven / London 1980. Rittgers, Ronald K.: The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge (MA) 2004. Idem: The Reformation of Suffering: Pastoral Theology and Lay Piety in Late Medieval and Early Modern Germany. Oxford / New York 2012. Rupp, E. Gordon / Watson, Philip S. (Transl. and Eds.): Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation, Philadephia 1969. Russell, Paul A.: ‘Syphylis, God’s Scourge or Nature’s Vengeance? The German Printed Response to a Public Problem in the Early Sixteenth Century’, in: Archive for Reformation History (80) 1989, p. 286–307. Scheler, Max: ‘The Meaning of Suffering’, in: Frings, Manfred S. (Ed.): Max Scheler (1874–1928): Centennial Essays. The Hague 1974, p. 121–163. Steiger, Johann Anselm: ‘Die Gesichts- und Theologie-Vergessenheit der heutigen Seelsorgelehre: Anlaß für einen Rückblick in den Schatz reformatorischer und orthodoxer Seelsorgeliteratur’, in: Kerygma und Dogma (39) 1993/1, p. 64–87. Idem: Medizinische Theologie. Christus Medicus und Theologia Medicinalis bei Martin Luther und im Luthertum der Barockzeit. Leiden / Boston 2005. Swanson, Robert N.: Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215–c. 1515. Cambridge 1995. Tanner, Norman P. (Ed.): Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1: Nicaea to Lateran V. London / Washington 1990. Tanner, Norman P.: ‘Pastoral Care: The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215’, in: Evans, Gillian R. (Ed.): A History of Pastoral Care. London / New York 2000. Taylor, Charles: Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge (MA) 1989. Idem: A Secular Age. Cambridge (MA) 2007. Thayer, Anne T.: ‘Judge and Doctor : Images of the Confessor in Printed Model Sermon Collections, 1450–1520’, in: Jackson Lualdi, Katharine / Thayer, Anne T. (Eds.): Penitence in the Age of Reformations. Aldershot 2000, p. 10–29.

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Westerink, Herman: The Heart of Man’s Destiny. Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Early Reformation Thought. New York / London 2012. Idem: ‘Protestant Thought as Blind Spot? De Certeau, Lacan and Luther’, in: Bocken, Inigo (Ed.): Spiritual spaces: History and mysticism in Michel de Certeau. Leuven 2013, p. 147–156. Wolf, Adam (Ed.): Lucas Geizkofler und seine Selbstbiographie, 1550–1620. Wien 1873.

Inigo Bocken

The Idea of Reform in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola

One of the leading ideas in Gerhart Ladner’s work is the observation that the idea of reform belongs to the very center of Christian experience and thought from its earliest beginnings. The idea of reform is a genuine Christian idea, enabling us to understand the proper significance of Christian thinking in comparison with the Greek ideal of cyclical renewal or of the modern ‘institutional’ conception of reform.1 From Ladner’s perspective, the Christian idea of reform is indissolubly connected with the notion of man being the image of God. The idea of reform necessarily contains the attempt of the human being to return to its original essence, which, in one way or another, has been blurred through the finite and material interests of the world in which we live. Or, in the words of Ladner himself, the idea of reform may be defined ‘as the idea of free, intentional and ever perfectible, multiple, prolonged and ever repeated efforts by man to reassert and augment values pre-existent in the spiritual-material compound of the world.’2 The Christian idea of reform therefore refers primarily to the personal and individual conversion of the faithful towards the religious path on earth, leading to the rediscovery of his/her ultimate goal and essence, i. e., being the image of God. All attempts to realize institutional or cultural reforms since early Christianity are in one way or another related to the personal search for the reparation of the original bond between the human soul and its divine source, in order for the believer to see God face to face. One of the most fascinating insights of Ladner’s book is that the need for reform in early Christianity circles around the question of who is the agent of the reform. Is it the human being, specifically the human soul? Or is it God who is the only one with the necessary power to establish the human being’s return to the divine? It is interesting to note that Ladner finds the first position in the works of the Greek fathers, whereas the second position can be identified with

1 Ladner 1959, p. 2–3. 2 Ibid., p. 35.

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Augustine, both main sources for Christian thought in the Middle Ages and modernity. The focus of Ladner’s view on the central dynamics of Christianity is directed towards the first Millennium of its history. However, it is of interest to enlarge the scope of this theoretical view on Christianity – containing both a philosophical and an historical way of understanding – to a period in which the ‘idea of reform’ seems to reach a new level of intensity : Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Partly this enlargement has already been initiated by some important students of Ladner.3 Since the 15th Century an amazingly increasing amount of reform movement and projects seems to have been established. Though already in the earlier Middle Ages, important reform movements can be found, such as the Franciscans and the Devotio Moderna.4 From 1500 onwards, the idea of reform seemed to move towards the centre of cultural awareness. In this chapter I want to describe this ‘idea of reform’ as a principle of philosophical reflexion within the cultural and religious practices. In a way, it was already the project of G.W.F. Hegel to understand modern philosophy as the reflective development of the Lutheran impetus. Hegel understands his own systematic approach as the ultimate speculative completion and coronation of Luther’s understanding of Christian freedom. In recent years, a lot of historical scholars became aware of the fact that the Reformation – the ‘reform movement’ of Early Modern Christianity – is far more than the confessional Reformation. Scholars like Heiko Oberman or Berndt Hamm saw very clearly that also the so-called ‘ContraReformation’ or ‘Catholic Reformation’ is part of this cultural and religious shift in Early Modernity. If this is the case, it could also be of interest to understand one of the sources of inspiration for the Catholic Reformation, Ignatius of Loyola, against the background of a philosophy of reform as well. This is what I intend to do in this chapter. In which way can the Ignatian Exercises be understood as the initiation of a way of thinking, a philosophy of reform? This approach enables the development of a view on ‘reform’ which is somewhat different than that of Hegel – more focused on the experience of imagination and centred around the power of the senses. The central question for Ignatius is: how is it possible to reform the self, including the senses, oriented towards the divine? But how can this meditative approach be understood as a philosophical investigation?

3 Bellitto / Flanagan 2012. 4 See Bocken 2012.

The Idea of Reform in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola

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The Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola

The Ignatian Spiritual Exercises form the core of Ignatian spiritual practice, from the beginning of the religious order up until the present. They are well known as one of the most important guides for the practice of meditation in the Christian tradition. Since their primary purpose is to be used as a guide for spiritual practice, they are not the most likely candidate for a model of philosophical reasoning. ‘What seems to me white, I will believe black if the hierarchical Church so defines.’ – this sentence, which can be found in the text of the Spiritual Exercises,5 seems to suggest that the opposite is true, that the meditation, as it is developed here, is more about authority and obedience than any reflective use of reason. Moreover, in contemporary culture there seems to be a tension between the experiential practice of meditation and the rather more cognitive act of reflection. Any attempt at understanding the philosophical meaning of the Spiritual Exercises will evoke the more general question of the relation between spirituality and rationality. In spite of Ignatius’ emphasis on obedience and authority, the innovative meditative practice as it is presented in the Spiritual Exercises is often characterized as the starting point of a new way of theorizing one’s personal relation with the divine. In his marvellous study on Ignatius ‘as a human being and as theologian,’ Hugo Rahner – a Jesuit himself – described the enterprise of the Spiritual Exercises as the foundation of an innovative way of dealing with the relation between theory and practice, and as a genuinely modern understanding of the concrete and the abstract.6 Even if Hugo Rahner does not develop this idea to its full consequences, I think he may have a point here. The reception history of the Spiritual Exercises shows that these are not minor thinkers who revert to the original intuitions of the Exercises, or to its innovative method – as it is, e. g., the case in Ren8 Descartes’ Meditationes de prima philosophia.7 The question as to what extent Descartes’ methodological philosophy can be read in an Ignatian way, is still unanswered, but there can be no discussion that Descartes himself, trained by the Jesuits in La FlHche, was indeed inspired by the method of the Spiritual Exercises. Later on in history – especially in the 20th Century – several creative attempts at reflective interpretations were made. In our age, Maurice Blondel’s philosophy of action is a clear and influential example of a philosophical elaboration of Ignatius’ spiritual intuitions.8 Even more famous is undoubtedly Roland Barthes’ semiotic interpretation of the Spiritual Exercises, in which he regards them as a practice of 5 Loyola 1961, par. 365, Thirteenth Rule, p. 68. 6 Rahner 1964, p. 312. 7 The influence of Ignatius on Descartes’ work, including the Meditations, has been recognized and discussed by many historians. An evaluative overview can be found in: Vendler 1989. 8 Boey 1994.

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decoding human desire.9 Moreover, as important scholars such as Karen Kilby and Philip Endean have noticed, Karl Rahner’s transcendental method is actually a systematic elaboration of the discretion of the spirits and the search for God’s will.10 Finally, the Spiritual Exercises play an important role in the analysis of modern desire as it can found in the work of the French historian and philosopher Michel de Certeau.11 In spite of a large number of studies on Jesuit spirituality, so far there has not been a systematic analysis of the philosophical reception of the Spiritual Exercises. This is beyond the scope of the present contribution, however. Before any such project could be undertaken, we need to ask how Ignatius conceives his spiritual project – how his imagination and textual staging are structured and how these can be understood against the background of the spiritual and speculative challenges of his time. That is why I have chosen to focus on the means of Ignatian reflection in my contribution. Understanding the Spiritual Exercises as a way of thinking inevitably means discussing the modes of expression of philosophical thought. For Ignatius, this involves studying not only his use of language, but also his use of images. In the end, the whole of life, in all its concrete personal aspects, seems to be a reflexive performance. It is this private and concrete practice, however, which has to become a living image, which brings into appearance the will of God. In this present text, I will use the work of the Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau to guide me in my exploration of Ignatius’s life and thought. De Certeau has understood very well that the way Ignatius deals with imagination can be seen as an answer to the speculative crisis of metaphysics and theology at the end of the Middle Ages – the so called ‘nominalist’ crisis, which marked the end of the classical ideal of knowledge and action – the idea of theor&a or contemplation. Certeau’s interpretation is characterized by a high degree of sensitivity to the performative aspects of spiritual and philosophical discourses. The different ways thoughts, observations, actions and feelings are expressed, help us to discover a proper way of thinking. Theoretical reflection will no longer be limited to just one form and will find its expression in for example painting, politics, poetry, mysticism or architecture. In order to explore this further, we need to return to Ignatius and his Spiritual Exercises. They appear as the guideline for a practice in which the whole of life – with all its shadows, ruptures, empty spaces, colors, odors, thoughts, and desires – can be seen as a space for ideas and visions. In the text of the Spiritual

9 Barthes 1971. 10 Endean 2001. On Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality see Kilby 2004. 11 Certeau 1973.

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Exercises, Ignatius refers again and again to the importance of the senses in the search for God’s will.12

2.

Theory and practice of reform in Christian spirituality

In order to understand the Spiritual Exercises, it is important to realize that the text, as it was written by Ignatius after his mystical experience in Manresa, is not meant to be read like a treatise. Rather, it is a spiritual guide for the one who is seeking God. Jesuits typically speak of the Spiritual Exercises as a book which should be performed rather than read. But what does it mean to say that one has to do something in order to understand what is at stake? And what kind of understanding are we talking about? Is this something which can only be said after one has completed the Spiritual Exercises? Or is the act the same as the understanding? These are of the kinds of questions that need to be asked with respect to any spiritual manuals in the history of Christian spirituality. The Spiritual Exercises are part of a long tradition of meditation literature and guidelines (manuductiones) which offer guiding, categories and criteria for discernment in order to see God. With the help of these criteria and categories, the reader can find out for himself or herself how to proceed along the spiritual path. Even in the tradition of the Desert Fathers, who in their solitude were permanently exposed to false impulses, we can find the need for a criterion by which to discern the truth from illusion, i. e. discerning God from the devil.13 There is no doubt that Ignatius refers to this tradition when he writes his spiritual guidelines. He is well aware of this tradition, which is in the words of Ladner, a tradition of re-form.14 For centuries after the Desert Fathers, medieval spiritual authors were inspired by Aristotle’s doctrine of virtues. Virtues were, in their view, a mediation between concrete life and the ultimate goal towards which our life is oriented and which is always in danger of being forgotten.15 Of course, Ignatius of Loyola was not a philosopher. In a way he was the complete opposite of the philosopher. He was a soldier, a man of practice, often infuriated, sometimes sentimental. He left no philosophical texts and he was well into his thirties by the time he started his philosophical training, probably having completed most of the Spiritual Exercises by then. This book is about the practice of meditation – it is meant to be a guide for all those who search for God. 12 13 14 15

Sudbrack 1990; Rahner 1964, p. 344–369. Waaijman 2007, p. 23ff. Rahner 1964, p. 22. Störmer-Caysa 2004.

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Nevertheless, we can safely assume that he was very well aware of the crisis of classical spiritual paradigms. It is plausible that he understood very well that the (intellectual and social) developments of his time were no longer compatible with the classical doctrines of virtue and spiritual manuals. He seems to have seen the need for a new relation between theory and practice. The Spiritual Exercises repeatedly insist – by way of the spiritual guide – that one should not reflect in a theoretical manner about a certain problem, e. g. about the Holy Spirit or about death. Philosophical deliberations can endanger the vivid experience of the event and risk distracting us from the vision of God. Nevertheless, I think that the Spiritual Exercises not only presuppose a philosophical problem, they also give a clear definition of that problem and offer strategies for its solution. Ignatius identifies the problem as the increasing uncertainty of all human knowledge at the end of the Middle Ages.16 This uncertainty is caused by the idea that there is an unbridgeable chasm between human and divine intellect. As a consequence, human reason does not have access to the divine intellect and its criteria. This means that all spiritual models and manuals for the search for God up to that point, from the Desert Fathers to Hugh of St. Victor or Bonaventura, are now somehow superseded. This chasm between human and divine intellect has of course always been a central theme in the history of Christian spirituality. Ignatius’ approach is different, however. He is a product of the 16th Century, a modern man, fascinated by the will of God, which is at the center of all his considerations. Like late medieval voluntarism, he considers this will to be so strong that the mediating virtues are unmasked as weak attempts to control or to manipulate the divine will itself. In this regard, Ignatius is confronted with the same challenge as Luther in his critique of scholastic philosophy.17 It is no longer possible to trust the traditional spiritual pathways, which describe the stages on the way towards the vision of God, which just have to be done or merely performed. In the Spiritual Exercises, one has to start anew. The aim of the Spiritual Exercises is nothing less than a completely new staging of one’s entire life. This is what Michel de Certeau understood very well when he described the Spiritual Exercises as a ‘space of desire’.18 The text of the Spiritual Exercises does not present any theological or philosophical visions. Instead, it offers mostly formal descriptions of procedures, as one of the first companions of Ignatius, Pierre Favre, already remarked.19 The

16 17 18 19

Gerwing 2004, p. 602. See Endean 1991. Certeau 2005, p. 239. Ibid., p. 245.

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reader is confronted with a purely methodological book, an empty procedure, which has to be filled by whoever is doing the exercises. We need to realize that Ignatius wrote the book after his original experience in Manresa, where he felt he had been touched by God. Wounded as a soldier at the battle of Pamplona, Ignatius read some spiritual books, and became convinced that he wanted to live like Jesus Christ. He intended to walk to the Holy Land in order to radically change his life.

3.

Form and reform of the Exercises

Ignatius halted his pilgrimage and came to the conclusion that there is only one goal in life: to discover the real desire that motivates the many things we pursue, but which also can be hampered by this pursuit.20 For no matter how conscientiously we follow any spiritual program, there is always a risk we will stray. It is this genuinely early modern theme of uncertainty which can also be found in Ignatius’ considerations. This insight explains the procedural form of the Exercises. For human beings, it is impossible to find a way to know God’s Will once and for all. It is impossible to take an external position – as scholastic philosophy did – in order to determine the right order of reality. We are always driven by desire, even when we are able to discern what corresponds to this desire and what does not. The discernment may be realized on different levels of reality – it always requires a formal procedure. Real desire only can be found in concrete discernments. There has been a lot of discussion about the austere form of the Exercises. Totally different authors, such as Hugo Rahner and Roland Barthes, have pointed out that the success of the book was a miracle in itself: the language Ignatius uses is rather coarse and it lacks any form of poetry, so the mere success of the book could already be seen as proof of its truthfulness and authenticity. This language which offers no enjoyment whatsoever, shows us that it is not the well-formulated sentences or impressive constructions of thought that count. Instead, language functions to make space for something else – for a form of action oriented towards the desire for God. As Certeau pointed out, this action is oriented towards the other and, as such, it opens up a space for the desiring soul. The Spiritual Exercises are nothing less than a form of staging, a mise en scene, complete with instructions for the director, in order to open up a space for the soul. Ignatius intends to communicate his new insight to others: we are involved 20 ‘Desire’ is one of the central topics of Christian mysticism, of which Ignatius was very well aware. This is shown in a clear way by Michel de Certeau in his books on the history of mysticism of 16th and 17th Century – La fable mystique (1984 and 2013).

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in the process of desire, even before we become aware of it. At the same time, every individual person has to experience this awareness from his or her own position. The instructions, in this way, are quite pliable. Sometimes Ignatius mentions that we have to find out for ourselves whether and how we want to sit down or stand, maybe get down on our knees, or perhaps stay in a small room or go for a walk. These acts in and of themselves are not very important. What is important is whether any of these positions can be helpful for achieving an insight into this deeper desire, in order not to be guided by ‘unordered’ desires. A lack of food, for example, would have us thinking about eating the whole time. The Spiritual Exercises are about the stories from the life of Jesus. Nevertheless, these stories are not – as Roland Barthes shows – the libretto of some kind of theatrical performance that is part of the exercises. The different scenes from the life of Jesus are in fact the setting; the background giving more relief to the performance. The libretto has – in the words of Certeau – not been written.21 It is written through acting, like in any form of experimental theatre in which the actors are not performing some fixed text from memory, but are just expressing what comes to mind while they are on stage. The stories from the life of Jesus are a setting and a mirror, explaining the desires of the actor. Here, the spiritual guide is not a spectator – he is actually more like a director’s assistant, correcting the actor from his experience and his knowledge of the text and rules of the Exercises. Sometimes he corrects the actor’s imagination and discusses how to better express it.

4.

Reform and the tradition of the Devotio Moderna

The staging of the Spiritual Exercises has a long tradition. Ignatius found the sources for his performative approach in the texts of the Devotio Moderna, the influential religious reform movement in 15th century Northern Europe. The most famous expression of this tradition is without any doubt Thomas / Kempis’ Imitatio Christi. There has been a lot of discussion about the reception of the Devotio Moderna in the work of Ignatius.22 In a way, the Spiritual Exercises can be seen as a methodologically well-founded elaboration of the insights that can also be found in Thomas / Kempis’ spiritual manual, itself an expression of the spiritual practices of the Devotio Moderna. The Devotio Modera was a reform movement in the Netherlands which also had some influence in Germany. Founded by Geert Groote, it was successful in the emancipated cities in both the Southern and Northern part of the Nether21 Certeau 2005, p. 246. 22 E.g. Maron 2001, p. 236; Baier 2009, p. 82.

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lands. In a way, the Devotio Moderna was an emancipation movement in which craftsmen, tradesmen, or politicians claimed that the spiritual path of imitating Christ was not exclusively for learned people or for the monks in their monasteries who were able to read in Latin.23 The vision of God was not reserved for those who knew the scholastic theoretical definitions, written in Latin.24 ‘Our practice at the spinning wheel is the highest form of theory’ – as one of the sister books from Emmerich, one of the many community houses of that time, puts it.25 The imitation of Christ has nothing to do with doctrinal or theological knowledge, which come from an outside perspective. The imitation of Christ is realized through the work in the garden or in the kitchen or even in the practice of reading. In the end, nobody can claim to have exact knowledge about this spiritual path. It is a way of acting, a performative practice. As a book of exercises and practices, the De imitatione Christi is a book with admonitions and smaller reflections, mirrors for the life of the soul, and it is the result of extensive experience in spiritual guidance. ‘Imitatio Christi’ in fact means to become an image of Christ yourself. Sometimes Thomas is very critical towards philosophical reasoning with regard to this ideal: ‘it is better to practice compunction as to know its definition’, he says, almost ironically, in Book I,3 of De imitatione Christi. This should be read for what it is, however: a critique on some forms of Aristotelian and Scholastic philosophy, which often claim that reason is able to understand everything, and that we can come to know exactly who God is and what His qualities are.26 Thomas’ comments are in fact a way of staging, enabling the seeker to find his or her own way of imitating in practice. Our practical life is the stage on which the Gospel can be re-enacted. This also means that the imitation of Christ has to be started over and over again. We are always in danger of thinking we know how to live in an authentic manner. This knowledge is often an obstacle, or a mask, enabling us to hide who we really are. The exercitant has to discern for himself or herself, and should not listen too much to what other people are saying – which is one of the favorite sentiments of Thomas / Kempis.27 ‘Whatever people are saying, the ordinary as well as the learned ones, let them become silent within you,’ Thomas writes.28 Nor is this all about our own judgements – these can be as alienating as other people’s

23 24 25 26 27 28

Van Ginhoven Rey 2014, p. 204; Brodrick 1956, p. 22; Deblaere 2004. Van Dijk 2012, p. 12. Bollmann 1998, p. 20. Bocken 2005. E.g. / Kempis 2008, p. 66f. “Taceant omnes doctores sileant universe creature in conspectu tuo: tu michi loquere solis”, Ibid., I, 3, 12 p. 34.

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judgements, perhaps even more so.29 In the end, only God’s judgment matters, but we are unable to know this judgment. We do, however, see the shadows of our own life, obscuring God’s judgment. If we look closely, however, we may be able to distinguish between light and dark.30 A similar approach is found in the Spiritual Exercises. Ignatius emphasizes that we need to find our own individual paths. Nothing in this world, no theology or scholastic philosophy, can discover what God wants. Of course, there are always people claiming to have knowledge about the will of God, but one should avoid this kind of na"ve self-deception. Nevertheless, Ignatius really believes that it is possible to gradually discover the real desire which can be identified with God’s desire.31 This is the final goal of the Spiritual Exercises: to be filled with the content of concrete life. Personal experiences are extremely important – at least for those who surrender themselves to this mise en scene. Emotions should be taken very seriously as they are movements of the soul.32 They tell us about our desires. The movements of the soul are, as Roland Barthes shows in his analysis of the Spiritual Exercises, a code which should be deciphered to be able to understand God’s desire, which is, in the end, our own deepest desire. This is to be found in concrete life, in images and experiences, or even in the memories of a taste.33 The actor of the Spiritual Exercises is performing an exercise by telling his or her own stories on the stage before the only spectator of this experimental theatre, God, for whom nothing remains hidden, and who is able to see everything at the same time and understand the deeper connections and contexts. It leaves the person performing the exercises with an ever greater awareness of his or her deep involvement in the process of desire, and frees him or her from the duty of having comprehensive theoretical knowledge of his or her own stories. It is in telling these stories, and in the production of images and scenes, that he is able to see better how shadows and light become manifest in one’s life.

29 30 31 32

Ibid., I, 14 p. 40. Bocken 2006. Loyola 1961, Preliminary Remarks, Annotation 1, p. 12. Ibid., Preliminary Remark, Annotation 3, p. 12: “As in all the following Spiritual Exercises, we use acts of the intellect in reasoning, and acts of the will in movements of the feelings: let us remark that, in the acts of the will, when we are speaking vocally or mentally with God our Lord, or with His Saints, greater reverence is required on our part than when we are using the intellect in understanding.” 33 Favre 1992, p. 10 and passim.

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Performance of consolatio and desolatio

The exercitant is an active participant. He or she is as creative as an artist. This, however, does not mean that the exercitant has to start from scratch reconstruct the whole story. It is the other way around – we begin by telling the story, only to discover the possibilities and impossibilities we were unable to see before. The creativity is in telling about new and unique things, in finding new images and ways of speaking about something – all these are present already in the material of his own actual life, however. The exercitant creates images and at the same time surrenders himself or herself to them, thereby also becoming a passive observer of these images. Later on, the exercitant is sometimes required to resist concrete longings – not always, but mainly to have the experience that it is possible to misunderstand one’s own desire. For example: Ignatius requires us to pray a little longer when we do not feel like praying, or to forgo dinner when we are hungry. Through all this, Ignatius warns us again and again never to exaggerate. Resisting one’s longings is not an ultimate goal. These exercises should be done only in order to learn what the ultimate desire is in order to reach the point where God’s desire and human desire converge. The categories of thinking, introduced by Ignatius, are as simple as they are clear. It is all about the discernment between consolation and desolation – consolatio and desolatio.34 Through acting out the exercises, we learn to discern which emotions bring consolation and which lead to desolation, inasmuch as we show our self to God’s gaze and ask what it is to see like God. Both categories are deduced from that which can be found about God in the Tradition, for God cannot want that we live in desolation. Consolation, therefore, is more original, though our life is a constantly shifting balance between consolation and desolation. This primacy of consolation is in fact the only necessary condition for the participation in this performance. It still remains possible for us to err and take a decision which will lead to desolation. Learning to see this is the goal of the exercises. Consolation and desolation are different for every human being. God does not desire the same thing for every individual. In the contrast of our emotions and experiences, we are able to discern the direction of our lives without ever being completely certain. In his comment on the German translation of the Spiritual Exercises, Hans Urs von Balthasar constantly refers to the comparative character of Ignatius’ use of language. The act of comparing does indeed form the basic structure of the Exercises. Human experience and knowledge are marked by this unavoidable comparative character, since man is never able to withdraw from this comparative dimension. Nonetheless, it is 34 Loyola 1961, Third Rule, Fourth Rule, Fifth Rule, p. 88f.

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possible to find a higher, superlative dimension in this endless comparison – the ultimate desire, the goal of the Spiritual Exercises. It is at that point that this becomes manifest in the intriguing chapter, ‘Principle and Fundament’ that: […] man is created in order to praise God, man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created. From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it. For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things in all that is allowed to the choice of our free will and is not prohibited to it; so that, on our part, we want not health rather than sickness, riches rather than poverty, honor rather than dishonor, long rather than short life, and so in all the rest; desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.35

This only becomes manifest at the moment that the exercitant becomes aware of the permanent process of comparison, and in this awareness discovers the foundations of this process. Through comparing these dimensions, we learn that desolation is a modus of consolation. The fact that we can know this modus presupposes that we desire consolation. These are the kind of experiences of contrast to which Ignatius constantly refers: the shadows in our own life we will never be rid of, but which can be understood as the framework for the visibility within the light. As human beings we live between light and shadow. We are unable to reject the shadow, but we are able to move between light and shadow, so that the latter serves as a contrast to the light, as this is the case in Caravaggio, an artist who himself was fascinated by the Spiritual Exercises.36 This line of reasoning should help us to understand the somewhat mystical formula introduced by Ignatius when he discusses the task of learning to see, taste, smell and so on. This task of discerning experience is important, since it mirrors how one might discern between experiences coming from God and those coming from the devil – from a ‘weak angel.’37 While the devil is a weak and fallen angel, the desolation he represents is not as original as consolation. Discerning (discretio) also means that one is able to experience the absence of consolation in the state of desolation. This is the case because desolation is the unmediated tension between God’s desire and one’s own concrete desire. The main, fundamental insight is that there is nothing within this world that is mere consolation. In reality, everything is moving between darkness and light, since

35 Ibid., 23, Principle and Foundation, p. 19. 36 Chorpenning 1987. 37 Loyola 1961, Second Exercise, third point, p. 28.

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we are never without sin, but no state is too sinful not to contain at least a trace of light. The only certainty is that of the decision. This can be any decision, depending on one’s personal imagination. Every decision entails a certain risk of losing control, but a decision also opens up space for that which comes toward us. As such, it may help us to understand Ignatius’ difficult remarks on obedience and on the role of the church to which I referred at the beginning of this contribution. This space allows us to understand that every decision is embedded in a practical and social context. Such a decision is not made by a purely autonomous subject. The discernment of the spirits can help us to see that the decision was already made before we started thinking about the decision. The real decision we have to make is the decision to say yes to the deepest desire – God’s desire within ourselves. ‘Sin’, in this case, does not refer to actual moral discourses or decisions, since we are never completely sure what is morally desirable and what is not. It is no mere coincidence that the Spiritual Exercises would later inspire moral probabilism.38 This ethical position revolves around the basic lack of certainty pertaining to moral judgments. This ethical school, promoted by the Jesuit order, again and again explored the possibility of the immoral character of moral principles. It is not enough to discern acceptable principles of conscience, to take a decision, in the knowledge that there is no ultimate certainty. In some contexts, moral principles can have totally immoral consequences. Therefore, it is necessary to understand these in a broader context and with pragmatic sensitivity. Again, we find the mechanism of comparison that can also be found in the Spiritual Exercises. Certainty is a matter of decision, and it comes about only after the process of comparison. The opposition between consolation and desolation remains decisive. When Ignatius discusses sin, it has to do with the rejection of consolation. We live in sin when we connect our whole life to one set reality and, therefore, we have a false understanding of the order of that reality. This will lead to a restlessness that hampers our actions, as we are able to develop an awareness that whatever we desire, it is not our real desire. It is generally known that the Spiritual Exercises prescribe a program that spans four weeks. In these weeks, the exercitant attempts to meditate upon the life of Jesus, which is similar to Thomas / Kempis’ De imitatione Christi. It is remarkable that Ignatius dedicates the whole first week to the problem of sin. During this week, the exercitant becomes aware that his or her desire is always connected with worldly goals. Although this is unavoidable, it is possible to see the difference between what our deepest desire is – which is at the same time God’s desire – and that which we believe to be our desire. We can learn to 38 Schmitz 1990, p. 354–368; Bocken 2014.

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distinguish this unavoidable difference, when we focus on the ruptures and unexpected movements within our life. Ignatius constantly stresses moments like these, especially when he refers to the life of Jesus: the perplexity of Mary, for example, when she hears from the angel Gabriel that she is pregnant, or the moment when Lazarus returns to the world of the living. Again, we see contrasts Ignatius emphasizes and which also help us to see our sinfulness: discernment of the spirits (discretio spirituum), living without certainty, the concrete image of our life as a space for the discovery of the unexpected desire and the ability to make these images new – all these aspects form the basic structure of the Spiritual Exercises as a practice of thinking. These aspects form the basic logic of these spiritual practices. The Spiritual Exercises use these to come to a comparison without a fixed point within, or based upon, daily reason. This comparative character, however, is fundamental to human existence. During the Spiritual Exercises, we learn to play with the contrasts of life before the only true spectator – God – so that we learn to discern the essential decision, which was made already before we were even born. To able to see this however, we first need to take another decision, we need to have the desire really see it. This is where the categories of consolation and desolation come into play.39 In a way, this spiritual program can be seen as a condensed form of the eternal desire present within one’s life. It is a form of thinking that helps us discern without becoming dependent on any earthly reality – for this would mean the loss of space. Although the Spiritual Exercises are an exclusively spiritual program, it is remarkable how its dynamic logical structure has been received in various fields and by authors and artists who are not directly part of any spiritual canon. This essay has attempted to show how the Spiritual Exercises also presuppose a model for reasoning which focuses on how to deal with human desire, while also attempting to not become hemmed in by the limits of reason itself. Perhaps this is the reason why Ignatius’ way of thinking can be seen as distinctly modern. The relation between will and reason, between the heart and reason, between experiencing and thinking, is one of the main challenges of modernity. Ignatius, through the Spiritual Exercises, seems to offer a basis for dealing with these relations. I already mentioned Caravaggio and his play with darkness and light, and I noticed that Maurice Blondel, with his ‘philosophy of action’, sees his own project as an answer to the dramatic chasm between both dimensions of human existence, and I believe he found his inspiration in the Ignatian exercises. As I said at the beginning of this contribution, this philosophical reception history is a project which still has to be developed further. For now, I want to close with a short reference to the philosophy of Ren8 Descartes. Descartes is not well known 39 Consolation is a central theme of late medieval and early modern religion, as Ronald Rittgers showed recently : Rittgers 2012. Consolation is also a central topic in De imitatione Christi.

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as an Ignatian philosopher, and he is often, too often perhaps, characterized as the first modern philosopher who instigated the modern separation of body and mind, of will and reason, et cetera. He is often seen as the original philosopher of technocratic reason, of the ideology of control, and so on. Understanding Descartes against the background of Ignatius could open up new perspectives on the real nature of the Cartesian project.

6.

Ignatius’ meditations and Descartes’ exercises

In his famous book, Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), Descartes (1596–1660), himself a Jesuit, uses a technique very similar to the Spiritual Exercises when he simply sits down in his chair and starts asking which knowledge is deceptive and which is not. It is just like Ignatius’ discretio spirituum. Also, for Descartes, the will of God is constitutive and, just as Ignatius did, he attempts to reach a point in which we can trust that our relation with the world is well ordered. There is, however, a clear and symptomatic difference between Descartes and Ignatius. As soon as the relation between the interior and exterior world is guaranteed by the real idea of God, Descartes seems to forget God, or at least does not need Him anymore. In Ignatius’ meditations, the limit between interior and exterior remains present. According to Ignatius, we always have to be aware of our use of the discernment of the spirits, permanently questioning our desire, permanently making more space in order to make our will conform more closely to God. It may be true that Descartes focuses on the process of knowledge. In his analysis of Descartes’ Meditations, against the background of the Spiritual Exercises, the American philosopher of language, Zeno Vendler, stresses the need to avoid exaggerating the differences between the two authors. From the perspective of the Spiritual Exercises, we see the necessity of a focus on an inner reform of the will.40 From this perspective, the Cartesian meditations do not deliver anything new to the fundamental and obsessive search for certainty. Instead, they focus on the necessity of philosophical thought on the dependencies and inner relation between thinking and the real world. According to Vendler, Descartes is searching for an original desire as well, a desire that precedes existence. Vendler shows quite convincingly that the problem of an exaggerated difference between both authors is mainly due to readers who are part of the philosophical tradition and who tend to think that the meditative form of

40 Vendler 1989, p. 219.

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Descartes’ text is only an external form. Instead, Descartes’ philosophy seems to focus around a choice for consolation.41

7.

Conclusion

Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises show how there are always reflective moments in day-to-day human life with its constant comparing, and they show how thinking is involved in this process of comparing. This reflection presupposes the ability of taking accurate decisions. According to Ignatius, one’s spiritual life can no longer exist outside of society, such as in an isolated monastery. The Spiritual Exercises pertain to the whole of life, even if they take only 30 days to complete. They can be seen as condensed ‘performances of thinking’. In this experimental theatre, God is the only spectator. It is the goal of the Spiritual Exercises, to become aware of the possibility of consolation and to see the dangers of desolation, and to find the possibility to develop a creative form of life within the connection between both. In the Ignatian Exercises, one can see the dynamics of re-form as they are described by Ladner. It is the search for the original form, although in the form of the original desire, which is in fact God’s desire within the subject, which has been covered by ‘sin’ and false decisions. It is impossible to find this original desire just by rational reasoning. It is also the ‘reasonable’ power of the imagination, which shows the participant of the Exercises new perspectives. The participant is able to learn to discover the open spaces where the original desire can develop its power. I hope to have shown that by doing so – inspired by the tradition of Christian meditation – Ignatius initiated a form of thinking, which can be called a ‘reform’ way of thinking. I referred shortly to the influence this way of thinking has had in modern philosophy. This however needs to be elaborated on in a larger project.

Literature Barthes, Roland: Sade, Fourrier, Loyola. Paris 1971. Baier, Karl: Meditation und Moderne. Würzburg 2009. Bellitto, Christopher / Flanagan, Zacharias (Eds.): Reassessing Reform. A Historical Investigation into Church Renewal. Washington 2012.

41 Later on it was Maurice Blondel who discussed the unity of meditative practice and epistemology again. His philosophy of action is nothing other than an attempt to explain the necessity of a practical decision within knowledge. See Boey 1994, p. 405.

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Bocken, Inigo: ‘The Language of the Layman. The Meaning of imitation Christi for a Theory of Spirituality’, in: Studies in Spirituality (15) 2005, p. 217–249. Idem: ‘De verinnerlijking van het licht’, in: Waaijman, Kees (Ed.): Nuchtere mystiek. Navolging van Christus. Hilversum 2006, p. 69–76. Idem: ‘Visions of Reform. Lay Piety as a Form of Thinking’, in: Bellitto, Christopher M. / Flanagan, David Zachariah (Eds.): Reassessing Reform. A Historical Investigation into Church Renewal. Washington 2012, p. 78–92. Idem: ‘Aequitas. Gerechtigkeit in actu von Thomas von Aquin bis Suarez’, in: Coincidentia (5) 2014/2, p. 46–58. Boey, Koen: ‘Blondel in het licht van Ignatius’ geestelijke oefeningen’, in: Bijdragen. Tijdschrift voor filosofie en theologie (55) 1994, p. 399–411. Bollmann, Anne: Schwesternbuch und Statuten des St.-Agneskonvent in Emmerich. Emmerich 1998. Brodrick, James: Ignatius of Loyola. The Pilgrim Years. New York 1956. De Certeau, Michel: ‘L’espace du d8sir ou le ‘Fondement’ des Exercices Spirituels’, in: Christus (20) 1973/77, p. 118–128. Idem: Le lieu de l’autre. Histoire religieuse et mystique. Paris 2005. Chorpenning, Joseph F.: ‘Another Look at Caravaggio and Religion’, in: Artibus et Historiae (8) 1987/16, p. 149–158. Deblaere, Albert: ‘Gerlach Peters (1378–1411). Mysticus van de onderscheiding van de geesten’, in: idem: Essays on Mystical Literature. Leuven 2004, p. 97–112. Van Dijk, Rudolf: Twaalf Kapittels over ontstaan, bloei en doorwerking van de Moderne Devotie. Hilversum 2012. Endean, Philip: ‘Ignatius in Lutheran Light’, in: The Month (24) 1991, p. 271–278. Idem: Karl Rahner and Ignatian Spirituality. Oxford 2001. Favre, Pierre-Antoine: Ignace de Loyola: Le lieu de l’image. Paris 1992. Gerwing, Manfred: ‘Devotio Moderna oder: Zur Spiritualität des Spätmittelalters’, in: Aertsen, Jan A. / Pickav8, Martin (Eds.): Herbst des Mittelalters? Fragen zur Bewertung des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts. Berlin 2004, p. 594–616. Van Ginhoven Rey, Christoph: ‘The Jesuit Instrument. On Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Modernity’, in: Maryks, Robert A. (Ed.): A Companion to Ignatius of Loyola. Life, Writings, Spirituality and Influence. Leiden 2014, p. 198–215. / Kempis, Thomas: De imitatione Christi (Ed.: Rudolf van Dijk). Kampen 2008. Kilby, Karen: Karl Rahner : Philosophy and Theology. London 2004. Ladner, Gerhart B.: The Idea of Reform. Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers. Cambridge (MA) 1959. Loyola, Ignatius: Spiritual Exercises (Transl.: Elder Mullan SJ). New York 1961. Maron, Gottfried: Ignatius von Loyola. Mystik – Theologie – Kirche. Göttingen 2001. Rahner, Hugo: Ignatius als Mensch und Theologe. Freiburg 1964. Rittgers, Ronald K.: ‘Grief and Consolation in Early Lutheran Devotion’, in: Church History (81) 2012/3, p. 601–630. Schmitz, Philipp: ‘Probabilismus. Das Jesuitischste aller Moralsysteme’, in: M. Sievenich, Michael (Ed.): Ignatianisch. Eigenart und Methode der Gesellschaft Jesu. Freiburg 1990, p. 354–368. Störmer-Caysa, Uta: Einführung in die mittelalterliche Mystik. Stuttgart 2004.

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Sudbrack, Josef: ‘Die Anwendung der Sinne als Angelpunkt für Theorie und Praxis der Exerzitien’, in: Sievenich, Michael (Ed.): Ignatianisch. Eigenart und Methode der Gesellschaft Jesu. Freiburg 1990, p. 96–119. Vendler, Zeno: ‘Descartes’ Exercises’, in: Canadian Journal of Philosophy (19) 1989/2, p. 193–224. Waaijman, Kees: Handbuch der Spiritualität. Formen, Grundlagen, Methoden. Ostfildern 2007.

Juan Antonio Senent de Frutos

Ignatian Modernity as another Kind of Modernity

1.

Significance of this research and hypothesis

Before inquiring into the problem of modernity and modernities, I want to consider the context of this research. This investigation’s task is not to give a simple historical reading of the meaning and features of what Western culture has achieved in the last five centuries. It is rather to try and rescue historical possibilities insofar as they help rebuild ways of humanization. These might respond to, or face the limits of our contemporary postmodern destitution. In this sense, we will attempt to make a hermeneutical contribution to the social methods of rebuilding civilization. On the merit of what I have argued in two previous works1 our reading shall be based on the understanding of what the Jesuit and Ignatian social body gives to its own cultural and historical tradition. This works towards an understanding of how that tradition builds bridges, and how it functions on the frontier of global culture and society while maintaining a congenial approach that is dialogical and inclusive. The proposed hypothesis is that today the Jesuit and Ignatian tradition searches for intercultural, interreligious and ecological quality of its presence in the world, and that it continues to inspire through its original sources. This tradition can build a way of presence from this logic, because this way was already present in its own sources. This implies two things: firstly, that we can originally recognize in this tradition a quality and capacity for civilization (latent possibilities that we search and discern instead of other ways of realization) as still inspiring and empowering socio-historical developments with a distinctive regard for the development of the hegemonic character. Secondly, that throughout its history we find that some of these possibilities have already been actualized. In what follows, we will consider the question of modernity/modernities, and the primary aspects of the concept of Ignatian ‘modernity’.

1 Senent de Frutos 2014; Senent de Frutos 2016.

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Juan Antonio Senent de Frutos

What modernity? Hegemonic modernity and other kinds of modernities

It is relevant for our own clarification and historical construction to understand the fundamentals which have shaped our history and that are still impacting social development. We can begin by recognizing two main interpretative traditions of modernity. The first, typical of Hegel or Burckhardt, encrypts its key civilization in the emergence of individual consciousness (Luther) and anthropocentric humanism (Renaissance), the booming of rationalism and experimental sciences (Descartes), in the secularization of social and political life and in the decline and fragmentation of religion in the West, which was replaced by science and policy. This would be a cultural answer to a triple crisis: an anthropological crisis or a crisis of human identity ; a crisis of how to build and understand knowledge, and thirdly, a socio-political crisis that demanded a relocation of social and religious actors as well as the Church in the gamut of social institutions (Protestant Reformation). In my opinion, this way of reading focuses on the description of some factors of the building process (while forgetting others) of what in the course of the centuries we can recognize as Modernity (with a capital letter ‘M’, as something unique, specific, and unchallengeable). This would be the hegemonic line within the historical process that happened in Europe in the last five centuries and that was projected around the globe, imposing upon and marginalizing other cultures, even within the same European social and historical area. There are other readings of modernity, which in my opinion, deepen and clarify the genealogy of the above factors. They show other historical processes that are invisible within the previous narrative. They therefore allow us to consider the plurality of ‘modernities’ with other strategies different to the hegemonic one. They also provide other social responses to the three crises mentioned above, even if these other possibilities of response were subordinated by the main line of the hegemonic modernity. Here we consider the work of Weber, Foucault, or Certeau. This reading comes from inside the possibilities of the European sphere. Along with the above, I think it is relevant to consider a third line of interpretation of European modernity, which seeks its own understanding from the non-European exteriority of global historical process over the last five centuries. It is the line of critical philosophy that comes, for example, from Latin America. These are authors such as Juan Carlos Scannone, Enrique Dussel, Ignacio Ellacur&a, Franz Hinkelammert, or more recently authors of the draft or ‘decolonial option’ Walter Mignolo, An&bal Quijano, Santiago Castro-Gjmez, or Ramjn Gosfroguel.

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For Juan Carlos Scannone the historical meaning which is expressed by the Western modern project in relation to other lands and peoples is the ‘will of absolutization’.2 This temporality closes off from what is new in history, not allowing for other people’s uniqueness. Dussel shows that the egology of the Cartesian ‘ego cogito’ is preceded, historically and politically, by an imperial egology of the ‘ego conquiror’.3 In this sense, modern epistemology and anthropology would be pre-constituted in a political-imperial project of the peoples of Europe over the ‘new world’. Ignacio Ellacur&a also showed that modernity was exposed outside European borders as a project of civilization in the world, guided by rational and religious imperatives, which unfolded as a totality of conquest and domination in the successive empires from the 16th century to the 20th century : Spain went to America to dominate, to conquer, to expand its power and its sources of wealth; it came accompanied by an ideological or ideologized load represented, especially at that time, by the Roman Church. It was, therefore, the Spanish sociohistorical structure of then which was revealed (as it was hidden) as a powerful human force. It was also revealed that force was moving, above all, by the anxious search for wealth and power : that what really moved to the individuals who came to Latin America. On the other hand, such a force was over-determined by an expansionist whole seeking the enhancement of his power.4

Hinkelammert, meanwhile, analyzes the dominating dimension of modernity as a process of absolutization of mediations, or the institutions that organize social life. Such absolutization devours individuals, and is the source of totalitarianism. Thus, human products such as science, law, and institutions ultimately shape a world of abstract mediations necessary for life, because they allow us to think and act in universal terms. However, those inevitable abstract mediations, created in order to allow human development, tend to become independent from man and no longer submit to him; they can even become powers that kill. At the root of this phenomenon is the issue of the ‘empowerment of formal and abstract rationality, the rationality of the media, which has been separated and becomes independent from material rationality, of purpose, to the extent of superseding it and subordinating it. This preeminence runs through the categorical structure of all political ideologies of modernity and it is the cause of its totalitarian derivations, characteristic of the 20th century.’5 In a convergent mode, the authors of the decolonial kind show modernity to be an imperialistic local design projected as the universal-human. Modern ra2 3 4 5

Scannone 1975, p. 256. Dussel 1992. Ellacur&a 2012, p. 347. Hinkelammert / Fern#ndez 2012, p. 16.

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tionality has a dark side which constitutes the other as a constituent part of that same rationality in its colonial character. This local design involves a complex plot of epistemic, social, political, economic, territorial, gender, race, and religious power that categorizes global society from a Western center that is imposed upon an exterior or periphery, which is the destination and the object of the colonial pattern of power that represents modernity. In this sense, the analysis of the decolonial authors shows that modernity is a way of projecting a particularity which goes global through imperialism. Thus, the universality that it projects is colonizing, abstract, self-centered, heterodetermining, and verticalizing. That is the problem of modernity : the modern deficiency is the will and the success in universalizing despotically. The problem, then, is the consubstantial deficit of being able to live with the difference, this is, with other ways of understanding economy, politics, legal systems, religions, gender, race, etc. This implies the avoidance of the lives of others: they will have to assimilate or they will be destroyed. Mignolo describes this deficit as ‘modern/colonial racism, namely, the logic of racialization that emerged in the 16th century, has two dimensions (ontological and epistemic) and only one purpose: classified as inferior and outside the domain of systematic knowledge all languages that are not Greek, Latin, and the six modern European languages. Thus, it preserves privilege of institutions, men, and categories of thought of European Renaissance and enlightenment.’6 We can now ask ourselves, what the key concepts of modern local design are. Hegemonic modernity is the answer that will be imposed (in comparison to other solutions or other ‘modernities’) as a response to the crisis of culture and medieval society. From my point of view, modernity, in its hegemonic version, can be interpreted from its own breakups, which leads to its final maturity in the 19th and 20th century. Viewed in this way, we can rebuild the fundamental assumptions that nourish it. It is a triple process of progressive disengagement and alienation from transcendence, each other, and the material or corporeal whole of nature. Progressing towards alienation and isolation, the individuals will be reduced to the rational subjects as the paradigm of humanity. This dominant cultural model supposedly has the legitimacy and the ability to impose itself upon all other models and replace them. These individuals, on the epistemic level, are absorbed by their own knowledge. Descartes, as Zubiri expressed, is a thinker who gives an account of this process: ‘man is […] a thing that is there […]. Descartes cuts the link that unites the knowledge to what the human being is and transforms the knowledge in the being itself of the human being.’7 In this 6 Mignolo 2013, p. 12. 7 Zubiri 1994, p. 285.

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context, the individuals are no longer a piece of the universe, but they are something in whom knowledge of the whole universe is contained. Nietzsche will show, three centuries later, what this intellectual situation modernity created means for human beings, when he says: ‘we are freer than we ever were to look in all directions; we do not perceive limits anywhere. We have the advantage of feeling around us a huge space, but also a huge vacuum.’8 If the person contains the world in his/her own knowledge, if this is the reality par excellence, then we are alone, our eyes finding ‘nothing’. There is a search without end, because there is nothing out there in which this knowledge finds support. This does not mean that there really is a vacuum, but it means that the individual finds him-/herself empty. In the process of alienation from the world, reality loses its texture, its limits, becoming an ‘empty space’. The subject does not belong to, nor is embedded in, the world. We only deal with things, but we do not treat ourselves as being connected to them. This position will come to articulate itself as a strategic or instrumental rationality when it releases itself from the mortgages of the former horizon. Max Horkheimer gives an account of this process of reduction of the reason to ‘subjective reason’.9 This triple process of progressive separation and estrangement from hegemonic modernity could be characterized relative to the three bodies mentioned above in the following way : First of all, the modern subjects cut themselves off from transcendence. They have absolutized the human horizon. Human beings can only assert their isolation and uprootedness. The dimension of the religation (Zubiri) to reality is overshadowed. Forms of interconnection are marginalized. Transcendent roads are impassable. Transcendence becomes a non-existent possibility or is a bad chance. Secondly, it increases the frontier with the others. Western modernity claims a unique way of humanization, not only for its own purpose, but also as a universal destination. The cultural differences become something to overcome or eliminate. Those who are located outside the circles of inclusion and relevance are in no position to dispute the universality of these claims. But those on the exterior do recognize the reverse of colonial hegemonic modernity. Thirdly, it raises barriers between individual subjects. Body and nature are frontiers for the person to overcome by knowledge and domination. Thus, a predominant characteristic of the modern subject is the exercise of power and of activity over passivity. This results in manipulation and exploitation over respecting one’s environment and listening to the other. In a condensed formulation based on the analysis of Ignacio Ellacur&a at the heart of the Latin-American Jesuit team of philosophical reflection (1983), we can say that: 8 Lefrevre 1971, p. 7. 9 Horkheimer 2002, p. 45.

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The hegemonic line that globalized modernity has produced implies a rupture of humanizing and founding relationships of individuals to groups – institutions against each other, nature and God.

In the words of Ellacur&a, ‘this dominant cultural horizon, whose explanatory matrix is in Enlightenment, must be judged from its negative effects: mass of surplus people, looted and destroyed nature, God as a functional being […] And in a global way, breaking humanizing relationships and foundations.’10 These ‘breaks’ have also generated their own historical fecundity, the development of a secular and liberal world, with an impressive machinery of technoscientific development, which promises to solve the human, social, and ecological crisis that humanity on earth has visibly and evidently faced in recent decades. Hegemonic modernity continues today in the supposedly postmodern context. Here the postmodern refers to the consciousness of the crisis of the hegemonic modernity. This awareness of the crisis results in two possible answers: finding the ‘solution’ in the same hegemonic dynamics of modernity that has jeopardized our civilization, or cultivating other cultural traditions and rescuing other subaltern possibilities in the European context. I think that it is relevant to ask whether, following our previous analyses of modernity, especially from the decolonial option, it makes sense to rescue the reinterpretation and continuation of other modernities today when the colonial dimension is part of all modernities. That would be the challenge that arises from the de-colonial turn: Modernity is a European narrative that has a hidden and darker face, which is colonialism. In other words, colonialism is constitutive of modernity : there is no modernity without colonialism.11

However, I do not think that we can universalize a historical judgment of this kind with respect to all the traditions in the same terms. I think that the rationality of hegemonic modernity has a constitutively colonial character insofar as it assumes a strategy of social construction of reality that ab initio is dogmatic, posing itself as superior to all previous or contemporary forms. That is the main problem. It is a canon that others do not critically confront, and does not allow dialogue, nor is it open to historical revision. In this sense, hegemonic modernity represents an imperialistic and solipsistic point of view. What has been noticed as the meaning and impact of a process and particular historical project, does not have to be understood in a mechanical way or in congruence with other European traditions in the last few centuries. Europe does not have a historical monopoly of imperialism/colonialism, and neither do all 10 Ellacur&a 2012, p. 78. 11 Mignolo 2001.

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European traditions present the same colonial features as the hegemonic strong version. This is evidenced by the so-called School of Salamanca. Even with its limits, it presents a critical opening of self-questioning and listening to other non-European individuals that we don’t find elsewhere. For example, in the debate between the position of Gin8s de Sepffllveda – who maintains a typically imperialist perspective, is racist, ethnocentric and colonialist – and Francisco de Vitoria, there is a critical questioning of those positions, which were in fact not taken seriously by the colonial powers in Hispanic America. The problem here is not just about the specific ideas that hegemonic modernity was arbitrating regarding the large questions that occurred from the Renaissance, but the problem is in using a solution with a universal character in a despotic and uncritical manner. Therefore, I think it will be fruitful to return to other traditions of wisdom, including those raised in the European context such as the Jesuit and Ignatian traditions. It would be relevant to conduct a decolonial reading with some hermeneutic suspicion of any experience and cultural tradition, in order to show to what extent these traditions contributed, or still contribute to, the construction of a pluralistic and free world. In this sense, we share An&bal Quijano’s perspective on ‘detachment’: ‘It is necessary to extricate oneself from the linkages between rationality/modernity and coloniality, first of all, and definitely from all power which is not constituted by the free decision of free people.’12 This is fundamental in reading and recovering other traditions. Other European traditions, such as the School of Salamanca, or the Ignatian tradition, attempted to react to the imperialistic inclinations projected by Europe in modern times. In this sense, I consider an option to identify and discern elements in these traditions that resent a decolonial reaction relative to hegemonic Western modernity. We should apply to this the thesis of the modernity/colonialist group who believe that ‘the way of thinking and making decoloniality arose, from the 16th century, as a response to the oppressive and imperialistic inclinations of modern European ideals designed and applied to the non-European world’.13

3.

Ignatian modernity. A short systematic outline

If we talk about Ignatian modernity, we do so in a particular sense: this tradition is a response that arises in the context of cultural, social, and religious problems and challenges the 16th century that had pitted European societies and churches 12 Quijano 1991, p. 19. 13 Mignolo 2001.

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against themselves, and the new geographical contexts to which they relate. When we use the noun ‘modernity’, we assume a certain common horizon for all possible modernities. We understand that the commonality of all modernities is their attempt to find or construct a new cultural synthesis or new answers to the epochal challenges that are not mere repetitions of earlier forms. By this I mean the production of a certain cultural ‘novelty’ (which may be colonial or not). When we describe modernity as ‘Ignatian’ we are aiming at two things. First, that modernity does not only have one version, although there has been a dominant, hegemonic version in the last five centuries. There were also complex relationships of mutual enrichment, as the contribution of the Jesuits to the development of modern science14 and education.15 At the same time, there was antagonism between them in the last centuries, as evidenced in the conflict with politics and science (philosophy) that caused the Society of Jesus’ expulsion from European colonies in the eighteenth century.16 Secondly, we understand the Ignatian tradition as a civilizing project and process, and in this sense a cultural matrix, not purely spiritual and religious, even though that is the core of the experience and sense from which its cultural forms emerge.17 This cultural matrix has an emergent context, which is the early modernity in historiographical terms. Although its vitality and historical evolution shows that this tradition is situated in a European or Eurocentric context, the Jesuits actively sought to have all the people who inhabit the earth as interlocutor. In this sense, the geopolitics that arises from this tradition does not replicate the geopolitical imperialism of Eurocentric modernity.

4.

Another modernity of ‘Principle and Foundation’ in the Spiritual Exercises (No. 23)

Let us try to advance a synthetic vision of this Ignatian cultural matrix; the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius de Loyola. Consider the solution that emerges from the core of its experience and how it can increase freedom of individuals. The hegemonic modernity can be characterized as a rupture of the founding and humanizing relationships of individuals and groups with each other, nature and God resulting the emergence of an epistemically abstracted and politically colonized human being. Ignatian modernity, on the other hand, offers another solution to this triad of relationships: the displaced subject. This means a human 14 15 16 17

Euve, Sequeiros 2013. Margenat 2016. Cf. Vivanco 2014. Senent de Frutos 2014.

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being that is able to experience him-/herself as open and in relation with the others, the creation, and the Other. This displaced subject lives his freedom as a possibility to find his own good, the common good (meaning the mankind and the creation) and the greatest glory of God. In this situation, there is no contradiction between the three elements, but a positive dialectic. The human being will find his/her fulfilment and freedom through a proper relationship with the other agencies in a benefactor circularity. This ‘Principle and Foundation’ provides us with a synthesis of the intellectual framework and reality of the spiritual exercises that we can consider as a critical proposition in the context of the rising modernity. The underlying issue is that of the reality and the realization of the individual, the impossibility or difficulty of remaining within isolation and achieving fullness. The individuals need and want to save their lives, take them to the fullest, and thus save their contingency. In this context the starting point for subjectivity is anthropocentric because, although the individuals are not closed in their own being, it is the place from where every possible transformation or ‘way’ emerges. Subjectivity is not given from outside, nature, or from above, from God. Ignatius here moves like all modernity, on the horizon of the subject, in line with the anthropocentrism of the Renaissance. In this sense, reality is seen from a humanized center, implying that the subject experiences its own reality as something different from God and the world. However, this place of departure, evidence of its cultural context, presents a challenge to Ignatius in the context of mainstream Western modernity. He argues that subjectivity cannot be the effect of human forces alone – as Baron Münchhausen pretended by pulling himself from the swamp he was stuck in. In this sense, this anthropocentric point of departure does not result in the anthropological illusion that other modern ideas produce. The anthropocentric starting point goes hand in hand with an awareness of connectedness with all possible realities and otherness. That is why there is a suspicion about the problematic consequences of anthropocentrism. At the beginning of modernity, we can thus detect an Ignatian critique of modernity. The Ignatian tradition reformulates the cultural framework in order to address, in a different way, subjectivity and human action. In this reformulation there isn’t a way back to the pre-modern horizon, because at the center of the construction of human action we now find the individual. But in the Ignatian matrix the individual does not perceive him-/herself as self-sufficient or disconnected from the world and the Other. It is a decentered center, an individual in search of realization through other instances, in which the human being is not confronted, opposed, cast away or dominated. This human center points at the discovery of the subject’s new place and function, as well as another

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mode of relationship with other agencies, while seeking a better realization of his-/herself.

a)

The subject and God

What is the solution that is being striven for? Save your life through God. Recognizing that one’s purpose and salvation lays not in his-/herself; or in selfdeification, or in the possession of worldly knowledge seeking utility by transforming domination. Salvation comes through a proper relationship with God and with things. God is posited as the end of existence, and the appropriate relationship is one of ‘praise’ of a relationship of gratitude, of ‘being reverent’, giving due respect, recognition and ‘service’, continuing the charitable project of God. From here a person must find his/her own way of realization that is unique and different. It is not universal. The reference to God is here not a source of abstract universality but a path of creativity and responsibility for the subject, no heteronomy but autonomy in listening with other instances.

b)

The subject and things

What is the relationship or response to the world? Max Weber recognized in modernity the culmination or radicalization of a cultural evolution, in line with the secularization of the world which finally culminates in the ‘disenchantment of the world’. This allowed and demanded the process of rational exploration of, and experimentation on, the world and all of its materials, including human physicality and biological identity. This, we all know, is a process that continues today. These cultural and historical dynamics generate knowledge that will be technically applied in the service of human desires, guided by the logic of utility. Everything is to be considered as to how much it can be subjected, transformed, or manipulated, ignoring any value in and of itself, and therefore, disenchanting the world we live in and consequently also ourselves. Ignatius introduces another way which is more complex and generates another historical process. This will be, in my opinion, the first substantive difference with the hegemonic reading of modernity. Immediately after the opening of the human being to God as a condition for happiness and wellbeing, he addresses man’s relation with the surrounding world: ‘and other things on the face of the Earth are bred for man, and to assist in carrying out the purpose for which it is raised’. In other words, worldly things are integrated into a relationship with man in search of salvation.

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In this context, created things, even the primary human goods, should first of all be treated as means. However, the world, the body, and health are not mere means, as they would be in the way of liberal modernity. They are much more mediums, utilized ‘in order to assist in carrying out the purpose for which it is created’ (‘that may help him in prosecuting the end for which they have created is’), i. e., they are not to be used despotically or without limits by the human. They are instead integrated into a human purpose: praising, being reverent, and serving God. Therefore use is not unrestricted, but it is modulated by the inclusion in the appropriate (charitable) relationship with God and creation. Ignatius continues: ‘From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it’. At first sight, it may seem as though we stand in the hegemonic path of modernity : the world as a means in the service of anthropocentric human purposes. It even seems like a decisive step in the direction that Weber describes as the ‘disenchantment of the world’. However, it is actually a step on the road to achieve another kind of relationship: ‘For this it is necessary to make ourselves indifferent to all created things’. The world would also lose its own value, even its own corporeality. The natural, physical and social world must be treated with dispassion, not as ‘disorderly condition’, i. e., not as something which seeks or determines itself, and which would dominate human freedom and its choices without impediments or ties to its ultimate goal. This work by indifference involves not remaining with created things, to go beyond them, passing beyond the value they have for us. This movement calls for the need of a certain disenchantment of the world, but only in order to move beyond the immediate link between the subject and the created things. In this way, objects ‘de-subjectify’; win actual ‘objectivity’ when dealing with them. This indifference does therefore not mean that things are indifferent, but points at another relation with things detached from anthropocentric strivings. The indifference that characterizes the attitude to achieve humanity is in turn nuanced by a double limit, one anthropological and another normative. We need to make ourselves indifferent ‘in everything that is given to the freedom of our free will’. The subject does not reach a perfect indeterminacy, but is conditioned and crossed by other trends that accompany him in all its determinations, and of which one will have to take charge. On the other hand, there is a regulatory limit to ‘what isn’t prohibited’. The subject has to discover that not everything can be used as a simple means, namely all ‘creatures’ that are not mere means, to an end. Persisting with a utilitarian and anthropocentric relationship – which we can fall into if we identify our position in the world merely with using things inasmuch as they are useful – would be ‘imperfect’. This applies to those people who do not understand or deal with the proper truth and value of the creature. Because to be ‘perfect’ means to ‘consider, meditate, and contemplate more

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before God our Lord in every creature’. To understand this, let’s look at no. 39 of the Spiritual Exercises: It is to be noted that, though in an idle oath one sins more when he swears by the Creator than by the creature, it is more difficult to swear in the right way with truth, necessity and reverence by the creature than by the Creator, for the following reasons. First Reason. The first: When we want to swear by some creature, wanting to name the creature does not make us so attentive or circumspect as to telling the truth, or as to affirming it with necessity, as would wanting to name the Lord and Creator of all things. Second Reason. The second is that in swearing by the creature it is not so easy to show reverence and respect to the Creator, as in swearing and naming the same Creator and Lord, because wanting to name God our Lord brings with it more respect and reverence than wanting to name the created thing. Therefore swearing by the creature is more allowable to the perfect than to the imperfect, because the perfect, through continued contemplation and enlightenment of intellect, consider, meditate and contemplate more that God our Lord is in every creature, according to His own essence, presence and power, and so in swearing by the creature they are more apt and prepared than the imperfect to show respect and reverence to their Creator and Lord. Third Reason. The third is that in continually swearing by the creature, idolatry is to be more feared in the imperfect than in the perfect.

It follows from this indifference, that to take a distance is to bring us closer to the things themselves. In fact, from another perspective, this allows a certain ‘reenchantment’ of the world, one that is not idolatrous, pantheistic, or a return to a cult and veneration of the things themselves. Culturally, modern disenchantment has led to the relocation of the human being with regard to where we live, and at the same time, use and overuse which has no foreseeable ending, even if it results in irrationality, and a collapse of the natural world we live in. In this sense, the postmodern solution is not at the height of the historical process of humanity or its needs, nor the delusional veneration of the world.

c)

The subject, things, and God

Another difference in Ignatius de Loyola’s work is that it puts the human being in the position of accessing a beneficial triangulation for him-/herself, objects, and for God. Ignatius exceeds the framework of anthropocentric reality by expanding it to save it: objects are also site of action of God. This dynamic, which is not expressed in the Principle and Foundation, is best understood in light of the end of the exercises, as contemplation to gain love (No. 230), and is that which actually completes the exercises. God is not a distant opposite to human otherness, nor a simple concept of perfection conceived by the human mind. He is

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not a fatal enemy of the human fantasy, nor is He reduced to a human idea. The contemplation that complements the formation of the sensitivity of the subject aims to achieve love and God, but through things, since He makes Himself present in things as creator and holder.

d)

The method

Another difference between hegemonic modernity and the Ignatian tradition can be identified by looking at the methods employed. With regard to methods, Ignatian tradition indeed differs from the main path of modernity, where a method or form of being and relating to other instances is based mainly on the activity of the subject acting against the limitations posed by other instances. The predominant modern form of activism is solipsistic; that is, the modern action takes place amidst a profound ontological human isolation, a detachment from the surrounding world. In Ignatius’ proposal, active and passive dynamics move in a circular manner, and this is what allows the connections sought in exercises (No. 15), where the work of an encounter between the created and its Creator. Therefore it avails itself of the human reflex action, ‘consider, meditate, contemplate’ (39). So for example, the point of anchorage or connection to reality are actions. In number 3, Ignatius tells us that in all the following spiritual exercises we use acts of understanding, of will, of application of the senses; we can relate to God. This is the so-called fundamental hypothesis. God is the hypothesis that launches the subject to action. One has to open up first to the presence of God in our experience, in order to be able to recognize the presence of God in dealing with things. This sets the conditions for mutual relations. From a theological point of view, God comes to meet us, because ‘He loved us first’. For Ignatius this was preparing people for the possibility of recognition of the presence of God. To use an example, we assume for the subject that God is neither clear nor assured in the relationship with him/her, as the subject will have to be ordained. There is a double path in the search for God: on one we have to be able to look for Him in our experience, but on the other we also have to be able to recognize Him in our actions.

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Imperium mundi or domus est mundus? Geopolitics, dialogue, and coexistence

Is there a position on the idea of world conquest, on the conquering ego, in the Ignatian modernity? There clearly is an interpretive tradition within the Society of Jesus and the writings of its founder charging a position of imperialistic domination. It is a ‘black legend’ that reaches to the present day. Theocratics, soldiers of the Papacy, gaining riches and power in politics at the courts of the kings and the European aristocracy, conspirators against the political power,18 are just some of the historical mystifications which have operated on the Jesuits, and that have earned them a strong antagonism since the Enlightenment (and even before). In this vein they are seen as pioneers of a Jesuit imperium mundi: ‘There is no doubt that the Jesuits intervened intensively in all worldly matters and that they sought to forge a new temporary Empire in the service of the spiritual power of the Church.’19 However, there is an expression of Jerjnimo Nadal’s, Jesuit of the first companions group, that says ‘for the Society the whole world is our home’,20 a statement that can be taken as a synthesis of another kind of presence that is sought after in this world. Instead of the imperium mundi this seeks the domus est mundus, which is actually opposite to the first, and conveys, not a colonial, but instead a convivial attitude. It deploys humanity itself to respect others and oppose injustice and violence. This attitude creates a sphere in which one is able to meet and discuss freely, since the values and insights of other traditions that embody other non-European cultures and other religions are respected. This is the way Jesuit pioneers such as Roberto de Nobili (1577–1656) in India, who sought an accomodatio – created a new context for European Christianity. Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) in China also cultivated a cultural exchange of European science with local knowledge and a religious adaptation to Chinese culture from deep knowledge of their traditions. It seems that the key to a nonimperial tradition consists of the knowledge of, and coexistence with, the plurality of the world, not only in negative terms or as mere ‘tolerance’, but as being able to actively take care of relationships and common conditions for the welfare of others, and even work with others of diverse spiritual and ethical traditions in order to understand and engage in the common needs of humanity. In this sense, helping others, giving material relief, and the growing or defending of people’s freedom together with the ability of convivial dialogue is not only the established

18 Vivanco 2014. 19 Rivera 2011, p. 59. 20 Nadal 1561, p. 469–470.

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historical nucleus of the Ignatian tradition, but is also its current self-understanding. Following this line there is an historical experience (one of the most significant historical manifestations of Ignatian tradition) that can help us understand in particular some of its geopolitics and the articulation of inter-ethnic relations. It is the Paraguay ‘reductions’. The origin and the political extinction of the Jesuit reductions of the Guarani people by the Portuguese and Spanish empires can help us to understand what the meaning of Ignatian geopolitics is. As Bartomeu Meli/ reminds us, reducciones emerged in America as a political project of integration of the Indian people into the colonial system.21 In particular, as a successful way to achieve pacification or reduction of the political and social conflict of the Indians to the colony due to the presence of priests and religious people, such as, for example, the Franciscans. They therefore could be evangelized and then submitted to the encomienda. According to Necker, the Franciscan intervention produced an effect sought, but never achieved by weapons: the pacification and submission of the Guarani people to the Spaniards.22 On the other hand, Meli/ said, Jesuit reductions are inscribed in an analogous historical context, but with a highly significant difference. In the consciousness of the early fathers – this is thus expressed in Provincial Diego de Torres ‘instructions’ – reduction is a place of protection from the ‘encomienda’ and any form of slavery. The Franciscans in fact coexisted with the encomienda system; the Jesuits wanted to dispense with it, and do everything to discredit it morally and politically. They even intended to suppress it by removing the conditions which made it possible. That is, they wanted to give the Indians another space independent of the encomienda colonial life; a sort of anticolonial space within the same colonial project. The Jesuits questioned the colonial order as such. Enrique Dussel, appreciates this as an ‘anti-colonial’ project, and ‘an area of reduced freedom’. The reduction was not primarily an instrument of control, it constituted a mediated civilization. In Paraguay, the difference between one small indigenous person and the other was the possession of a ‘cradle’, an axe of iron which allowed the planter to pass to the Iron Age, agriculture and urban society, which meant that civilization sprang from this point.23 Moreover, G. Wilde recognizes the dialogical and negotiated character of this cultural process that took place in reductions in times of the Jesuits that can be understood as the ‘complex result of unique processes of ethnogenesis that, at different levels or scales, expressed negotiated interaction between religions and native leaders, 21 Meli/ 1981, p. 30–36. 22 Necker 1975, p. 81. 23 Dussel 1981, p. 21.

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contradictions between priests and other sectors of society and the colonial church (including other religious orders), adapted to the local environment and new meanings that defined ownership and autonomous indigenous spaces’.24 The historical end of the reductions is also enlightening. The suppression of political and ecclesiastical reducciones, under the colonial interest of the European powers, and especially the Portuguese empire, to enslave the Indians, and exploit the material wealth of their territories reveals a difference in comparison to the social, religious and political presence of the Society of Jesus in these territories. Of the abundant literature on this topic, I will highlight one recent contribution.25 It gives insight into the difference between hegemonic modernity, dispossession of the riches and freedoms of the other, destruction of their cultures, which at that time was identified as ‘enlightened despotism’ on the one hand, and another currency which revealed the presence of the Jesuits among those Guarani people for the protection of political freedom and social life on the other hand. In terms of contemporary human rights we could speak, in this sense, of the defense of the process of self-determination of other peoples as a key of inter-ethnic relations in Ignatian geopolitics.

6.

Conclusions

Hegemonic modernity or modernization of societies, and of the nature of the available process, articulates a civilizing process which is observable in a set of interdependent social practices or social subsystems that show how the subject is understood, and how it can project its relations in other instances. These practices articulated a systematic whole endowed with coherence. Likewise, we can understand Ignatian modernity as a civilizing process that articulates how we can understand the human being and interact with other instances which can also be seen in its structure and systematic character, displaying certain coherence between the logics of practices with respect to the others that are literally a project of the world. In this book chapter I have conducted a brief review of various systematic and inclusive practices in accordance with Ignatian tradition to show its global scope that is the nucleus of this tradition. The display of key differences between the two types of modernity reveals a plurality of ways various socio-cultural responses to the reconstruction of the traditional or pre-modern societies in Europe from the 15th century are articulated. However, these roads are developed in a context of political and cultural struggles that, in the successive centuries of development, are margin24 Wilde 2012, p. 197. 25 Vivanco 2014.

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alizing or exclusionary of other alternatives to the main reading which assumes Eurocentrism and European superiority. In this sense, Ignatian modernity which is articulated originally in the first three generations of Jesuits, is later partly colonized by the hegemonic logic of racism and exploitation, and was maintained, for their livelihoods, in a political environment that developed in this direction. Either this, or it is subalternized up to the attempt of their complete suppression of the social body and the tradition of Ignatius in Europe and in the rest of the world during the time of the ‘enlightened despotism’ and the alliance of political powers with imperialistic economic interests. This is precisely because it showed another side to the Western presence in the world that contradicted that of empire and its logics. Therefore, in the original sense, Ignatian modernity articulates a global project that cannot be conceived as inherently colonial, unlike hegemonic modernity. In this sense, it has its origins in fundamental possibilities for constructing social interactions and institutions that express a quality dialogic and conviviality with other peoples, cultures, religions, and with nature itself. Therefore, this type of modernity is not necessarily colonial, although it was sometimes colonized when their social interactions and institutions yielded to a logic of empire and folded to the lasting strength of hegemonic modernity. These possibilities originating from the Ignatian tradition that are expressed in Ignatian Spirituality and that have projected to the various fields of human activity since the time of the first Society of Jesus, may be recovered or reappropriated contemporarily by the Ignatian community to respond to the crisis of modernity, or rather, to respond to the cultural crisis and the social and environmental crises that are caused by the worldwide reproduction of the hegemonic modernity of domination. In this sense, what is called ‘Ignatian modernity’ here, currently has a postmodern character, inasmuch as it is a civilizing contribution which may converge with other cultural and religious traditions of the world in the attempt to overcome the various imbalances and ailments which cause the generation of a world tending towards monocultural conformity to hegemonic modernity. At the same time, this tradition can talk from the same space of socio-cultural generation of the modern matrix, that is, from the field of Western culture, with people who assume the necessary reorientation and reformulation of the constituent foundations of the modern project from the crisis of this project. Because of this, it can bring reflexivity to the modern cultural process, showing other possible ways for it to try to overcome the destitution caused by Eurocentric, hegemonic modernity.

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Autoren

Inigo Bocken ist wissenschaftlicher Direktor des Titus-Brandsma-Instituts, Dozent an der Fakultät Philosophie, Theologie und Religionswissenschaften der Radboud-Universität Nimwegen, und Ordentlicher Professor an der Cusanus Hochschule, Bernkastel-Kues. Christian Danz ist Ordentlicher Professor für Systematische Theologie an der Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultät der Universität Wien. Ronald K. Rittgers ist Ordentlicher Professor für Geschichte und Theologie und Inhaber der Erich Markel Chair in German Reformation Studies an der Valparaiso Universität, USA. Hans Schelkshorn ist Ausserordentlicher Professor am Institut für Christliche Philosophie der Universität Wien. Juan Antonio Senent de Frutos ist Professor für Politische Philosophie und Rechtsphilosophie an der Loyola Universität Andalusien, Sevilla. Gerrit Steunebrink war bis zu seiner Emiritierung Dozent an der Fakultät Philosophie, Theologie und Religionswissenschaften der Radboud-Universität Nimwegen. Herman Westerink ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter des Titus-Brandsma-Instituts, Dozent an der Fakultät Philosophie, Theologie und Religionswissenschaften der Radboud-Universität Nimwegen, und hat eine Stiftungsprofessur an der KU Leuven.