35. Fresenius. Mystik und geschichtliche Religion
Von Wilhelm Fresenius, Lic. theol.
Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. 1912. 1 icentiate Fresenius is an admiring pupil of W. Herrmann, and has
L written this little book apparently for the purpose of defending the so-called "historical" conception of religion, held by Herrmann in common with his fellow Ritschlians, against the "mystical" conception of religion which is now again becoming very widespread. According to the so-called
"historical" conception of it, religion is not a native possession of the human soul; it is something which meets man in the course of the process of living. It is an experience—an Erlebnis, something that occurs to him— which some day befalls him—begegnet, encounters him—when he finds himself face to face with goodness manifested in a personal life with such power that he cannot choose but utterly surrender himself to it. Religion is thus a fact which occurs in a human life, a transaction, a transaction of the man's own; yet it is rather produced in him than by him—through the
might of the goodness revealed to his observation. "A man cannot make religion for himself; nor can he acquire it by labors or performances of any kind whatsoever—he can neither earn it by works nor excogitate it by brooding. It has always itself laid claim to be a gift of God to man.
Therefore, the only path to religion lies in observing and marking the experiences of our own life, if perchance there may speak to us in them a power of love and goodness which we cannot withstand. Experiences arise in our own life, however, only in our commerce with other men, with personalities in whom we are able to put trust, that is, from whom we receive the impression that they have risen above purely instinctive life to personal being. By their means we are turned to that which raised them out of their nothingness. We Christians accordingly speak of the Christian community as that with the existence, vitality and historical power of which the possibility of religious life is for us indissolubly bound up. And it is therefore that we designate religion, because it is attached to human intercourse and its historical, personal root, as historical religion" (p. 64).
Religion, in this view, therefore arises in the soul of man in particular conditions of time and space, under influences brought to bear upon him from without—under the influences, to be more specific, of other personalities which impress him as good. In the formal definitions which Fresenius frames (p. 63), "religion is the experience which the morally thinking man makes, when the power of the good so encounters him that he must surrender himself to it utterly"; and (p. 65) "the Christian religion is the experience which the morally thinking man makes of the Person of Jesus, when the power of the good so encounters him in it, that he must surrender himself to it utterly."
With this conception of religion as evoked in man by a quite specific experience, which comes to him from without, the Mystical contention that we must look within ourselves to find God stands obviously in direct
contradiction. "It is the characteristic of all Mysticism," Fresenius remarks in bringing this contradiction to view, "that it maintains the immediate presence of divine life in man, which needs only to be recognized and felt,
—and it is therefore that in all mysticism it is contemplation which selfevidently forms the best way to God—while historical religion has always presented itself as the new life, which comes into being by the action of person on person and is not already (even though hiddenly) present in man" (pp. 50–51). It is not strange therefore that Fresenius looks with alarm upon the irruption of Mystical ideas which seems at present in progress and posits the problem which is raised by this irruption in such phrases as these—"whether we are to be saved from the religious exigencies of our day by giving our attention to historical religion, to the gospel of Jesus as the Reformers understood it, or by sinking ourselves into the feeling of infinity and by speculatively contemplating that which lives in our souls by nature" (pp. 54–55). For Fresenius emphasizes that what the Mystic finds in the soul is merely its natural endowment. "We have heard religion—or rather its Mystical form—," he says, "compared with the contemplation of nature and art; what we experience and feel in the enjoyment of nature, in gazing on a beautiful painting, in listening to a symphony by a master, that—so we have been told—is essentially related to religion, or rather is religion's self, because it is the apprehension and feeling of the eternal and imperishable. But just as surely as the enjoyment of nature and art can evoke mysticism, just so surely is the infinite which is felt in it not the God of religion. For Christian piety at least, God is not the Eternal, Imperishable which we feel, but the Power for Good which comes into contact with us, above time and eternity, in the personalities who evoke confidence (Zutrauen) in us,—which Power is not maintained by us to be God, but manifests itself to us as God. Where, however, God is sought and found in indefinite feelings, in experiences of the infinite, there
He is nothing but a name for the unknown and incomprehensible which arouses that feeling. Man then humbles himself before a power which he does not know, but which, if he will not give himself the lie, he postulates, and from which he then, since he cannot get along without them, arbitrarily forms conceptions—which perhaps, however, are actually derived from historical religion" (p. 82).
Obviously the debate between the Ritschlian, as represented by Fresenius, and the Mystic turns primarily upon the question of what, when the Mystic sinks himself into himself, he finds there. The Mystic says he finds God. The Ritschlian says he finds nothing but an indefinite and indefinable feeling of the infinite which he arbitrarily dubs God. This question at once, however, passes into another: the question of the conception of God. To the Mystic, Fresenius intimates, God is simply
Immensity; to the Ritschlian He is the Good: to the former therefore He is a mere thing, to the latter He is a Person—for when we say "good" we say
Person. As over against all Mystical phantasies, therefore, the Ritschlian stands for "the personal God, who drawing near to us in religious experience, calls us to ethical, personal life" (p. 88). This great transaction takes place, of course, at a given point of time and thus the Ritschlian stands for what he calls "historical religion." "Thus over against historical religion which springs out of personal life-experiences in the social organism there stands history-less Mysticism which forgets the social organism in arbitrarily produced feelings and phantasies" (p. 89). That the contradiction of these conceptions may be felt in its full force, however, the phenomenalism which rules the Ritschlian conception must be borne in mind. To this phenomenalism Fresenius manages to advert even in this brochure (p. 73), speaking with some contempt of the old Lutheran dogmaticians who still believe in a substantial soul (it is "the thing in itself," he remarks in parenthesis) and, over against this human soul, in a
substantial God. As they did not find the real nature of man in his activities, he complains, so they did not find God "in particular activities, in historical acts and personal operations" but postulated a somewhat behind these activities of which they endeavored to frame some conception and which they sought afterwards to bring somehow into connection with historical facts. For the "soul" of man he would substitute a series of activities under the conception of "Life" (Leben), and correspondingly for the substantial God he would substitute a series of activities also known as "Life" (Leben). And as God consists only in His activities, of course He can be known only in His activities, and it is idle to seek Him as lying inert in the human heart.
It certainly were hard choosing between two such one-sided conceptions of God—a God who is bare Immensity (or "Reality," as it is the irritating habit of the Mystics to call Him), or a God who is bare
Activity. Fortunately we are shut up to no such option. Nor can the question of what may be found in the human soul be thought to be closed by the unfortunate fact that many of those who have turned their contemplation in upon it have found there apparently nothing but a vague sense of immensity. There are mystics and mystics. Indeed Fresenius, as he addresses himself to the study of mysticism and the possibility of there being a mystical element in religion, is oppressed no more by the multitude of the mystics who require to be taken account of than by the immense variety of definitions of mysticism which claim attention. Quot homines, tot sententiae. To ease his task Fresenius selects three recent writers of importance, whom he considers fair representatives of divergent types of Mystical thought and endeavors to derive from a study of them a working notion of what Mysticism stands for at the moment at least. These are
Friedrich von Hügel, Nathan Söderblom, and Georg Klepl. To the first of these thinkers "Mysticism is the specifically Catholic ideal of piety" (p. 10);
to the second it is "the essential content of Christianity, and that precisely of Protestant Christianity" (p. 28); to the third (he does not employ the term) it is the abiding basis of all possible religion in these sophisticated times. As the result of his induction Fresenius strangely arrives at the conclusion that, as a phenomenon in the Christian Church at least,
Mysticism is distinctively Catholic or at least Catholicizing. He had no doubt thrown Söderblom out of consideration, somewhat arbitrarily one would think, because of his identification of mysticism with the general supernatural element in Christianity. But one would suppose that Klepl— who does not, however, consider himself a Mystic—was as far as possible from a Catholicizing conception of religion.
The truth seems to be that Fresenius has not in the end been able to emancipate himself from his traditional Ritschlian conception here.
Ritschl, Harnack, Herrmann are cited in support of his finding (p. 85) and the volume closes with a quotation from the well-known pages of Harnack's "History of Dogma" (E.T. vi. 1899, pp. 99 f.) in which he warns evangelical Christians off from too complete a sympathy with Mysticism— merely because of their delight in the warm spiritual life which it exhibits— on the ground that it is essentially Catholic and cannot be Protestantized.
Despite so great an array of authority we cannot help thinking this finding a mistake. The evangelical Christian may be well put on his guard against Mysticism—to which he cannot unreservedly give himself, as Harnack truly observes, "if he has made clear to himself what evangelical faith is"; and no doubt the legalism and formalism of the Romish teaching have ever been powerful contributory causes to the production of Mysticism in the Catholic Church. But it finds its impelling cause clearly elsewhere and therefore it is not even exclusively an intra-Christian phenomenon. We can scarcely deny the name of Mystic to Plotinus or Jalálu 'd Din, to Greek or Persian, Muslim or Hindu saint. In the actual definition of Mysticism to
which Fresenius comes, if it be considered merely as a definition of Mysticism within the limits of the Catholic Church, we may nevertheless find our way. "Mysticism," says he, "is the ideal of piety which is necessarily formed on the basis of a legalistic, Catholic or Catholicizing conception of religion, by men, weary of the burden of ecclesiastical tradition and cold formalism, who seek after a personal experience and assurance of faith, and, utilizing religious tradition and customs as means to their end, find the goal of their search in an indefinite and indefinable feeling of the eternal which is arbitrarily maintained to be God" (pp. 83–84). Mutatis mutandis the same might be said for Mysticism in the Protestant Churches, or for Mysticism among the Mohammedans or the Hindus. Everywhere
Mysticism avails itself of the forms of religion and the theological formulas under which it grows up as means: everywhere it lays hold of the sense of the immense and the eternal which it finds in the soul. It remains still a question, however, whether its discovery of God through this feeling of the immense and the eternal is altogether arbitrary.
To go at once to the root of the matter, what Mysticism really is, is, at bottom, just natural religion. That its form has been given it so prevailingly
—perhaps we ought to say, constantly—by the influence of Pantheizing thought may be treated here as accidental; though it must be confessed that it has much the look, historically, of an essential characteristic, in which case we should have to define Mysticism as Pantheizing natural religion.
Meanwhile we are not to be driven or tempted from the position that men are by nature religious and will in any event have a religion; that there has been ineradicably implanted in them a sensus deitatis (as Calvin has taught us to call it) which inevitably becomes a semen religionis. Fresenius himself is compelled to allow the presence in man of "a religious disposition, or an inborn religious capacity" which provides the psychological possibility of religion (p. 60); and he freely admits that this "capacity for religion" has
enabled multitudes to become actually religious under influences wholly unknown to us (p. 16). His contention only is that it must be called into action by influences coming from without and of a personal-ethical kind: it never, according to him, functions independently so as to produce religion.
The Mystic, on the contrary, insists that it normally effloresces into actual religion whenever opportunity is given it to function. The difference here is fundamental and rests on divergent ontologies. If it be reduced to the single question of whether God approaches man only from without, through the medium of other personalities acting upon him by the way of a so-called
"ethical" appeal; or rather Himself forms a part of man's spiritual environment in contact with whom man exists and of whom he has immediate experience, we must pronounce the Mystic certainly in the right.
And this we may surely do without prejudice to complete rejection of the entire Pantheizing coloring of the common (or shall we say constant?)
Mystical presentation. The mischief of Mysticism lies not in its claim to find God through the ineradicable natural instincts of the soul but in its persistent effort, being natural religion, to substitute itself for supernatural religion, that is to say, for Christianity. The relation of Christianity to natural religion seems to be very frequently, we might even say commonly, misconceived. They are not two religions, lying side by side of one another, of which one must be taken and the other left: whether with the Ritschlian we take Christianity (or rather, what they mistake for Christianity) and leave natural religion, or with the Mystics we take natural religion and leave
Christianity. As what is called special revelation is superinduced upon and presupposes what is called general revelation, and these two form one whole, so Christianity is superinduced upon and presupposes natural religion and forms with it the one whole which is the only sufficing religion for sinful man. Although Mysticism is not Christianity, therefore,
Christianity is mysticism. There are multitudes of Mystics who are not
Christians, but there is no Christian who is not a mystic—who does not hold communion with God in his soul, and that not merely as the God of grace by virtue of whose recreative operations he is a Christian, but as the God of nature by virtue of whose creative, upholding, and governing operations he is a creature. We may or may not be able to make out a historical claim to the name of Mysticism to express this Christian mysticism; the name may be preëmpted by something essentially different and any attempt to rescue it to this nobler usage may be productive only of confusion. We may think it futile to distinguish, as has often been attempted (von Hügel quotes the distinction from Rauwenhoff, as Charles
Hodge quoted it from Nitzsch), between Mystik and Mysticismus, as designations respectively of the "white" and the "black" Mysticism. But the name apart, the thing lies at the very foundation of the Christian religion: there is no Christian religion where there is no inward communion with God.
As Christianity is mysticism without being Mysticism, so also is it a historical religion without being "Historical Religion" in the sense of Fresenius and his school. In calling religion "historical" Fresenius and his school mean nothing more than that its origin in every individual case is to be sought and found not in some innate disposition of the man but "in his own history," that is, as he explains (p. 21), "in the experiences of his life, in the effects of living personalities, in occurrences which can maintain their right before his clear ethical judgment." Their minds are not at all on the great historical occurrences by which the God of Grace has intervened in the sinful development of the race by redemptive acts—the incarnation, the atonement, the outpouring of the Holy Ghost—but merely on the lifeexperience of the individual man, in the course of which, they affirm, religion is brought to him as one item in the temporal series of his experiences. Of the great redemptive acts of God by which Christianity is
constituted and by virtue of which, lying at its heart, it is a "historical religion" they will know as little as the Mystic himself. To them, too, all religion, inclusive of Christianity, as a, or the, religion, is independent of all occurrences of the past and is purely a present experience of man. They differ with the Mystic here only in making it an experience, not of man's native life of feeling, but of his presently acting ethical will.
When remarking on this matter Fresenius carefully explains that "the deepest difference" between von Hügel the Mystic and Herrmann, the advocate of "historical religion," "lies here in this: that Hügel seeks to assign its place in the soul-life of man to religion as a given entity (psychological method), while Herrmann exhibits its origin in the spiritual-ethical life of man and establishes it as a power which works from person to person and is therefore historical (historical, systematic method)" (p. 21). So eager is he not to be misunderstood, by the use of the term "historical" here to imply some recognition of the historical elements of Christianity as that term is ordinarily understood, that he attaches a note to the word to explain that he, like Wobbermin (Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, xxi. 1911), distinguishes between the two German terms geschichtlich and historisch and applies only the former, but never the latter, to his Christianity. To him
Christianity has ceased to be a "historical" (historische) religion and the "faith" which he calls by that name is absolutely independent of all
"historical" (historische) facts. This includes even the fact of Jesus. We must not be misled here by the place which "the Person of Jesus" holds in the "Christianity" of Herrmann and of course also in that of his pupil
Fresenius. Fresenius has been at pains to explain to us that it is the geschichtliche Jesus, not the historische Jesus, that is here in question. It is a matter of indifference to him and all those of his way of thinking whether there ever existed any historische Jesus: all that is important is that we shall have a genuine "experience" of Jesus, that He should come to us
geschichtlich, that is, in a real encounter with our soul. This constitutes Him to us the point of inspiration needed to awaken us to religious life and it is indifferent to us whether He really ever lived on earth (Zeitschrift für
Theologie und Kirche, xxii. 1912, pp. 244–268). Not merely have the incarnation, the atonement, the outpouring of the Spirit—all the redemptive acts of God—gone; the "historical Jesus" may go too. On no fact of the past whatever can Christianity rest: it is purely for each man an experience of his own.
Certainly no Mystic could cut himself more completely loose from the historical elements of Christianity than is done here. And, by virtue of the fact that all that makes Christianity that specific religion which we call
Christianity lies precisely in these historical elements, the neglect or rejection of them is the rejection of Christianity. The whole life-work of Herrmann may have been to show how a man of our day may still be a Christian; but unfortunately he has done this by adapting what he calls
Christianity to the point of view of the "man of our day," and the outcome is that he solves the problem by dissolving Christianity. The "historical religion" which Fresenius offers us is therefore no more Christianity than the Mysticism of the most extreme of the Mystics, and brings us not a single step closer than it to a real Christianity. Of course if the whole difference between Mysticism and "historical religion" were reduced to the single question of whether Christianity is the product of the native religious sentiment or comes to man from without and is embraced by an act of his own ethical will, we should have unhesitatingly to give the right to "historical religion." We have not had to wait for the Ritschlian school to learn that faith comes by hearing; or that as believing implies hearing so hearing implies a preacher. By virtue of the very circumstance that Christianity is a historical religion and is rooted in facts which have occurred in the world and through which the redemption which has come
into the world has been wrought out, it must be communicated. And nothing is more sure than that there can be no Christianity apart from the working upon the heart of these historical facts as proclaimed, appreciated, and embraced in confident faith. The action of the ethical will in laying hold upon the Saving Christ is of the essence of Christianity and there is no Christianity without it.
What Fresenius brings into contrast in his discussion is, then, merely two extremely one-sided conceptions of religion: the religion of the mere feelings and the religion of the bare ethical will. Neither has any claim to the name of Christianity. For Christianity is a historical religion and neither of these conceptions of religion has any essential connection with history. The religion of the mere ethical will is just as purely a merely natural religion as is the religion of the mere feelings. The Christian may therefore stand by and watch the conflict of these standpoints with interest indeed but without concern. Each tendency—"Mysticism," "Historical Religion"—is engaged in validating elements of the religious life, which enter into and find their due place in Christianity. But not only is each fatally one-sided in its exclusive insistence upon its own element of religious experience, but both in combination fall far short of even a complete account of natural religion; and neither has any place whatever in its system of thought for that supernatural religion which alone can avail for the needs of sinful men. The problem which presses on us is not whether, in the religious conflicts of our time, we should turn for rest and peace to "Mysticism" or to "Historical
Religion"—to the religion of the feelings or to the religion of the ethical will: but whether there is not some more comprehensive religion which will take up into itself and engage the whole man, intellect, sensibility, and will alike, and meeting him in his actual condition of weakness and corruption and guilt, rescue him from his lost state and renew him in all the elements
of his being, to present him to God a new man. After all said Christianity remains the only religion which meets the case.
1. 1 The Princeton Theological Review, xii. 1914, pp. 332–340.