by Matthew Gaetano

Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), one of the most important early German Romantics, deserves more attention from theologians today. I think that one of the reasons for the problematic shape of “modernity criticism” today is that we at times forget about the critics of Bacon, Hobbes, Descartes, and others between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Of course, scholars are well-aware of the opposition to these currents, but how much do these critics shape our popular understanding of the history of ideas since the early Enlightenment?

Pascal, Voetius, Leibniz, and others, for instance, expressed deep concern about Cartesianism within decades of Descartes’s utterance of the cogito, ergo sum. But less than a century after Leibniz’s death, the Romantics also sought to challenge certain tendencies of early modern philosophy. When we think of Romanticism, we tend to think of poetry and music–and rightly so! But the early German Romantics also had a theological and philosophical vision that is worthy of serious reflection.

As far as theology is concerned, it is important to remember that a figure sometimes called the father of liberal Protestant theology, Friedrich Schleiermacher (d. 1834), had a major role in early German Romanticism–for instance the important literary journal Athenaeum. Schleiermacher was also Schlegel’s roommate in Berlin. But Schlegel’s life and thought took a very different direction. In April 1808, Schlegel became a Roman Catholic in Cologne with his wife Dorothea (daughter of Moses Mendelssohn and aunt of Felix Mendelssohn). He took a position in the Austrian civil service in 1809 and lived in Vienna until his death. Some dismiss his later thought as conservative, detached from the dynamism of the 1790s. Consider the following passage:

As a young man he is an atheist, a radical, and an individualist. . . . Some years pass: the same Schlegel, converted to Catholicism, a diplomat and journalist in the service of Metternich, surrounded by monks and pious men of society, is no longer anything but a fat philistine of unctuous speech, lazy, empty, his mind on food, and incapable of remembering the young man who had written: ‘A single absolute law: the free spirit always triumphs over nature.’ Which is the real one? Is the later Schlegel the truth of the first? Does the struggle against a bourgeois who is banal engender no more than a bourgeois who is exalted, then weary, and finally only contribute to an exaltation of the bourgeoisie? Where is romanticism? In Jena or Vienna?

I want to see greater continuity between the early Romanticism through his Catholic phase. But more work on the later Schlegel must be done.

I was interested, though, in how Schlegel would compare to other Catholic conservatives of this period. In his lectures (given just before his death) on the Philosophy of Life, Schlegel divides up the thinkers of his day into three parties. The very fact of intellectual partisanship and hostility results, he believes, from the discord in man’s life that results from the Fall (which Schlegel compares to an eclipse) and from the diabolical tendencies of some modern thinking. He says, “man … has gone still further, and by transferring the innate discord of his internal consciousness to outward objects, has forcibly rent asunder God and Nature,–he has thus divorced the sensible world and its Maker, and set them in hostile array against each other, and thereby brought physical science in collision with the knowledge of divine things and with revelation” (99). As in his earliest writings, Schlegel seeks to find unity in his life and in the cosmos.

These three parties that reflect this discord are the rationalists, the pantheists, and the traditionalists (99-100). (Except for the “sect of the rationalists,” these are my names for these three groups.)

Rationalists, Schlegel says, are those who “doubt indiscriminately of all things, and test every matter by the standard of their own scepticism.” These are the thinkers that we typically associate (rightly or wrongly) with certain currents of the Enlightenment.

The pantheists are “the exclusive worshipers of nature, and has many members among scientific men.” In reaction to the materialism or Deism of some Enlightenment thought, certain thinkers (many in the Romantic movement) embraced the idea of living within a divinized nature. Songs and poems can be offered to such a re-enchanted nature. Instead of the disenchanted world of much modern thought, this pantheistic vision of the world would give life meaning and restore our connection with the myths of antiquity.  I think that it’s fair to say that the early thought of Schlegel would find its place in this current.

The third party are “those who derive, from the positive source of a divine decision, the law of their thinking and the standard of their judgment.” He doesn’t name anyone here, but I would argue that this is a reference to some of the conservative, counter-revolutionary thinkers after the French Revolution.

In the period just before his death, after years of service in Vienna and of worship in early nineteenth-century Catholic churches, Schlegel does not see himself as being fully in their ranks:

Now, this last party, if it would only go a few steps further, and draw still deeper from this source, would be able to assign its appropriate place and value to every potence and truth in the other species of thought and knowledge, and even thereby might qualify itself to dissolve and reconcile the all-pervading discord. But inasmuch as they do not adopt this conciliatory attitude towards natural, historical, and even artistic knowledge, so far as they are true, but, on the contrary, in a spirit of animosity, attempt to circumscribe and set negative limits to them, if not absolutely to reject them as worthless and profane,–then, when they least wish it, they really sink into a party no less than the other two. (99-100)

The problem with this sort of Traditionalism is that it is not sufficiently open to truth wherever it is to be found–in science, in history, in poetry, and so on. Schlegel rejects a notion of divine revelation as a fortress defending the faithful against anything that cannot be grounded directly in “an appeal … to a higher and divine authority,” whether Scripture or the Pope. Such a view does not take seriously enough the way in which all of Creation and the human spirit’s participation in divine understanding are a general revelation of the infinite God.

Schlegel calls on thinkers of his day to take Moses as their exemplar. Moses “did learn from Egypt all that there was for him to learn” (158). But he “made it quite new again”; he “despoiled them of their ‘jewels of gold and jewels of silver,’ by a theft permissible in the realm of science and truth.” This Augustinian vision of despoiling the Egyptians was, Schlegel thought, lacking in many of his Christian contemporaries. “With one or two exceptions,” he writes, “it is impossible to boast of them that, like Moses, they were ‘learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.’ And hence the fact is at once explicable why, with such ardent and unbounded zeal, they should have effected comparatively so little against the modern Egyptians, and the new Egyptian darkness of our own days” (158).

Schlegel was deeply devoted to divine revelation and to tradition. (And he appreciated counter-revolutionary Catholics like Joseph de Maistre, a point that must be explored further.) Schlegel’s conception of tradition was supposed to be open to all of the achievements in historical, literary, and scientific study. He appreciates those Christian writers who have devoted themselves “to the noble work of re-establishing right sentiments and principles” about divine things, but they needed to do much more to plunder the Egyptian gold–to draw upon the learning even of those who were hostile to the Church.

The Regensburg Forum is dedicated to history, philosophy, and theology in the Augustinian tradition. It seems appropriate for us–following Augustine’s way of talking about the Christian appropriation of learning “outside the fold”–to ask how well twenty-first-century scholars have struck the balance highlighted by Schlegel? Have they been tempted to build up a fortress of tradition and divine revelation while ignoring other truths that are part of God’s creation? At the other extreme, have they simply joined the Egyptian magicians or taken up Egyptian learning without, as Schlegel puts it, making it “quite new again” and giving it “another nature by the end to which [it is] employed” (158)? Instead, Schlegel tells us–along the same lines as Augustine in On Christian Doctrine–that “it is lawful for man to wrest from the evil power all that may be converted into a means of honouring the things of God and His revealed truth, and which thereby is better employed, spiritualised, and invested with a higher and better significance. This is true even of our own days, as it was then, and indeed always has been” (158).