Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 by Various

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Such, shortly, so far as we can gather, is the main scope, popularly
stated, of Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, as it is delivered in his two
first lectures on the philosophy of life, the first being titled, "Of the
thinking soul, or the central point of consciousness;" and the second, "Of
the loving soul, or the central point of moral life." The healthy-toned
reader, who has been exercised in speculations of this kind, will feel at
once that there is much that is noble in all this, and much that is true;
but not a little also, when examined in detail, of that sublime-sounding
sweep of despotic generality, (so inherent a vice of German literature,)
which delights to confound the differences, rather than to discriminate
the characters, of things; much that seems only too justly to warrant that
oracular sentence of the stern Fichte with which we set out, "_The younger
brother wants clearness_;" much that, when applied to practice, and
consistently followed out in that grand style of consistency which belongs
to a real German philosopher, becomes what we in English call Puseyism and
Popery, and what Goethe in German called a "_chewing the cud of moral and
religious absurdities_." But we have neither space nor inclination, in
this place, to make an analysis of the Schlegelian philosophy, or to set
forth how much of it is true and how much of it is false. Our intention
was merely to sketch a rapid outline, in as popular phrase as philosophy
would allow itself to be clothed in; to finish which outline without
extraneous remark, with the reader's permission, we now proceed.

If man be not, according to Aristotle's phrase, a [Greek: zoon logikon] in
his highest faculty, a _ratiocinative_, but rather an emotional and
imaginative animal; and if to start from, as to end, in mere reason, be in
human psychology a gross one-sidedness, much more in theology is such a
procedure erroneous, and altogether perverse. If not the smallest poem of
a small poet ever came to him from mere reason, but from something deeper
and more vital, much less are the strong pulsations of pure emotion, the
deep-seated convictions of religious faith in the inner man, to be spoke
of as things that mere reason can either assert or deny; and in fact we
see, when we look narrowly into the great philosophical systems that have
been projected by scheming reasoners in France and Germany, each man out
of his own brain, that they all end either in materialism and atheism on
the one hand, or in idealism and pantheism on the other. All our
philosophers have stopped short of that one living, personal, moral God,
on whose existence alone humanity can confidently repose--who alone can
give to the trembling arch of human speculation that keystone which it
demands. The idea of God, in fact, is not a thing that individual reason
has first to strike out, so to speak, by the collision or combination of
ideas, the collocation of proofs, and the concatenation of arguments. It
is a living growth rather of our whole nature, a primary instinct of all
moral beings, a necessary postulate of healthy humanity, which is given
and received as our life and our breath is, and admits not of being
reasoned into any soul that has it not already from other sources. And as
no philosopher of Greek or German times that history tells of, ever
succeeded yet in inventing a satisfactory theology, or establishing a
religion in which men could find solace to their souls, therefore it is
clear that that satisfactory Christian theology and Christian religion
which we have, and not only that, but all the glimpses of great
theological truth that are found twinkling through the darkness of a
widespread superstition, came originally from God by common revelation,
and not from man by private reasoning. The knowledge of God and a living
theology is, in fact, a simple science of experience like any other, only
of a peculiar quality and higher in degree. All true human knowledge in
moral matters rests on experience, internal or external, higher or lower,
on tradition, on language as the bearer of tradition, on revelation;
while that false, monstrous, and unconditioned science to which the pride
of human reason has always aspired, which would grasp at every thing at
once by one despotic clutch, and by a violent bound of logic bestride and
beride the ALL, is, and remains, an oscillating abortion that always
would be something, and always can be nothing. A living, personal, moral
God, the faith of nations, the watch-word of tradition, the cry of
nature, the demand of mind, received not invented, existing in the soul
not reasoned into it--this is the gravitating point of the moral world,
the only intelligible centre of any world; from which whatsoever is
centrifugal errs, and to which whatsoever is opposed is the devil.

Not private speculation, therefore, or famous philosophies of any kind,
but the living spiritual man, and the totality of the living flow of
sacred tradition on which he is borne, and with which he is encompassed,
are the two grand sources of "the philosophy of life." Let us follow these
principles, now, into a few of their wide-spread streams and multiform
historical branchings. First, the Bible clearly indicates what the
profoundest study of the earliest and most venerable literatures confirms,
that man was not created at first in a brutish state, crawling with a slow
and painful progress out of the dull slime of a half organic state into
apehood, and from apehood painfully into manhood; but he was created
perfect in the image of God, and has fallen from his primeval glory. This
is to be understood not only of the state of man before the Fall as
recorded in the two first chapters of Genesis; but every thing in the
Bible, and the early traditions of famous peoples, warrants us to believe,
that the first ages of men before the Flood, were spiritually enlightened
from one great common source of extraordinary aboriginal revelation; so
that the earliest ages of the world were not the most infantine and
ignorant to a comprehensive survey, as modern conceit so fondly imagines,
but the most gigantic and the most enlightened. That beautiful but
material and debasing heathenism, with which our Greek and Latin education
has made us so familiar, is only a defaced fragment of the venerable whole
which preceded it, that old and true heathenism of the holy aboriginal
fathers of our race. "There were GIANTS on the earth in those days." We
read this; but who believes it? We ought seriously to consider what it
means, and adopt it _bona fide_ into our living faith of man, and man's
history. Like the landscape of some Alpine country, where the primeval
granite Titans, protruding their huge shoulders every where above us and
around, make us feel how petty and how weak a thing is man; so ought our
imagination to picture the inhabitants of the world before the Flood.
Nobility precedes baseness always, and truth is more ancient than error.
Antediluvian man--antediluvian nature, is to be imaged as nobler in every
respect, more sublime and more pure than postdiluvian man, and
postdiluvian nature. But mighty energies, when abused, produce mighty
corruptions; hence the gigantic scale of the sins into which the
antediluvian men fell; and the terrible precipitation of humanity which
followed. This is a point of primary importance, in every attempt to
understand how to estimate the value of that world-famous Greek
philosophy, which is commonly represented as the crown and the glory of
the ancient world. All that Pythagoras and Plato ever wrote of noble and
elevating truths, are merely flashes of that primeval light, in the full
flood of which, man, in his more perfect antediluvian state, delighted to
dwell; and it is remarkable in the case of Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Thales,
and so many other of the Greek philosophers, that the further we trace
them back, we come nearer to the divine truth, which, in the systems of
Epicurus, Aristippus, Zeno, or the shallow or cold philosophers of later
origin, altogether disappears. Pythagoras and Plato were indeed divinely
gifted with a scientific presentiment of the great truths of Christianity
soon to be revealed, or say rather restored to the world; while Aristotle,
on the other hand, is to be regarded as the father of those unhappy
academical schismatics from the Great Church of living humanity, who
allowed the ministrant faculty of reason to assume an unlawful supremacy
over the higher powers of intellect, and gave birth to that voracious
despotism of barren dialectics, in the middle ages commonly called the
scholastic philosophy. The Greek philosophy, however, even its noblest
Avatar, Plato, much less in the case of a Zeno or an Aristotle, was never
able to achieve that which must be the practically proposed end of all
higher philosophy that is in earnest; viz. the coming out of the narrow
sphere of the school and the palaestra, uniting itself with actual life,
and embodying itself completely in the shape of that which we call a
CHURCH. This Platonism could not do. Christianity did it. Revelation did
it. God Incarnate did it. Now once again came humanity forth, fresh from
the bosom of the divine creativeness, conquering and to conquer. There was
no Aristotle and Plato--no Abelard and Bernard here--reason carping at
imagination, and imagination despising reason. But once, if but once in
four thousand years, man appeared in all the might of his living
completeness. Love walked hand in hand with knowledge, and both were
identified in life. The spirit of divine peace brooded in the inner
sanctuary of the heart, while the outer man was mailed for the sternest
warfare. Such was pure Christianity, so long as it lasted--for the
celestial plant was condemned to grow in a terrestrial atmosphere; and
there, alas! it could only grow with a stunted likeness of itself. It
was more than stunted also--it was tainted; for are not all things tainted
here? Do we not live in a tainted atmosphere? do we not live in a time out
of joint? Does not the whole creation literally groan? Too manifestly it
does, however natural philosophers may affect to speak of the book of
nature, as if it were the clear and uncorrupted text of the living book of
God. Not only man, but the whole environment of external nature, which
belongs to him, has been deranged by the Fall. In such a world as this,
wherein whoso will not believe a devil cannot believe a God, it was
impossible for Christianity to remain in that state of blissful vital
harmony with itself with which it set out. It became divided. Extravagant
developments of ambitious, monopolizing faculties became manifest on every
side. Self-sufficing Pelagianisn and Arianism, here; self-confounding
Gnosticism and Manichaeism there. Then came those two great strifes and
divisions of the middle ages--the one, that old dualism of the inner man,
the ever-repeated strife between reason and imagination, to which we have
so often alluded--the other, a no less serious strife of the outward
machinery of life, the strife between the spiritual and the temporal
powers, between the Pope and the Emperor. This was bad enough; that the
two vicars of God on earth should not know to keep the peace among
themselves, when the keeping of the peace among others was the very end
and aim of the appointment. But worse times were coming. For in the
middle ages, notwithstanding the rank evils of barren scholasticism,
secular-minded popes, and intrusive emperors, there was still a church, a
common Christian religion, a common faith of all Christians; but now,
since that anarchical and rebellious movement, commonly called the
Reformation, but more fitly termed the revolution, the overturning and
overthrowing of the religion of Christendom, we have no more a mere
internal strife and division to vex us, but there is an entire separation
and divorce of one part of the Christian church (so called) from the main
mother institution. The abode of peace has become the camp of war and the
arena of battles; that dogmatical theology of the Christian church,
which, if it be not the infallible pure mathematics of the moral world,
has been deceiving men for 1800 years, and is a liar--that theology is
now publicly discussed and denied, scorned and scouted by men who do not
blush to call themselves Christians; there is no universal peace any
longer to be found in that region where it is the instinct of humanity,
before all things, to seek repose; the only religious peace which the
present age recognises, is that of which the Indian talks, when he says
of certain epochs of the world's history, _Brahma sleeps_! Those who
sleep and are indifferent in spiritual matters find peace; but those who
are alive and awake must beat the wind, and battle, belike, with much
useless loss of strength, before they can arrive even at that first
postulate of all healthy thinking--there is a God. "_Ueber Gott werd ich
nie streiten_," said Herder. "About God I will never dispute." Yet look
at German rationalism, look at Protestant theology--what do you see
there? Reason usurping the mastery in each individual, without control of
the higher faculties of the soul, and of those institutions in life by
which those faculties are represented; and as one man's reason is as good
as another's, thence arises war of each self-asserted despotism against
that which happens to be next it, and of all against all--a spiritual
anarchy, which threatens the entire dissolution of the moral world, and
from which there is no refuge but in recurring to the old traditionary
faith of a revolted humanity, no redemption but in the venerable
repository of those traditions--the one and indivisible holy Catholic
church of Christ, of whom, as the inner and eternal keystone is God, so
the outer and temporal is the Pope.

Such is a general outline of the philosophy of Frederick Schlegel--a
philosophy belonging to the class theological and supernatural, to the
genus Christian, to the species sacerdotal and Popish. Now, without
stopping here to blame its sublime generalities and beautiful confusions,
on the one hand, or to praise its elevated tendency, its catholic and
reconciling tone on the other, we shall merely call attention, in a single
sentence, physiologically, to its main and distinguishing character. It
was, in fact, (in spirit and tendency, though not in outward
accomplishment,) to German literature twenty years ago what Puseyism is
now to the English church--it was a bold and grand attempt to get rid of
those vexing doubts and disputes on the most important subjects that will
ever disquiet minds of a certain constitution, so long as they have
nothing to lean on but their own judgment; and as Protestantism, when
consistently carried out, summarily throws a man back on his individual
opinion, and subjects the vastest and most momentous questions to the
scrutiny of reason and the torture of doubt, therefore Schlegel in
literary Germany, and Pusey in ecclesiastical England, were equally
forced, if they would not lose Christianity altogether, to renounce
Protestantism, and to base their philosophy upon sacerdotal authority and
ecclesiastical tradition. That Schlegel became a Romanist at Cologne, and
Dr Pusey an Anglo-Catholic at Oxford, does not affect the kinship. Both,
to escape from the anarchy of Protestant individualism, (as it was felt by
them,) were obliged to assert not merely Christianity, but a
hierarchy--not merely the Bible, but an authoritative interpretation of
the Bible; and both found, or seemed to find, that authoritative
interpretation and exorcism of doubt there, where alone in their
circumstances, and intellectually constituted as they were, it was to be
found. Dr Pusey did not become a Papist like Frederick Schlegel, for two
plain reasons--first, because he was an Englishman, second, because he
was an English churchman. The authority which he sought for lay at his
door; why should he travel to Rome for it? Archbishop Laud had taught
apostolical succession before--Dr Pusey might teach it again. But this
convenient prop of Popery without the Pope was not prepared for Frederick
Schlegel. There was no Episcopal church, no Oxford in Germany, into whose
bosom he could throw himself, and find relief from the agony of religious
doubt. He was a German, moreover, and a philosopher. To his searching eye
and circumspective wariness, the general basis of tradition which might
satisfy a Pusey, though sufficiently broad, did not appear sure enough.
To his lofty architectural imagination a hierarchical aristocracy,
untopped by a hierarchical monarch, did not appear sufficiently sublime.
To his all-comprehending and all-combining historical sympathies, a
Christian priesthood, with Cyprian, Augustine, and Jerome, but without
Hildebrand, Innocent, and Boniface, would have presented the appearance
of a fair landscape, with a black yawning chasm in the middle, into which
whoever looked shuddered. Therefore Frederick Schlegel, spurning all half
measures, inglorious compromises, and vain attempts to reconcile the
irreconcilable, vaulted himself at once, with a bold leap, into the
central point of sacerdotal Christianity. The obstacles that would have
deterred ordinary minds had no effect on him. All points of detail were
sunk in the over-whelming importance of the general question.
Transubstantiation or consubstantiation, conception, maculate or
immaculate, were a matter of small moment with him. What he wanted was a
divinely commissioned church with sacred mysteries--a spiritual house of
refuge from the weary battle of intellectual east winds, blasting and
barren, with which he saw Protestant Germany desolated. This house of
refuge he found in Cologne, in Vienna; and having once made up his mind
that spiritual unity and peace were to be found only in the one mother
church of Christendom, not being one of those half characters who,
"making _I dare not_ wait upon _I would_," are continually weaving a net
of paltry external _no's_ to entangle the progress of every grand decided
_yes_ of the inner man, Schlegel did not for a moment hesitate to make
his thought a deed, and publicly profess his return to Romanism in the
face of enlightened and "ultra-Protestant" Germany. To do this certainly
required some moral courage; and no just judge of human actions will
refuse to sympathize with the motive of this one, however little he may
feel himself at liberty to agree with the result.

But Frederick Schlegel, a well informed writer has said,[F] "became
Romanist in a way peculiar to himself, and had in no sense given up his
right of private judgment." We have not been able to see, from a careful
perusal of his works, (in all of which there is more or less of
theology,) that there is any foundation for this assertion of Varnhagen.
Frederick Schlegel, the German, was as honest and stout a Romanist in
this nineteenth century as any Spanish Ferdinand Catholicus in the
fifteenth. Freedom of speculation indeed, within certain known limits,
and spirituality of creed above what the meagre charity of some
Protestants may conceive possible in a Papist, we do find in this man;
but these good qualities a St Bernard, a Dante, a Savonarola, a Fenelon,
had exhibited in the Romish Church before Schlegel, and others as great
may exhibit them again. Freedom of thought, however, in the sense in
which it is understood by Protestants, was the very thing which Schlegel,
Goeres, Adam Mueller, and so many others, did give up when they entered the
Catholic Church. They felt as Wordsworth did when he wrote his beautiful
ode to "Duty;" they had more liberty than they knew how to use--

"Me this uncharter'd freedom tires;
I feel the weight of chance desires;
My hopes no more must change their name--
I long for a repose that ever is the same."

And if it seem strange to any one that Frederick Schlegel, the learned,
the profound, the comprehensive, should believe in Transubstantiation,[G]
let him look at a broader aspect of history than that of German books,
and ask himself--Did Isabella of Castile--the gentle, the noble, the
generous--establish the Inquisition, or allow Ximenes to establish it? In
a world which surrounds us on all sides with apparent contradictions, he
who admits a real one now and then into his faith, or into his practice,
is neither a fool nor a monster.

[Footnote F: Varnhagen Von Ense, Rahel's Umgang, i. p. 227. "Er war
auf besondere Weise Katholisch, und hatte seine Geistesfreiheit dabei
gar nicht aufgegeben."]

[Footnote G: The following is Schlegel's philosophy of
transubstantiation--"Though it be true, that in the Holy Scriptures, in
accordance with the symbolical nature of man, there is much that is
generally symbolical, and symbolically to be understood; yet when a
symbol proceeds immediately from God, it can in this case be nothing less
than substantial; it cannot be a mere sign, it must also be something
actual; otherwise it would be as if one would palm on the eternal LOGOS,
who is the ground of all existence and all knowledge, words without
meaning and without power. Quite natural, therefore, it must be regarded,
i.e. quite suitable to the nature of the thing, although _per se_
certainly supernatural, and surpassing all comprehension, when that
highest symbol which forms the proper principle of unity, and the living
central point of Christianity, is perceived to possess this character,
that it is at once the sign and the thing signified. For now, that on the
high altar of divine love the one great sacrifice has been accomplished
for ever, and no flame more can rise from it save the inspiration of a
pure God-united will, that solemn act by which the bond formed between
the soul and God is from time to time revealed, can consist in nothing
else than this--that here the essential substance of the divine power and
the divine love is in all its lively fullness communicated to, and
received by man, as the miraculous sign of his union with
God."--_Philosophie des Lebene_, p. 376. On the logic of this remarkable
passage, those who are strong in Mill and Whately may decide; its
orthodoxy belongs to the consideration of the Tridentine doctors.]

In his political opinions, Schlegel maintained the same grand consistency
that characterizes his religious philosophy. He had more sense, however,
and more of the spirit of Christian fraternity in him than, for the sake
of absolutism, to become a Turk or a Russian; nay, from some passages in
the _Concordia_--a political journal, published by him and his friend
Adam Mueller, in 1820, and quoted by Mr Robertson--it would almost appear
that he would have preferred a monarchy limited by states, conceived in
the spirit of the middle ages, to the almost absolute form of monarchical
government, under whose protection he lived and lectured at Vienna. To
some such constitution as that which now exists in Sweden, for instance,
we think he would have had no objections. At the same time, it is certain
he gave great offence to the constitutional party in Germany, by the
anti-popular tone of his writings generally, more perhaps than by any
special absolutist abuses which he had publicly patronized. He was,
indeed, a decided enemy to the modern system of representative
constitutions, and popular checks; a king by divine right according to
the idea of our English nonjurors, was as necessary a corner-stone to his
political, as a pope by apostolical succession to his ecclesiastical
edifice. And as no confessed corruption of the church, represented as it
might be by the monstrous brutality of a Borgia, or the military madness
of a Julius, was, in his view, sufficient to authorize any hasty Luther
to make a profane bonfire of a papal bull; any hot Henry to usurp the
trade of manufacturing creeds; so no "sacred right of insurrection," no
unflinching patriotic opposition, no claim of rights, (by petitioners
having _swords_ in their hands,) are admissible in his system of a
Christian state. And as for the British constitution, and "the glorious
Revolution of 1688," this latter, indeed, is one of the best of a bad
kind, and that boasted constitution as an example of a house divided
against itself, and yet _not_ falling, is a perfect miracle of dynamical
art, a lucky accident of politics, scarcely to be looked for again in the
history of social development, much less to be eagerly sought after and
ignorantly imitated. Nay, rather, if we look at this boasted constitution
a little more narrowly, and instruct ourselves as to its practical
working, what do we see? "Historical experience, the great teacher of
political science, manifestly shows that in these dynamical states, which
exist by the cunningly devised balance and counter-balance of different
powers, what is called governing is, in truth, a continual strife and
contention between the Ministry and the Opposition, who seem to delight
in nothing so much as in tugging and tearing the state and its resources
to pieces between them, while the hallowed freedom of the hereditary
monarch seems to serve only as an old tree, under whose shades the
contending parties may the more comfortably choose their ground, and
fight out their battles."[H] It is but too manifest, indeed, according to
Schlegel's projection of the universe, that all constitutionalism is,
properly speaking, a sort of political Protestantism, a fretful fever of
the social body, having its origin (like the religious epidemic of the
sixteenth century) in the private conceit of the individual, growing by
violence and strife, and ending in dissolution. This is the ever-repeated
refrain of his political discourses, puerile enough, it may be, to our
rude hearing in Britain, but very grateful to polite and patriotic ears
at Vienna, when the cannon of Wagram was yet sounding in audible echo
beneath their towers. The propounder of such philosophy had not only the
common necessity of all philosophers to pile up his political in majestic
consistency with his ecclesiastical creed, but he had also to pay back
the mad French liberalism with something more mad if possible, and more
despotic. And if also Danton, and Mirabeau, and Robespierre, and other
terrible Avatars of the destroying Siva in Paris, had raised his
naturally romantic temperament a little into the febrile and delirious
now and then, what wonder? Shall the devil walk the public streets at
noon day, and men not be afraid?

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