The Warfare of Humanity With Unreason: Christian Thomasius

I

THE year 1688 is memorable for two revolutions: one in England, the other in Germany. In England a conspiracy of statesmen — partly patriotic, partly rascally — dethroned the last of the Stuarts. In Germany a young Leipsic professor began giving his lectures, — not in Latin, but in German.²

Each of the revolutions thus begun ended a great evil phase of history which had lasted during centuries; each began a better phase which lasts to - day. A very plausible argument might be made to show that of these two revolutions the act of the German professor was really the more important. For if the work of William of Orange and his partisans was to destroy Stuartism, with all its lying kingcraft, and to set in motion causes which have directly developed the constitutionalism of England, of the United States, and of so many other modern nations, the work of this young professor and his disciples was to dethrone the heavy Protestant orthodoxy which had nearly smothered German patriotism, to undermine the pedantry which had paralyzed German scholarship, to substitute thought for formulas, to bring the principles of natural right to bear upon international and general law, to discredit religious intolerance, to root out witchcraft persecutions and procedure by torture from all modern codes, and to begin that emancipation of public, and especially of university, instruction from theological control, which has given such strength to Germany, and which, to-day, is rapidly making its way in all other lands, including our own.

That we may understand this work, let us look rapidly along the century and a half which had worn on since the time of Luther and Melanchthon.

Even before Melanchthon sank into his grave, he was dismayed at seeing Lutheranism stiffen into dogmas and formulas, and heartbroken at a persecution by Protestants, even more bitter than anything he had ever experienced from Catholics.³

Luther had, indeed, been at times intolerant; but his intolerance toward Carlstadt was simply the irritation of a strong man at nagging follies, the impatience of a sensible father with a child who persists in playing with firebrands. Far worse was his intolerance toward Zwingli. That remains the one blot on his great career, — and a dark blot; — yet, with all this, he was, in breadth and fairness of mind, far beyond his age. But the theologians who took up the work which the first reformers had laid down soon came to consider intolerance as a main evidence of spiritual life: erelong they were using all their powers in crushing every germ of new thought. Their theory was, simply, that the world had now reached its climax; that the religion of Luther was the final word of God to man; that everything depended upon keeping it absolutely pure; — men might comment upon it in hundreds of lecture-rooms and in thousands of volumes; but — change it in the slightest particle — never.

And in order that it might never be changed, it was petrified into rituals and creeds and catechisms and statements, and above all, in 1579, into the “Formula of Concord,” which, as more than one thoughtful man has since declared, turned out to be a “formula of discord.”

For ten years the strong men of the Lutheran church labored to make this creed absolutely complete; strove to clamp and bind it as with bonds of steel; to exclude from it every broad idea that had arisen in the great heart and mind of Melanchthon; to rivet every joint, so that the atmosphere of outside thought might never enter. At last, then, in 1579, after ten years of work, the structure was perfect. Henceforth, until the last day, there was to be no change.

But, like all such attempts, it came to naught. The hated sister sect grew all the more lustily. When the “Formula of Concord” was made, Calvinism was comparatively an obscure body in Protestant Germany, but within a generation it was dominant in at least one quarter of the whole nation, and had taken full possession of the great German state of the future, — the Electorate of Brandenburg.⁴

The result, then, of all this labor was that the Protestants quarreled more savagely than ever; that while they were thus quarreling Protestantism lost its hold upon Germany; that Roman Catholicism, no longer dull and heavy, but shrewd, quick, and aggressive, — with the Jesuits as its spiritual army and Peter Canisius as its determined head, — pushed into the territory of its enemies, reconverted great numbers of German rulers and leaders of thought who were disgusted at the perpetual quarreling in the Protestant body; availed itself skillfully of Protestant dissensions, and waged the Thirty Years’ War; thus bringing back to the old faith millions of Germans who had once been brought under the new.

Yet, even after these results were fully revealed, and despite most earnest utterances in favor of concord, by many true men, clerical and lay, a great body of conscientious ecclesiastics continued to devote themselves to making the breach between Lutherans and Calvinists ever wider and deeper. Various leading theologians gave all their efforts to building up vast fabrics of fanaticism and hurling epithets at all other builders. Their bitterness was beyond belief. Just before the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, Paræus, a Calvinistic divine of great abilities and deeply Christian spirit, proposed that Lutherans and Calvinists unite in celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Reformation. Both sides denounced him. The leaders at the Lutheran universities of TÜbingen and Wittenberg united in declaring the scheme “a poisonous seduction into hell.”

Still later, when the terrible Thirty Years’ War was showing the results of Protestant bigotry and want of unity, leading court preachers of Saxony thundered from the pulpit the words: “To unite with Calvinists is against God and Conscience, and nothing less than to do homage to the founder of the Calvinistic monstrosity, Satan himself.” ⁵

When Tilly began the siege of Magdeburg, which ended in the most fearful carnival of outrage and murder the world had seen since the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, efforts to relieve it were cruelly hindered by these same Protestant dissensions. At about the same time, the period when peasants began to declare their doubts of the existence of a God who could permit such terrible evils as were brought upon them by the Thirty Years’ War, the magistrate, at a religious debate in Thorn, having forbidden blackguardism and calling of names and hurling of epithets from the pulpit, the eminent Calovius, with two other Lutheran divines, protested so vigorously that the order was revoked. And when the evil consequences of discord had been stamped into men’s minds even more deeply, and various statesmen and even ecclesiastics sought to promote more kindly views, John Heintzelmann, Rector of the Berlin Gymnasium, declared, “ Whosoever belongs to the Calvinistic Church is accursed.”

All attempts by wise men to put an end to this scandal seemed utterly in vain. The Great Elector of Brandenburg having published a decree exhorting all the clergy, both Lutheran and Calvinistic, to keep the peace, Paul Gerhard, of the great Nicolai Kirche in Berlin, a gentle and deeply religious soul, whose hymns Christians are singing today in all lands, declared that he could not conscientiously obey; that he could not consider Calvinists his brother Christians. Against this decree of the Elector sundry clergy appealed to the theological faculties of Helmstadt, Jena, Wittenberg, and Leipsic, and to the clergy of Hamburg and Nürnberg, to know whether the order of the Elector was to be obeyed; and all, or very nearly all, these bodies answered, “No; ye are to obey God rather than man.” The University of Wittenberg went a step farther, and showed that while the duty of Calvinists was to tolerate Lutheranism, the duty of Lutherans was to persecute Calvinism, because, it was insisted, “the Lutherans can prove Calvinism to be false.” ⁶

The greatest Protestant theologian of the seventeenth century, George Kalixt, exerted himself for peace; and on him was fastened the epithet “Syncretist.” The meaning of this terrible word was, virtually, peacemaker; but when repeated in the ears of the people, it aroused as much horror and brought as much persecution as the epithet “atheist” would have done.

And Spener came, — seeking to revive devotion in the church. He urged Christianity as a life and not a repetition of formulas; his personal creed was “orthodox” in every particular, his life was saintly, his words wrought as a charm on multitudes to make them more true and noble, — all to no purpose. He was driven by the ecclesiastical authorities out of pulpit after pulpit, and his own goodness and the goodness produced in his disciples were held by his clerical superiors to increase his sin. August Hermann Francke began the career which resulted in the creation of the most magnificent charity ever established by a German Protestant,—the Orphan House at Halle; but for years he was driven from post to post for his lack of fanatical zeal. Generation after generation raised men who labored in vain for peace: they were simply denounced as shallow, impious, and the epithet “Syncretist” was hurled at them as a deadly missile. The greatest German philosopher of the century, Leibnitz, attempted to find some common ground, and was declared to be “worse than an atheist.”

Hardly better was it in science and literature. The universities were fettered by theological clamps. Professors, instructors — even fencing masters and dancing masters — were obliged to take oath to believe and support the required creed in all its niceties. Galileo’s announcements were received by the ruling Protestant ecclesiastics with distrust and even hostility. When Kepler began to publish his discoveries, a Stuttgart Consistory, of September, 1612, warned him “to tame his too penetrating nature, and to regulate himself, in all his discoveries, in accordance with God’s word and the Testament and Church of the Lord, and not to trouble them with his unnecessary subtleties, scruples, and glosses.” The standing still of the sun for Joshua was used against Galileo by the Protestant authorities in Germany, as it was used against him by the Inquisition at Rome. The letter of the Reformation Fathers was everything; their real spirit nothing.⁷

Another crushing weight upon science and literature was the dominant pedantry. The great thing was to write commentaries upon old thought, and diligently to suppress new thought. The only language of learned lectures was a debased Latin. During the seventeenth century pedantry became a disease in every country. In England a pedant sat on the throne, and Walter Scott has mirrored him in the Fortunes of Nigel. In Italy and Spain the same tendency prevailed: the world now looks back upon it, sometimes with abhorrence, sometimes with contempt, as pictured in both countries by Manzoni in the Promessi Sposi. In the American colonies it injured all thinkers, and two of the greatest — the Mathers — it crippled. In France there was resistance. Montaigne had undermined it, and it was the constant theme of his brightest wit; La Bruyère presented it in some of his most admirably drawn pictures; Molière, who had occasion to know and hate it, held it up to lasting ridicule in the Manage Forcé.

But, bad as that seventeenth-century pedantry was, in France, England, Italy, and Spain, each of these countries had a literature of which thinking men could be proud, and a language in which its most learned men were glad to write. Not so in Germany. The language of learned Germans had become mainly a jargon; their learning owlish; their principal business disputation.

The same spirit was seen in the whole political and civil administration. The Thirty Years’ War had left the country in a fearful state; the population of great districts had been nearly rooted out; powerful cities had been reduced to a third of their former population; wealthy provinces had been brought to utter poverty. Then, if ever, the country needed good laws and a wise administration. But nothing could be worse than the system prevailing. In its every department pedantry and superstition were mingled in very nearly equal proportions; everywhere was persecution; everywhere trials for witchcraft; everywhere criminal procedure by torture, though the futility of torture had been demonstrated nearly two thousand years before.

The lower orders of society had been left by the war in a state of barbarism, and the leaders of the church, while struggling with one another on points of dogma, found little if any time to instruct their flocks in anything save antiquated catechisms.

Into such a world, in 1655, was born Christian Thomasius. The son of a professor at the University of Leipsic, his early studies, under his father’s direction, comprised nearly all the sciences then taught at that centre of learning; but he finally settled upon the law as his profession, and after having done thorough work both in study and practice, he began lecturing at the University where his father had lectured before him, and mainly upon the same subject, — the principles of law.

In order to understand the work which Thomasius thus began, we must review briefly the development of International Law during the period immediately preceding the time when he gave himself to it.

As we go on through that period, matters seem at their worst. Such actions as those of Julius II, releasing Ferdinand of Spain from his treaty with France; of Clement V, allowing the King of France to break an inconvenient oath, and violate a solemn treaty; of Pius V, destroying the sanctity of treaties in order to revive civil war in France, had seemed to tear out the very roots of International Law. But, bad as these acts were, they were followed by worse. The Conduct of Innocent X, denouncing the Treaty of Westphalia and absolving its signers from their oaths, thus seeking to perpetuate the frightful religious wars which had devastated Germany for thirty and the Netherlands for seventy years; this and a host of similar examples, Protestant as well as Catholic, seemed to fasten that old monstrous system upon the world forever. So far as nations had any views regarding their reciprocal duties, these were most practically expressed in Machiavelli’s Prince, the gospel of state scoundrelism. All was a seething cauldron of partisan hostilities, personal hatreds, and vile ambitions, scoundrelism coming to the surface more evidently than all else.⁸

But under this cloud of wretchedness an evolution of better thought had been going on. Amid the mass of venal advocates and dry pettifoggers had arisen jurists, men who sought to improve municipal and international law; and in 1609 came, as we have seen in an earlier study in this series, the first work of Hugo Grotius,—his Mare Liberum. Finally, in 1625, amid all the atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War, he published at Paris his great work, the De Jure Belli ac Pacis. It was the foundation of modern thought in that splendid province. It confronted the unreason of the world with a vast array of the noblest utterances of all times; it enforced these with genius; it welded the whole mass of earlier ideas, thus enforced, into his own thought, and put into the hands of those who followed him a mighty weapon against the follies of rulers and the cruelties of war.

We have seen that the fundamental thought of Grotius thus fully developed was that International Law has a twofold basis: first, “Natural Law,” —the moral commands of God to the human family as discerned by right reason; secondly, “Positive Law,” — the law which results from the actual agreements and enactments of nations.

As between these two divisions, his clear tendency was to give supremacy to Natural Law — that, derived from the thought of God imparted to the moral nature of man — and to bring Positive Law more and more into conformity with this.

The first eminent apostle of Grotius was Pufendorf, who, in 1672, published his De Jure Naturœ et Gentium, laying stress, as Grotius had done, upon the revelation of right reason in various ways and at various periods. He was at once confronted, as Grotius had been, by a large part of the clergy. At that period International Law, and indeed all law, was kept well in hand by theology, and theology discovered in the views of these new thinkers a certain something which weakened sundry supposed foundations of law, as laid down in our sacred books.

Was any attempt made to mitigate the horrors of war, the Old Testament was cited to show that the Almighty commanded the Jews, in their wars, to be cruel. Was any attempt made to mitigate persecution for difference in belief, the New Testament was opened at the texts, “ Compel them to enter in, ” and “ I came not to send peace, but a sword.” Was any attempt made to loosen the shackles of serfs, both the Old and New Testaments were opened to show that slavery was of divine sanction. Was any attempt made to stop witchcraft trials, which during a century continued destroying at the rate of a thousand innocent persons in Germany every year, an appeal was made to the text, “Ye shall not suffer a witch to live,” in the Old Testament, and to the casting out of devils in the New. Was an attempt made to abolish torture, the eminently orthodox Carpzov and his compeers cited David’s dealings with the children of Ammon.

The teachings of Grotius and Pufendorf cut to the heart of all this: and therefore, as the work of Grotius had been placed upon the Index by Catholics, the works of Pufendorf were put under the ban by a large body of Protestants.

Into the war thus begun, Thomasius, faithful to the teachings of his father, entered heartily by lecturing against Grotius and Pufendorf. He himself tells us, later, that he did not at first separate the questions of legal philosophy from those of theology; that, in his judgment at that early period, to doubt the principles laid down by theologians was to risk damnation; that, so great was his trust in the authority of so many excellent men, that he would have exposed himself to the charge of ignorance sooner than to the slightest suspicion of separating himself from the dominant teaching.⁹

But there came in his thinking a great change. With that impartiality which is one of the rarest virtues in strong men, he studied carefully the work of his adversary and was converted by him; and, having been converted, felt it a duty to be even more earnest in supporting than he had previously been in opposing him. More than this, he thereby learned the great lesson of relying upon his own powers. He declares, “I now saw that any being gifted by God with reason sins against the goodness of his Creator when he allows himself to be led like an ox by any other human being;” and he adds: “I determined to shut my eyes against the brightness of human authority, and to give no more thought to the question, who supports any doctrine, but simply to the grounds on which it is supported.”

The earlier views of the young instructor had been well received; but as he developed these later ideas his audiences became alarmed, and “before long,” he tells us, “I was left alone in my lectureroom with my Grotius.”

Yet not discouraged. Having given two years to study, thought, and travel, he began again, and now drew large audiences. The inert mass of German law began, under his hands, to throb with a new life.

At first his zeal and ability carried all before him; and, despite the grumblings of his opponents, he was in 1685 admitted to membership in the learned society which edited the literary journal of the University, — the Acta Eruditorum.

But matters became speedily worse for him. The young instructor’s facility in lecturing and publishing was as great as his zeal, and his every book and every lecture seemed to arouse new hatred in the older race of theologians and jurists. Enemies beset him on all sides; now and then skirmishes were won against him, resulting in condemnation of this or that book or prohibition of this or that course of lectures.

But for his real genius, he would have lost the battle entirely. He committed errors in taste, errors in tact, errors in statement, errors in method, more than enough to ruin a man simply of great talent; but he was possessed of more than talent; of more than genius.¹⁰

For there was in him a deep, earnest purpose, a force which obstacles only increased; and so, as preparatory to his lectures of 1688, came the startling announcement that they were to be in the spoken language of his country. This brought on a crisis. To his enemies it seemed insult added to injury. Heretofore Thomasius had developed the ideas of Grotius and Pufendorf; this was bad enough; but now, his opponents declared that he purposed to disgrace the University and degrade the Faculty. In vain did Thomasius take pains to make his views understood. In vain did he extol the Greek and Latin classics; in vain did he show the great advantages which France and other nations had reaped from the cultivation of their own languages; in vain did he show that lecturing in Latin was conducive to the reworking of old thoughts rather than to the development of new; that a flexible modern language is the best medium in which new thought can be developed: all in vain.

The opposition became more and more determined, but he stood none the less firmly. More and more he labored to clear away barbarisms and to bring in a better philosophy; and while he continued to deliver some of his lectures and write some of his books in Latin, he persisted in using German in those lectures and books which appealed to his audiences more directly and fully. This brought more and more intrigues, more and more pressure: every sort of authority, lay and ecclesiastic, was besought to remove him.

As we have seen, he had been one of the editors of a Latin literary journal; he now established a literary journal in German, — the first of any real value ever known. Up to that time newspapers in Germany were petty sheets giving mere summaries of news; Thomasius was the first to found a German literary journal in any true sense of the word.¹¹

Not only did he give up the old language of literary criticism, but he relinquished its old paths. The time-honored methods in criticism were simple. They were largely those of a mutual admiration society: each professor sounding in sonorous Latin the glories of his sect or his clique, and showing in pungent Latin the futility of all others. With all such, Thomasius made havoc, discussed the works of his colleagues and of others impartially; asked no favors and showed none. He was the sworn foe of intolerance, of abuses rooted in prejudice, of all mere formulas and learned jargon.

Nor did he confine himself to that easiest and cheapest of all things, destructive criticism; he determined not merely to criticise, but to create, — not merely to destroy, but to build; he showed, distinctly, power to develop new good things in place of old bad things.

This work of his, then, while apparently revolutionary, was really evolutionary : he opened German literature to the influences of its best environment; he stripped off its thick, tough coatings and accretions of pedantry, sophistry, and conventionalism, and brought it into clean and stimulating contact with the best life of Germany and of Europe.

While opposing the unfit use of the ancient languages, he never ceased efforts to improve his own language. Luther had, indeed, given it a noble form by his translation of the Bible; but pedantry was still too powerful: the vernacular was despised. All care was given to Latin. At sundry schools of high repute children were not only trained to speak Latin, but whipped if they spoke anything else. Learned schoolmasters considered it disgraceful to speak their own language, or to allow their pupils to speak it. The result was that the German language had become a jargon. Even Thomasius himself never fully freed his style from the effect of his early teaching: much as he did to improve German literature by calling attention to the more lucid French models, he never could entirely shake off the old shackles.¹²

No less striking were his efforts in behalf of a better system of instruction. He insisted that so much useless matter was crammed into scholars’ minds that there was little place for things of real value. He urged the authorities to give up the debased Aristotelianism still dominant, sought to quicken thought on subjects of living interest, and declared: “the logic of the schools is as useless in prying into truth as a straw in overturning a rock.” ¹³

The evil was deep-seated. Candidates for degrees in his time discussed such subjects as the weight of the grape clusters which the spies brought out of the Promised Land: one professor lectured twenty-four years on the first chapter of Isaiah; another lectured an equal time on the first ten chapters of Jeremiah; still another gave thirteen years to an explanation of the Psalms; Gessner, the philologist, gave forty lectures upon one word in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.¹⁴

To all the objections of Thomasius against this sort of learning, his opponents had an easy answer: they declared his arguments shallow, and himself a charlatan. But he committed still another crime. Spener having continued his efforts to bring peace between the warring factions in the church and to arouse Christian effort, Thomasius defended him, made common cause with him, and, indeed, for a considerable time, became milder in character and utterance. Hence it was that, though for his views on the source of public law he had been called an “atheist,” he was now called, for his tolerant views, a “pietist.”

And soon came another charge, even worse. A Danish court preacher, Masius, had put forth a treatise to prove Lutheranism the form of religion most favorable to princely power, — that no other religion taught so plainly the divine authority of princely government, the necessity of passive obedience on the part of the governed, the absolute authority conferred on government directly from God, and without any necessary consent of the people. No argument could appeal more strongly to the multitude of princelings, great and small, who then ruled every corner of Germany with rods of iron.

But these statements and arguments Thomasius, in the regular course of his work as professor and journalist, brought under criticism; stigmatized them as an attempt to curry favor with the ruling class; and finally declared that, although the powers that be are ordained of God, various rights on the part of the governed must be supposed. This threw the opposing theologians into new spasms. They had previously, without much regard for consistency, declared him an atheist and pietist; they now declared him guilty of treason, the Danish Government made a solemn complaint to the Government of Saxony, and Thomasius’s book was burned by a Danish hangman, while the Elector of Saxony, the palace clique, and the authorities of the church at Dresden, were more loudly than ever besought to remove him.

Against all this he stood firm. But at last fortune seemed to desert him. His love of justice plunged him into apparent ruin. The Duke of Sachsen-Seitz had wished to marry a daughter of the Elector of Brandenburg. The reasons for the marriage were many and weighty. The alliance was a happy one for the two states, and the prince and princess loved each other; but Saxony was Lutheran, and Brandenburg Calvinistic: the marriage was, therefore, denounced from the leading Lutheran pulpits. Against these Thomasius began another struggle. On grounds of simple justice and of public right, and of opposition to intolerance, he favored the marriage. Committees were now appointed to examine into his utterances and opinions. The Philosophic Faculty of Leipsic made formal charges against him before the Royal Court at Dresden, beseeching the authorities to stop his lectures and to allow him to print nothing which had not received the sanction of the censure. This led to a catastrophe : a warrant was issued for his arrest, and, as treason was one of the crimes charged, he took the wisest course left him,— he shook from his feet forever the dust of Saxony, fled by night from Leipsic, and sought refuge in Halle, under the sway of the Elector of Brandenburg.

Thus, in 1690, apparently ended all his opportunities to better his country. At the age of thirty-five years, he saw his enemies jubilant; every cause for which he had struggled lost; himself considered, among friends and enemies alike, as discredited and ridiculous.