Abstract
In his contribution to Habermas’s Stichworte zur ‘geistigen Situation der Zeit’ (1979), Jürgen Moltmann provides a retrospective analysis of reformation, revolution, and liberation within the context of German theology. While Molmann’s lamentations are largely political, the deeper and more fundamental philosophical and theological problem of nature emerges through a closer reading.
“The God that meets me in nature is the God of wrath” (Luther)
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Notes
Jürgen Moltmann, “Theology in German Today” in Contemporary German Perspectives on The Spiritual Situation of the Age’ ed. Jürgen Habermas, trans. Andrew Buchwalter (MIT, 1984), p. 187. German Edition, Stichworte zur ‘Geistigen Situation der Zeit’ (Suhrkamp, 1979 ).
Erazim Kohâk, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago, 1984), pp. 32, 49, 66–68. The metaphoric title of this work, and its meditative character, conveys an accurate sense of the spirit informing Kant’s understanding of “the starry heavens above and the moral law within” as something more than a purely formal transcendental deduction.
The permanent separation of the Eastern (Greek) and the Western (Latin) Church in 1054, beginning with the Iconic Controversy in the 9th century and continuing to the present day, originated in conflicting conceptions of nature and the divine. This is another aspect of the “civilizational fault line,” to use Huntington’s phrase, so evident in the religo-ethnic conflict in the former Yugoslavia.
Martin Chemnitz in his Loci Theologici (1591) says that “Our natural knowledge of God either amounts to nothing, or is imperfect, or languid” — amounts to nothing in the sense that it has no saving power, imperfect because it knows nothing of the “inner” or moral nature of the Law, and languid in the sense that it is “feeble and easily shaken by doubts.” Chemnitz cites as an example the Tusculan Disputations where Cicero tells Antony “to read diligently Plato’s treatise concerning the immortality of the soul. Nothing will be left to you to desire.” “This I have done,” Antony replies, “and somehow or other as long as I read, I assent, but whenever I lay down the volume and begin to reflect concerning the immortality of the soul, all my assent glides away” (Loci, I, 20). So also Johannes Quenstedt, in his Theologia Didactico-Polemica (1685),aserts that while one can make a case for the natural knowledge of God (aletheia and aletheian tou theou,Romans 1:18, 25) as partly hemphotos or “innate, implanted and constitutional,” and partly epikatatos or “acquired by reasoning and research,” both are imperfect with respect (a) “to their object, this object being either altogether unknown or inadequately known,” and (b) “to its subject, this subject being the inability to recognize God with sufficient constancy… in consequence of congenital corruption” (I, 253).
Jewish scholars have long pointed out that such perceptions are mistaken or at least distorted by the Augustinian notion of concupiscence,a notion that substantializes the famous line from the Song of David (Psalm 51) that “in sin did my mother conceive me” as distinct from “unto sin.” The latter contains more of an Aristotelian notion of potency,and this may be a more accurate reading. Whatever the case, a thousand years of celibate tradition could not fail to color the views of the Reformers, even though they had broken the pattern during the Reformation.
Exodus 20:4 (King James Version). Luther’s rendering is instructive: Du sollst dir kein Bildnis noch irgendein Gleichnis machen, weder von dem, was oben von Himmel, noch von dem, was unten auf Erden, noch von dem, was im Wasser unter der Erde ist.
Luther lived on the cusp of what R.G. Collingwood accurately describes, I think, as the transition from the “organic” conception of nature as a “thinking substance” in the classical and early medieval worlds, to the “mechanistic” view that emerged in the Renaissance and continued through the Enlightenment. Both are “analogical,” he argues, the analog being the consciousness of the machine in the Renaissance and Enlightenment; hence the movement from Plotinian emanationism, in the former, to deism, in the latter. See R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature Oxford, 1945 ), p. 5f.
A notable exception, of course, is the 17th century speculative theosophist, Jacob Boehme — who, of course, was condemned by the Lutheran establishment as a heretic!
Of course, this is the general basis of Richard Rorty’s skeptical argument in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, 1984).
It is possible, I think, to establish a line from this view to the rather more optimistic holistic environmental movements of the present day — movements driven, on the one hand, by egalitarian conceptions of right that include even species-beings other than humans, and, on the other hand, by a deeply felt, intuitive devotion to nature as an in-and-for-itself.
I’ve developed this at some length in Hegel and the Spirit: Philosphy as Pneumatology (Princeton, 1992), pointing out that while Pietistic excess was repugnant to both Kant and Hegel, the essence of Pietism, especially from the standpoint of social and political philosophy, was deeply appreciated and deemed an intrinsic part of the civil society.
Luther characterizes this dialectic as something akin to “two foxes tied together by their tails,” the only thing being different about them is that “their heads are pointing in opposite directions.” Both foxes, as in Isaiah Berlin’s famous characterization, are Pelagian in the sense of claiming essential knowledge regarding the nature of nature “by their own wits,” so to speak; on the one hand, the Thomists, on the other, the Anabaptists, “and while they outwardly profess to be the great enemies of one another, inwardly they think, teach, and defend one and the same thing…,” viz., self-salvation. See Commentary on Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians (1531),Middleton Text (1575) prepared by Philip S. Watson (London: James Clarke & Co., 1953), p. 19.
I might add that this “intensity” also contributes to what remains, for many, the “inscrutable” dimension of German Idealism (especially certain Anglo-American thinkers), and that this inscrutability remains such apart from an appreciation of the religioius and theological antecedents of 18th and 19th century German philosophy.
On a personal note, I might mention that, many years ago, I discussed with Professor Kohâk the prospect of doing a dissertation on Erasmus’s libro arbitrio and Luther’s servo arbitrio,developing this historical problematic within the context of Ricoeur’s Le Volontaire et l’involontaire. “Now that is a dissertation I’d like to advise”! he replied. I decided instead to work on the problem of Transcendence in the philosophy of the unabashed voluntarist, Karl Jaspers, and Professor Kohâk, thankfully, still served as one of my advisors.
What precisely “nature” means in this instance is unclear, for there is nothing in its formulation that approximates the notion of phusis (especially as Kohâk develops it in The Embers and the Stars. In popular usage, this formula seems to be a fall-back to the substantialistic language of the scholastics, whose discourse was informed, in the main, by the christological controversies and the language of “nature” considered as hypostasis — that is, as “fixed.” Calvinism, of course, reinforces this use through its notion of “total depravity.” What it has meant to the millions of individuals who have “confessed” their “sinful and unclean” nature down through the centuries is anyone’s guess — although it may be safe to speculate that for Lutherian and Catholic alike, it connotes the Augustinian sense of concupiscence,or at least it used to. As we discussed this paper, Professor Kohâk related the humorous story of two children, one Lutheran and the other Anglican, the former saying to the latter: “You are just an occasional offender, but I am a natural sinner”!
See Hegel, VPRe1, Enz., passim.
In his critique of liberalism, Karl Barth made frequent use of the late-19th, early-20th century comic-liberal figure, Baron von Munchausen, who `was forever trying to pull himself out of the Quagmire of contingency and sin by pulling upwards on his handlebar mustache’!
See my Hegel and the Spirit: Philosophy as Pneumatology (Princeton, 1992).
A current example of this might be adduced in the cynical contemporary term spinmaster,that is, the publicist who, for their clients, puts a different “spin” on things which, otherwise, remain very much the same, viz., “politics as usual.”
Revolutionary conceptions of Liberalism, understood as an abstract principle, are “falsche” because “die Fesseln des Rechts and der Freiheit ohne die Befreiung des Gewissens abgestreift werden, daß eine Revolution ohne Reformation sein könne.” Lectures on the Philosophy of History,trans. J. Sibree (New York: Prometheus, 1991), p. 453; Suhrkamp, XII, p. 535.
See Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness ( Cambridge, 1988 ). Pippin is entirely correct in suggesting, as he does extremely well in this book, that one of Hegel’s chief concerns was to broaden or existentialize (and historicize) the implications of the transcendental turn in Kent.
See Tom Rockmore, Hegel’s Circular Epistemology (Indiana, 1986).
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Olson, A.M. (1998). Theological Reflections on the Nature of Nature: Revolution, Reformation, Restoration. In: Cohen, R.S., Tauber, A.I. (eds) Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 195. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2614-6_10
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