The 19th Floor

It might be a stretch, but perhaps only a slight one, to suggest that the century just past, so celebrated and reviled at the turn of the millennium, will ultimately be judged inconsequential by historians when compared to the “long century” that, as historians reckon, began with the strident cries of “liberty, equality, and fraternity” in 1789 and ended with the bloodbath of 1914-18.

Consider, for example, the revolutions of 1989, the crumbling of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe. That the events of that year signified the retreat of the long shadow cast by Karl Marx was almost universally acknowledged. But to grasp their full significance, Francis Fukuyama—who became one of the most influential interpreters of that year of revolutions—turned for inspiration to none other than Marx’s own mentor, G. W. F. Hegel, proclaiming 1989 as a sign of the necessary global triumph of liberalism and “the end of history.”

And this is but one instance out of many. In fact, much of the 20th century could be construed as the conflicted outworking of 19th-century thought. Nationalism, born in the experience of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic conquests, proved a dominant factor in the origins of the Great War and, subsequently, in the rise of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The theories of Marx, refracted through Lenin, fueled the 1917 Russian Revolution, as well as other socialist experiments throughout the world. Western liberalism itself, though born in the Enlightenment, achieved coherence and direction only in the democratic developments of the early and mid-19th century and in the writings of liberals like Alexis de Tocqueville and J. S. Mill.

Indeed, wherever we look, the innovations and questions of 19th-century thinkers persist. Scientists today are still indebted to Charles Darwin as we embark upon the wonderful, horrible genetic future. Psychologists and psychiatrists remain preoccupied with exorcising the ghost of Freud, while some critics have hailed the notion of “the therapeutic” as the key to explaining contemporary culture. What are 20th-century existentialism and neo-orthodox theology if not evidence of the prescience and power of Søren Kierkegaard’s melancholy mind? Contemporary feminism traces its roots to writings like Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). And aren’t the myriad moods of postmodernism ultimately footnotes to the scribblings of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose terrible originality seems slightly less so when one reads fellow 19th-century pessimists like Arthur Schopenhauer and Jacob Burckhardt? What is more, the above catalogue does not even glance at the influence of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Feodor Dostoevsky, August Comte, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Leopold von Ranke, John Henry Newman, William James, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and many more. A century of dunderheads it was not.

The abiding significance of the 19th century’s intellectual legacy was not lost on the brightest lights of the century just past. One thinks of Karl Löwith’s From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought; Hayden White’s Metahistory; The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe; Karl Barth’s Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century; and Owen Chadwick’s The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century. Alasdair MacIntyre’s Three Rival Forms of Moral Inquiry, one of the most provocative works of contemporary philosophy, amounts to an extended meditation on divergent 19th-century intellectual currents.

But if we draw attention to the enormous legacy of 19th-century thought, we are also bound to acknowledge the forbidding and difficult character of many of its master texts. Anyone courageous enough to sit down with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind for example, probably shares a special kinship with spelunkers overtaken by panic and fatigue in labyrinthine darkness. The best way to read Marx’s Das Kapital, someone once quipped, is to tear Marx out and read the introductory material. Personal experience confirms such frustration. As a teacher of modern European history, I find that students regularly gravitate to the bloody drama and ostensible relevance of more contemporary events, despite my repeated suggestion that historical perspective might reveal the origins of 20th-century events in 19th-century ideas.

It is for precisely this reason that Steve Wilkens and Alan Padgett’s survey of “Faith and Reason” in the 19th century is so valuable. Their book is the second in a series, complementing Colin Brown’s earlier one that covered the period from the classical world to the Enlightenment. Wilkens and Padgett provide an eminently readable “overview for students.” Beginning with Kant and ending with Freud, they leave few stones unturned as they touch upon German Idealism, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Left Hegelianism, Positivism, Liberalism, Pragmatism, Confessionalism, Darwinism, and more. (One wonders if the century would be at all comprehensible without the fortuitous suffix “ism.”) Their method is straightforward, as befits a survey. For the most part, they proceed with a brief sketch of each thinker’s life before summarizing the most salient and influential aspects of his thought. A section on “significance” usually follows and, finally, a critical assessment that often includes comparisons and contrasts with previously discussed thinkers and movements.

Although most sections are compelling and informative, I was especially pleased by the authors’ ability to sort out the shape and significance of German Idealism. I was equally impressed by the lucidity of the chapter entitled “Confessionalism and Liberalism,” in which they discussed several tradition-based reactions to popular religion and to the century’s faith in rationality; here they consider John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement, Neo-Lutheranism, Mercersburg Theology, and Charles Hodge and Princeton Theology. Under theological liberalism, they discuss major German figures like Albrecht Ritschl, Adolf von Harnack, and Wilhelm Herrmann; the Catholic Modernism of Alfred Loisy; and Walter Rauschenbush and the Social Gospel. They conclude this chapter with a suggestive allusion to Karl Barth’s reaction to 19th-century theology, which includes the well-known quote that his Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (1918) “fell like a bomb on the playground of the theologians.” (This whets one’s appetite for a projected volume by the authors on 20th-century philosophy and theology.)

A volume like Wilkens and Padgett’s raises the question of what is the appropriate nature of a Christian survey of an important area of academic inquiry. What might a student at, say, Azusa Pacific University (where both authors were based when their book was published, though Padgett has since moved to Luther Seminary in Saint Paul, Minnesota) or at my own institution, Gordon College, take away from a course on 19th-century intellectual history that differs from such a course taught in a secular environment? The authors state explicitly that their faith “stimulated and guided” the work. Yet I was struck by how little a colleague who might not share the authors’ faith commitments would object to their assertions. The contours of Christian reasoning are apparent, but the book is remarkably evenhanded. And this is for the good, for all too often Christian scholars have abetted their ghettoization by using “insider” vocabulary or by making unwarranted appeals to divine insight.

Still, I wonder if the authors were, at times, too cautious in pursuing the implications of their faith. This is especially apparent in their criteria of selection. Bearing in mind that selection is always a daunting task for a survey and that the authors are primarily interested in philosophers, I was left with several concerns. With the exception of the aforementioned chapter on confessionalism and liberalism, the book rarely departs from what one might call the canonical “grand narrative” of modern Western intellectual history. But by adhering so closely to this narrative, Wilkens and Padgett omit several routinely overlooked but nonetheless significant Christian thinkers. For example, the University of Berlin’s E.W. Hengstenberg (1802-69) was a conservative Lutheran thinker of tremendous influence in Germany during the heyday of theological liberalism. While the authors mentioned him briefly, I cannot help but think that students might benefit from knowing how a mind like Hengstenberg’s responded to his Berlin colleagues Schleiermacher and Hegel and to radical biblical critics like D. F. Strauss and F. C. Baur, all of whom receive substantially more attention than Hengstenberg.

More significantly, I was struck by the paucity of Catholic thinkers. Besides gaining familiarity with John Henry Newman and Alfred Loisy, a reader might assume that Catholics made little or no contribution to 19th-century thought. Félicité de Lammenais, a pioneer of Catholic modernism, is not discussed. The authors refer to Leo XIII twice in passing, but his most influential encyclicals—such as Aeterni Patriss (1879), which sparked a Thomist revival in philosophy still felt in John Paul II’s recent Fides et Ratio, and Rerum Novarum (1891), the Magna Charta of modern Catholic social thought—are not mentioned, let alone discussed. Other conspicuous Catholic omissions include René Chateaubriand, Alexis de Tocqueville, Lord Acton, and J. J. Döllinger. While I’m inclined to agree that 19th-century Protestant and secular thought was both more innovative and, for better or worse, influential, I’m also persuaded that all Christian students—perhaps especially evangelicals—would profit considerably from knowledge of the Catholic intellectual tradition from this period.

Yet as it stands, Christianity and Western Thought is a useful and much-needed book, which could be fittingly employed in a number of history, theology, and philosophy courses. It could also serve as a general introduction for anyone who desires to make sense of the significant and complex terrain of modern thought. And a worthwhile task this is, for as the violent convulsions of the 20th century recede in memory, the intellectual convulsions of the 19th century seem interminably with us.

Thomas Albert Howard is associate professor of history at Gordon College and author of Religion and the Rise of Historicism (Cambridge Univ. Press).