Abstract
The agony of faith that failed is one of the familiar echoes of Victorian England, as familiar as the conservative rant against the corrosive scepticism of ‘German’ professors who would have been better at the bottom of the ‘German Ocean’. A crisis of faith, however, is less easy to detect, define, and date, and the hunt for it is much obfuscated by characteristic perceptions of both the mid-nineteenth and the late-twentieth centuries. The Religious Census of 1851 seemed more shocking to contemporaries than it does to us because of two assumptions which they shared neither with previous nor with later generations, that there should be a parson in every parish and that everyone free and able to darken the doors of a place of worship should do so weekly. And our own day has blinkers of its own. Is the present religious situation in western Europe an adequate hermeneutic for the whole story? Or is the problem of believing as encountered in Victorian England a chapter in a complicated web of many plots, in which belief finds new social roles as well as losing old ones, not least because of a radical redistribution of Christian belief and practice in the world as a whole. Is there one story, that of secularisation, or are there several?
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Notes
Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (London, 1966–70).
Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century: The Gifford Lectures in the University of Edinburgh for 1973–4 (Cambridge, 1975).
ibid., 2.
On the ‘golden age of the Church of England’ see Desmond Bowen, The Idea of the Victorian Church: A Study of the Church of England, 1833–1889 (Montreal, 1968).
Owen Chadwick, The Mind of the Oxford Movement (London, 1960) 50.
G.R. Balleine, A History of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England (London, 1957) 164–5.
W.R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850 (London, 1972) 287.
T.W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London, 1982) 24–49.
W.R. Ward, ‘Oxford and the Origins of Liberal Catholicism in the Church of England’, Studies in Church History, 1 (1962) 233–52.
W.R. Ward, Theology, Sociology and Politics: The German Protestant Social Conscience, 1890–1930 (Bern, 1979).
W.R. Ward, ‘The Protestant Churches, Especially in Britain, and the Social Problems of the Industrial Revolution’, in Religion und Kirchen im industriellen Zeitalter, Schriftenreihe des Georg-Eckert-Instituts für internationale Schulbuchforschung, Bd I.23 (Braunschweig, 1977) 63–72.
For the case of Reading see S. Yeo, Religion and Voluntary Organisations in Crisis (London, 1976). Cf. G.E. Milburn, ‘Piety, Profit and Paternalism: Methodists in Business in the North-East of England, c. 1760–1920’, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society, 44 (1982) 45–92.
C.V. Cox, Recollections of Oxford, 2nd edn (London, 1870) 355.
For a Canadian study of this which could be paralleled in contemporary England see Neil Semple, ‘“The Nurture and Admonition of the Lord”: Nineteenth-century Canadian Methodism’s Response to “Childhood”,’ Histoire Sociale — Social History, 14(1981) 157–75.
The best study of this subject is by James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900 (Cambridge, 1979). For an earlier period there is a suggestive American study that makes use of German material: H. Hoverkamp, Science and Religion in America, 1800–1860 (Philadelphia, 1978). See also T.D. Bozeman, Protestants in an Age of Science (Chapel Hill, NC, 1977).
J.G. Walch, Historische und theologische Einleitung in die Religions-Streitigkeiten ausser der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, 5 vols (Jena, 1733–6; repr. Stuttgart, 1972) 1: 606.
Johannes Reiskius, Commentario de Monarchia Quinta (Wolfenbüttel, 1692).
F.W. Barthold, Die Erweckten im protestantischen Deutschland während des Ausgangs des 17. und der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts besonders die frommen Grafenhöfe (repr. from Historisches Taschenbuch 1852–3 [Darmstadt, 1968]) 1: 166. Eva von Buttlar gave it out that her lover (a theologian called Winter) and a medical student from Jena were God the Father and God the Son, while she was no less than the Holy Spirit.
For Löscher’s assault upon the alleged unorthodoxy of the English church see M. Greschat, Zwischen Tradition und neuem Anfang (Witten, 1971) 236.
H.L. Benthem, Neu-eröffneter Engländischer Kirch- und Schulenstaat, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1732) preface, paras 9–10.
Dr Kayser, ‘Hannoversche Enthusiasten des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte, 15 (1905) 59.
Max Goebel, ‘Geschichte der wahren Inspirations-Gemeinden von 1688 bis 1850’, pt III, Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie, N.F. 19 (1855) 98.
Andreas Gross, Vernunftiger und unpartheyische Bericht über die neuaufkommende Herrnhütische Gemeinde, 3rd edn (Frankfurt/Leipzig, 1740) 21.
M. Brecht, ‘Die Entwicklung der alten Bibliothek des Tübinger Stift in ihren theologie- und geistesgeschichtlichen Zusammenhang’, Blätter für Württembergische Kirchengeschichte, 63 (1963) 59, 63. The holdings of the library at the Stift are a marvellous continuous record of what was thought worth buying. Whitefield and Watts, for example, were thought more important than Wesley.
There was strong English representation in J.H. Reitz, Historie der Wiedergebohrnen, 5th edn (Berleburg, 1724).
Carl Heinrich von Bogatsky, Aufrichtige und an aller Kinder Gottes gerichtete Declaration über eine gegen ihn herausgekommene Herrnhütische Schrift (Halle, 1751) 10.
Wolfgang Martens, Die Botschaft der Tugend: Die Aufklärung im Spiegel der deutschen moralischen Wochenschriften (Stuttgart, 1971).
Johann Rudolf Schlegel, Kirchengeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Heilbronn, 1784–96) esp. 2: 814.
Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten, Sammlung von merkwurdigen Lebensbeschreibungen grossten Teils aus der britannischen Biographen übersetzt … (Halle, 1754–7), unpaginated preface. As late as 1798 it could be reported that ‘the English imperial constitution … without doubt one of the best in the world … opens to all foreigners without distinction access to this blessed island…. English freedom causes the land … to blossom’; but it was already noticeable that ‘the Briton is not himself inventive, but … follows the track pointed out to him by the foreigner’ (Kirchengeschichte der deutschen Gemeinden in London [Tübingen, 1798] 9–13).
Martin Schloemann, Siegmund Jacob Baumgarten: System und Geschichte in der Theologie des Überganges zum Neuprotestantismus (Göttingen, 1974). Among the English authors whom Baumgarten had gone out of his way to introduce to German readers were the deists and their critics.
Emanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der neuem evangelischen Theologie, 5th edn, 5 vols (Gütersloh, 1975) 4: 50.
A substantial East German Lessing-reader (Lessing für unser Zeit: Ein Lesebuch, 25th edn [Berlin/Weimar, 1984]) almost excludes Lessing the theologian. This imbalance may be rectified by Lessing’s Theological Writings, ed. H. Chadwick (London, 1956).
Reimarus: Fragments, ed. C.H. Talbert (London, 1971).
The Autobiography of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ed. K.J. Weintraub, 2 vols (Chicago, 1974) 2: 8–23.
Gerhard Kaiser, Pietismus und Patriotismus in literarischen Deutschland (Wiesbaden, 1961).
The political parallel was explicitly drawn by Heine in his Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland (1834), Sämmtliche Werke, 13 vols, Bibliothek Ausgabe (Hamburg, n.d.) 7: 126.
For a fuller development of this argument, see Marilyn Chapin Massey, Christ Unmasked: The Meaning of ‘The Life of Jesus’ in German Politics (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983).
Hans-Joachim Braun, Technologische Beziehungen zwischen Deutschland und England von der Mitte des 17. bis zum Augang des 18. Jahrhunderts (Dusseldorf, 1974).
Carl Diehl, Americans and German Scholarship, 1770–1870 (New Haven, 1978) esp. 1.
W.R. Ward, Victorian Oxford (London, 1965) chs 5 and 6. Walter Harley Conser, Jr, shows indeed that the confessional frame of mind was an international phenomenon, but does not admit that confessionalism could only become international by following migrations of population (‘Church and Confession: Conservative Theologians in Germany, England and America, 1815–66’, Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1981. Published under the same title, Macon, Ga. 1984).
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (London, 1978) 175, 174.
Troeltsch Studien, Bd 3, eds Horst Renz and Friedrich Wilhelm Graf (Gütersloh, 1984) 119.
John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London, 1984) 221.
W.R. Ward, Early Victorian Methodism (Oxford, 1976) 420–1. More information of this kind, mostly of a later date, is to be found in Willis B. Glover, Jr, Evangelical Nonconformists and Higher Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1954).
S. Budd, Varieties of Unbelief: Atheists and Agnostics in English Society (London, 1977) 10.
R. Wellek, Confrontations: Studies in the Intellectual and Literary Relations between Germany, England and the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1965) 6–11.
Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952).
Letters Literary and Theological of Connop Thirlwall, eds J.J.S. Perowne and L. Stokes (London, 1881).
‘Mason Lodge’ (Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, in Works, 30 vols [1897; repr. London, 1969, 1974] 10: 237–8).
On the ‘Goethe Gemeinde’ see W.H. Bruford, ‘Goethe and Some Victorian Humanists’, Publications of the English Goethe Society, NS 18 (1949) 34–67. On Carlyle see R. Wellek, ‘Carlyle and German Romanticism’, and ‘Carlyle and the Philosophy of History’, ibid., 34–113; and C.F. Harrold, Carlyle and German Thought, 1819–34 (New Haven, Conn., 1934).
Ben Knights, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1978) 65.
On the plagiarism see N. Fruman, Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel (London, 1972) e.g. 31–4, 80–3. On Coleridge as a philosopher, see J.H. Muirhead, Coleridge as a Philosopher (London, 1930); R. Wellek, Immanuel Kant in England, 1793–1838 (London, 1931); T.B. McFarland, Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition (Oxford, 1969); Donald MacKinnon, ‘Coleridge and Kant’ in Coleridge’s Variety, ed. John B. Beer (London, 1975) 183–203.
T. Hodgskin, Travels in the North of Germany, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1820) 2: 265–9.
Quarterly Review, 23 (1821) 446–8.
Karl-Dieter Ulke, Agnostisches Denken im Victorianischen England (Freiburg/München, 1980).
The study being commended in a book which delighted Emerson and Carlyle, J.H. Sterling, The Secret of Hegel (Edinburgh, 1865).
J.W. Rogerson, ‘Philosophy and the Rise of Biblical Criticism: England and Germany’, in England and Germany: Studies in Theological Diplomacy, ed. S.W. Sykes (Frankfurt, 1982) 22–3. Cf. The Cambridge History of the Bible, 3: 274–95.
e.g., Theology, 76 (1983) 602–3. Even Reimarus appeared in English translation in 1971.
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Ward, W.R. (1990). Faith and Fallacy: English and German Perspectives in the Nineteenth Century. In: Helmstadter, R.J., Lightman, B. (eds) Victorian Faith in Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10974-6_3
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