This was the start of the golden age of German intellectual influence, which was only brought to an end by the ravages of Adolf Hitler following 1933. These developments were felt first at the University of Berlin (later the Humboldt University). Among the notable thinkers there were Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) in philosophy, Bartold Georg Niebuhr in history and Friedrich Karl Savigny in jurisprudence. But it was more than just names. New disciplines were invented, which went beyond the traditional breakdown into law, medicine and theology. For example, specialisations such as philosophy, history, chemistry and physiology all came into being at that time and deepened and proliferated.6 The idea of specialisation itself took on a new force as a new literature – history for historians, chemistry for chemists – evolved. As Roger Smith has pointed out, this was when the difference first emerged between specialist literature and a general readership. As Smith also says, these new academic disciplines did not yet include sociology or psychology, which began in a far more practical way, as a result of observations away from the universities, in prisons, asylums or workhouses.7
Hegel was partly responsible for the rise of history. In his book The Philosophy of History, he advanced the view that the ‘divine will’ unfolds over time, as the universe reveals itself, and so history is in effect a description of this divine will. For him, this meant that theology was to be replaced by history as the way to apprehend the ultimate truths. On his account, man was not a passive creature, an observer of history, but in all senses a participant, a creator, or co-creator of it, in co-operation with the divinity. Hegel’s famous theory as to how history moves forward – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – and his concept that, at certain critical times, ‘world historical figures’ (like Napoleon) emerge, to distil and personify the central arguments of an age, was for many the most satisfying concept about the past, and how it leads to the present.8
But it wasn’t only Hegel. We have already encountered the discipline that also helped to spark the revival in historical studies in Germany – philology, the comparative science of languages. Even in the nineteenth century, the classical languages maintained a certain position, even though language studies had been transformed by Sir William Jones’ observations about the links between Sanskrit and Latin and Greek (covered in Chapter 29). Jones’ insights had had the impact they did because, in those days, far more people had an acquaintance with the classics, not least because doctoral theses – even in the ‘hard’ sciences – had to be written in Latin. In schools, there was an emphasis on Greek and Latin because of the part the classical authors had played in the development of logic, rhetoric and moral philosophy. The initiative of William Jones, and the subsequent discovery and translations of the ancient Indian scriptures, transformed not only philology, but the study of all texts. The most important effort in this regard took place first at Göttingen in the late eighteenth century, when the text of the Bible itself came under critical scrutiny. In time this had a profound effect on theology and meant that, in the early part of the nineteenth century, philology became the central discipline in the new universities, at least so far as the humanities were concerned.9
Humboldt himself was particularly interested in philology. He had formed a friendship with Condillac in Paris, and the Frenchman had helped overturn the standard idea that language had originated in a single God-given tongue, from which all other languages were descended. With Condillac, Humboldt shared the view that languages had evolved, reflecting the different experiences of different tribes and nations.10 Language, Humboldt concluded, was ‘mental activity’, and as such it reflected the evolutionary experience of mankind.11 So this is how philology and history came to form a central part of university scholarship, which would grow in importance throughout the nineteenth century. Combined with the Oriental renaissance, philology made India a fashionable area of study for a while and the analyses of language changes seemed to indicate that four waves of people had migrated from the original homeland, via the Middle East, to Europe. This is no longer the accepted view, but it proved important because it was in the context of this debate that Friedrich Schlegel, in 1819, first used the word ‘Aryan’ to describe the original Indo-European peoples. This idea was badly mangled by later ideologues.12
In Humboldt’s reformed German university system, by far the most controversial and yet influential form of historical/philological scholarship was textual criticism of the Bible and associated documents.13 As the world had opened up, thanks to the Oriental renaissance and Napoleon’s travels, in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, more and more early manuscripts had been discovered (in Alexandria, and in Syria, for example), manuscripts that varied in interesting and instructive ways, which not only taught scholars how early ideas had varied, but proved helpful in perfecting dating techniques. Philologists-turned-historians, like Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), were pioneers in the critical inspection and dating of primary sources.
In particular, attention turned to the New Testament. Exegesis, the interpretation of the meaning of the text, was nothing new, as we saw in Chapter 25. However, the new German philologists were much more ambitious: with the new techniques at their disposal, their first achievement was to accurately date the gospels, the effect of which was to throw a new light on the inconsistencies in the different accounts, so that their overall reliability began to be questioned. It is important to say that this did not occur overnight, nor was it deliberate. Originally, scholars such as F. D. E. Schleiermacher (1768–1834) had merely wished to distil a reasonable trajectory for the biblical narrative, one that could be accepted by any rational person. In the process, however, so much doubt was cast on the texts themselves that Jesus’ very existence as a historical figure began to be undermined and this risked sabotaging the very meaning of Christianity.14 The most controversial of all the Germanic textual bombshells was The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, published in 1835 by David Strauss (1808–1874). Strauss was much influenced by German romanticism – he wrote a romantic tragedy that was performed, and took a great interest in magnetic and hypnotic cures. In this way he acquired an understanding of God as immanent in nature, but not as someone who would intervene in the course of history.15 Strauss thus used history against religion, arguing that its details were insufficient, by a long way, to support Christianity as it existed in the nineteenth century. So incendiary were his findings – that Jesus was not a divine figure, that the miracles never took place, that the church as we know it has little connection with Jesus – that Strauss’s appointment to a professorship in Zurich in 1839 sparked a local riot so worrying to the local authorities that he had to be ‘retired’ before he even had chance to take up his chair. His conclusions could not be retired so easily, however. In England, Marian Evans, better known as George Eliot, ‘nearly drove herself to despair with the soul-stupefying labour involved in the translation of Strauss into English, but she thought it her duty to humanity’.16 As we shall see in Chapter 35, Strauss’s work was just one element in the nineteenth century’s struggle with religion, and what some were beginning to call ‘the death of God’.