The missing link

A review of “The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy” 

This is a series of translated lectures, given in France by a German scholar, dealing with the mystical sources of German Romanticism. It should be read together with “Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition” by Glenn Alexander Magee and “Schelling and Swedenborg” by Friedemann Horn. In the lecture, Romanticism is a somewhat broad concept, encompassing Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, amongst others.

Usually portrayed as a strictly philosophical movement, Romanticism was actually heavily influenced by various esoteric, mystical and apocalyptic notions derived from religious traditions. Thus, Fichte's subjective idealism centered on a “divine” Ego is probably inspired by German mystic Master Eckhart. Schelling's speculations about spiritual corporeality and the “evolution” of God owe something to the Kabbala. He also studied Swedish mystic Swedenborg, including the idea that conjugal love could survive the physical death of both spouses. Franz von Baader is prominently mentioned in these lectures, hardly surprising since he was an esotericist in his own right, while acting as the “gray eminence” of German Romanticism. Baader studied Jacob Boehme, Master Eckhart and Saint-Martin (the latter a contemporary).

One thing that always baffled me is the connection to Hegel, whose philosophy at first glance seems very different, in both degree and kind, from anything “occult”. Yet, Hegel was a friend of Baader, who introduced him to the writings of Boehme and Eckhart! The notion that the World Spirit comes to know itself through history is superficially similar to the mystical idea that God comes to know himself through the mystic, but I always felt there must be a missing link somewhere. This book provides two such links: Christian Pietists Johann Albrecht Bengel and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger. Both had developed an evolutionary perspective already before Romanticism. God's revelation evolves, not simply in the sense of new theological truths being revealed through the Spirit, but concretely in and through history. The perspective is apocalyptic: God's redemptive plan will eventually evolve to a point when His kingdom on Earth will be established. To Oetinger, the millennial kingdom was explicitly democratic, egalitarian and socialist. There was even a kind of “dialectic” involved, since God's moves are always countered by Satan's ditto, forcing God to change his plans to attack Satan the better. As evolution progresses, the conflicts between good and evil become more and more violent. Since the battle between God and Satan takes places in history and therefore in society, it's easy to secularize this perspective into a this-worldly plan of evolutionary-apocalyptic salvation. This sounds almost like Hegel…and Marx!

Schelling was also influenced by Oetinger, who attempted to combine the evolutionary apocalyptic with studies of the Kabbala. God or Spirit evolves by becoming more corporeal, eventually creating a kind of spiritualized matter (compare “the resurrection of the body” and “heavenly bodies” in Christianity). This is almost identical to Schelling's perspective. Thus, the various sefira in the Kabbalist system aren't simply conceptually distinct from each other, but actually evolve one by one during a cosmogonic process of God's becoming. A tie-in to Hegel's World Spirit is possible here. It turns out that both Schelling and Hegel had studied at the theological seminary at Tübingen in their youth, a seminary where the writings of Bengel and Oetinger were studied!

I realize “The Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy” is a very obscure work about a rather narrow subject, but I found it fascinating, and therefore give it five stars. They were wrong, of course. History is obviously cyclical. :P