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

The sixteenth modality

I'm reading this book as we speak. At least I'm trying to! J Glenn Friesen's “Neo-Calvinism and Christian Theosophy” is a super-scholarly, in-house study of the Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), who is almost unknown outside a small circle of admirers. To make matters worse, Friesen argues that most of Dooyeweerd's epigones have misunderstood The Philosophy of the Law-Idea. Friesen's own research into the matter was originally rejected by most Dooyeweerdian scholars, and seems to have become tolerated only recently. Small wonder, since it's implications are potentially staggering. “Neo-Calvinism and Christian Theosophy” is another example of a genre I've encountered before, where a well known literary or philosophical figure is revealed to have occult/esoteric/Hermetic influences, previously unheard of. Hegel, Wordsworth, W B Yeats and C S Lewis are four such people who have been “outed”, more or less convincingly, by writers interested in the Western secret tradition.

In Dooyeweerd's case, what's at stake is his status as a “Christian” philosopher working in the tradition of 19th century Dutch Neo-Calvinist theologian Abraham Kuyper, often seen as a staunch defender of orthodoxy and presuppositionalist apologetics. Indeed, I originally came across Dooyeweerd's name when reading about presuppositionalism. He is referenced by Christian Reconstructionist and creationist Rousas Rushdoony. A quick look at Dooyeweerd's own philosophy revealed him to be weird and almost incomprehensible, but also “liberal” and “unscriptural”, at least compared to his unwanted admirers in the United States crank belt. I assumed that Dooyeweerd was unique in the negative sense of that word, and thought of him no further. Friesen's book, while hard to understand, at least cleared this one up. Dooyeweerd and his Philosophy of the Law-Idea (or Cosmonomic Idea, in some translations) sounds unfamiliar since it really isn't based on Calvin, Calvinism or even Neo-Calvinism. Rather, Dooyeweerd was heavily inspired by the grey eminence of German Romanticism, Franz von Baader (1765-1841), whose worldview combined traditional Christian theology with Hermeticism, more specifically the theosophical writings of Jacob Boehme. If true, this would make Dooyeweerd a closeted heretic and put into question his status as a “Calvinistic” philosopher. Indeed, Dooyeweerd was subject to an inquisitorial investigation by the Curators of the (Neo-Calvinist) Free University in Amsterdam, where Dooyeweerd lectured. During the investigation, Dooyeweerd refused to reveal his sources of inspiration! It is Friesen's contention that the Philosophy of the Law-Idea is a revised version of Baader's theosophy. Since Baader was both an esotericist and a Catholic with ecumenical leanings, his ideas would automatically have been suspect in a Reformed context.

The following summary is based on reading about half of the book, and skimming the other half. I have chosen to “translate” Baader's and Dooyeweerd's respective philosophies into the language of other traditions I'm more familiar with.

On one point, Baader and Dooyeweerd were closer to traditional Christianity than to Western esotericism: there is a qualitative distinction between God (who is Trinitarian) and everything created. Man can never partake of God's nature or essence. The rest of their systems, however, sound like Neo-Platonic emanationism, and Friesen actually calls it panentheist (pan-en-theist). A fundamental point of Dooyeweerd's philosophy is opposition to all forms of dualism, including mind/body dualism. He solves this problem by arguing that the visible material cosmos is the periphery and expression of the “supratemporal heart”, which forms its Center. The supratemporal heart is the root of every individual human, humanity at large, and the entire material creation. It roughly corresponds to Brahman-Atman or the Neo-Platonist One. The material world emanates from it in the same way as white light is divided into colors by a prism. Thus, while the material world is “lower” than the supratemporal heart, it is also its manifestation, thereby overcoming dualism. This was also Baader's position. Baader believed that the world bore God's imprint and could be studied symbolically, a Hermetic concept (compare microcosmos-macrocosmos). To Dooyeweerd, the emanations from the Center take the form of 15 “modes” or “aspects”, each being a mode of consciousness and each having its own irreducible meaning. In keeping with Christian theology (but also some forms of esotericism), Baader and Dooyeweerd believed that our world is fallen, that humans were originally called to redeem it, but that humanity failed in its mission, making it necessary to send Christ. In some mysterious fashion, Adam's fall impacted all of creation, and in the same way, Christ's death on the cross also impacted all of creation, but in the opposite direction. Christ's atonement had some kind of ontological significance. As for humans, we naturally consist of both soul and body, as center and periphery, which explains why our souls (dwelling in the supratemporal heart after physical death) will get new bodies at the resurrection.

Another important point for Dooyeweerd was that all knowledge is religious at its root, and that rational thought isn't autonomous. This has been interpreted by presuppositionalists to mean that the Bible, a unique divine revelation, must be accepted as the unproven axiom for all further reasoning. Dooyeweerd's point, according to Friesen, was very different. To him, rationalistic theology based on propositional revelation (“a God who speaks”) is really another form of the belief in the autonomy of reason, since it elevates our rational faculty above all others. It means that rationality and logic are part of God's nature (perhaps the supreme parts), which He has decided to impart on humans. To Dooyeweerd, the idea that the root of all knowledge is religious is a mystical notion. We have pre-rational, pre-theoretical and pre-empirical knowledge of the supratemporal heart. Indeed, this is what makes knowledge possible at all. Rational thought is part of the *created* cosmos, not part of God's innermost nature, and exists alongside other forms of knowledge (such as intuition, aesthetic knowledge, etc). Therefore, Reason isn't the pinnacle of God's mind, but one of many indirect expressions of it. In the same way, theology is simply one way of sorting things out. The Bible is important but not absolutely central as in Christian fundamentalism. The “presuppositionalism” of Dooyeweerd is really the Romantic conviction of the cosmos as an organic whole. Materialism splits it apart, making it impossible to fully understand. I do get the impression, however, that the Throne and Altar conservative Baader was more consistently “organic” than Dooyeweerd, who as a good Dutch liberal believed in “sphere sovereignty”! Dooyeweerd further emphasized that the 15 “aspects” weren't logical categories arrived at by abstracting and comparing various properties. The 15 aspects seem to be intuitive, arrived at by a kind of pre-theoretical knowledge.

One thing the book doesn't prove is a firm link between Baader and Abraham Kuyper, often seen as the founder of Neo-Calvinism. Kuyper was too traditionally Christian. Yet, he certainly knew of Baader and occasionally referenced him. Dooyeweerd was interested by Kuyper's more mystical writings, which mentions the “heart”. He was also intrigued by Kuyper's peculiar statement that Jesus' miracles didn't prove him to be God, since humans will do the same things (or even greater things) after the resurrection. Of course, working at the Free University (which was founded by none other than Kuyper himself), Dooyeweerd would have needed a “Kuyperian” cover for his heterodox philosophy. I think he found it in Kuyper's devotional writings, but also in Kuyper's presuppositionalist concept of the “antithesis”. Nor does the book say whether Dooyeweerd had other occult inclinations apart from studying Baader's obtuse and cryptic aphorisms. Baader was interested in Mesmerism, lucid dreams and séances. One of his séances is said to have scared the living daylights out of fellow German philosopher Schelling! I almost get the impression that Dooyeweerd's system is a kind of “scholastic” Baaderism sans the yoga (or the séances)…

I'm not sure who might be interested in “Neo-Calvinism and Christian Theosophy”, but if the more intellectually exotic corners of theology or esotericism is your thing, it might perhaps be worth a week or two of study. The author also has a website devoted to the same subject. Previosuly, I saw the Cosmonomic Idea through a glass darkly. Now, I see face to face…

The grey eminence

A review of "Franz von Baader´s Philosophy of Love" by Ramon J Betanzos 

This is a difficult book on philosophy, theology and mysticism. I admit that I didn't read literally every word of it! Still, Betanzos' work seems to be to the only book-length study of Franz von Baader available in English. Thus, it's impossible to avoid for those interested in this particular thinker. There is also some interesting material on Baader's political ideas in "Conservative Millenarians", which could complement this study.

Franz von Baader (1765-1841) was a Bavarian polymath whose interests spanned science, theology, philosophy, politics and occultism. For a period, he was the Bavarian superintendent of mines. Baader had contacts with the Pietistic circles in Russia around Czar Alexander I, wrote several memoranda to the rulers of Russia, Austria and Prussia after the Napoleonic wars, and was involved in the drafting of the founding document of the Holy Alliance. Perhaps more importantly, he was something of an eminence grise of the Romantic movement, being personally acquainted with its foremost representatives. The infusion of esotericism into Romanticism was at least to some extent due to Baader's towering influence backstage. He was also on good terms with Hegel, despite major philosophical differences.

Baader was (of course) a political conservative, who wanted an organic and hierarchic society. He saw himself as a Christian and belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. Ironically, however, it seems that Baader was nevertheless the wrong kind of conservative. His contacts with the Russian Pietists and his attempts at ecumenism between the Orthodox Church and the Western churches eventually made him persona non grata in Czarist Russia. His opposition to the papacy in favour of conciliarism didn't exactly endear him to the Roman Catholic hierarchy. His political ideas also took a somewhat unexpected turn, when Baader began calling for democratic reforms in Bavaria in order to win the working class for the conservative cause, thus making Baader a forerunner to Christian Democracy (this is not mentioned in Betanzos' book, however).

Philosophically, Baader was heavily influenced by Jacob Böhme. He also appreciated Saint-Martin. My impression is that Baader's project was to harmonize Böhme with more traditional Christian theology, including Trinitarianism. He rejected the idea that Böhme was a pantheist, and took a position that could perhaps be viewed as panentheist. While Schelling and Hegel seem to have emphasized the "heretical" sides of Böhme, Baader rather viewed him as a spiritually advanced Christian. Baader also lacked the evolutionary perspective of Hegel and the Romantics. Rather, he viewed the human condition as one of creation, fall and redemption, with the resurrection of the body as the last phase.

Of course, Baader's concrete interpretation of this Christian schema was somewhat unusual. Adam's fall is a gradual fall in several steps from a spiritual state into matter. Adam was originally an androgynous creature. The "creation of Eve from Adam's rib" was really a splitting apart of the androgynous creature, and a consequence of the fall. Man is saved by Sophia, sometimes called Sophia-Eros, who is embodied by Christ. Despite being in some sense "female", Sophia is at bottom androgynous and represents God's love. Baader sees many symbols of androgyny in the Bible or Church tradition, including the Virgin Mary who begets Jesus without a male, or the Father begetting the Son. Redeemed man will be restored to his androgynous position. His glorified resurrection body is sexless, something the Bible states explicitly.

The path to redemption goes through restoring God's image in man by subordinating oneself to God's love. One way of restoring the original androgynous unity is by marriage and marital love. The man and the woman complement one another, and hence become a kind of first attempt at restoring the primordial unity. Baader's view of gender roles was essentialist and hopelessly patriarchal, with women being subordinate to men, and marriage being indissoluble á la Catholicism. Indeed, his view of love, androgyny and hierarchy reflected his view of society as a whole: an organic unity, in which hierarchy is preserved, while the various classes or estates love one another, thereby reflecting God's love. (That's what they always say, isn't it?) Christian ecumenism was based on the same reasoning, with Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants uniting in love.

From Betanzos' description, I get the impression that Baader's message is a kind of domesticated occultism. The antinomian potential of love and androgyny are safely channelled away through traditional marriage. Something tells me Baader would have disapproved of transsexuality (that would presumably have been "negative androgyny"), not to mention sex magic. Although somewhat unusual, his exegesis is nevertheless based on the Bible, appeals to the Church Fathers, etc. In contrast to his role model Böhme, I don't get the impression that Baader was a real mystic. However, he did have a wild side nevertheless, with a strong interest in mediumship, magnetism and other paranormal manifestations. I believe I read in another book - probably "Schelling and Swedenborg" - that Baader used his own teenage daughter as a medium, which scared the living daylights out of poor Schelling, who was invited to one of the séances! This makes you wonder about Baader's discernment...

I can't say that "Franz von Baader's Philosophy of Love" is the most exciting read around, but as I already pointed out, those unfortunate enough not to understand German, have no other choice than to peruse this book. Today, Franz von Baader is almost forgotten, but one can't fully understand Romanticism without getting acquainted with the ideas and activities of its grey eminence.

Guilt by association

"Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition" is something of a disappointment. The author, Glenn Alexander Magee, argues that the well-known German philosopher Hegel was an occultist and a Gnostic, or rather a Hermeticist (the author defines Hermeticism as different from Gnosticism). If true, this would indeed be quite interesting. Hegel influenced Marx, whose ideology became the official one in the Soviet Union (creatively developed by Lenin, of course). Was the Soviet Union really based on a Gnostic or "Hermetic" philosophy?

Hmmm....

Unfortunately, I don't think Magee really proves his point. Most of the book is simply guilt by association. The book never really delivers. For instance, Magee promises to prove that Hegel was influenced by Hermeticism in his youth, but he is forced to admit that Hegel's teenage diaries contain no entries about Hermetic subjects. Magee brushes this aside with the rather strange argument that "what you talk about every day, you don't write about in your diary". No? Since when? Here, the very lack of evidence for Hermetic influence is dialectically transformed into evidence *for* such influence. Sorry, but that's simply not convincing! Further, the author states that there is no direct evidence for Hegel ever being a Freemason. But since Schelling, Goethe and Fichte were Freemasons, and since Hegel mingled or corresponded with them, therefore... Magee also points out that Hegel and Schelling were friends, and that *Schelling* was influenced by Hermeticism. But Hegel and Schelling parted ways later, since Hegel disliked his friend's philosophy! Further, the author states that Hegel was a friend of Franz von Baader, which is true, but the two gentlemen often criticized each other. Besides, Baader wasn't an unthinking, orthodox Hermeticist.

In plain English, the entire book is nothing but "guilt by association", although positive "guilt", since Magee seems to like the idea that George Wilhelm Friedrich was a Magus. Personally, I don't care either way. I just don't think the case is compelling enough.

I don't doubt that there are similarities between Hegel and Hermeticism (or Gnosticism, if you like). That Hegel studied Jacob Böhme is, of course, uncontestable. He also studied Master Eckhart. Hegel's idea that God needs to create the world in order to realize himself, and that he realizes himself through man, sounds "pretty old hat" to all students of mysticism. So far so good. But is that the end of story?

Hegel's innovation was to claim that God (the World-Spirit) realizes itself through history, and necessarily embodies itself in human cultures and institutions. This historical perspective seems to be lacking from Schelling, for whom Nature was God's embodiment, and it doesn't seem to exist within the Hermetical tradition either, where the individual magus rises himself above everything else, including history. Magee has managed to find only two examples of Hermeticists with some kind of historical perspective, Isaac Luria and Joachim of Fiore, but it's difficult to see any real similarity between their apocalypticism (obviously derived from the Bible) and Hegel's evolutionary perspective.

Why was Marx able to "turn Hegel on his feet"? How could Hegelianism ever be given a secular, left-wing interpretation? Were the left-Hegelians raving mad? I don't think so. When Hegel claimed that the Weltgeist necessarily embodied itself in human institutions with a history, the question automatically arised, what on earth this "World Spirit" could possibly *be*? Isn't it simply a more superstitious, Romantic, pantheistic word for the historical process itself? A historical process propelled forward by *human* spirit? It was Hegel's "grounding" of the Weltgeist that made it possible for the left-Hegelians and Marxists to hi-jack his philosophy. Had Hegel simply said the same thing as Böhme, Schelling or Baader, this would have been impossible!

In other words, Hegel wasn't simply a student of Böhme, and absolutely not an "initiate". He was an innovator, who (dialectically?) pointed forward, to a very different philosophy.

Not just about Bavaria

"Conservative Millenarians" is a book by Paul Gottfried about the Romantic experience in Bavaria. In other words, the book deals with certain religious and philosophical developments in early 19th century Bavaria, a kingdom in southern Germany.

Sounds like an obscure, boring subject, does it not?

Actually, "Conservative Millenarians" has a much broader scope. It deals with the Romantic movement as a whole, especially with the influence of esoteric ideas on German Romanticism. The relationship between the Romantics and the Catholic Church is covered, as is their political ideas and entanglements. Gottfried also describes the Awakening, a pan-European religious revival after the Napoleonic Wars.

The Bavarian setting is no co-incidence, however. Many well-known Romantics lived or taught in Bavaria, and the kingdom was rocked by both the Awakening and various conflicts between Catholics and supporters of the Enlightenment. I always wondered where the Romantics got their curious religious-philosophical ideas from, so strikingly similar to Hermeticism. Apparently, a Hermetic-occultist subculture existed in Germany since the Renaissance. It's main exponents before the Romantic period were the Rosicrucians. While no leading Romantic thinker joined an actual Rosicrucian lodge, their ideas and agendas were often strikingly similar. For some reason, Gottfried never investigates the relationship between Rosicrucians and Freemasons. Unless I'm mistaken, some Romantics were Masons.

The author asks some hard questions about how "conservative" all these people really were. In many ways, the Counter-Enlightenment seems to have been a parallel development to the Enlightenment, not just a counter-reaction to it. The Rosicrucians originally recruited both opponents and proponents of the Enlightenment, before hardening to a conservative sect. The anti-Enlightenment mystic Karl von Eckhartshausen was heavily indebted to Kant, whom he admired quite openly. The Awakening in Bavaria was to some extent plebeian, and its leaders got in trouble with the Catholic hierarchy. The author also points out that to many intellectual seekers (including the Bavarian king Ludwig I), Catholicism and Romanticism was pretty much the same thing. A final chapter is devoted to Franz von Baader, who attempted to create a conservative-worker alliance and called for Christian labour unions!

When the Enlightenment challenged Christian confessionalism, it simultaneously unleashed the Hermetic-occultist stream. With Church interference gone, the stage was set for Pietistic revivals, as well. (Of course, similar processes had been at work already during the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation.) Both Romantics and Pietists were opposed to Enlightenment rationalism, but in their own way, they were the unnatural children of the Enlightenment itself. Even their millenarianism was probably a mimic of Enlightenment belief in progress. Hence the strange phenomenon of "conservative millenarians".

To sum up, "Conservative millenarians" is an excellent overview both of Romanticism in general, and of its Bavarian experience.

Dreams of a spirit-seer

"Schelling and Swedenborg" is a scholarly monograph on the influence of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg on the German philosopher Schelling.

Before reading this work, I assumed that Schelling was a boring, bland pantheist with a Romantic crush on "nature" (read meadows, hills or something to that effect). In reality, of course, Schelling was a sophisticated thinker who constantly straddled the border between philosophy proper and theology. Eventually, he came to accept the existence of a spirit-world and even a kind of personal God whose highest revelation was "Johannine" Christinianity. For good or for worse, Schelling was strongly inspired by the Gnostic speculations of Jacob Böhme, something he shared with other Romantic thinkers as well. And then, he studied Swedenborg.

The author, Friedemann Horn, seems to be either a Swedenborgian himself, or some kind of sympathetic fellow traveller. He mentions both similarities and differences between Schelling and the "seer of the North". Schelling accepted Swedenborg's idea of spiritual corporeality. I admit that I don't quite understand this notion, but Schelling's point seems to be that spirits aren't a kind of abstract "ideas" or disembodied entities implying complete dualism between spirit and matter. Rather, spirits are in some sense "material" and hence very real, keeping their earthly personalities intact. At death, humans only shed the grossest, physical part of the body - a spiritualized body survives as a vehicle for the immortal soul. (Perhaps he had in mind what others would later call "the astral body"?)

Schelling was also interested in Swedenborg's ideas about heavenly marriage. Swedenborg apparently believed that spouses would be re-united in the spirit-world and continue to live there as husband and wife. Schelling had personal, psychological reasons for embracing both a very concrete personal immortality and heavenly marriage after the death of his beloved wife Caroline.

Other Swedenborgian notions discussed by Schelling include the theory of correspondences, Christology and eschatology. Interestingly, however, Schelling rejected Swedenborg's allegorical view of the apocalypse and resurrection in favour of a more "orthodox" position.

The book also contain more disturbing information, but not about Schelling. Apparently, both Schelling and Franz von Baader believed in a quite literal spirit-world, but Baader took the thing a bit too far, even carrying out bizarre experiments on his own daughter, whom he regarded as demon-possesed! Schelling started to avoid the Baader household after this. (Note that Baader was a well known and important intellectual and political figure in his native Bavaria!)

Obviously, I did some further reading on Schelling after digesting this book! What struck me is that Schelling accepted ideas that were decidedly non-philosophical. How do you philosophically "deduce" the spiritual corporeality of dead people? There seems to have been a tension in Schelling between a genuine religious longing, and demands of a strict philosophical Systeme. His rival Hegel strikes me as a very different kind of person!

"Schelling and Swedenborg" is a very specialized, in-house kind of book. Frankly, it *is* somewhat boring. Nor does it contain any sensational revelations, at least not if Schelling's intellectual evolution is taken into account. I mean, why shouldn't Schelling have read Swedenborg? Still, Horn's book could be of some interest to students of philosophy, theology and theosophy.

Perhaps F.W.J. Schelling at bottom wanted to be...a spirit-seer.