Arthur Drews
Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews was a German writer, historian, philosopher, and important representative of German monist thought. He was born in Uetersen, Holstein, in present-day Germany.
Biography
Drews became a professor of philosophy and German language at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe. During his career he wrote widely on the histories of philosophy, religions and mythology. He was a disciple of Eduard von Hartmann who claimed that reality is the "unconscious World Spirit", also expressed in history through religions and the formation of consciousness in the minds of philosophers. Drews often provoked controversy, in part because of his unorthodox ideas on religion and in part because of his attacks on Nietzsche and passionate support of Wagner. He rose to international prominence with his book The Christ Myth, by amplifying and publicizing the thesis initially advanced by Bruno Bauer, which denies the historicity of Jesus.The international controversy provoked by the "Christ Myth" was an early part of Drews's lifelong advocacy of the abandonment of Judaism and Christianity, both of which he regarded as based on ancient beliefs from antiquity, and shaped by religious dualism. He urged a renewal of faith based on Monism and German idealism. He asserted that true religion could not be reduced to a cult of personality, even if based on the worship of the "unique and great personality" of a historical Jesus, as claimed by Protestant liberal theologians, which he argued was nothing more than the adaptation of the Great Man Theory of history promoted by Romanticism of the 19th century.
Drews was considered a dissenter. Many German academics didn't accept his "dilettantism". Drews was a reformer, and stayed involved in religious activism all his life. He was, in his last few years, to witness and participate in an attempt by the Free Religion Movement to inspire a more liberal form of worship. This was his reason for parting with the German Faith Movement, a venture trying to promote an awakening of a German Faith, an unusual form of nationalistic and racist faith with Hindu overtones — far removed from the elitist German idealism Drews expounded in his last book, The German Religion which he had hoped to see replace Christianity and what he considered its primitive superstitions. Later, Drews came back to the same subject in The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present, which is a historical review of some 35 major deniers of Jesus historicity, covering the period 1780–1926.
Influences
During Drews's life, Germany was going through turbulent times, both politically and culturally. Friedrich Nietzsche had become a prominent cultural icon while Richard Wagner was a highly controversial personality. Nietzsche was a strong critic of Christianity and its morality, which he perceived as glorifying weakness and death. At first he was a friend and admirer of Wagner, but soon became a disgruntled critic, turning against his previous friend. He reproached Wagner for his conversion to anti-semitic Christianity and his glorification of medieval sagas and spiritual chastity as the sign of a decadent, dying culture. He posited that Wagner's "unending melody" only dramatizes theatrical posing and is hostile to the affirmation of vital Dionysian life forces. Nietzsche claimed that Wagner's art was not Germanic, but closer to Italy's Roman Catholicism. Nietzsche passionately critiqued Wagner's ideas, detailed in Nietzsche contra Wagner.Drews was a staunch supporter of Wagner and wrote many books and articles on Wagner's religious and nationalistic ideas, which are still considered by some scholars to be important works on the subject. He also embarked on a critique of Nietzsche, who was a lifelong critic of Christianity and Christian morality. Drews reproached Nietzsche for being an apostle of unbridled individualism — a stance which put Drews in an awkward position in the German establishment. His criticisms were never well received by academics nor by German society as a whole, since Nietzsche had become a national figure.
In 1904, Drews gave a critical lecture in Münich on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Nietzsches Philosophie. " is not aiming at bypassing morality as such, only the external morality which imposes its commandments to the individual, and results in the decay and submission of the Self. He would like to counter this old morality enemy of the Self with a new morality springing from the individual will and in conformity with his nature." Drews continued with his philosophical critique of Nietzsche in Nietzsche als Antipode Wagners, 1919 . His 1931 book on Wagner came out with a supplement on Nietzsche and Wagner, for which Bernhard Hoffers asserted that many of Drews' views later borrowed by the standard scholarship on Wagner without giving him credit.
Drews delivered his last public critique of Nietzsche in his article Nietzsche als Philosoph des Nationalsozialismus? in the journal Nordische Stimmen No. 4. There Drews again attacked Nietzsche on philosophical grounds, in direct opposition to the Nazi effort to enlist Nietzsche in its propaganda, and unconcerned about potential consequences. Wolfang Müller-Lauter, in Experiences with Nietzsche, quotes Drews:
One finds in Nietzsche neither national sympathy nor social awareness, . Nietzsche is, on the contrary, and particularly after his break with Richard Wagner, an enemy of everything German; he supports the creation of a "good European," and goes so far as to accord the Jews a leading role in the dissolution of all nations. Finally, he is an individualist, with no notion of "the National Socialist credo: 'collective over individual utility'...After all this, it must seem unbelievable that Nietzsche has been honored as the Philosopher of National Socialism, … for he preaches in all things the opposite of National Socialism", setting aside a few scattered utterances. The fact that such honors have repeatedly been bestowed on him has as its main reason, that most people who talk about Nietzsche tend only to pick the 'raisins' from the cake of his philosophy and, because of his aphoristic style, lack any clear understanding of the way his entire thought coheres.
Drews's views on religion
Eduard von Hartmann
Drews, unsatisfied by the abstract rationality of Kantian philosophy, was attracted to religion, but was put off by what he regarded as the spiritual dryness of Christianity. Drews found his anchor in the monism of Eduard von Hartmann, professor of philosophy in Berlin. Hartmann had been strongly influenced by Schopenhauer and his pessimism and had embraced Darwinism and history. Hartmann published his work Philosophy of the Unconscious, in 1869. The concept of the unconscious mind became the new form of the ultimate reality, the Absolute, or the Geist, or World Spirit of Hegel, combining pantheism with rational idealism. In his view the human mind is not separate from this unconscious reality, but exists as it approaches self-consciousness, especially in the opinion of the philosophical community.Drews expanded his views in Die Religion als Selbst-bewusstsein Gottes: eine philosophische Untersuchung über das Wesen der Religion,. The text expressed that religions are conscious expressions of the unconscious, and philosophy and religion can finally be united. The absolute Spirit was not another separate entity, and Hartmann and Drews rejected the idea of any personal God and mind-matter dualism.
In Christ Myth II, Drews specified his motivation: "The chief danger that has come to our time, especially to religion, under the influence of science is the denial of objective purpose in the universe. Let men be taught to believe again in ideas, and then monism, in its idealistic form, will become the first principle of all deep religious life." Drews goes on to proclaim a need for the "religion of the future" to be a "concrete" monism. The advocacy of this system of monism became Drews's life program and the subject of his philosophical and religious writings. It was also the motivation for his social activism in the Free Religion Movement, which had been sprouting cultural associations in Germany, especially in the search for a new religion anchored in European and, more specifically, German culture. Both Hartmann and Drews shared an infatuation with history, and the belief in the direction of history, transmuted into a philosophical axiom by Hegel, was applied to the history of religion and mythology.
Influence of Albert Kalthoff and Bauer
Drews derived additional key ideas from Albert Kalthoff. Kalthoff was an active minister who managed to marry three times in his short life, and revived Bruno Bauer's Christ Myth thesis in his Das Christus-Problem. Grundlinien zu einer Sozialtheologie and Die Entstehung des Christentums, Neue Beiträge zum Christusproblem. Kalthoff criticized what he regarded as the romanticist and sentimental image of Jesus as a "great personality" of history developed by German liberal theologians. In Kalthoff's views, it was the early church that created the New Testament, not the reverse; the early Jesus movement was socialist, expecting a social reform and a better world, which fused with the Jewish apocalyptic belief in a Messiah. Kalthoff saw Christianity as a social psychosis. Drews accepted Kalthoff's ideas, but insisted that the original Christian socialism was religious, not economic.Critique of liberal theology
Drews did become an acerbic critic of what he called the "faulty historical method" of academic liberal theologians. His primary critique of Judaism and Christianity was that they were ancient, archaic myths from antiquity that had become obsolete, and "their concepts foreign to our mindsets in the modern scientific age". He opposed the Romanticist cult of personality applied to Jesus in what he referred to as the Christ myth. He rejected the attempt of liberal theologians like Albert Schweitzer to idolize a historical Jesus as a unique personality, which he asserted was the result of The Great Man Theory subjected to modern manipulations by scholars of the Historical Theology school. This view had been already advanced by Schweitzer himself in his review of historical criticism in Germany with his book The Quest of the Historical Jesus.In Die Religion als Selbst-bewusstsein Gottes : eine philosophische Untersuchung über das Wesen der Religion, Drews saw the phenomenon of religion through his philosophical approach as the self-consciousness of God through the mind of mankind. "Godmen" were to be replaced by "God-mankind", an adaptation of Georg Friedrich Hegel's "World-Spirit".
In The Strong Personality, Ch. 12 of "The Witness of the Gospels", Part IV of Christ Myth II, Drews argues that the force of personality of ahuman Jesus cannot be at the source of Christendom's spread:
Each man fights for his own chimera, not for history...in matters of religion the belief of many generations proves nothing but their own credulity... A great error is propagated more easily than a great truth, because it is easier to believe than to reflect, and men prefer the wonders of romance to the plain facts of history... we might urge against Christians that the faith of any people in the miracles and oracles of its religion proved its truth; I doubt if they would admit the argument, and we will do the same with theirs. I know that they will say that they alone have the truth; but the other people say the same.
...the Persian Mithra was a very shadowy form beside Jesus, who came nearer to the heart, especially of women, invalids, and the weak, in his human features and on account of the touching description of his death. But that shows at the most that the more concrete idea has the better prospect of triumphing in a spiritual struggle than the more abstract; it proves nothing as regards the historical reality of the idea. Moreover, history teaches us that it was quite different causes—partly external and accidental causes of a political nature, such as the death in the Persian war of the Emperor Julian, one of the most zealous followers of Mithra—that gave Christianity the victory over Mithraism.
He had been outspoken in presenting his views on religion with extreme clarity in Idea and Personality: Settlement of the Religious Crisis, Ch. 14 of The Witness of the Gospels, and Part IV of Christ Myth II. Drews asserted that mankind cannot let the present be still shackled by what he called "past superstitions of ancient times". He outlined what he called the religion of the future, which he said must acknowledge the World-Spirit proclaimed by Hegel as God-mankind, which is God manifesting himself through history with human actors and oracles who are merely major agents. The cult of "great personalities" he dismissed as an illusion; individuals could no longer be seen as godmen, just as revealers and oracles of the divinity.
The purely historical conception of Jesus cannot satisfy the religious consciousness of our age. obsolete. has not merely broken with the geocentric and anthropocentric view of the origin of Christianity, but has seen through the superstitious nature of ecclesiastical Christology. Modern humanity has, therefore, the task of again universalising the idea of divine redemption, or enlarging the idea of a god-man...to the idea of a god-humanity...
returns in a certain sense to pre-Christian religion and its numerous "god-men,"... filled with the idea of the one reality and its spiritual nature, to which the various individuals are related only as modi, phenomena, or'revelations, confiding in the divine control of the world, and therefore in its rationality and goodness...Thus man secures a faith in himself, in the divine nature of his being, in the rationality of existence; thus he is placed in a position to save himself, without a mediator, simply on account of his own divine nature... The religion of the future will either be a belief in the divine nature of the self, or will be nothing... no Christ is needed for it, and there is no ground for concern that religion may perish with the denial of the historicity of Jesus...
is not only superfluous, but mischievous. It loads the religious consciousness with doubtful historical ballast; it grants the past an authority over the religious life of the present, and it prevents men from deducing the real consequences of their Monistic religious principles. Hence I insist that the belief in the historical reality of Jesus is the chief obstacle to religious progress...
to whom this high appreciation of the present above history may be traced, as well as this vindication of "personalities of world-history." The great personality has clearly a value even in our own view: in it the unity of God and man, the God-mankind, attains a clearer expression. It serves as proof to the religious consciousness that God raises up the right man at the right time. It reveals the living connection of the common individual life with the universal spiritual life. The divinity lives in history, and reveals itself therein. History is, in union with nature, the sole place of divine activity... one continuous stream of divine activity flows through time... To bind up religion with history, as modern theologians do, and to represent an historical religion as the need of modern man, is no proof of insight, but of a determination... to recognise the Christian religion alone.