Von Wilhelm Fresenius, Lic. theol. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. 1912.1
Licentiate Fresenius is an admiring pupil of W. Herrmann, and has written this little book apparently for the purpose of defending the so-called “historical” conception of religion, held by Herrmann in common with his fellow Ritschlians, against the “mystical” conception of religion which is now again becoming very widespread. According to the so-called “historical” conception of it, religion is not a native possession of the human soul; it is something which meets man in the course of the process of living. It is an experience—an Erlebnis, something that occurs to him—which some day befalls him—begegnet, encounters him—when he finds himself face to face with goodness manifested in a personal life with such power that he cannot choose but utterly surrender himself to it. Religion is thus a fact which occurs in a human life, a transaction, a transaction of the man’s own; yet it is rather produced in him than by him—through the might of the goodness revealed to his observation. “A man cannot make religion for himself; nor can he acquire it by labors or performances of any kind whatsoever—he can neither earn it by works nor excogitate it by brooding. It has always itself laid claim to be a gift of God to man. Therefore, the only path to religion lies in observing and marking the experiences of our own life, if perchance there may speak to us in them a power of love and goodness which we cannot withstand. Experiences arise in our own life, however, only in our commerce with other men, with personalities in whom we are able to put trust, that is, from whom we receive the impression that they have risen above purely instinctive life to personal being. By their means we are turned to that which raised them out of their nothingness. We Christians accordingly speak of the Christian community as that with the existence, vitality and historical power of which the possibility of religious life is for us indissolubly bound up. And it is therefore that we designate religion, because it is attached to human intercourse and its historical, personal root, as historical religion” (p. 64). Religion, in this view, therefore arises in the soul of man in particular conditions of time and space, under influences brought to bear upon him from without—under the influences, to be more specific, of other personalities which impress him as good. In the formal definitions which Fresenius frames (p. 63), “religion is the experience which the morally thinking man makes, when the power of the good so encounters him that he must surrender himself to it utterly”; and (p. 65) “the Christian religion is the experience which the morally thinking man makes of the Person of Jesus, when the power of the good so encounters him in it, that he must surrender himself to it utterly.”
With this conception of religion as evoked in man by a quite specific experience, which comes to him from without, the Mystical contention that we must look within ourselves to find God stands obviously in direct contradiction. “It is the characteristic of all Mysticism,” Fresenius remarks in bringing this contradiction to view, “that it maintains the immediate presence of divine life in man, which needs only to be recognized and felt,—and it is therefore that in all mysticism it is contemplation which self-evidently forms the best way to God—while historical religion has always presented itself as the new life, which comes into being by the action of person on person and is not already (even though hiddenly) present in man” (pp. 50–51). It is not strange therefore that Fresenius looks with alarm upon the irruption of Mystical ideas which seems at present in progress and posits the problem which is raised by this irruption in such phrases as these—“whether we are to be saved from the religious exigencies of our day by giving our attention to historical religion, to the gospel of Jesus as the Reformers understood it, or by sinking ourselves into the feeling of infinity and by speculatively contemplating that which lives in our souls by nature” (pp. 54–55). For Fresenius emphasizes that what the Mystic finds in the soul is merely its natural endowment. “We have heard religion—or rather its Mystical form—,” he says, “compared with the contemplation of nature and art; what we experience and feel in the enjoyment of nature, in gazing on a beautiful painting, in listening to a symphony by a master, that—so we have been told—is essentially related to religion, or rather is religion’s self, because it is the apprehension and feeling of the eternal and imperishable. But just as surely as the enjoyment of nature and art can evoke mysticism, just so surely is the infinite which is felt in it not the God of religion. For Christian piety at least, God is not the Eternal, Imperishable which we feel, but the Power for Good which comes into contact with us, above time and eternity, in the personalities who evoke confidence (Zutrauen) in us,—which Power is not maintained by us to be God, but manifests itself to us as God. Where, however, God is sought and found in indefinite feelings, in experiences of the infinite, there He is nothing but a name for the unknown and incomprehensible which arouses that feeling. Man then humbles himself before a power which he does not know, but which, if he will not give himself the lie, he postulates, and from which he then, since he cannot get along without them, arbitrarily forms conceptions—which perhaps, however, are actually derived from historical religion” (p. 82).