Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (140 page)

Likewise, Christian feminism became as vital a feature of Protestantism worldwide as in Catholicism. Little of it was expressed in terms of vocations to the religious life. That was a difficult concept for Protestants after the Reformation's monastic dissolutions, although from 1845 onwards a significant number of strong-minded women intimidated or nonplussed male leaders in the Anglican Communion by founding nunneries which exalted episcopal authority while defying actual bishops, persisting with charitable work or the contemplative life in the face of all discouragement.
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Otherwise, visionary Protestant women lacked the opportunities which Marian devotion offered their Catholic counterparts to find a place within existing Church structures. Since Mary was not available to them as a mediator for their messages, they tended to don the mantle of Old Testament prophets, and some of them found themselves excluded from existing Churches as a result.

The earliest and most famous of these prophetesses was Joanna Southcott, a gentlewoman from Devon, who passed through Methodist enthusiasm to something more individual. Her first vision in middle age in 1792 led to a large-scale apocalyptic movement which remained resolutely female in its leadership during her lifetime, despite frequently manipulative interventions from maverick men. It challenged the male Church establishment by treasuring a box of Joanna's prophecies which could only be opened in the presence of twenty-four Anglican bishops; this cousin of the hidden last prophecy of Our Lady of Fatima may still be waiting in Bedford, England.
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Of greater long-term significance were the experiences of two charismatic Scottish sisters from Clydeside, Isabella and Mary Campbell. Isabella built up a reputation as a person of exceptional holiness, and after her early death, crowds were drawn to her home by an enthusiastic memoir of her published by her parish minister. Amid this excitement, Mary began making pronouncements in an unknown language, inspiring others in her neighbourhood to do likewise, and also undergoing a miraculous cure from apparently terminal ill health. Reports of these Scottish displays of 'gifts of the Spirit' deeply interested an influential group of Evangelical friends in their regular meetings in the elegant rural seclusion of Albury in Surrey. One of the Albury regulars, Edward Irving, a well-known and extrovert minister of the Church of Scotland, was inspired to begin a spiritual journey into prophecy which had consequences for the Christian Church worldwide. The Campbells and their impact on Irving had unknowingly provided the first glimmers of the modern Pentecostal movement (see pp. 910-14).
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More commonly women's activity followed the logic of the earlier English Protestant feminists like Mary Astell (see pp. 793-4). That was easier in those Churches not burdened with established status and with a strong ethos of congregational decision-making. In one case which attracted a great deal of interest, a congregation of Seventh Day Baptists in London was reduced by death and its choosiness about membership to seven women without a minister. After much conflict with the congregation's male trustees and repeated assertions that leadership functions were reserved by divine resolution to men, male Baptist ministers reviewed the dispute in 1831. They looked at the congregational logic of Baptist theology on the nature of the Church, and decided nineteen to eleven (in the face of warnings that they would be laughed at) that women were perfectly capable of forming a Church and calling a (male) minister.
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In 1853 a Congregational Church in South Butler, New York, extended the same logic in ordaining Antoinette Brown as minister, the first woman outside the countercultural Quakers to hold such an office in modern Christianity.

Evangelical Protestantism, influenced by the optimistic social activism of post-millennialism (see p. 759), was particularly hospitable to this 'first-wave' feminism. Women offered themselves for missionary work overseas, a huge asset in cultures where men could not communicate face to face with the opposite sex. At home women involved themselves in a great range of causes envisaging radical change in social behaviour, especially the abolition of slavery, and a war on that male-dominated subversion of quiet family evenings and secure finance, indulgence in alcohol. They were active in matters where men might easily be compromised if they showed excessive interest, most obviously the welfare of millions of poverty-stricken young women forced into prostitution. The English Evangelical Josephine Butler, daughter of a liberal-minded Whig MP, took his hatred of slavery to the streets of Britain. She told the story of hearing a woman's cry from the window of her comfortable Oxford home: 'a woman aspiring to heaven and dragged back to hell - and my heart was pierced with pain. I longed to leap from the window, and flee with her to some place of refuge.' Instead she concentrated on rather more systematic and effective campaigns against male indifference to the humiliation of women who ended up selling their bodies. She aroused horror that such a well-brought-up married lady could talk on public platforms about venereal disease. 'That dreadful woman, Mrs Butler' was the comment of one leading Oxford High Churchman, Canon Henry Liddon.
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A PROTESTANT ENLIGHTENMENT: SCHLEIERMACHER, HEGEL AND THEIR HEIRS

Despite their often curiously overlapping trajectories, the two halves of Western Christianity diverged significantly in at least one respect. The relationship of Protestantism to the Enlightenment was much more ambiguous and less confrontational than that of Rome: it embraced a theological and scholarly project to make sense of the new intellectual landscape rather than condemn it. At the heart of northern Europe was Berlin, capital of a Prussian Hohenzollern monarchy which had led Germany's successful resistance to Napoleon. One important element in the national renewal which the Hohenzollern took as their sacred duty was the creation in 1810 of a new university, a project conceived at the lowest point in their campaigns against the Emperor of the French. Steeped in the Pietist tradition, King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia was aware not only of the grievous damage done to European education by the dispersal of the Jesuits and the Revolutionaries' closure of a clutch of great Catholic universities, but also of the general decay in the Protestant university system. There were certainly doubts as to whether such a medieval and pre-Enlightenment word as 'university' should be used for the sort of institution the King envisaged, but Wilhelm von Humboldt, his chosen head of a new department significantly yoking 'Ecclesiastical Affairs and Public Education', persuaded the King that it would be appropriate for an institution designed to perpetuate Protestant culture, of which the King's great-uncle Friedrich the Great had been such a distinguished patron.
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Berlin's university was intended to set new standards for both teaching and research, and from its foundation it triumphantly succeeded, proving the model for similar institutions throughout the world - even as far afield as that creatively selective borrower of Protestant values, post-1868 Japan. The Berlin model committed Prussian Protestantism and all those who admired it to a conscientious exploration of how Christianity might make the methods of the Enlightenment its own. The Hohenzollern, Reformed Protestant rulers presiding over a Lutheran kingdom, were not inclined to make specifically confessional instruction a priority. They had some initial hesitation in including theology in the new institution's brief at all, but doubts were overcome by the advocacy of a brilliant migrant from the University of Halle, Friedrich Schleiermacher. He recognized that theology could no longer claim its place as the senior discipline in a university, but he vigorously defended a dual role for it: as a practical discipline for improving general pastoral care in a Christian society, and equally as a general branch of scholarship, with as much potential as any hard science for research and analysis. This became the basis for a liberal Protestant discipline of theology, increasingly eschewing particular confessional allegiance. It is an ideal which (for all its problems) has survived in the Western world, increasingly including the Catholic university world, until the present day.
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Such a theological project, explicitly embracing the Enlightenment, looked back to Immanuel Kant and sought to enrol him in the project of Protestant renewal. For Schleiermacher, Kant's notion of individual conscience shaped not just knowledge of the paths of morality which humans must follow in order to be true to themselves, but more specifically religious consciousness. Schleiermacher was seized by the Romanticism of early nineteenth-century Europe, and melded it with the religion of the heart so instilled in him from his experience of Moravians in childhood and student days. For a while in his youth, he had lost that faith altogether; he cultivated his doubts in his philosophy studies in Halle, which in his time had turned far from the university's original Pietism towards an austere Enlightenment rationalism. When faith returned, he rebelled against rationalism, and saw feeling and emotion as the senior partners of reason. Travelling in the same direction towards the divine, they could leap beyond reason to perceive the infinite.

On Schleiermacher's deathbed, his wife heard him say, 'I must think the deepest speculative thoughts, and they are to me completely at one with the most intimate religious sensations.'
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So humans should not merely perceive what must be done in some abstract form, but should make a conscious effort of will to seek the source of all that was holy and dependable: a loving God. Schleiermacher summed up the conviction which had emerged out of Western Christianity since the seventeenth century, that other great world faiths might also perceive this God; such consciousness of God lay at the foundation of all religions, and was the fruit of revelation. The unique gift of Christianity was the person of Jesus, who revealed his own divinity by representing the most perfect consciousness of God that there could be. The questions which scholarship increasingly posed about the biblical text were unimportant beside Schleiermacher's conviction that 'to ascribe to Christ an absolutely powerful consciousness of God and to attribute to him an existence of God in him are entirely one and the same thing'.
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Schleiermacher's colleague in the University of Berlin, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, was never his soulmate, and followed a very different path away from Kant. Hegel was not seized by the personal emotion which made Schleiermacher return to his Pietist inheritance, and sought instead to build a system of knowledge and of being which would dwarf the achievements of Aristotle and go beyond the scepticism of Kant. Like Kant, Hegel took human consciousness as his starting point, but he denied that anything was beyond the mind's capacity to know, and he constantly emphasized the role of human history, properly understood (and therefore of course properly researched by scholars), as the stage for the drama of reflection. All things are in a state of progress, or becoming, within history: a process achieved by the dialectic principle. A
thesis
is followed or met by an
antithesis
, and the encounter in turn produces a
synthesis
which reaches a higher level than either. Such syntheses at their higher resolutions can only be understood by a philosophical elite, so all religions are a mediation of higher truths to those less able to perceive them. That follows from the relationship of God to creation, the one bound to the other without separation: 'Without the world God is not God.'
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Human consciousness is a progress towards absolute knowledge of the Absolute, the Spirit which alone is reality.

For Hegel, there was no problem in identifying this Spirit with the transcendent God whom Luther and the magisterial Reformers had described, yet his God as essence or reality seems as far from the wholly other God of Platonism as it is from the passionate and personal God of Judaism. Not all his disciples, amid his varied and profound influences on European thought, would be able to find any God at all. Among them was Ludwig Feuerbach, whose reading of Hegel led him along with a number of self-styled 'Young Hegelians' to the conclusion that Christianity must be superseded because it represented a form of 'false consciousness'. Humanity's sense of its intimacy with God arose from the fact that humanity itself had created God in its own image: 'the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively. Such are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God.'
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That which was called divine revelation only revealed humanity to itself. It was this proposition which lay behind the radical rejection of the Christian Church by Marx and his admirers, though not all Marxists have found it impossible to hold together Marxism and Christianity.

The strangest reaction to the progress of Protestant philosophy from Kant to Hegel, yet perhaps one of the most significant in the long term for Western Christianity, came from a Danish Lutheran, Soren Kierkegaard. He was never short of money thanks to his father's prosperity in business and his own earnings from writing (matched by his ability to spend them on himself), so he hardly bothered having a life, outside his publication of thirty books and a heap of writings still in manuscript at his death. Famously he broke off his one engagement, and much (probably too much) has been made of that in interpreting the discussion of tragedy and meaninglessness which runs through his works. Retreating from much practical engagement with the world - though he would regularly and cheerfully venture from his desk for a 'people bath' in the streets or the theatre - he plunged himself in his solitariness into an engagement with human experience in turns savage and apparently frivolous, shape-shifting in his writings under a variety of pseudonyms, and mocking the good-mannered Christianity which Lutheranism in Copenhagen had constructed out of good education, everyday virtue and measured interpretation of Hegel. He looked behind his father's respectability to see the poverty-stricken boy who had cursed God, married his house-keeper (Soren's mother) because of her pregnancy, and had never lost his sense of horror and despair at his own sins.
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