Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (141 page)

In reflecting on such anguish lying behind the decorous facade of city life, Kierkegaard explored the inner consciousness of the individual, and he condemned Hegel's dialectic path to the Absolute as a betrayal of the individual. Sin was not an aspect of some impersonal Hegelian process; it was a dark half of human existence, a stark alternative to a road which led to the broken, powerless Christ. Faced with such a choice, there could be no middle ground - so Kierkegaard offensively expressed loathing and contempt for the most respected clergy of his Church, whom he saw as tainted by just such a compromise. The Church had ceased to be other. Amid obsessive diatribes against the criminal respectability of the unfortunate (and fortunately deceased) Bishop Mynster, he declared:

Original Christianity relates itself so militantly to this world that its view is: not to want to slip happily and comfortably through this world but to take care to collide in dead earnest with this world . . . Thus there is a world of difference, a heaven of difference between the Mynsterian life-view (which actually is Epicurean, one of the enjoyment of life, zest for life, belonging to this world) and the Christian view, which is one of suffering, of enthusiasm for death, belonging to another world.
⁴²

This torrent of words was a declaration of war on the notion of Christendom, but it was also a declaration of war on all intellectual systems, dogmatic or otherwise: 'no generation has learned from another how to love, no generation can begin other than at the beginning, the task of no later generation is shorter than its predecessor's'.
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Kierkegaard's vehemence was mixed with laughter, his destruction of contemporary religion and philosophy based on a mockery of complacency and a constant sly questioning which he had discovered in Socrates. Kierkegaard's contemporaries did not put him on trial or kill him for his Socratic fun, but they found him baffling, just as Athenians long ago had puzzled over Socrates. How could the bitterness he displayed towards contemporary Christianity emerge from such a playful eccentric? It is not surprising that Kierkegaard did not have a speedy impact in the nineteenth century - particularly since he was writing in one of Europe's more narrowly distributed languages. Amid the blows which the twentieth century has delivered to humanity's self-esteem, Kierkegaard's steady concentration on the sufferings and loneliness of a God-Man on the Cross addresses the perplexities of Western Christianity, while not necessarily providing any answers beyond serene resignation and an appreciation of the laughter which may emerge from pain.

Kierkegaard was only too correct that Christendom still dominated the vision of official northern European Protestantism. Both Schleiermacher and Hegel, deeply affected by the memory of French invasion and eventual German victory, enthusiastically identified themselves with the Prussian state's project of national renewal, and they looked beyond Prussia, not only to the creation of a true German unity but to something more. Hegel's view of progress encompassed the attainment of world peace, but it entailed the emergence of a superior state which would overcome all others in political organization and cultural dominance as part of its recognition of the God of history. That state might well be planned in the University of Berlin. Kant had also sketched out a vision of world peace, without that alarming corollary - but now after Napoleon's defeat, it was characteristic of liberal German Protestantism also to be nationalist; and then after the failure of parliamentary efforts at reunion in 1848-9, also largely monarchist. Hohenzollern Prussia triumphed between 1867 and 1870 over first the Austrian and then the French emperor. A Second Empire (
Reich
) was proclaimed in 1871, self-consciously an heir to the old Holy Roman Empire, and so a Protestant alternative to that still-existing Catholic empire of the Habsburgs. German academics, theologians included, gave it their allegiance with extraordinary fervour.

The great historian Leopold von Ranke, historiographer to the Prussian Court and giant among the professors of the University of Berlin for half a century, saw the new German Emperor as 'immediate to God' (
unmittelbar zu Gott
). This was a fusion of nationalism and divine right theory in which liberty and equality took a distinctly subordinate place to monarchy and a new imperial Court.
⁴⁴
An essential underpinning of this vision was a sense of the divine right of Protestantism. From early in his career, Ranke also included in his vision of the future a sense of the unity of the 'Teutonic' nations of northern Europe, in which one essential element was the Reformation. He was not alone in this. Protestant nations of northern Europe, several of them precociously industrialized, and mindful of the rapid imperial expansion of Britain and the United States in contrast to the fading of Spain and Portugal, could be forgiven for seeing their prosperity and growing power as God's will against a decaying world Catholicism. Towards the end of the century, one best-selling British Evangelical rant culminated in a typical paean of praise in that vein to God's chosen nations: 'When we contrast Popish countries with Protestant lands, can we doubt any longer which religion most promotes
National Prosperity
?'
⁴⁵
It was a vulgar expression of the mood which prompted Max Weber to create the thesis embodied in
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
.

All through the nineteenth century, Evangelicals kept up the transcontinental links sustained since the first days of Pietism, which were now encouraged by the continuing family ties of the British monarchy to German royal houses. The Prussian monarchy was central to this. King Friedrich Wilhelm III's rather shapeless religious energies led him to press, against much opposition, for a union of his Lutheran and Reformed Churches, complicated by his eccentric amateur interest in the High Church aspects of Anglicanism, which produced some bizarre liturgical experiments and even more ill-will.
⁴⁶
More problematic still was the project which Friedrich Wilhelm's son, successor and namesake sponsored in 1841 for a joint Anglo-Prussian bishopric in Jerusalem. There could have been no better symbol of the worldwide aspirations of northern European Protestants, but the Prussian enthusiasts had totally misunderstood the delicate political situation in the contemporary Church of England. Despite the fact that the plan provided for the bishop in Jerusalem always to be in Anglican orders, English High Churchmen were outraged (see pp. 841-2). The joint venture eventually lapsed; a conventionally conceived Anglican bishopric remains in Jerusalem, today making its own sterling contribution to ecumenical and inter-faith endeavours in that troubled region.
⁴⁷

More long-lasting, and of genuinely worldwide significance, was another segment of the same enterprise which shared its focus on Palestine: an Evangelical Alliance linking British and German Evangelical Protestants, founded in 1846. One of the Alliance's concerns was to return Jews to Palestine and convert them there. This was an unprecedentedly practical attempt to hasten on the Last Days, that recurrent Protestant preoccupation. Most supporters of the Jerusalem bishopric project had viewed that enterprise in the same light, much excited by the fact that the first man chosen as bishop, Michael Solomon Alexander, was an English convert from Judaism and former rabbi. Alexander had demonstrated in his own person that the conversion of the Jewish people was imminent - an essential preparation for the End Times. The Evangelical Alliance found many other battles to fight as new threats to the Evangelical world view repeatedly emerged, but its first close association with Jerusalem projects was a precocious sign that international Evangelical Protestantism was going to link itself to the fate of the land of Palestine, even before many Jews began to share that concern (see pp. 992-3).
⁴⁸

It was with this triumphalist Protestant ideology in the background that the architect of the Second Reich, the Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, launched in 1871 what one of his severest Protestant critics, Rudolf Virchow, Berlin's independent-minded Professor of Pathology, usefully christened the
Kulturkampf
- the clash of cultures. What cultures were these? Liberalism and Protestant Germany in alliance against international and conservative Roman Catholicism. Bismarck was hoping to yoke the new power of the Protestant imperial state to the horror of liberals at Pope Pius IX's various dogmatic statements leading up to the declaration of infallibility - he could also draw on German nationalist contempt for and fear of Polish Catholics, whose dismembered nation lay partly within the Reich. The Chancellor was attempting nothing less than a permanent shift in the balance of power within the new empire, to eliminate Catholicism as a significant political force in northern Europe. He did not succeed: by 1887 he was forced to abandon the policy, having achieved little permanent beyond some enhanced government interference in Catholic education and clergy appointments. Partly Bismarck was defeated by the past: the religious geography which the Peace of Westphalia bequeathed Germany in 1648 (see pp. 647-8) was more powerful than the pattern of governments established after the end of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and popular Catholic support for suffering clergy was too strong for a state whose liberal instincts forbade the extreme violence which would have been necessary to make a success of its authoritarian policies. Moreover, the tangle of jurisdictions on which the new German Empire was constructed made it impossible to achieve even limited consistency in containing Catholic resistance.
⁴⁹

There was a new and more profound reason for the imperial government's half-hearted repression. A large proportion of the non-Catholic population of the empire had no real connection with Christian practice and Christian obsessions, and was itself hostile to the Bismarckian Reich. Already in eighteenth-century German cities, a significant number of people had ceased to go to church. Later patterns were complex, and it was not merely in urban areas that religious observance had ebbed, as statistics of those making their communion at Eucharists in State Churches demonstrated. In 1910, a classically high level of 140 yearly communions per hundred Church members was recorded in the countryside of Hesse-Kassel, but at the other extreme the equally rural district of Jever in north-west Germany registered seven communions per hundred members, which was much the same as the most extreme example of urban abstention, six per hundred, in the north German port of Kiel. By then one factor had become clear: a great many working-class people turned away from Protestant churches which had identified themselves with the conservative imperial system, and instead embraced a socialism which had begun providing them with a whole alternative subculture for leisure activities and welfare, paralleling what the Church could provide. The German Social Democratic Party was Europe's first mass socialist party, and it was as much the subject of government repression as the Catholic Church. German Protestantism was thus caught between Catholics and socialists. In 1869 around 1 per cent of the working class had attended church in Berlin's Protestant parishes, and that figure had halved by the outbreak of war in 1914.
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BRITISH PROTESTANTISM AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

Patterns were different in northern Europe's other major Protestant monarchy, Great Britain. Here, ecclesiastical complexity dated back to the seventeenth-century disruptions of British Protestantism (see pp. 647-54). While after 1801 the two established Protestant Churches of Scotland and of England/Ireland still suffered mutual tensions through their differing confessional commitments and ecclesiastical systems, the separated non-established Protestant denominations - Dissenters and Methodists - were increasingly powerful and vocal in England and Wales. They formed a distinct Protestant mode of life, 'Chapel' as opposed to 'Church'. In Ireland, a Roman Catholic majority chafed for lack of a voice in state affairs alongside the minority Protestant Irish establishment. Anglican clergy, not much interested in the existence of the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland, tended to regard their Church as synonymous with national identity, although Anglican Evangelicals tended to be less dismissive of their fellow Protestants than were Tory High Church Anglicans.
⁵¹
The national Anglican fiction beloved of Tories was in fact proving increasingly difficult to sustain: English Protestantism was much more riven than Protestantism in any other part of Europe, apart from the kingdom of the Netherlands. Paradoxically, in the long term this meant that levels of churchgoing remained higher in Britain's cities than in Germany; England's tradition of vigorous dissent meant that hostility to the established Church did not turn into general anticlericalism or hostility to Christianity, but was channelled into alternative Christian practice. British socialism notoriously owes more to Methodism than to Marx - indeed, in the twentieth century it came to owe more to the Mass than to Marx, as newly enfranchised working-class Catholics turned their votes to the Labour Party.
⁵²

British governments actually increased their support for the Church of England in the aftermath of the American Revolution and in nervous reaction to the French Revolution. In 1818 Parliament voted funds for a large number of new (and remarkably joyless) urban churches, and for around forty years from the late 1780s it was also official policy to finance Anglican establishments in British colonial possessions. Quite abruptly that changed.
⁵³
In 1828 the Tory government abolished restrictions on Protestant Dissenters holding public office in England and Wales, but worse was to come for conservative Anglicans. Protestant traditionalists of all complexions were outraged by Parliament's passage of Catholic Emancipation the following year; now, among other reliefs of their legal disabilities, Catholics could be elected as members of the British Parliament, and so the monopoly of members of the Established Churches on government was broken. Renegade Tory sponsors of emancipation, led by the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington (veteran of far trickier campaigns in the Napoleonic Wars), performed this volte-face against their natural instincts because they were desperate to solve problems posed by Catholic discontent in Ireland. Their Whig successors in government, not inhibited like the Tories by much nostalgia for Anglican monopoly, went further. In 1833 they proposed remedies for some of the greater absurdities in the government of the Protestant Church of Ireland, which perpetuated a ghostly institutional structure inherited from the pre-Reformation Irish Church while serving only a fraction of the modern population.