Protestantism and Progress

A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World

Ernst Troeltsch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351496117
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Denominaciones cristianas

Ernst Troeltsch focuses his Protestantism and Progress on two main areas. First, he centers on the intellectual and religious situation, from which the significance and the possibilities of development possessed by Christianity might be deduced. This leads to an engaging historical investigation regarding the spirit of the modern world. Troeltsch argues that the modern world can only be understood in the light of its relation to earlier epochs of Christian civilization in Europe. He notes that for anyone who holds the opinion that in spite of all the significance that Catholicism retains, the living possibilities of development and progress are to be found on Protestant soil, the question regarding the relation of Protestantism to modern civilization becomes of central importance.Troeltsch also distinguishes elements in modern civilization that have proven their value from those which are merely temporary and lead nowhere. He gives the religious ideas of Christianity a shape and form capable of doing justice to the absoluteness of religious conviction, and at the same time considering them in harmony with what has actually been accomplished towards solution of the practical problems of the Christian life.A new introduction by Howard Schneiderman brings this monumental work into the twenty-first century, and explains why its ideas are more important than ever, one hundred years after its original publication.

1
The Meaning of “The Modern World”

Of the historical conceptions with which our inquiry has to deal, one which is apparently among the simplest, but in reality is often rather loosely used, is that of the “modern world”—or, if we wish to avoid the pretentious term “world,” which extends rather unduly the sphere of our own existence, the conception of modern civilization as developed in Europe and America. It will be advisable at the outset to seek a more exact definition of this term, for when this is found it will suggest to us the questions which we shall have to put to Protestantism as one of the ancestors of modern civilization. This civilization, of course, includes within itself the most various tendencies, but it bears nevertheless a certain general stamp, of which we are instinctively conscious. The designation “modern” is in this connection to be understood only a potiori, since it continues to include a large proportion of the older factors; but it is precisely in the struggle with these older factors that it becomes conscious of its individuality. This individuality, however, is very difficult to define, partly because of the manifoldness and heterogeneity of the factors and conditions which characterize it, partly because of the want of a strict differentia, such as might be afforded when the contrast with a different subsequent civilization had made it possible to recognize the forces which, at the close quarters of present experience, cannot all be brought into the field of vision, or, at any rate, do not fall into proper perspective. We are therefore, for the most part, reduced to defining it by contrast with preceding periods, especially with the immediately preceding period, of civilization. Thus the characteristics by which we have to define it are essentially negative. Modern civilization, indeed, first became conscious of its newness by its antithetic relation to that which preceded it; while its attempts to produce something new took the most varied forms. And even at the present day a general characterization of it can only be given by negative determinations of this kind.

Modern civilization, if we look to its immediate context, took its rise from the great period of Church-civilization, based on the belief in an absolute and immediate Divine revelation and the embodiment of this revelation in the Church as the organ of redemption and moral discipline. There is nothing which can be compared with the power of such a faith when it is really a natural growth, and stands unquestioned. For when this is the case, God, the Divine will, is everywhere, immediately present, exactly recognizable, having as its organ an infallible institution. In these conditions all strength for great achievements and all assurance regarding the ultimate goal of life are drawn from this revelation and its organized expression in the Church. The creation of this mighty edifice was the last effort of antiquity, under the decisive influence of Christianity; and this edifice forms the centre of what is known as medieval civilization. The immediate intrusion into the world of the Divine, with its laws, forces, and ends, exactly definable against the background of purely natural capacity, determines everything, and produces an ideal of civilization which, in theory at least, signifies a direction of mankind as a whole by the Church and its authority—an ideal which everywhere authoritatively determines the mode of combination of supernatural. Divine, with natural, earthly, human ends. Supreme over all is the Lex Dei, which is composed of the Lex Mosis or the Decalogue in combination with the Lex Christi and the Lex Ecclesiæ but also as Lex Naturæ includes within itself the juridico-ethical and the scientific heritage of antiquity, and the natural claims of life.

The great theory which regulates everything is this. At bottom both laws, the biblico-ecclesiastical, and the Stoic, natural, law, are one, since in their original form they coincided. It is only now, in sinful humanity, that they diverge; and under the direction of the Church their proper equivalence is again to be restored, though now, indeed, conditioned by the continuance of original sin.

It is, therefore, above all things a civilization of authority in the fullest sense, arousing, by its authority, the highest aspirations after eternal salvation, stirring the most living depths of subjective soul-life, and uniting the immutable Divine with the mutable human in a cosmos of ordered and organized functions. Moreover, this religious authority leads men, by means of the Church’s ordinances of salvation, up from the present world, corrupted as it is by original sin, to the other and higher world. The consequence of this is the depreciation of the earthly sensuous world and the fundamentally ascetic character of the whole theory and shaping of life. This asceticism has sometimes the primarily mystical sense of an extinguishing of all that is finite and sensuous in the eternal and super-sensuous; sometimes primarily the disciplinary sense of a methodical adaptation and direction of all action towards the ends of the other life. In the former case it tends to Quietism; in the latter to methodical action. Catholicism practiced both: in pattern form among the clergy and the religious orders; and among the laity with due regard to the conditions of the practical life. Further points that have to be noticed are, that, alongside of all this, real life made good its claims; and that both Christian theism, and also the heritage received from ancient civilization, represented another way of regarding the world.

These contradictory tendencies were reconciled by the Church in the system of spiritual and secular functions which it created. In this system the consistent carrying out of the ascetic method of life is confined to the official representatives of the Church, the clergy, and those who voluntarily dedicate themselves to this ideal, the monastic orders, while under their direction the mass of the people, of whom they are the representatives and spiritual guides, perform their various social functions according to the Lex Naturæ, being only subjected to the ascetic ideal from time to time, or in a limited degree. Just as the authority of the Church knew how to recognize alongside of it the natural reason, so asceticism was able to take under its wing the natural life. Catholicism is therefore characterized by an extremely elastic union of the ascetic life prescribed by authority and the freer natural life “in the world,” and in this union it organized the civilization of the whole of later antiquity, and, to a still greater extent, of the Romano-Germanic so-called Middle Ages. Its whole outlook on the world and its whole dogmatic system, its science, its ethics, its political and social doctrines, its juridical and economic theories, and the whole of its practical activities, are dominated by this point of view. No importance is attached to the independent discovery of new truths; nor is a new political and social edifice to be constructed by conscious organizing effort. The ideal is simply that the established truths, natural and revealed, the Church’s dominion over the world and the politico-social conditions which unalterably result from the nature of things, are to be brought into a harmony dominated by the religious ends of life, and regulated both directly and indirectly by sacerdotal authority. It is, when all is said and done, a compromise, but a compromise dominated by the authoritative, ascetic, world-condemning, religious influences of the Church as the organ of salvation. Of course, the factors we have indicated are not the only determining factors of the Middle Ages. There come in all kinds of external conditions quite independent of them, and in part necessary preliminaries to the victory of the Church’s scheme of civilization. Such were, the political and social situation in late antiquity, the juridical and economic conditions obtaining among the Germanic races, the opportunity for Church direction in the rudimentary economic conditions of the early Middle Ages, the restriction, in the early days of city life, of trade and industry by the corporate form of their organization, and the weakness of all central authority, apart from which the dominance of the Church would not have been possible. But the fact that all these conditions contributed to produce a Church-directed civilization, finds after all its main explanation in the spiritual content and character of the latter, and therefore, as a whole, it may be characterized as the period of essentially Church civilization.

In contrast with this the essential character of modern civilization becomes apparent. It is everywhere engaged in opposing Church civilization and in substituting for it ideals of civilization independently arrived at, the authority of which depends on their inherent and immediate capacity to produce conviction. This independence, whatever its basis, as opposed to Church authority, to purely external divinely-given standards, dominates everything. Even where new authorities are in principle established, or in practice followed, the respect accorded to them arises from purely independent and rational conviction; and even where the older religious convictions hold their ground, their truth and their binding force are, at least among Protestants, primarily based on inner personal conviction, not on submission to authority as such.

Only strict Catholicism stands by the old idea of authority, and is therein felt to be an intrusion into the modern world of a foreign body of anomalous character; and even Catholicism has been obliged to give up in many respects the practical implications of the claim. The immediate consequence of such independence is necessarily a constantly growing individualism of conviction, opinion, theory, and practical aim. A bond of union absolutely superior to individualism can only be supplied by a power as tremendous as that of the belief in an immediate supernatural Divine revelation, such as Catholicism possessed, and organized in the Church as the extension and continuation of the Divine incarnation. Once this bond of union disappears, the immediate consequence is a splitting up, on the basis of all kinds of human opinions. These cannot pronounce decisions with absolute. Divine, but only with relative, human authority; and however rationally based this human authority may feel itself to be, and however confidently it may hope to unite men on the basis of reason, there will always be a divergence among the various views and utterances of reason. Divine infallibility and ecclesiastical intolerance necessarily give place to human relativity and toleration.

When an endeavor was made to find objective standards and fixed points to oppose to mere subjective caprice, scientific thought presented itself as the only resource. In virtue of its foundation in natural science, which was in principle new in relation to antiquity and its products, it offered new potentialities for the establishment of a clearly and methodically defined point of view, as well as for the technical mastery of nature. In the place of revelation, reigned scientific thought, and in place of ecclesiastical authority, the literature inspired by the new methods. Hence the rationalistic, scientific character of modern civilization, in which its individualism both freely expressed itself, and at the same time seemed to find its natural boundaries. The successor of theology, at once its contrast and its counterpart, was found in the naturalistic, rationalistic system of the sciences and the regulation of life by the so-called Rationalism.

Of course, Individualism could not be always and everywhere kept within these boundaries. The more the supposedly fixed rational order was made the object of historical thought, with reference to its origin, and the more historical thought extended itself in the process beyond scientific thought in the narrower sense, the more completely was the fixed system dissolved into the flux of transience, with ever greater future possibilities opening before it. The independence of thought which came in along with Rationalism finally recognized that everything which was ostensibly rational was historically conditioned, and discovered the wide range of variation in professedly rational conceptions. This rationalistic Individualism passed more and more into a Relativism, the disruptive and divisive effects of which are only too familiar to us today, but in which we also recognize a liberation of the most tremendous forces and possibilities.

There are not wanting, of course, socializing reactions against this divisive tendency, both in theory and, more especially, in the practical phenomena of political and economic life. But these reactions rest on a different basis from the Church’s “authority” civilization. Only temporarily, in the period of the anti-rationalist reaction, have the two movements approached and coalesced with one another. Since then they have again diverged. To-day it may be said that the politico-economic counter-movement against autonomous Individualism daily becomes more widely separated from that associated with the Church reaction. For the former movement, like that which it opposes, really rests upon the modern principle of the autonomous and conscious creation of human society, in a free form suitable to changing conditions. It is not revelation and the life to come which form the strength of the prevailing modern forces of association.

From all this results a further characteristic of modern civilization: the limitation of the interests of life to the present world. If the absolute authority has fallen, which, in its absoluteness, made the antithesis of the Divine and human equally absolute, if in man an autonomous principle is recognized as the source of truth and moral conduct, then all conceptions of the world which were especially designed to maintain that gulf between the Divine and human, fall along with it. With it falls the doctrine of the absolute corruption of mankind through original sin, and the transference of the ends of life to the heavenly world in which there will be deliverance from this corruption. In consequence, all the factors of the present life acquire an enhanced value and a higher impressiveness, and the ends of life fall more and more within the realm of the present world and its ideal transformation.

Now, whether this tendency issues in pure secularism, or whether it holds to a connection, now of course inward and organic, between the doings of the present life and the continuation of life in the world to come, in any case the presuppositions of ecclesiastical asceticism have disappeared. We can now, as Lessing said, look forward to the future life as to the morrow which naturally succeeds today. Since it is no longer possible to separate and mark off from one another the purely earthly life and the life led by the power of God, life appears either as purely human, or as filled in its whole extent with the Spirit of God; which often enough works out in the end to much the same result. Pantheistic feeling is woven into the texture of modern life, and expresses itself in its Art and Science. Whatever of purely philosophic and scientific difficulty and contradiction it may contain, it is in any case the expression of a spirit of world-affirmation with which the asceticism of the older type of religious life is not reconcilable in any of its aspects. Religious asceticism in the form of negation of the world and self-disciplining with a view to a super-earthly life-aim has disappeared from the modern world, however completely the unrestrained enjoyment of life has remained for it mere theory, and however much the simple life of natural impulse has been limited by reflection and purposeful work.

And with this is connected the final characteristic of the modern spirit—its self-confident optimism and belief in progress. This was an accompanying phenomenon of the struggle for freedom in the period of Illuminism, which without such a confidence could not have broken the old chains, and it then found confirmation in a multitude of discoveries and new creations. The old cosmic conceptions dominated by the Fall, the redemption of the world, and the final Judgment have fallen away. Today everything is filled with the thought of development and of progress upward from the depths of darkness to unknown heights. The despairing sense of sin, the sense of a great world-suffering imposed on us for our purification and punishment—the two presuppositions of redemption and the Church’s ordinances of redemption—have been banished. And even where the progressive spirit falters, and the misery of the world makes itself felt, it is no longer the old Christian pessimism based on the Fall, but a skepticism based on experience, or on a pessimistic metaphysic. That is not to say that all the forces of the religious life of Israel and of Christianity have been cut off at the roots. But in comparison with their former power to provide a basis for the saving ordinances of the authoritative Church with its discipline and training for the other world, they have certainly become extraordinarily weak and lifeless. They are no longer capable of producing or sustaining a Church-directed civilization.

To these characteristic marks of the modern spirit have to be added those which belong to the domain of purely practical circumstances and conditions; in regard to which it is difficult to say how far they determine that spirit or are on the other hand determined by it. There is the whole phenomenon of the formation of giant states with their vast military power, which shatters the dream of an ecclesiastical world-empire, the development of modern capitalistic business-organization, bringing everything under its sway, the growth of applied science, which has accomplished more in a couple of centuries than in the two previous millenniums, the immense increase in the figures of population, which has become possible through all this and in turn creates the necessity of it all, the bringing of the whole world within our mental horizon and the contact with immense non-Christian empures, the struggles of the nations without, in the arena of world-politics, and the struggle within of the new social classes created by this development. All this combines with the mental and spiritual revolutions described above to form a new whole, which brings with it new duties and problems, as compared with the ancient world of Church civilization; in which the old Churches, their world-view and their ethics have no longer any firm basis, however strongly the indestructible religious yearning and the need for a fixed point of support may make men cling to the remnants of the ancient ecclesiastical world, which still retain no inconsiderable influence.¹

There are not wanting those who profess to see in this modern world chiefly the signs of the dissolution of an old, firmly-constructed, deeply-rooted civilization. People have been ready to compare it with that period of civilization which falls at the beginning of our Era. Out of that period Church civilization arose, renewing and re-creating it by the infusion of new ideas and new blood. But apart from this renewal, in its individualistic autonomous rationalism, so closely resembling that of the present day, and in the vacillating uncertainty of religious and moral conviction, it represented the dissolution of the ancient Mediterranean civilization.

Precisely this comparison with late antiquity, however, serves, after all, to indicate those features of the modern spirit which are of a positive character—whereas, when compared with the Church civilization of the Middle Ages, it had chiefly to be distinguished by negative and formal characteristics. In the modern world there meets us everywhere, instead of dissolution, a thronging host of new creations. Instead of a helplessness taking refuge in fantasy and skepticism, we find in the modern world an imposing and constantly increasing practical mastery of things. In the first place, there appears instead of the universal monarchy of antiquity, with its deadening effect upon individual life, the system of great national states with extensive territories, standing, or desiring to stand, in equipoise; also a political organization of these states which gives to the citizens a share in their government, not directly by the primitive universal assembly, but by systems of representation; further, a juridical, bureaucratic, and military organization of these states, which gives them a peculiar solidity, and brings the ends of civilization in their widest extent within the ends of the State. Finally, in place of a horizon bounded by the Mediterranean coasts, we have now an ocean horizon, which offers immensely greater and more involved problems of expansion and colonization. Everywhere that means new tasks, which are still far enough from being accomplished. In the second place, we observe a condition of economic life which opens up much wider possibilities; which, no longer based on household and slave production, but upon a highly organized national economy, upon a system of international exchange made possible by currency and credit, upon a fabulous development of applied science, and, above all, upon capitalism, affords to a formally and legally free population opportunities for the almost limitless exploitation of all its powers and gifts. From all these conditions there results an entirely new social classification, which, alongside of political and military officialdom, has produced the wholly new phenomenon of a capital-owning and cultured middle-class, and puts the free working population in a position to strive, not only for a formal legal equality, but also for an equal share of material benefits. That does not look like an end, but rather like a beginning, of great social developments.

In particular, the kernel of the social life is formed by a family life in which monogamy is expressly raised to an ethical principle, the sexes stand in an independent personal and legal relation towards one another, love is refined by romanticism and sensibility, the patria potestas in regard to the children is relaxed, and the mutual cohesion of the “clan” or wider family is very much diminished. This sexual ethic of the monogamic family—no easy thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The Meaning of “The Modern World”
• 2 The Meaning of “Protestantism”
• 3 Protestantism and the Modern World: Points of Contrast
• 4 Protestantism and Politico-Social Institutions
• 5 Protestantism and Economic Organization, Social Developments, Science and Art
• 6 Protestantism and Modern Religious Feeling
• Index