Browning and His CenturyClarke, Helen A. (Helen Archibald)
Philosophy
Browning and His Century
Clarke, Helen A. (Helen Archibald)
Browning, Robert, 1812-1889; Nineteenth century; Poets, English -- 19th century -- Biography
Eichhorn, one of the first of the Germans to be studied in England, had
found a point of departure in the celebrated "Wolfenbüttel Fragments,"
which had been printed by Lessing from manuscripts by an unknown writer
Reimarus discovered in the Wolfenbüttel library. These fragments represent
criticism of the sweepingly destructive order, characteristic of what has
been called the naturalistic school. Although Eichhorn agreed with the
writer of the "Fragments" that the biblical narratives should be divested
of all their supernatural aspects, he did not interpret the supernatural
elements as simply frauds designed to deceive in order that personal ends
might be gained. He restored dignity to the narrative by insisting at once
upon its historical verity and upon a natural interpretation of the
supernatural--"a spontaneous illumination reflected from antiquity
itself," which might result from primitive misunderstanding of natural
phenomena, from the poetical embellishment of facts, or the symbolizing of
an idea.
Doctor Paulus, in his commentary on the Gospels (1800), carried the idea
still farther, and the rationalistic school of Bible criticism became an
assured fact, though Kant at this time developed an entirely different
theory of Bible interpretation, which in a sense harked back to the older
allegorical interpretation of the Bible.
He did not trouble himself at all about the historical accuracy of the
narratives. He was concerned only in discovering the idea underlying the
stories, the moral gist of them in relation to human development. With the
naturalists and the rationalists, he put aside any idea of Divine
revelation. It was the moral aspiration of the authors, themselves, which
threw a supernatural glamour over their accounts of old traditions and
turned them into symbols of life instead of merely records of bona fide
facts of history. The weakness of Kant's standpoint was later pointed out
by Strauss, whose opinion is well summed up in the following paragraph.
"Whilst Kant sought to educe moral thoughts from the biblical writings,
even in their historical part, and was even inclined to consider these
thoughts as the fundamental object of the history: on the other hand he
derived these thoughts only from himself and the cultivation of his age,
and therefore could seldom assume that they had actually been laid down by
the authors of these writings; and on the other hand, and for the same
reason, he omitted to show what was the relation between these thoughts
and those symbolic representations, and how it happened that the one came
to be expressed by the other."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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