David Strauss and Historical Criticism
Part of a Series of Philosophy of History
Saturday 27 January 2024 is the 216th anniversary of the birth of David Friedrich Strauss (27 January 1808–08 February 1874), who was born in Ludwigsburg, Germany, on this date in 1808.
Strauss was part of a scholarly tradition known as “the higher criticism” or “historical criticism,” which applied historiographical techniques of source criticism to the Bible. Needless to say, this was controversial, and Strauss, as the author of Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (1835–1836, English translation by novelist George Eliot The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, 1846), became a controversial figure. We can think of The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined as a scholarly version of the Jefferson Bible (The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth), in which the miracles and supernatural references were edited out, leaving only the stories and the parables.
Strauss explains his thematic motivations at the beginning of the book:
“A main element in all religious records is sacred history; a history of events in which the divine enters, without intermediation, into the human; the ideal thus assuming an immediate embodiment. But as the progress of mental cultivation mainly consists in the gradual recognition of a chain of causes and effects connecting natural phenomena with each other; so the mind in its development becomes ever increasingly conscious of those mediate links which are indispensable to the realization of the ideal; and hence the discrepancy between the modern culture and the ancient records, with regard to their historical portion, becomes so apparent, that the immediate intervention of the divine in human affairs loses its probability. Besides, as the humanity of these records is the humanity of an early period, consequently of an age comparatively undeveloped and necessarily rude, a sense of repulsion is likewise excited. ‘The incongruity may be thus expressed. the divine cannot so have happened; (not immediately, not in forms so rude;) or, that which has so happened cannot have been divine: — and if a reconciliation be sought by means of interpretation, it will be attempted to prove, either that the divine did not manifest itself in the manner related, — which is to deny the historical validity of the ancient Scriptures; or, that the actual occurrences were not divine, — which is to explain away the absolute contents of these books.”
In my recent discussion of Lessing I touched on his critique of salvation history, which is described in the 2021 paper by Samuel A. Stoner, “Lessing and the Art of History”:
“On the basis of his argument that “contingent truths of history can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason,” Lessing calls the legitimacy of the emerging science of historical and philological Biblical criticism into question (Schriften, XIII.5/Writings, 85). For, as Henry Allison has argued, Lessing’s distinction between reason and history separates ‘the question of the truth of the Christian religion from the question of its historical foundation’.”
Strauss took the next step beyond Lessing, critically examining the historical foundations of the Bible, hence of Christianity. The argument can be made that, once ideas like Lessing’s made it into public consciousness, it was inevitable that a book like Strauss’ The Life of Jesus would be written, but we must be careful about claims of inevitability. In a counterfactual history that diverges from our actual history we could identify many alternative historical possibilities in which a figure like Strauss or a book like The Life of Jesus never made an appearance. On the one hand, any number of events might have intervened, changing the course of history; on the other hand, there is there is the peculiarly rationalistic character of Western thought, even in relation to Western mysticism, mythology and theology, which would have eventually been brought to bear upon this tradition.
Through a millennium of medieval history, vast summas of theology were written in a thoroughly rationalistic spirit. The Sentences of Peter Lombard, which was the occasion of countless commentaries during the Middle Ages, gives us a glimpse of the strangeness of the medieval mind, which took Gospel stories and restated them as abstract philosophical propositions. After the elaboration of this peculiar form of rationalism over the medieval longue durée, another form of rationalism emerged (perhaps no less peculiar), and for the past five hundred years all these former rationalistic monuments were torn down in the name of a new rationalism that would supplant the previous form of rationalism, and new monuments were erected in their place.
Diarmaid MacCulloch in Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, pointed out this rationalism in the Christian tradition and its Greek roots:
“It was Socrates’s questioning of the half-century-old Athenian democracy which was a major cause of his trial and execution; his trial is the central event around which Plato’s dialogues are focused, making it as much a trial of Athenian society and thought as it was of Socrates. The grotesque absurdity of killing a man who was arguably Athens’s greatest citizen on charges of blasphemy and immorality impelled Plato to see a discussion of politics as one facet of discussions of justice, the nature of morality and divine purpose — in fact to see the two discussions as interchangeable. Western religion and philosophy have remained in the shadow of those exchanges: Western culture has borrowed the insistence of Socrates that priority should be given over received wisdom to logical argument and rational procession of thought, and the Western version of the Christian tradition is especially prone to this Socratic principle.”
The perverse rationalism of western civilization, including the churches that have dominated western history, was the primary reason that the scientific revolution and technological civilization grew out of western civilization. This rationalism has taken many forms through history, often mutually incompatible forms, and it continued to unfold in the work of scholars like Lessing and Strauss. The Hegelians, who considered history to be a rational process, were not at all happy the The Life of Jesus. Strauss wrote a pamphlet in response to them. Others were even more put out; in English the book was called, “the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.” Strauss was burned in effigy in Zurich when he was offered a chair in theology at the university; the university backed off and gave Strauss a pension to make him go away.
For all the controversy, the book was a sensation, and Strauss followed up the sensation of The Life of Jesus with The Old Faith and the New. In this work he summed up his previous work and then took the next step beyond it:
“The difficulty of applying the purely historical view and method of treatment is of course increased when we come to the primitive history of Christianity and the writings of the New Testament. A resolute beginning, however, is made, a solid foundation secured. No modern theologian, who is also a scholar, now considers any of the four Gospels to be the work of its pretended author, or in fact to be by an apostle or the colleague of an apostle. The first three Gospels, as well as the Acts, pass for doctrinal compilations of the beginning of the second century after Christ, the fourth, since Baur’s epoch-making investigation, as a dogmatising composition of the middle of the same century. The drift of the first is decided by the different positions which their authors (and in the second place, their sources) had occupied in the disputes between Jewish Christianity and that of St. Paul; the dogma which the fourth Evangelist proposed to demonstrate in his narrative is the JudaicoAlexandrine conception of Jesus as the incarnate Logos. Foremost among the undisputed writings of the New Testament are the first four Epistles of the Apostle Paul; but the present readiness of critics to acknowledge the Revelation of St. John as genuine is almost unwelcome to modern orthodoxy.”
The largely (though not exclusively) naturalistic outlook of Strauss, making use of the best scholarship and science of the time, also entailed its own rational criticism in turn, thus The Old Faith and the New became the target of Nietzsche. Nietzsche liked to put other philosophers on blast, but he did this not out of personal animus, but with a purpose in mind, as he explained in Ecce Homo:
“I never attack persons; I merely avail myself of the person as of a strong magnifying glass that allows one to make visible a general but creeping and elusive calamity. Thus I attacked David Strauss — more precisely, the success of a senile book with the ‘cultured’ people in Germany: I caught this culture in the act.”
The first of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations was “David Strauss, The Confessor and the Writer” (1873), in which he unfavorably compared Strauss to Ranke and Mommsen, implying that the confessional character of Strauss’ book is beneath the dignity of a true historian, and only the most vulgar of critics, looking for demonic inspiration for Strauss’ unorthodox ideas, could have any interest in such things:
“…the last thing the real thinker will wish to know is what kind of beliefs are agreeable to such natures as Strauss… Who could need the confessions of belief of a Ranke or a Mommsen, even though they are scholars and historians of an order quite different from David Strauss? As soon as they sought to interest us in their beliefs rather than in their knowledge they would be overstepping their bounds in a very annoying fashion. But this is what Strauss does when he tells us of his beliefs. No one wishes to know anything about them, except perhaps certain narrow-minded opponents of the Straussian dogmas who feel that there must lie behind them a system of truly diabolical principles and would no doubt want Strauss to compromise his learned utterances by betraying this diabolical background. Perhaps these uncouth fellows have even benefited from Strauss’s latest book; the rest of us, however, who have had no reason to suspect the existence of such a diabolical background, have done no such thing — we would, indeed, have been grateful if we had found a little diabolism in these pages. For the voice of Strauss speaking of his new faith is certainly not the voice of an evil spirit: it is not the voice of a spirit at all, let alone that of an actual genius. It is the voice of those people whom Strauss introduces to us as his ‘we’ — they are, he says, ‘scholars and artists, office workers and soldiers, tradesman and landed proprietors, in their thousands and by no means the worst in the land’ — and who, when they tell us of their beliefs, bore us even more than when they tell us of their dreams.”
Nietzsche’s critique of Strauss was of a piece with his other writings of the period; the Untimely Meditations also included appreciations of Schopenhauer and Wagner from the point of view of a former disciple not yet fully having separated himself from the milieu of his intellectual formation. Nietzsche would not return to Strauss, but he continued to write about Wagner until his madness resulted in the end of all work. The second of Nietzsche’s untimely mediations was a critique of the role of history in history; one could even call it, in a tendentiously Kantian phrase, a Critique of Historical Reason.
David Strauss contributed in his own way to this emerging critique of historical reason, of which Nietzsche was also a part, which makes of Strauss and Nietzsche strange bedfellows. Indeed, the whole of this episode in intellectual history is a tangled tale of very strange bedfellows, with one mésalliance after another. Contemporary theologians and Hegelians both hated Strauss, but for different reasons; the Hegelians supported Nietzsche’s critique of Strauss, presumably on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but Nietzsche hated Hegelianism at least as much as the work of Strauss.
Both Strauss and Nietzsche in their work stripped away the theological consolations of tradition; Nietzsche also stripped away the rational consolations of Hegelianism, and so left us bereft, with no guideposts by which to find our way. His solution is amor fati — the love of fate — but most of us are not strong enough to love what Fate has in store for us. Nietzsche also left us with a lot of unanswered questions implied by his criticisms of history: Has reason manifested itself in history? Can reason manifest itself in history? What would it look like for reason to manifest itself in history?
For a Christian Platonist like Augustine, providential history is the manifestation of divine reason in history, and both Strauss and Nietzsche attacked the very idea of such a thing. In Strauss’ naturalistic re-telling of the Gospels all the providential elements are stripped out of history and we are left with a counter-providential conception of history; we have a history that is no longer a salvation history. This satisfies the intellectual conscience of scientific reason, but it leaves our other faculties as bereft as Nietzsche left us. It also leaves us with our need to construct an alternative to salvation history, which is what Strauss tried to do in The Old Faith and the New, and we have been trying to do ever since.
