Abstract
The article analyzes from the case of Friedrich von Hügel what the special interest of Roman Catholic Modernism in mysticism was about. Different from major tendencies in modernist research, it places his work in the framework of the discourse on “religious experience” around 1900. This way it becomes visible that von Hügel’s account of mysticism was shaped to a great extent by scholars from a liberal Protestant background, such as William James, Rudolf Eucken, and Ernst Troeltsch. In engaging these scholars, von Hügel was able to develop his own concept of the “mystical element” of religion from the perspective of a Catholic believer. The case of von Hügel suggests that Roman Catholic Modernism in general should be studied more in connection with its scientific setting outside Catholic theology.
Keywords
The Catholic modernist crisis is often regarded as a conflict about the methods of biblical criticism or, in a more general way, as a struggle of Catholic theology with modern historical thinking. It is less known that a significant number of the scholars involved in the modernist movement were interested in mysticism. This also accounts for Baron Friedrich von Hügel, a British layman and scholar of German descent, who is often said to have been the center of the movement. The ‘laybishop of modernism’ (P. Sabatier) had a strong interest in mysticism, which is reflected best in his magnum opus, The Mystical Element of Religion as Studied in St. Catherine of Genoa and Her Friends, published in 1908. 1
In this article, 2 I investigate with the case of von Hügel what the modernist interest in mysticism was about. My claim will be that the baron’s work on mysticism was a part of an international scholarly discussion about an experiential account of religion around the year 1900. This discussion took place in different disciplines outside traditional dogmatic theology and was led to a great extent by scholars from a liberal Protestant background. By reviewing von Hügel’s connection to this setting, I seek to outline his understanding of religious experience and mysticism.
I will begin by assessing some general tendencies of modernist research in the past decades that made it difficult to see the connection between the modernists’ interest in mysticism and the international discussion on ‘religious experience’ outside Catholic theology at that time. I continue by briefly sketching this intellectual stetting. Then I will turn to Friedrich von Hügel and his participation in this discussion. For the purpose of this article, I will focus on three scholars who are of central importance for von Hügel’s work: William James, Rudolf Eucken, and Ernst Troeltsch. The baron’s understanding of the ‘mystical element’ of religion was to a significant extent shaped by the intellectual encounter with these scholars. Nevertheless, the baron did not merely adopt or combine influences but developed his own concept by transforming it from the perspective of a Catholic believer. Finally, I will reflect briefly on the consequences of von Hügel’s case for the understanding of Catholic modernism in general.
The intellectual context of modernism: patterns of modernist research
The research on Catholic modernism of the past decades has been shaped by patterns that made it difficult to see the connection between the modernist interest in mysticism and the non-Catholic and non-theological discussion about the religion of the time. Instead, research concentrated on a primarily intra-theological setting. At the same time, the scholarship has turned the focus to the future or the past of the modernist movement. I will describe three patterns that follow this line.
Most introductory works on Catholic modernism assume that there were two major theological fields in modernist theology: historical and mystical (or experiential). The first field is usually associated with Alfred Loisy and his attempt to reconcile the truth of the Christian faith with historical change. The second field is often linked with George Tyrrell and his focus on personal religious experience in its tension with the institutional aspect of the faith. 3 Both figures, Loisy and Tyrell, are usually studied in the context of their theological network and the antimodernist theological and curial opposition. In addition, studies by systematic theologians have often connected modernist theology to the theology surrounding the Second Vatican Council in a teleological manner: Either the modernists appear as forerunners of the breakthrough at Vatican II, 4 or they happen to be the early protagonists of legitimate ideas while still lacking the adequate intellectual means to propose these ideas. 5 There is, of course, nothing wrong with studying the modernists in their theological context or comparing them with the ideas of Vatican II and the theology surrounding it. But the focus on Catholic theology and the prehistory of Vatican II can obscure the view on the non-theological intellectual setting of modernist theology. Moreover, there is often a strong focus in these studies on the conflict of the individual with the institution of the church. This is indeed an important implication of modernist theology in general. It means, however, to underestimate Loisy’s or Tyrrell’s theoretical ambition if their cases are reduced to the conflict between personal faith and Church authority. 6
At the same time, there is also a tendency to link modernist theology to the past in a way that ignores the influences upon it from outside Catholic theology. In 1979, Thomas Michael Loome published his Tübingen dissertation under the title: Liberal Catholicism, Reform Catholicism, Modernism: A Contribution to a New Orientation in Modernist Research. 7 Loome used these terms primarily to highlight the relationship between the English modernists, Tyrrell and von Hügel, and German theological movements of reform. Following Loome, German Church historians especially have applied a broader understanding of modernism, which included very different problems of theological and ecclesiastical reform. This focus exposed the link between German theologians accused of modernism and earlier protagonists of liberal Catholicism. 8 However, such a broad understanding of modernism has turned away from the theoretical outline of modernist theology. 9 It cannot account for the fact that this outline was typical for the intellectual setting of the sciences of religion around the year 1900. Moreover, Loome’s focus on Tyrrell’s and von Hügel’s relationship to Germany was, again, largely restricted to Catholic theologians. 10 This was misleading given the fact that von Hügel’s main interlocutors in Germany, Eucken and Troeltsch, were liberal scholars with a Protestant background, and Tyrrell’s interest in German scholarship was mediated primarily by von Hügel. 11
Apart from Loome and the German case there has been a departure from the intellectual surroundings of modernism that comes into play with the term ‘mysticism’. Some publications on von Hügel see the scope of this interest in mysticism in a mixture of historical research on the mysticism of the past and a pastoral form of spiritual renewal in the present. 12 One could think here of the popular writer Evelyn Underhill, who was very successful by providing this very mixture. 13 In the case of von Hügel, this understanding is not totally inaccurate. The baron did play a role as spiritual adviser (for example, for Evelyn Underhill) 14 and his work was, to a minor extent, historical work on the mysticism of the past. However, it is already apparent by the title of von Hügel’s work, ‘The mystical element of religion as studied in St. Catherine of Genoa and her friends’, that the baron did not get his theological ideas from Late Medieval mystics, but that St. Catherine served as the model of a mystic to be explained in the terms of the contemporary sciences of religion, where speaking of different ‘elements’ of the phenomenon ‘religion’ had become common. 15 Moreover, the contemporary interest in mysticism went far beyond the borders of Catholic theology. The theoretical core of von Hügel’s book reflects this by engaging scholars such as William James, Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Eucken, Henri Bergson, and others.
In conclusion, then, all these general patterns follow a legitimate interest. They fail, however, to see the broader picture of the intellectual environment of modernist theology. The tendency to focus on intra-theological developments, past and future, has, in both branches of modernist theology, neglected its connection to the contemporary non-theological scholarly discourse on religion. It is only recently that this connection has become a matter of interest. The latest research on Loisy and the French modernists stands out for its attempts to situate modernism within the larger discussions of the development of the sciences of religion like the history of religion and the psychology of religion. 16
Regarding a central figure like von Hügel, similar investigations still do not exist. The extensive literature on von Hügel has been of course aware of the baron’s many interlocutors from different disciplines in Britain, France, Italy, Germany and the United States. Some of these relationships have been explored in detail. 17 Yet, most of the literature has focused on von Hügel’s contacts in the modernist movement throughout Europe. 18 Two exceptions to this are the early works of Peter Neuner and Hans Rollmann. Neuner and Rollmann tried to identify where von Hügel was influenced by scholars outside Catholic theology, with special attention to German scholars from a Protestant background. 19 Still, these works have remained mostly unaware of the fact that von Hügel was part of an international discussion undertaken primarily outside Catholic theology, which had a special interest in the category of ‘religious experience’. 20
‘Religious experience’ and mysticism in the sciences of religion around 1900
Around the year 1900, there existed a dynamic discussion on a new scholarly engagement of religion, a discussion in which new ideas spread quickly across the borders of nations. There were thinkers involved from established disciplines like philosophy, where new schools developed (e.g. philosophy of life, historism and hermeneutics, pragmatism, neoidealism, phenomenology). At the same time, new disciplines were born like the history of religion, psychology of religion and sociology of religion. Sometimes they were integrated into a new discipline called ‘religious science’ or ‘religious studies’.
It is, of course, not possible here to describe even the major patterns of this vast terrain. For a full intellectual history of Catholic modernism, it would be necessary to examine different connecting paths to the contemporary discussions. The modernist interest in mysticism, especially in the case of von Hügel, leads to an important segment of the discussion that is centered on the ‘experiential character’ of religion. Again, this is an extensive subfield, the boundaries of which are difficult to draw. Thinkers as different as Auguste Sabatier, Henri Bergson, William James, Wilhelm Dilthey, Ernst Troeltsch, and Rudolf Otto were a part of it. There are, however, some general features that characterize this discussion. I will give, with no claim of completeness, a brief outline of four of them that can be illustrated by Ernst Troeltsch’s study, Die Selbständigkeit der Religion (The autonomy of religion), published in 1895–1896. 21
First, the thinkers involved were searching for an understanding of religion that was not reductionist. Religion was to be conceived as something that has its own character and value, which cannot be reduced to something else. This was said primarily against a scientific naturalism that was gaining more and more ground. At the same time the ‘autonomy of religion’ was to be defended against its reduction to metaphysics or to morality as in metaphysical idealism or in the Kantian fusion of religion and morality.
Second, it was agreed that this non-reductionist account of religion can be achieved by looking at the sensual, emotional, or experiential side of religion. Concepts like ‘experience’ or in German Erfahrung and Erlebnis were preferred. 22 Whatever might be said about the truth of what is experienced by religious believers, there is a certain reality and specific character to it that must be taken seriously both in the study of the religious past and under present modern conditions.
Third, there was a call for a science of religion based on these insights. Many shared, however, that the established disciplines of theology and philosophy, which traditionally dealt with the phenomenon of religion, were in their contemporary state not suited for this task. As for theology, it seemed clear that a new science of religion could not be bound by a specific creed or any kind of dogmatic regulation if it were to acknowledge other religions as religions. A science to meet this requirement should be based on a general concept of religion that would not be limited to a single religious tradition. Regarding philosophy, there was a strong opposition against Hegel and his followers because it was doubted that in Hegel’s speculative system there would be a place for religion as a phenomenon in itself. Instead, it called for a science of religion that tried to understand lived religion (gelebte Religion), the religion of real believers. 23
Fourth, it was clear that there could be different new sciences of religion. There was, for example, a strong interest in the history of religions, and at the same time in the new discipline of ‘psychology of religion’. Still, many thinkers involved agreed that this whole new setting of the sciences of religions should be somehow held together by a renewed philosophy of religion. Troeltsch, for example, supported the establishment of the psychology of religion, but he wanted to connect it to religious history, while a transformed philosophy of religion was to reflect on their mutual relationship. 24
A fifth feature contains different aspects already mentioned: the whole discourse was neither secularist nor, in the Christian sense, theologically orthodox. 25 On the one hand, there was a distance from traditional theology, although a number of thinkers involved came from a Protestant tradition or were even Protestant theologians who, like Troeltsch, would not deny the possibility or necessity of dogmatic theology. Of course, in their view, this discipline would have to undergo serious changes in its fundamental methodological assumptions. Since ‘religious experience’ was supposed to function as a basic datum of a new religious science, dogmatic theology had to cope with the relativizing effects of this principle. On the other hand, in the view of many, this very principle expressed a relatively stable basis of religion even under modern conditions. Troeltsch and James assumed that religion would prevail or even rise anew. It was, however, a form of religion that, although not entirely detached from traditional Christianity, was religion in the first place and not Christianity. Likewise, many thinkers involved would declare themselves as religious individuals whose attachment to traditional Christianity was loosened to different degrees.
What role did ‘mysticism’ play in the whole discourse? Three aspects can be differentiated: First, ‘mysticism’ was used simply as a synonym for ‘religious experience’, as referring to the affective and emotional side of religion. We find such a use in William James, who speaks of mysticism as the phenomenon he is interested in without any reservation. 26 Troeltsch occasionally makes a similar use of the term. The fact that it is still controversial whether Troeltsch was a ‘mystical’ thinker reflects, however, a second aspect of the term mysticism that is related to its confessional use. In the German part of the discussion the rejection of mysticism as ‘Catholic’ by the Ritschl School was still influential. 27 Here ‘mysticism’ was seen at odds with the Lutheran rejection of natural theology. In fact, Troeltsch did not think primarily of the medieval mystics as a model for mysticism but of a religious tradition in the footsteps of Schleiermacher. Nevertheless, the use of the term by free-thinking religious individuals was hampered by its Catholic connotation. It seems that in the French setting this was not the case. ‘Mysticism’ could be used in a traditional Catholic sense and in the non-theological debates in the sciences of religion. 28 Especially in Troeltsch, there is a third aspect of ‘mysticism’. He used the term not only for the experiential element of religion but also for a way of being religious outside religious traditions and institutions. Troeltsch believed that in the long run the mystical individual could not be the focal point of the development of Christianity under modern conditions. There must remain some kind of attachment of the mystic to historical Christianity. 29 Nevertheless, the term ‘mysticism’ stood for a relatively independent form of religious life reflecting the fact that a growing number of individuals from the middle class defined themselves as religious, but only in a vague sense as Christians. 30
Von Hügel’s contribution to the discourse on ‘religious experience’
Von Hügel’s work was situated in a contemporary discussion where the term ‘mysticism’ was thriving but ambiguous. On the one hand, the term was associated with the great mystics of the Catholic past. Von Hügel followed this track by turning toward the mysticism of St. Catherine, a married lay mystic of the 15th century. On the other hand, von Hügel wanted to take part in the discourse of the sciences of religion where ‘mysticism’ and ‘religious experience’ were linked in a way that went far beyond traditional Catholic theology. He was, measured only by the quantity of his publications, far more interested in this second field. 31
In the following section, I analyze a limited but significant part of von Hügel’s attempt to engage in this discussion. I will do this by introducing three major themes of his thought, each of which he developed in an exchange with three thinkers from this field. These are William James and Ernst Troeltsch, whose attachment to it is very clear. The third figure is Rudolf Eucken and in his case it can be questioned whether he belonged to this setting. Largely forgotten today, Eucken was in his time an intellectual celebrity whose philosophical works for a broader public were translated into many languages. In 1908, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature for what is usually labeled a ‘neoidealist’ philosophy. 32 His relationship to von Hügel was, as in the case of Troeltsch, close. In both cases this is reflected by an extensive correspondence. 33 In the case of James there is only a single, yet very substantial, letter. 34 All three thinkers are quoted frequently in von Hügel’s writings; on Eucken and Troeltsch he published articles. Finally, his reading diaries reveal that von Hügel was familiar with their major works.
The autonomy of religion based on religious experience
Von Hügel shared the view of his non-theological colleagues regarding the autonomy of religion based on religious experience. We know from his reading diaries that he read and valued highly Troeltsch’s article ‘The autonomy of religion’, where this central conviction was laid out in detail. 35 He also read James’ Varieties of Religious Experience early. 36 In the letter he sent to James later, together with his Mystical Element, he praised the first chapter of the Varieties as a ‘truly magnificent attaca; I have often wished that it might appear as a separate booklet for every word tells, every word is weighty and much wanted in these our nerve-wrecked, unwisely introspective times’. 37 Von Hügel was in favor of the chapter in which James brilliantly ridiculed a reductionist understanding of religious experience, an understanding that deduced from the emotionally excessive or even pathological nature of this experience that it is ‘nothing but’ physiological irregularities. 38 In his Mystical Element, von Hügel approved of James’ non-reductionist account of ‘neural conditions and consequences for all and every mental and volitional activity’ as laid out by James in his Principles of Psychology. 39 Even more important for von Hügel was the influence of Eucken, whose books are often constructed around a rejection of naturalism. In fact, von Hügel’s first philosophical text at all was a review of Eucken’s book The Struggle for a Spiritual Life of 1896. 40 Von Hügel was deeply impressed by this book and his ‘revolt against naturalism’. 41 The baron was part of this insisting on the autonomy of religion, of the rejection of the nothing-but, of the struggle for a spiritual reality.
The thinkers involved not only opposed naturalism but also the reduction of religion to morality or metaphysics. The relationship between religion and morality was not a central question for von Hügel, but there was one significant contemporary controversy in this field in which he was determined to take someone’s side. This was a conflict within German liberal Protestant theology, wherein Troeltsch attacked Wilhelm Hermann for his Kantian and Ritschlian position.
42
Von Hügel refers to Troeltsch’s critique in the article Grundprobleme der Ethik (Fundamental Problems of Ethics) to stress that religion is not just a fusion of moral principles and Christian history.
43
In a text entitled Religion and Illusion, he says about Troeltsch’s essay: And this same study shows that religion, in proportion as it gains a fuller consciousness of its own specific character, retains indeed relations with ethic and politics, science, philosophy and art, and even increases or refines such relations, yet in and through all such relations it increasingly differentiates itself from all those other modes and ranges of life and apprehension.
44
So here again the baron was obviously a part of the discussions outside (Catholic) theology.
It is a more complicated question as to what extent the defense of the autonomy of religion was in von Hügel’s work also directed against a reduction of religion to metaphysics. 45 It seems here that Eucken’s influence on the baron was strong. At the same time, it is difficult to determine in what way Eucken was a metaphysical thinker. The term ‘neoidealist’, which is often used to describe his philosophy, can be misleading. In Eucken’s major work on the philosophy of religion The Truth of Religion – a work that von Hügel, according to his diary, read ‘2 or 3 times’ 46 – his position oscillates between a speculative and a more experiential understanding of religion.
Eucken’s argument starts from the dualism between physical nature and the free human being, a dualism that in his view leads to a permanent struggle of the latter not to be neglected by the former. 47 This struggle, carried out by man in his moral, aesthetical, and cultural activity, is the first step in overcoming the dualism. 48 However, Eucken’s major point is to conceive of this struggle as part of a holistic mental entity that keeps human culture from falling into the abyss of a naturalistic nothingness. 49 Eucken calls this entity Geistesleben 50 (spiritual life) and this very term reflects the ambiguity of his thought. On the one hand Eucken strives for an idealist, mental (geistig) whole that exists prior to the struggle of mankind and enables man to carry out this struggle. 51 He insists that it is to be located in an eternal cognitive sphere that is to be entered through what he calls the ‘noological’ method, as distinct from a ‘psychological method’. 52 On the other hand, he calls this entity Leben, life, and often he speaks of it as something that we cannot access by an intellectual operation but by opening ourselves to the ‘deepness of life’, which guarantees human existence its positive value and continuance. 53
A similar ambiguity can be found in von Hügel’s paper ‘Experience and Trancendence’, a text that seeks to fuse Eucken’s term of Geistesleben and James’ notion of the ‘Sub-Consciousness’. 54 He says regarding James, apart from the ‘clear presentations’ of our mind, there is a ‘dark region and activity’ in it. 55 He adds in a way that seems to follow Eucken: ‘There is an opening wide and energizing the whole human being in an aspiration and effort after the Infinite and Abiding’. 56 Von Hügel appears not to be sure whether these entities are accessed through a rational operation. The apprehension of the ‘Infinite and Abiding’ is ‘in itself, obscure’ 57 and there can be no ‘direct clearness’ 58 about it. At the same time, the ‘infinite’ is introduced as the opposite of the contingent and therefore must be discovered by a rational operation.
The historical–institutional aspect of lived religion
From his letter to William James we know that von Hügel disapproved very much of James declaring in the introduction of his Varieties to focus only on the experiential aspect of religious belief: ‘I continue to feel your taking of the religious experience as separable from its institutional-historical occasions and environment [. . .] to be schematic, a priori, not what your method, so concrete and a posteriori, seems to demand’. 59 So von Hügel accused James of breaking with his own method by neglecting an aspect of religious belief. The psychologist who claims to look at real religious individuals decides not to pay attention to an important part of reality. 60
What von Hügel called in the letter the ‘institutional-historical occasions and environment’ of religious experience was the grand question of Troeltsch’s work. As von Hügel wrote in the obituary about his friend’s position: ‘Christianity, as all specific religion, is profoundly historical – without a genuinely historical Person and a nucleus of downright happenednesses it ceases to be itself’.
61
In his major book, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches and Groups, Troeltsch also offered a way in which to relate the historical aspect of the faith to the Church as a teaching institution.
62
Von Hügel strongly welcomed this view: I do not doubt that, with regard to any systematic and emphatic mysticism, Professor Troeltsch has presented us with the most valuable fact, when he finds such mysticism to come always second and never first, as compared with historical and institutional religion which always comes first.
63
Von Hügel was, however, not only concerned about the teaching Church as an institution that would guarantee the historical element of religion. He also tried to convince his interlocutors that the liturgy and the sacraments must be conceived of as stimulators of religious experience. And here it was more difficult to find allies. In a very positive article about Eucken, published in the Hibbert Journal, von Hügel asked: ‘Why must Sacraments, conceived as in any degree and way effecting, and not merely as expressing, Spiritual Life, be pure superstitions?’ 64 And he continues: ‘A religious philosophy [. . .] which nowhere appears to realise the pressing need of Cultus [. . .] cannot probe their depths the central living forces still held [. . .] by Mosque and Synagogue, by Christian Chapel and Church’. 65 Von Hügel appears here not as an apologist of Catholicism but as searching for a concept of religion that would fit empirical religion.
Again, it was in Troeltsch where the baron found at least in part what he was looking for: ‘There is the need of Common worship. Professor Troeltsch has admirably shown that this necessity is rooted in the very nature of man and of human religion’.
66
In fact, Troeltsch was one of the first in this field who highlighted the importance of worship for the development of religious communities.
67
Regarding the sacraments, however, von Hügel was not able to convince his friend. Von Hügel attributed that to Troeltsch’s Lutheran background; in one of his articles he calls Troeltsch ‘a sensitively anti-magic and anti-Rome Christian’.
68
Von Hügel, on the other hand, was convinced that these two questions belonged together: I perceive, once more that the psychology and epistemology of such a ‘no sacraments’ position will not work – they have sprung from extrinsic considerations. I perceive also that, if we insist, as strongly as does Troeltsch, upon the strict necessity for religion, at least amongst mankind at large, of history, worship, cultus of Christ, we accept the Church, and we cannot well reject the Sacraments.
69
Religious experience and God
Finally, there is a problem that was also relevant for von Hügel’s relationship to his modernist collaborators. The baron increasingly became uneasy about the pantheism of some his friends who, like Loisy, abandoned belief in a personal God in the years after the Roman condemnation of modernism. 70 It has been deduced from von Hügel’s criticism that he returned to a more traditional theology when he came to see where the movement was leading. 71 This, however, does not seem true in two respects: On one hand, we find this issue in von Hügel’s writings from the very beginning in the 1890s. On the other hand, he was sure that belief in a personal God, whom believers can have a real relationship with, needed new ways of thinking. He sought these ways by entering discussions with scholars of religion outside Catholic theology.
We first encounter von Hügel’s thought on this problem in his criticism of Eucken, whose work is full of warnings about a religious anthropomorphism regarding the personality of God. The baron replied to this several times by referring to the German idealist philosopher Hermann Lotze: ‘Lotze is right; not only is perfect personality compatible with the idea of the infinite, but it is compatible only with such an idea’.
72
The idea von Hügel takes from Lotze is that finite human beings who are incomplete in their personality cannot but conceive of the infinite as perfect personality. In speaking of perfect personality, von Hügel seemed indeed close to traditional theism. However, his argument does not come from the metaphysics of God, but from a transcendental reflection on our own finite nature.
73
In Experience and Transcendence he states, For note how the most universal and specific of human characteristics is a keen sense of our relativity, of our little anthropomorphisms and provincialisms in face of Objective Reality. ‘Man never knows how anthropomorphic he is’, says Goethe. True; yet is a man, Goethe, and at bottom all men, in proportions as they are truly such, who have somehow discovered this truth, and who suffer from it as spontaneously as from the toothache or from sleepless nights.
74
This kind of argument is typical for Experience and Transcendence. In the baron’s later texts one can find that his criticism of Eucken took a different direction. It is not the personality of God that he is worried about as much as the question of where Eucken’s concept of religion acknowledges that we can encounter God in a real way. What he did not find in Eucken is the notion of ‘direct adoration and of communion with God’.
75
God, the Spirit, may exist – indeed, Eucken believes he does, and ends by showing you how and why he thinks so; but there is nowhere, we find, any keen sense of how ontologically, ‘Spiritual Life’ simply follows from [. . .] the interrelation between, the Spirit and spirits, God and men.
76
Von Hügel was dissatisfied with the fact that Eucken’s concept of religion does not contain anything like ‘adoration’ or ‘prayer’: ‘for all these fundamentals of live religion we still look in vain amongst the philosophers and philosophies’. 77
In von Hügel’s letter to James a similar dissatisfaction can be observed. In the baron’s view, James ignores (or at least relegates to a secondary place) what I think is, in proportion to a religion’s depth and delicacy, religion’s primary conviction and the unalterable insistence, viz. the predominance of its Object, God, the Spirit, the Infinite, over the Subject, the apprehending finite spirit.
78
When von Hügel speaks of the ‘predominance of the object’ in religious experience, it becomes clear that his question is more phenomenological now. It is not so much the question of whether God himself can be thought of as a person, but how we can intellectually account for what von Hügel thinks is undeniable, that religious experience is directed to an object, which is superior.
Again, it was in Troeltsch that von Hügel found support for this. Several times the baron referred to Troeltsch as the one who fought for this understanding of religious experience. ‘God – a Reality, the Reality distinct form the world, which nevertheless springs from, is supported, and is penetrated by Him. He lived this faith with grand directness’, von Hügel wrote in the obituary. 79 Elsewhere he says: ‘Truly Troeltsch is right, – still, under our very eyes, God, the great Reality, and faith in Him as such, and the Beyond, and real faith in its reality are the power and peace of our little human Here and Now’. 80 Troeltsch in fact argued for this position not from a philosophical point of view, but as a scholar of lived religion. 81
However, von Hügel felt the need to account for this aspect of religious experience also from a philosophical perspective. In a long article on Troeltsch, von Hügel argued that Troeltsch in his philosophy falls short of the position he holds as a scholar of religion: Yet for Troeltsch the thinker, our own mind appears often to be what alone we can incontestably start with, and any reality, distinct from the mind’s consciousness of itself, is but an inference of this mind from this its consciousness and requires proof as to its trans-subjective validity; the belief in the need of sense-stimulation for the awakening of the mind and of the soul, is, in religion, sheer ‘magic-mongering’.
82
At this point, von Hügel’s disagreement with Troeltsch’s rejection of the sacraments is taken to a more abstract epistemological level. Von Hügel spent the last years of his scholarly life working on an epistemology that he called ‘critical realism’, a position that was different from the idealism underlying the positions of Eucken and Troeltsch. 83 He sought to show that in religious life, there can be at least that ‘minimum of certainty on which all human certainty and action [. . .] are demonstrably built’. 84
Unfortunately, von Hügel’s theory remained a fragment. When he was invited to deliver the Gifford lectures in the years 1924–1925, he started to work on a manuscript, but died in 1925. 85 Von Hügel’s draft, indeed remaining just a draft, was published later under the title ‘The reality of God and Religion and Agnosticism’. If the baron had finished this piece, it would likely be possible today to say a final word about his intellectual position within the contemporary discourse on religious experience.
Conclusion: Von Hügel and the modernist interest in mysticism
Von Hügel’s work was to a major extent a part of the contemporary discourse on ‘religious experience’. He was interested in a science of religion that was able to explain lived religion, the religion of real believers. As we have seen, the baron embraced this discussion with significant adaptions. Although he was not an apologist in the traditional sense, 86 he kept his Catholic perspective. In doing so, he was able to find allies in the contemporary discourse on ‘religious experience’ itself who were hesitant about the emphases put by others on the merely inner spiritual character of religion, on the monistic, pantheist theology and on the epistemological idealism.
In this way von Hügel found his own independent, free-thinking but Catholic way through the intellectual setting of his time while providing new intellectual paths to Catholic thought.
As a leading figure of the modernist movement the baron’s example shows that the modernist interest in mysticism was about much more than a historical study or spiritual revival of the mysticism of the past. For the study of Catholic modernism, his case highlights the contemporary intellectual setting of modernist theology. The mystical interest in modernism is primarily not an issue of the mystical past, nor of earlier or later episodes of theological reform, but of its own time. This discussion was shaped to a great extent by thinkers from other sciences of religion and a liberal Protestant background.
It is this connection that, despite the steps taken in the past years, especially for the French setting, should be further explored in order to do justice to the modernists’ intellectual efforts to account for the future of religion under modern conditions. While the non-theological protagonists of this discussion, like James or Troeltsch, have not lost their topicality, Catholic modernists are often studied as figures of the past. The fact that Catholic theology has only recently begun to engage James or Troeltsch indicates the possibility of another understanding of 20th-century Catholic intellectual history that is yet to be written.
