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ABSTRACT
This article focuses on responses to Darwinism among German scientists and theologians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Christian thinkers foregrounded in this study all commented at length on Darwinism and critically examined theories of natural selection. In doing so, they did not resort to what we now label “fundamentalist tropes,” or, as I call them, “anti-modernist tropes.” Rather, they were willing to accept empirical evidence and thought in broad religious and philosophical terms about evolution’s mechanisms. The arguments that these scholars offered against materialists’ employment of Darwin’s ideas fit within the broader “revolt against positivism.”
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 For Darwin’s own words see Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (New York: Signet Classics, 2003), 507. For more on the relationship between Darwinism and materialism in popular culture see Alfred Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 17–29, 142–144. For an intellectual survey of German materialists see Frederick Gregory, Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1977).
2 Albert Wigand, Zeitfragen des christlichen Volkslebens: Der Darwinismus ein Zeichen der Zeit (Heilbronn: Verlag von Gebr. Henninger, 1878), 99. Henceforth, all translations are mine unless otherwise noted.
3 Ibid., Zeitfragen, 98–99.
4 Martin Amrein and Kärin Nickelsen, “The Gentleman and the Rogue: The Collaboration between Charles Darwin and Carl Vogt,” Journal of the History of Biology 41:2 (2008), 253, 263. See also Thomas Junker and Uwe Hoßfeld, Die Entdeckung der Evolution: Eine revolutionäre Theorie und ihre Geschichte, 2nd ed. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), 93–96: Haeckel found in Darwin a defense against the “weapons of tyrants and the curses of priests.”
5 David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918, 284–285. The classic work on the Tübingen School is Horton Harris’ The Tübingen School: A Historical and Theological Investigation of the School of F.C. Baur (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1990). Put quite simply, the Tübingen School, for all its diversity, called into question the historicity and particular, literal truth claims of the Bible.
6 The varieties and intricacies of “materialism” are too extensive to unpack here. For a concise, thoughtful review of these issues, see Frederick C. Beiser, After Hegel: German Philosophy, 1840–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 53–96.
7 James C. Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition: Retracing the Origins of Conflict (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 3–4, 13; Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, 75–76. For a closer examination of the many varieties of scientism see Mikael Stenmark, “What is Scientism?” Religious Studies 33:1 (1997), 15—32. The so-called “four horsemen” of “new atheism” are Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris.
8 Peter J. Bowler, Evolution: The History of an Idea (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 14.
9 James C. Ungureanu, “Relocating the Conflict Between Science and Religion at the Foundations of the History of Science,” Zygon 53:4 (2018), 1120–1124, esp. 1122.
10 H. Stuart Hughes, Consciousness and Society: The Reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890–1930 (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), 38–39.
11 Erich Wasmann, Der Kampf um das Entwicklungsproblem in Berlin (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagshandlung, 1907), 141.
12 Gabriel Ward Finkelstein, Emil Du Bois-Reymond: Neuroscience, Self, and Society in Nineteenth-century Germany (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013), 246–247, 340 (fn. 42).
13 Finkelstein, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, 4–5, 260–261; see also idem, “The Greatest Unknown Intellectual of the 19th Century,” The MIT Press Reader, November 7, 2019, https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-greatest-unknown-intellectual-of-the-19th-century/#:~:text=Emil%20du%20Bois%2DReymond%20proclaimed,he%20is%20all%20but%20forgotten.
14 Finkelstein, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, 263, 274, 281.
15 Denise Phillips, “Reconsidering the Sonderweg of German Science: Biology and Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40:1 (2010), 141–142. For Haeckel’s biography, see Mario A. Di Gregorio, From Here to Eternity: Ernst Haeckel and Scientific Faith (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005) and Robert J. Richards, The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). Both Di Gregorio and Richards sketch excellent portraits of Haeckel’s life but are more concerned with Haeckel’s relationship to Romantic science and philosophy and to Darwinism per se than with the various scientists and theologians, Wasmann excepted, who challenged him. They have developed their treatments of Haeckel—and found their points of disagreement—in active personal dialogue with each other, as Di Gregorio notes in his “Acknowledgments.” While Di Gregorio is right to underscore the religious nature of Haeckel’s ideology, I would argue that he goes much too far in associating Haeckel with Luther and liberal Christianity; Haeckel sometimes couched his arguments in those terms, but it seems clear to me that he does so only to make his fairly revolutionary ideas more palatable. Phillips astutely observes that Haeckel’s continuity with Romantic tradition remains much disputed. More specifically, Haeckel used Romantic terminology and possessed a keen aesthetic sensibility, even as he dispensed with the teleological implications of terms such as “type” and “perfection.”
16 Frederick Gregory, Nature Lost?: Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008).
17 Gregory, Nature Lost? 3, 16. For the full economic-determinist treatment see Ueli Hasler, Beherrschte Natur: Die Anpassung der Theologie an die bürgerliche Naturauffassung im 19. Jahrhundert (Bern: Peter Lang, 1982).
18 Hasler, Beherrschte Nature, 7.
19 Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, 142–143. A similar (German) work with broader parameters: Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: Bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit 1848–1914, 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018).
20 Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, 75–99.
21 Peter E. Gordon, “The Idea of Secularisation in Intellectual History,” in A Companion to Intellectual History, eds. R. Whatmore and B. Young (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 244.
22 See, for example, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Philologie und Schulreform: Festrede im Namen der Georg-Augusts-Universität (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1892); Adolf von Harnack, Die Notwendigkeit der Erhaltung des alten Gymnasiums in der modernen Zeit (Berlin: Weidmann, 1905). Both men feared that the rise of modern history and STEM would correlate with the fall of the classics and of the Gymnasium itself.
23 One may sympathize with the extent to which Haeckel troubled many of his contemporaries without resorting to the overly broad, unnuanced claims of Richard Weikart and Daniel Gasman. See Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Daniel Gasman, Haeckel's Monism and the Birth of Fascist Ideology (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2008).
24 Ernst Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1900), 8.
25 Ibid., 349.
26 Ibid., 290. Comte held that society first went through “theological” and “metaphysical” phases, respectively, before arriving at a “positive stage” in which speculation succumbed to empiricism.
27 Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, 288–291.
28 Ibid., 336–338. See also Todd H. Weir, Secularism and Religion in Nineteenth-century Germany: The Rise of the Fourth Confession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 3, 86, 92, 192–195, 233, 265–266. Haeckel was a key—if not the key—participant in the rise of this secularist “fourth confession,” an entity which, like the individual Haeckel, declared independence from other, more traditional “confessions” while retaining many of the same accoutrements.
29 Bernhard Kleeberg, “Moral Facts and Scientific Fiction: 19th Century Theological Reactions to Darwinism in Germany,” in the London School of Economics and Political Science’s Working Papers on the Nature of Evidence: How Well Do ‘Facts’ Travel?, no. 04/05, published online at http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/22544/: 6–7. This paper, a draft of a presentation Kleeberg held at a 2005 conference on “Biblical Hermeneutics and the Study of Nature,” surveys some—but by no means all—of the same figures who feature in the present article, but as a matter of course, it focuses heavily on epistemological and hermeneutical problems. It is, in a word (or two), more specialized and philosophically-oriented than this present survey of responses to Darwinism in nineteenth-century Germany. That is, Kleeberg’s piece offers a valuable historiographical contribution but ultimately differs from my work in its aims and general orientation.
30 Haeckel, The Riddle of the Universe, 336, 350–351.
31 Haeckel quoted in James C. Albisetti, Secondary School Reform in Imperial Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 148. See also Ernst Haeckel, “Real Gymnasium und Formal-Gymnasien,” Zeitschrift für mathematischen und naturwissenschaftlichen Unterrichts 17 (1887).
32 Gregory, Nature Lost? 49.
33 Otto Zöckler, “Über Schöpfungsgeschichte und Naturwissenschaft,” in Neun apologetsiche Vorträge über einige wichtige Fragen und Wahrheiten des Christenthums (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1869), 50.
34 Ibid., 34–35.
35 Ibid., 36.
36 Ibid., 29.
37 Ibid., 38.
38 “Wissenschaft,” sometimes translated as “science,” often signifies nothing more than an organized body of scholarly knowledge in a particular discipline.
39 David F. Strauss, Der alte und der neue Glaube (Bonn: Verlag von Emil Strauß, 1875), 32.
40 Gregory, Nature Lost? 110; Erik Linstrum, “Strauss’s ‘Life of Jesus’: Publication and the Politics of the German Public Sphere,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71:4 (2010), 614.
41 David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 285.
42 Wasmann, Der Kampf um das Entwicklungsproblem, 49.
43 Ibid., 27.
44 Wasmann, Der Kampf um das Entwicklungsproblem, 30. For a more detailed, accessible description of Wasmann’s amical selection, see A.J. Lustig, “Erich Wasmann, Ernst Haeckel, and the Limits of Science,” Theory in Biosciences 121 (2002), 252–259.
45 A.J. Lustig, “Ants and the Nature of Nature in Auguste Forel, Erich Wasmann, and William Morton Wheeler,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds. Fernando Vidal and Lorraine Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 294.
46 Wasmann, Der Kampf um das Entwicklungsproblem, 32.
47 Ibid., 6.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 143.
50 For a more comprehensive description of the founding of the Keplerbund, see Ulrich Dankmeier, “‘Naturwissenschaft und Christentum im Konflikt:’ Die Konstruktion konkurrierender Weltanschauungen unter dem Einfluss des naturwissenschaftlichen Paradigmas durch den Deutschen Monistenbund und den Keplerbund am Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts” (doctoral dissertation, Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität zu Frankfurt am Main, 2007), 317–340.
51 Dankmeier, “Naturwissenschaft und Christentum in Konflikt,” 14.
52 Sander Gliboff, H. G. Bronn, Ernst Haeckel, and the Origins of German Darwinism: A Study in Translation and Transformation (Cambride: MIT Press, 2008), 203.
53 Eberhard Dennert, Vom Sterbelager des Darwinismus: Ein Bericht (Stuttgart: Max Kielmann, 1903).
54 Dennert, Vom Sterbelager des Darwinismus, 8.
55 Kelly, The Descent of Darwin, 98.
56 Dennert, Vom Sterbelager des Darwinismus, 31, 73.
57 Ibid., 80.
58 Ibid., 83.
59 Johannes Reinke, Kritik der Abstammungslehre (Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1920), 1.
60 Ibid., 7.
61 Ibid., 45.
62 Ibid., 30.
63 Ibid., 44.
64 Ibid., 128 (emphasis mine).
65 Ibid., 118–119.
66 Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 106. Hughes made the connection between Mach and Vaihinger (as well as Henri Poincaré) clear and used the quoted phrase to succinctly describe their thought.
67 Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 114.
68 Johannes Reinke, Das dynamische Weltbild: Physik und Biologie (Leipzig: Barth, 1926), 157; Karl Viëtor, Goethe the Thinker (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950), 78.
69 Hughes, Consciousness and Society, 122.
70 There was no shortage of innovative thinkers in the Catholic world, but they were largely marginalized and suppressed as a result of the “resounding” victories of Orthodoxy, ultramontanism, and papal antimodernism in the latter half of the nineteenth century. See Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century, 296–297. Protestant state-builders undoubtedly worked to propagate such a reputation vis-à-vis “backward” Catholics. See Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 20.
71 Jakob Frohschammer, Das Christenthum und die moderne Wissenschaft (Vienna: Tendler & Co., 1868).
72 Ibid., 1, 5–7.
73 Ibid., 8.
74 Ibid., 3.
75 Ibid., 18–19.
76 Ibid., 379.
77 Ibid., 528–531, 540.
78 Ibid., 532.
79 Ibid., 534–535.
80 Ibid., 231–232.
81 Frohschammer, Das Christenthum, 415.
82 Thomas Albert Howard, The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 83–84.
83 Ibid., 417.
84 See Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 20:
Rather than seeing the Kulturkampf exclusively as a church-state affair, it might also be instructive to consider it as part of the general trajectory of German nation-building, as an attempt to consolidate German national culture, to create—by force of state coercion—a cultural unity, a coherent nation, across confessional lines. The official Kulturkampf … was a strategy of nation-building … centered on an attempt to create a common high culture in which national values, largely synonymous with those of enlightened Protestantism, would be shared.
85 Simon Fisher, Revelatory Positivism? Barth’s Earliest Theology and the Marburg School (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 133.
86 Wilhelm Herrmann, Die Religion im Verhältnis zum Welterkennen und zur Sittlichkeit: Eine Grundlegung der systematischen Theologie (Halle: Niemeyer, 1879).
87 Ibid., 449–450.
88 Ibid., 16.
89 Ibid., 17.
90 Ibid., iii.
91 Ibid., 47.
92 Ibid., 61.
93 Ibid., 63, 67.
94 Ibid., 256.
95 Ibid., 257.
96 Ibid., 299.
97 Rudolf Schmid, The Scientific Creed of a Theologian, trans. J.W. Stoughton (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1906).
98 Ibid., ix.
99 Ibid., xiii, xxi.
100 Ibid., xxi–xxii.
101 Ibid., 170.
102 Ibid., 16–17.
103 Ibid., 29, 51.
104 Ibid., 107.
105 Ibid., 134–137, 158, 162–164.
106 Ibid., 93. Darwin quoted in ibid., 117.
107 Schmid, The Scientific Creed, 176.
108 Here again, for a general biography one should consult Finkelstein, Emil Du Bois-Reymond; see also Beiser, After Hegel, 97–103: “Rather than extolling the powers of natural science, Du Bois-Reymond stressed its limits … .[He] declared that there are two insurmountable limits of to all scientific knowledge: the nature of matter, and the connection between consciousness and the brain” (97–98). Du Bois-Reymond is most famous for his usage of the Latin phrase “ignorabimus,” or “we will not know,” in reference to these “limits.”
109 Their appraisals of this “straight line” are, of course, utterly opposed. See also Liam Jerrold Fraser, Atheism, Fundamentalism and the Protestant Reformation: Uncovering the Secret Sympathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
110 Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007); Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (New York: Riverhead Books, 2016).
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Robert Lynn Powers
Robert L. Powers is currently an ABD Ph.D. student in the history department at Louisiana State University. Although the particular subject of his dissertation concerns the history of the humanities and sciences at the University of Berlin in the Weimar period, his wide-ranging interests include the intellectual and social histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe and America more generally.