Two points, which are at once gateways and ends, determine and characterize, according to Overbeck, the being of man and of humanity. With the term ‘Super-History’ (Urgeschichte) or ‘creation-history’, he designates the one; with the term ‘death’, the other. Out of the supra-temporal, unknowable, inconceivable super-history which is composed wholly of beginnings, in which the boundaries dividing the individual from the whole are still fluid, we have come. To the single, inconceivably important moment of death in which our life enters the sphere of the unknown where, throughout our life-time, exists all which is beyond the world known to us, we go (pp. 20–1, 297). We have perhaps looked too deeply into the cause of things, we know too much about all things, even about those most hidden and unattainable, about the things of which we can actually know nothing at all, the last things. ‘We cannot escape this knowledge and we must live with it’ (pp. 293, 300).
What lies between these two ends, these ‘last things’, is the world, our world, the comprehensible world which has been given us. Whatever is or can be ‘historical’ is by its very nature (eo ipso) part of this world. For ‘historical’ means ‘subject to time’ (p. 242). And whatever is subject to time is limited, is relative, and is made manifest as world by the ‘last things’ of which we are now cognizant, whether we will or not. ‘It is in no way possible to concede to the Pharisees a kingdom of God already appearing among them, wholly on this side of the end’ (on Luke 17:20–1, p. 47). Frankly, in order to comprehend this world, so far as that is our aim, we do better not to step out of it; we should avoid even ‘the slightest breath of theology’ (p. 5), and as successors of the Rationalists, remain, with the resolute prudence of the true realist (p. xxviii), within its boundaries, the boundaries of humanity (p. 241).
If we cannot defend the things of this world and if none of the relationships in which we walk the earth can withstand the criticism which reduces the whole to relativity, we can still love them and we need take the criticism no more seriously than it deserves (pp. 29, 248). But this (fractured!) love for the things of this world does not originate in religion; it rests, even the smallest fraction of it, on our own action. Its ‘natural basis can of course be designated by the term God by anyone who knows what he is talking about’ (p. 249). The ‘capacity for ecstasy’ is by no means disregarded as ‘the source of the power of culture’ (p. xxviii) by the Rationalists with whom Oberbeck liked to align himself, as a sort of anonymous upstart, beside Kant, Goethe, and Lichtenberg (p. 136).
If the concept of death marks the limit of human knowledge, so it must also signify its transcendental origin. It can ‘serve us as an irresistible broom for sweeping out all the lies and shams that plague our earthly life’. If the command to remember death (memento mori) when rightly understood affects our life for good (p. 297), then we must ascribe to it a peculiarly creative and fruitful meaning. ‘Death creates life as well as destroying it’ (p. 247). Without a ‘tiny drop of ecstasy’ (p. 182), rationalism would not be the living, all-embracing principle that Overbeck understands it to be. For it happens that just this ‘tiny drop’ is the source of the stream. The two great unknowns, super-history and death, are exactly the hinges on which the ‘sceptical’ world-view hangs! ‘We men really go forward only when we launch ourselves from time to time into the air and we live our lives under conditions which do not permit us to shirk that experience’ (p. 77). ‘The man who actually and resolutely depends upon himself in this world, must have the courage to depend upon nothing’ (p. 286).
But such a man must reckon seriously with this ‘nothing’, and the tiny drop of ecstasy must be genuine; it must not be confused with mysticism, romanticism, and pietism—although ‘Pietism is for me the only form of Christianity under which a personal relation to Christianity would be possible for me’ (p. 179). For ‘a human individual can never expect to discover in himself a substitute for God.… Self-surrender is no sure road to God, but the (mystic-romantic-pietistic!) idea of man’s ever finding God in himself is still more hopeless’ (p. 286).
‘The essential quality in Overbeck was not intellectual but elemental. He was constantly “out of bounds”; and this was not a matter of stepping across a line in some small area; it was an impressive and genuine advance, a violent invasion. In his criticism, the jagged ledges of bared thought leave free the vista of the hidden valley below, green in the springtime.’ So Bernoulli says felicitously (p. xix); but unfortunately he somewhat obscures this important insight by the psychological trappings with which he decorates it as a sort of ideological antidote.
I myself would understand Overbeck’s fundamental doctrine of super-history and death with the deep sense of the dialectic of creation and redemption which is there expressed (e.g. pp. 29–31, 248 f.), as a transcendence of all ‘ideology’; and I would count the writer, with Socrates and Plato, among those ‘heathen proclaimers of the resurrection’ of whom it is said, ‘I have not found such faith, no not in Israel.’
From the unbelievably narrow and solid basis of this critical foundation are to be understood the three polemic discussions which in their manifold convolutions constitute the major content of the book. The first deals with the existence of Christianity in history; the second with the nature of modern Christianity; the third with the Christian-ness of all theology, especially of the theology of the present day. Overbeck’s unanswered question unfolds into several questions.
II
On the position of Christianity in history and its various aspects much has been said in the last decades. If I am not mistaken, Troeltsch’s thesis of the temporary social significance of the church and his dismal picture of the coming ice ages in which this social significance would be ended, constituted the last important stage which this discussion reached before the war. I listened to him, in Aarau in 1910, with the dark foreboding that it had become impossible to advance any farther in the dead-end street where we were strolling in relative comfort. But wholly different from the questions which evoked such answers is the question of whether there can possibly be any talk at all of a position of the church in history or of its historical aspects.
Does Christianity have the possibility of an historical development? That is, can it undergo the continuance, the becoming and perishing, the youth and old age, the degeneration and progress which are temporal characteristics? Does it in itself give evidence of a will to become an historical entity? Is it possible for a historian as such to do justice to Christianity? Or, to put the question from the world’s standpoint, can Christianity claim real significance as an historical entity? Is it possible for a historian to treat Christianity apart from culture?
Overbeck denies such a possibility categorically. Inflexibly he confronts us with the choice: If Christianity, then not history; if history, then not Christianity. ‘Historic Christianity—that is Christianity subjected to time—is an absurdity’ (p. 242). History is precisely the basis on which Christianity can not be established; for ‘neither Christ himself nor the faith which he found among his disciples has ever had any historical existence at all under the name of Christianity’ (pp. 9–10). ‘The first Christians are no proper subject for human historical writing’ (p. xxi). ‘History is an abyss into which Christianity has been thrown wholly against its will’ (p. 7). ‘From the a-priori of our concept of time, it follows that Christianity as a phenomenon of history has become indefensible’ (p. 244).
‘The best school for learning to doubt the existence of God as ruler of the world is church history, if it be granted that that is the history of the religion, Christianity, which was established by God in the world and if it be assumed that God has guided its history. Obviously he has done nothing of the kind. There is nothing miraculous in church history. To judge from it, Christianity seems as completely abandoned to the world as anything else which exists there’ (pp. 265–66). ‘Church history teaches that Christianity has been incapable of extricating itself from the effect of a single human weakness—just as has the supposed divine guidance of its destiny. Not one horror of history, not one horror among all the horrible experiences which history includes, is lacking in the experiences of church history’ (p. 19). ‘So far as Christianity in the area of its historical life has not been spared