ideal politician explicitly based himself on Plato, and he is for the republic . . . he is the true and actual originator of German socialism.”21
Karl Vorländer (1860–1928), an outstanding representative of the neo-Kantian movement, attempted to combine Marxism and ethics by means of Kant’s philosophy of ethics and epistemology in order to support the neo-Kantian socialism that Cohen represented. According to Vorländer, socialism must not marginalize an epistemological-critical foundation and ethical enlargement, the aspect lacking in Marxism.22 In 1921 Vorländer was convinced that he would fight for a synthesis between Marx and Kant. In his interim report on Die neukantische Bewegung im Sozialismus, he said that one cannot connect socialism historically with Kant: “I emphasize explicitly that the Königsberg Philosopher has not played a role of ‘originator of socialism’ historically, and that the development of the socialism in contrast has run into ‘under completely other philosophical auspices’. What is at stake is only the possibility of methodical, systematical, logical connection.”23 In Vorländer’s view, there would be no contradiction between Kant and Marx; thus Kantian philosophy of morality could be integrated into Marxism without violating the latter’s basic assumption. For Vorländer, historical materialism is understood to define consciousness rather than to become an economic determinism that produces social and cultural consciousness. Consequently there is an interaction between the base and the superstructure in which human will plays an important role.
According to Marquardt, in Vorländer’s book The New Kantian Movement in Socialism (Die neukantische Bewegung im Sozialismus), Barth underlined the following sentence: “‘What is at stake is not whether Kant possibly already has had the socialistic idea, but whether his ethics can be really the point of departure to a socialistic ethics.’”24 However, the neo-Kantian way to socialism has been characterized by its idealistic ethical revisionism, in contrast to scientific socialism in a Marxist sense. All in all, during his student period between Berlin and Marburg, Barth’s approach to socialism is located between Marxist elements in Sombart and the neo-Kantian ethical socialism in Cohen and Vorländer.
In April 1907 Barth again enrolled in the University of Berne. However, Fritz Barth became tired of his son’s wild goings-on and sent his son off to Adolf Schlatter in Tübingen. Dismayed at Schlatter, Barth made acquaintance with Christoph Blumhardt for the first time on December 27, 1907, and then frequently visited him in Bad Boll, “though my eyes were not yet fully open.”25 With his father’s final consent, Barth studied under Herrmann and Adolf Julicher in Marburg, and together with Rudolf Bultmann later assisted Martin Rade (1857–1940) editing Die christliche Welt in 1908. At the Aarau Student Conference before the beginning of the semester at Marburg, Barth had already been able to hear Herrmann’s lecture (“God’s Revelation to Us”) and Ragaz, whose theme was that God was meeting us today in socialism. Incidentally, it was in Marburg where Barth also renewed his acquaintance with Eduard Thurneysen, his lifelong friend from Zofingia. During his stay at Marburg, Herrmann became the great theologian for Barth. In acclaiming his greatness, Barth said, “I soaked Herrmann in through all my pores.”26
Johann Wilhelm Herrmann
What underlines Herrmann’s lifelong concern is the possibility of securing Christian faith from a metaphysical or scientific knowledge of the world. Herrmann distinguished himself from the old liberalism and also from all orthodoxies and all positivistic theology. Herrmann became the leading theologian among the faculty at Marburg (1879–1917) and was regarded as one of the most important systematic theologians of his time. His teaching gained an international reputation by including not only such students as Barth and Bultmann but also American students in pre–World War I Germany.27 As Barth recalled,
The air of freedom blew through his auditorium. It was certainly not by chance that for decades every semester a small caravan from Switzerland made the pilgrimage to Marburg and felt especially at home there. Our rebellious minds, repudiating all authority, found satisfaction there. We listened gladly when traditionalism on the right, rationalism on the left, mysticism in the rear were thrown to the refuse dump, and when finally ‘positive and liberal dogmatics’ were together hurled into the same pit.28
In his essay “Why Does our Faith Need Historical Facts?” (1844),29 Herrmann strove to answer the problem of the relation of faith to history with concentration on the inner life of Jesus, which is the essence of religion for Herrmann. It is the inner life of Jesus on which faith is grounded as historical fact. He banned every trace of metaphysics from theology. His project for the exclusion of metaphysics from theology was not meant to denounce science and morality as unnecessary life-expressions. Rather ethical claims held a special place for him in relation to religion. For Hermann, historically grounded theology meant being grounded in the inner life of Jesus as a historical fact. Historically grounded theology in Troeltsch’s sense is also grounded in the communion of the Christian with God, who comes about in history. Besides, Schleiermacher’s Speeches had a deep influence on Herrmann and helped to improve his mature understanding of religious experience.
Herrmann’s deep interest in securing the independence of religion from science and ethics moved him back from Ritschl toward the direction of Schleiermacher. In Barth’s recollection, Hermann praised Schleiermacher’s Speeches as “the most important pieces of writing to have appeared before the public since the closing of the canon of the New Testament.”30
Herrmann’s way to religion is first of all to distinguish religious knowing from all other forms of scientific knowledge. According to Herrmann, God is transcendent and supramundane. Therefore, God is not known through the way science knows the world. In fact, God lies beyond all of what science can prove and have access to. The self-revelation of God offers the basis for the rise of religion; religion lives from revelation. That being the case, the scientific method cannot prove God’s reality. Science and philosophy cannot touch the reality of God. The object of Christian faith does not lie within the realm of scientific knowledge of the world. The human situation is too easily marginalized and ignored in Cohen and Natorp. True religion is neither produced by the moral will (Kant), nor identical with it (Cohen). Besides, religion is not the objectless emotion that accompanies the moral will (Natorp). “True religion, which ‘carries in itself the energy of the moral purpose’ . . . has also its own root and its own life.”31
In the concluding sentence of Die Metaphysik, Herrmann stated: “When we seek to do theological work, we do not clutch at the goals of metaphysics.”32 However, Herrmann’s concepts of religion and revelation are not in opposition to the anti-Christian position of modern philosophy and of natural and historical science. “The real enemy’s position is on the right, within Christian theology itself.”33
Our knowledge of God becomes possible only based on the fact that God has come to us in history. Independent of nature or natural science, Christian faith stands on its own foundation because religion lives from revelation alone. The self-revelation of God on which religion is based is the miracle that occurs beyond the natural and against nature. Schleiermacher’s definition of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence in his Glaubenslehre stands under a critical reservation because, for Herrmann, religion is not identical with feeling without reservation. Religion is an ability given by God in which humans
