5. David Strauss. David Strauss came to Berlin from
Tübingen in 1831 in order to study under Hegel, who
died, however, when Strauss had been able to hear only
a few lectures. Strauss had studied biblical scholarship
and church history under F. C. Baur at Tübingen, and
during his first years at Berlin he acquired a knowledge
of Hegel's philosophy of history and went to lectures
by Schleiermacher, Michelet, and Philipp Marheineke,
a theologian of Hegelian views who preached at
Hegel's funeral and edited his Lectures on the Philoso-
phy of Religion. In 1832 Strauss reviewed in the Jahr-
bücher Karl Rosenkranz's Encyclopädie der theolo-
gischen Wissenschaften (Bonn, 1832), and maintained
that Rosenkranz was wrong to argue that the absolute
activity of God was bound to manifest itself in miracles
when exercised in the human sphere. He also thought
that some of Rosenkranz's interpretations of Hegel
“went straight over into mysticism.” His Leben Jesu
(Tübingen, I [1835]; II [1836]) is a detailed examination
of the Gospel narratives within a Hegelian framework
of ideas. The central theme is that the facts of the birth,
career, and death of Jesus were occasions around which
myths were formed which gave expression to the long-
ings and aspirations of the early Christian community.
The myths were not deliberately invented, but devel-
oped because of the expectations of a Messiah learned
from the Old Testament. But Strauss emphasizes that
the central myths of Christianity represent important
truths that are not affected by the rejection of false
historical beliefs. In the Preface he writes: “The super-
natural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection
and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts
may be cast upon their reality as historical facts,” and
at the end of the book, after summarizing Hegel's in-
terpretation of Christian doctrine, he says that Chris-
tian clergy should continue “to adhere to the forms of
the popular conceptions” but should take every oppor-
tunity “to exhibit their spiritual significance.” In gen-
eral, this significance is that “it is humanity that dies,
rises and ascends to heaven.... by the kindling in him
of the idea of humanity, the individual man participates
in the divinely human life of the species.” Strauss
differs from Hegel in rejecting mysticism and in regard-
ing the human race rather than the Church as the
body in which Christ continues to live.
Strauss's justifications in the controversy that ensued
are contained in his Streitschriften zur Verteidigung
meiner Schrift über das Leben Jesu (Tübingen, 1838;
new ed., 1841). Strauss remarks that Hegel was un-
happy about historical criticism because, like Goethe,
he was unwilling for great heroes to be depreciated.
But Strauss shows that his account of the dwelling of
the Holy Spirit in the Church is the same as Hegel's.
Strauss says, too, that whereas Fichte was a revolu-
tionary philosopher, Hegel was the philosopher of the
Restoration—“Hegel's term objective mind' describes
the transformation.” Fichte emphasized the struggle
with things as they are, Hegel the mind that is already
in them. It is here that Strauss began the practice of
characterizing religious and philosophical outlooks in
terms of politics. Göschel, he says, was on the Right,
and he himself on the Left, even though he is not
welcome there. A new note is struck when he writes:
“... the victory which man achieves over the natural
forces within him by education and self-mastery, and
over the natural forces outside him by inventions and
machines, is of more value than controlling nature by
the word of a thaumaturge” (1841 ed., III, 116). Here
there is the suggestion that moral control and mastery
over nature through science and industry is an im-
proved substitute for religion.
