Founding the Fathers. Elizabeth A. Clark
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on Kant, Hegel, Schelling, and Pantheism impressed American colleagues.9 Indeed, the charge to Smith at his inauguration as Professor of Theology at Union explicitly cautioned him against displaying any favor to Skepticism, Radicalism, Romanism, Materialism, and Pantheism.10
In Smith’s view, modern Infidelity—covering both skepticism and unbelief—assumed three forms: in England, Rationalism; in France, Atheism; and in Germany, Pantheism. The subtle and persuasive “weapons” and “arts” of Infidelity, especially in its German guise, must be studied carefully by Christians who wish to mount a challenge:11 mere denunciation, “the indiscriminate censure of all that is German,” will not suffice.12 Labeling philosophies “German and transcendental” does not defeat them. Challengers must, Smith insisted, demonstrate that the ideas are “radically unsound” and “essentially unphilosophical.”13
Smith believed that Christianity in Germany was facing its “fiercest assault”: Pantheism had promoted “Revolutionary democratic opinions, and foul-mouthed blasphemy.”14 He worried that “applauded schemes of infidelity … assume that the age of theology is past.… They give what they call a philosophical sense to the Christian doctrines, turning realities into fictions, and destroying all in Christianity that has been the source of its life and power.”15
Ancient methods of apologetics, Smith insisted, were too feeble to answer modern philosophical problems. Students must not imagine that Butler’s Analogy—the text used in courses on Christian apologetics—could meet “the questions raised by Hegel and Bauer, by Darwin and Spencer.”16 Nor is the ancient orthodox Trinitarianism that condemned Arianism, Sabellianism, and tritheism sufficient to demolish the “humanitarian view” associated with Pantheism. Although Christianity is stronger now than ever, Smith claimed, its “assailants” are likewise more powerful.17
The conflict with Pantheism remained Smith’s special concern.18 Pantheism he defined as “that modification of religious belief, or philosophical speculation, which affirms that God is all; ‘all’ being here taken as the unity, which underlies, and is expressed in, individual, multiple existences.” Pantheism claims that there is “but one substance, or spirit, in the universe, which alone has real and permanent being.”19 Hegelian philosophy was the central culprit.20 Smith cited Hegel’s claims that the highest problems of philosophy and theology are the same; that his system was merely biblical theology in a new guise; that to know God—“Absolute Spirit”—is to know Hegelian philosophy. Pantheism as the “absolute philosophy,” Smith objected, asserts that it contains the truth of Christianity—but all other truth as well.21
Despite Smith’s sometimes more generous reading of Hegel, he registered many criticisms of Hegel’s system. First, it has no true doctrine of creation. “Negation,” a moment in the dialectic, is not a productive force. It is incapable of showing how matter came to be. The creation of the “real world,” Smith insisted, requires “power-force.” Pantheism teaches emanation, not creation.22
Second, Hegel discounts the uniqueness of Christianity and the Christian understanding of deity. For Hegel, Smith charged, Christianity becomes the mere “flower” that is developed out of all religions, not “a new and divine and supernatural order of things.” Pantheism concedes that Christianity is true only if it is taken philosophically. God is accorded no existence apart from the world, finding his “consciousness” only in man.23 The Incarnation is not uniquely located in Jesus, but in the “generic unison of divinity and humanity, found in the race as a whole,” while the Trinity is the “rational process” of God’s development.24 “It is atheism itself,” Smith claimed, “for it virtually denies the being, the power, the providence of God.”25 Is God just “another name for the Absolute Unknown?”26 As a system, he concluded, Pantheism is complete—and dangerous.27
Pantheism’s consequences for ethics likewise troubled Smith. On the theoretical level, he claimed, it denies human freedom (“because all is development”), individual immortality (because only the race survives), and the reality of sin. On the practical level, Pantheism, in the company of materialistic and socialistic philosophy, teaches that this present life and the pursuit of happiness is all. Allegedly the “most ideal of systems,” Pantheism produces sensual men. In practice, it is a new form of Epicureanism. It encourages humans to aim for a “high social state,” rather than to concede that earthly life is simply “the portal to another world.”28 Elsewhere, Smith more generously admitted that some “infidels” are moral and embrace “natural religion”—without acknowledging its source in the Bible, as they should.29
Materialism, that is, Positivism, was also of grave concern to Smith.30 In 1868, Union sponsored James McCosh’s (subsequently published) Ely Lectures on “Christianity and Positivism.”31 Smith had warned students and readers against Materialism (holding that “mind is a modification of matter”32) even before McCosh’s lectures roused greater interest. As a philosophical theory, Smith claimed, Materialism is atheistic in its practical results. Identified with “the Compte [sic] school,” Materialism “asserts that all facts, events, and laws can be ultimately explained by matter and its modifications.” Spirit, in this view, is merely a “mode of matter.” The soul is conceived as a material entity that “comes and goes with the body.” For Materialists, Smith charged, sensation alone is the source of knowledge; the moral law, only a modification of natural phenomena; and God, simply the name for the ultimate unconscious power of nature.33
Against these Materialist assumptions, Smith armed his students with Idealist rebuttals. Matter, the substratum of all phenomena, he told them, is “itself an idea of the mind,” the latter being the productive “powerforce” of creation. Materialism fails in that it cannot explain the phenomenon of life, of “living organism.” Christians, by contrast, reject the notion that the human soul and mind are simply modifications of matter.34
George Fisher of Yale likewise warned students and readers against a Pantheism that “hypostatizes” the laws of nature “as if they were a selfactive being” and resolves history into “the movement of a great machine.”35 Pantheism, he charged, obviates the notion of a personal God. It denies humanity’s distinctiveness (resolving “personal being into a … transient phase of an impersonal essence”) and the notion of mind as “a separate, substantial, undivided entity.” Pantheists and atheistic Rationalists rashly claim that they alone own science, assuming that the “supernatural is unhistorical.”36 Moreover, Pantheism undermines morality by dissolving the “absolute antithesis between good and evil,” “the bonds of obligation.”37 Fisher cautioned his audience against trying “to evolve the Christian religion out of consciousness,” as do German Pantheists: Christianity’s distinctive essence cannot be identified with “a process of thought.”38
Philosophical Materialism had a stormy history at Yale. In the 1870s, President Noah Porter protested Professor William Graham Sumner’s teaching of Herbert Spencer and Comte; he specifically objected to Sumner’s use of Spencer’s Study of Sociology as a textbook.39 Although Sumner was an ordained Episcopal priest, he deemed Spencer’s book, despite its religious implications, the best available for teaching the new subject of sociology. The controversy escalated in the public press and became a major moment in the struggle for professorial freedom.40 Fisher apparently sided with the conservative Yale President. The best refutation of Materialism (“a gloomy and unnatural creed”), Fisher advised, simply attends to “the agency of mind” and registers human moral feelings of compassion, selfforgetfulness, obligation, conscience, guilt, and remorse, which, he claimed, cannot be accounted for on Materialist grounds.41 If Materialism were to prevail, then (as with Pantheism) sensual appetite and “earthly passions” could “gain an undisputed ascendancy, and overturn at last the social fabric.” Fisher charged that Comte, an “avowed Atheist,” deems religion a delusion stemming from humanity’s “childhood,” a faltering, primitive attempt to understand nature. Comte thus overlooks the deep power that religion