Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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John E. Toews
a national political culture. What meaning would join the newly eman-
cipated individuals of civil society into a common identity; what norms
would regulate their actions? The role and authority of the established
confessional churches in fulfilling this function of providing meanings and
norms for social interaction were radically altered by the loss of traditional
corporate status, property and thus autonomy (especially in Catholic con-
tinental states), by the confessional pluralism inherent in liberal reforms
(freedom of thought, expression and association), and by the growing com-
petition of aesthetic and scientific (‘secular’) ideologies that increasingly
made bids for hegemony in the sphere of ‘spiritual’ authority and its cultural
institutions.
These changes could not be intellectually contained or controlled by
the rehabilitation and repetition of conventional, inherited discourses
about church–state relations. The old arguments concerning the rela-
tions between spiritual and temporal powers were transformed by the
infusion of dynamic intellectual energies and complicating tensions from
new experiences and from the new consciousness of personal, commu-
nal and ontological identity that had risen to public prominence during
the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. ‘Church’ and ‘state’ as well as
their relations with each other were redefined in the conceptual frames
of the individual self as a dynamically evolving, embodied agency or
‘subject’, of community as ‘inner’ (subjective) identification with a sys-
tem of meanings and norms shaped into the historical particularity of
a cultural totality by language and tradition, and of faith as an experi-
ence of the sublime or abyssal ground of individual existence and cul-
tural identity. In clarifying and complicating ways, arguments about the
relations between church and state organised the public implications of
post-revolutionary conceptions of subjective autonomy and communal
being.
This chapter will sketch out four historical and conceptual ‘moments’ in
the nineteenth-century attempt by West European thinkers to reimagine
the tensions, reciprocal relations and boundaries between state and church
as objectifications of ‘inner’ relations within the historically structured,
inwardly differentiated ‘totality’ of human existence. The central theoretical
question was not one of renegotiating boundaries between two existing
institutional entities within a consensually validated world, but of achieving
consensus and authorisation for the constitution of a world in which those
entities would emerge with new identities.
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Church and state
1 Romantic reframing: church and state as expressive polarities
In the cluster of influential, canonised texts that marked the emergence of
the various romantic movements in Western Europe around 1800,specific
theorising about the relations between church and state played a subor-
dinate, almost peripheral role. At the same time, the early writings of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth and Robert Southey, Ren
´
e
de Chateaubriand, Joseph de Maistre and Benjamin Constant, Friedrich
von Hardenberg (Novalis), Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schlegel,
F. W. J. Schelling, Friedrich H
¨
olderlin and G. W. F. Hegel gave shape to con-
ceptions of self, culture and religious experience that would set the terms for
the nineteenth-century debate. Church and state appeared in these writings
as expressive rather than constituent forms, as the contingent appearances of
the substance of personal and collective human experience, as the external
‘letters’ (either expressive articulations or repressive fetters) of the inner,
immanent ‘spirit’ of individual and associative life. Four interrelated con-
cepts or beliefs defined the cultural and ideological map constructed by the
early romantic texts.
Most striking, exhilarating and disturbing was the romantic reconstruc-
tion of essential selfhood or personal identity as radical autonomy, as creative
subjective agency engaged in an ‘infinite’ process of self-fashioning through
the organisation and sublimation of its natural ground in the body and its
desires and through the subjective appropriation and shaping of its par-
ticular socio-cultural, historical conditions. The model for autonomy in
this romantic conception was not so much the inherited liberal notion of
individual rights and interests guaranteed by universal laws of nature or
reason, or the notion, most commonly attributed to Rousseau or Kant, of
a self-legislating moral subject constructing the public rules governing its
own behaviour, but the freedom of the poet constructing self and world as
works of his creative imagination. Michel Foucault has aptly summarised
the problematic tensions in this construction of selfhood in terms of the
contradictions of the ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’ of finite subjectiv-
ity (Foucault 1971,pp.312–43). On the one hand, the self was understood
as ‘essentially’ embodied and historical, as always specifically and ‘positively’
fashioned by the anonymous structures of language and culture. On the
other hand, the self was posited as the dynamic creative agency, the ‘infi-
nite’ productive power for which any particular ‘positive’ identities were
simply possible embodiments or expressions. In their dynamic element,
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the empirical embodiments of self-identity were like specific works of the
poetic imagination, open to acts of reflective transcendence and constant
transformation. They revealed, in their very particularity, the possibility of
being otherwise.
1
What kind of associative life or ‘community’ could constitute an appro-
priate ‘home’ for this romantic subject? Romantic politics was above all a
cultural politics, a politics of meaning in which processes and institutions of
subjective identification and mutual recognition superseded, and sometimes
all but displaced, processes and institutions for the protection of individual
rights and the regulated pursuit of individual interests. It was in the com-
municative interaction of social relations that the self as subject actualised
its potentialities, produced itself as a specific concrete identity for others,
and recognised this identity as an object of reflective transcendence through
the eyes and actions of others. The medium for this reciprocal interactive
sociability of a diversity of subjects was language, broadly defined in terms
of the symbol systems that allowed individuals to give meaningful shape
to their subjectivity and communicate with others. The conditions for
membership in such cultural communities of individuated subjects or ‘indi-
vidualities’ included general access to the means of self-objectification and
communication and freedom of interaction. In this sense the cultural ‘state’
or community of meaning of early romantic ideology assumed both the
emancipatory liberal and inclusive populist/democratic/nationalist dimen-
sions of the transformations of the revolutionary era. Even romantic theories
that looked to the past for models of authentic community were less con-
servative attempts to sustain a living tradition than therapeutic responses to
the peculiar dilemmas of post-revolutionary homelessness.
Early romantic ideas of community were marked by the assertion that
recognition of diversity, difference or subjective individuality was the con-
dition for the reciprocal bonding of an ‘organic’ totality. At the same time,
the mutual recognition of diverse individualities was premised on the exis-
tence of diverse collective subjects, cultural ‘selves’ that ultimately defined
the boundaries of the cultural organism. After 1800 such cultural subjects
tended to become identified with cultural ‘peoples’ or ‘nationalities’, but
at the outset and in important ways in later decades as well, the collective
subject of ‘Europe’ or ‘Christendom’ constituted an important element in
1 The contradictions of romantic subjectivity in the early works of Wordsworth, Chateaubriand,
Friedrich Schlegel and Schleiermacher are analysed, psychologised and historically contextualised in
Izenberg 1992.
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Church and state
romantic cultural politics. Romantics often displayed an obsessive interest in
an idealised historical model of the differentiated unity of pre-Reformation
European Christendom, conceived as a na
¨
ıve prefiguration of the self-
consciously ‘organic’ society of the future. The specific juridical, admin-
istrative and legislative institutions of the state proper played a subordinate
role in this romantic vision, as dependent expressions of the substance of
associative life that was located in social interactions of mutual recognition
and symbolic identification. Legal and governmental institutions possessed
importance as instruments for expressing difference and for nurturing or
repressing the reality of communal identity but were not the loci of that
identity itself. Or at least the identity of the community was only present
in the institutions of government and law in a formal way, separated from
the actual substance of individual life as a life of will, feeling and creative
agency.
The third element in the early romantic vision of culture was the ‘restora-
tion’ of religious experience and consciousness to the centre of communal
life. In a ‘classic’ romantic formulation, Schleiermacher in 1799 defined
religious experience as the unmediated ‘intuition and feeling’ of the ‘infi-
nite nature of totality, the one and the all’, a ‘childlike’ encounter with the
Absolute as the ‘ever-fruitful womb’ of Being in relation to which every-
thing individual appeared as ‘a part of the whole and everything limited
as a representation of the infinite’ (Schleiermacher 1988,pp.102, 105). In
religious consciousness the embodied historical individual experienced the
ground of its own double life as both the subject and the object of its activity
through an encounter with the foundational, primal unity of subjectivity
and objectivity. Religious experience thus produced a consciousness of the
infinite source of the finite subject’s acts of self-expression and self-shaping.
Metaphysical philosophy (and theology), art and literature, and the ordering
principles of associative ethical life were all attempts to mediate religious
experience of ‘absolute’ or ‘infinite’ identity with the natural and histori-
cal conditions of finite subjectivity. Religious experience provided direct,
unmediated contact with the absolute centre of existence, the Being of all
beings. Early romantic conceptions of the church flowed from such con-
ceptions of religious experience as an encounter with the conditions or
presuppositions of finite existence. In general terms, churches represented
that aspect of culture in which individual subjects recognised, nurtured,
articulated and communicated their religious experience. It was a site for
giving expression to that dimension of common life in which individuals
recognised in each other their shared relationship to the absolute, to that
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infinite power which made their finite existence possible. It was a place for
the language of art and for the aesthetic priests who sustained and renewed
this language. Whether such churches had anything to do with the actual,
existing confessional churches was not, at first, very clear.
2
Romantic conceptions of the subject as creative individuality, of commu-
nity as an identity of diversity in an organic totality, of religion as both an
unmediated relation to the absolute and a mediation between the absolute
ground and cultural difference, were connected and transformed by the
romantic theory of history, which constructed the past as a succession of
cultures in a teleological narrative moving from some originating undiffer-
entiated identity of subjects and objects, through a process of fragmentation,
individuation and conflict, and culminating in the achievement of an arti-
ficially or culturally constructed ‘higher’ unity that affirmed differentiation
within an articulated, organic or systematic totality.
3
The merger of the
secular history of peoples and cultures into the sacred history of redemp-
tion, in which a lost Garden of Eden was refound as a culturally constructed
‘New Jerusalem’, made all attempts to stabilise the relations between church
and state, even when defined as subordinate products or objectifications of
subjective cultural identities, problematical and contestable.
Amongst the array of early Romantic texts, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s
On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1796–9) addressed the specific
problem of church–state relations most directly. As an intimate friend of the
literary critic and aesthetic philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, a participant in
the Berlin romantic circles of the turn of the century, and a trained the-
ologian on an ecclesiastical vocational track within the Prussian Reformed
Protestant church, Schleiermacher was perfectly situated to bring roman-
tic perspectives on self, culture and the experience of the sublime into
a critical relation with inherited conceptions of the church and church–
state relations. In the Fourth Speech of the Reden, entitled ‘On the Social
Element of Religion, or, On Church and Priesthood’, he noted that an
understanding of the nature of subjective religious experience required a
rethinking or reimagining of ideas of religious community. The ‘whole idea
2 The German romantics Schlegel, Novalis and H
¨
olderlin certainly wavered at first about whether
or not the ‘new mythology’ or ‘new religion’ would be ‘Christian’. Schlegel claimed: ‘we have no
mythology . . . it is time that we earnestly work together to create one’ (Schlegel 1968,p.81). Hegel
and Schelling similarly played with the notion of a post-Christian religious mythology as the popular
form for their philosophical innovations.
3 There is a remarkable comparative analysis of the dialectical spiral of romantic theories of development
(both for collectivities and individual psyches) in Abrams 1971.
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of the church’ needed to be subjected to ‘a new consideration, reconstruct-
ing from the centre outwards’. The ‘centre’ in Schleiermacher’s view was
the associative life that evolved among those individual subjects who were
in the process of attempting to give shape to their unmediated intuition
(Anschauung) of the dependence of the individual subject on the Absolute
through communication with others in religious fellowship. Religious life
was essentially social in the sense that religious intuitions only became real
as they were articulated for other subjects, and thus emerged as objects of
reflection and further development. This fellowship of ‘mutual communi-
cation of religious intuitions’ was a fellowship of equal subjects without
hierarchical order and without fixed languages or symbols for defining the
never completely or transparently expressible content of religious intuitions.
It was a community in which language was always in process and individuals
continually worked at shaping the particularity of their own intuitions for
communicative interaction – an open-ended dialogue of love, rather than
a static conformity to a creed or dogmatic discourse. Such communities of
the religious were essentially ‘free’ and dynamic, but they also led naturally
to a search for institutions of mediation that would at least temporarily unite
the diversity of private religious languages for purposes of edification and
education of those who were seeking religious experience but did not yet
possess it. The creation of an institutionalised church with trained teachers
(clergy) was made necessary by a membership that included not only the
positively pious – those who possessed the religious experience – but also
the ‘negatively’ or potentially pious – those who were seeking or needed
the religious experience. In terms of the inherent logic of religious com-
munity, Schleiermacher imagined a process in which linguistic articulation
and historical institutionalisation underwent a constant process of transfor-
mation and never became fixed in creed and law. Common languages and
symbolic systems could never be more than temporary results of the com-
municative process, emerging like the harmonies of choral music from the
always diverse, constantly evolving and accumulating experiences in which
individuals constructed personally differentiated perspectives on their com-
mon dependence on the Absolute. What stifled the dynamics of this natural
process was the interference of states in religious society. The state, seek-
ing to use religious society for its own purposes of establishing civil peace
among self-interested individuals through obedience to its laws, fixed forms
of language and symbol into systems with claims to exclusive and permanent
validity and organised the broader ecclesiastical society into a politicised,
legal ecclesiastical state, appropriating the historically contingent forms of
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religious expression for its own tasks of fixating and stabilising identities.
In 1799 Schleiermacher presented the absolute separation of church and
state, the emancipation of religious society from all political interference
and control, as a prerequisite for the progressive evolution of the ‘true’ or
authentic church as a religious community.
Schleiermacher, however, did not imagine his religious society as an
invisible church, as a purely spiritual communion. The reciprocal sociabil-
ity, the communicative and ethical interaction, of religious individuals was
a dynamic association in the world, ‘a perfect republic’ or a ‘priestly people’
in which ‘each alternately leads and is led; each follows in the other the
same power that he also feels in himself and with which he rules others’
(Schleiermacher 1988,p.166, 1984,p.270). The relations of this society
were imagined as potentially permeating the whole culture, emerging first
in the mutual relations of family and friendship but expanding outwards in
concentric circles to encompass the totality of associative life. The eman-
cipation of religious society from the external fetters of political control
would in fact allow religious experience to work transformatively within
society and culture. Ecclesiastical emancipation was thus redefined in a pos-
itive way, not as an escape or refuge from the political realm, but as the
centre from which the realm of politics would itself become an expression
of ethical community, of an identification of free subjects. In the last pages
of the fourth speech Schleiermacher intimated that the eradication of mass
pover ty and mechanical, necessary labour through technological and sci-
entific control of the inanimate ‘dead forces’ of nature could free everyone
to join in the mutual labour of expressive self-fashioning and thus enjoy
the consciousness of participation in the infinite powers of the Absolute:
‘then for the first time, everyone will be freeborn; then every life will be at
the same time practical and contemplative, the rod of the taskmaster will be
raised over no one, and all people will have peace and leisure to contemplate
the world in themselves’ (Schleiermacher 1988,p.186, 1984,p.290). Both
state and church would disappear as separate institutions when all of society
took on the characteristics of a church association.
As long as this utopian identification of religious society with human
society remained a future hope rather than a present reality some form of
separate religious society, with both exemplary functions as a model for the
future and as the cultivator of religious consciousness among the ‘negatively
pious’ was required. In 1800 it was not clear among Schleiermacher and
other members of his romantic generation whether this mediating church
would emerge as a reformation of existing ecclesiastical forms, or present
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itself in more radical revolutionary form as a ‘messias in pluralis’
4
of a post-
Christian future, in which the self-expression of religious experience would
move beyond the limiting historical moment of European Christendom and
its confessional differentiations. Where Schleiermacher’s choices would fall
was intimated in the Reden in his view of the historical evolution of reli-
gious societies and cultures. Although in principle Schleiermacher insisted
that every individual intuition of the Absolute was necessarily perspecti-
val, individually shaped in historically limited ‘positive’ symbolic forms,
and that all collective symbolic expressions of religious experience and
associative life were historically defined organisations of diversity open to
constant transformation, he also presented a teleolog ical development of
religious forms in which Protestant Christianity represented a culmination
that superseded other religious societies (both non-Christian and Christian)
and included their perspectives within it. Christianity superseded pagan
and Judaic religious forms because its mode of intuiting the relationship
between finite subjectivity and the Absolute brought to symbolic objectifi-
cation the essential nature of religious experience and religious society. The
Christian perspective was self-reflexive and thus able to encompass all of
the historical and perspectival diversity of religion within it. In Protestant
Christianity the particular individual cultural form became itself the univer-
sally human, represented as an organism of dynamically mediated difference
(Schleiermacher 1988,pp.213–22, 1984,pp.316–25).
Written with rhetorical fervour and infused with the consciousness
of imminent historical transformation, Schleiermacher’s Reden,likethe
aphorisms and essays of Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, the poetry of
Wordsworth and Coleridge, or the philosophical treatises of Schelling and
Hegel, slid over a number of problematic areas in early romantic con-
ceptions of religious culture, collective symbolic forms, and ecclesiastical
institutions. Some of these problems were more explicitly displayed in the
sprawling apologia for the historical superiority of Christian culture in
Chateaubriand’s Genius of Christianity (1799–1801). Like his early romantic
contemporaries, Chateaubriand rediscovered the power of the doctrines,
rituals, institutions and language of Christianity in the context of the emo-
tional, aesthetic and cognitive needs of a finite, temporally and naturally
individuated, human subject. Seeking recognition for the infinite dimension
in its restless processes of self-making, the romantic subject was driven by
indeterminate passions that could attain no adequate earthly objectification.
4 The term is from Novalis 1929,p.364.
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John E. Toews
In two novellas originally intended as illustrative stories displaying both the
need for Christianity and its therapeutic power in meeting that need – ‘Atala’
and ‘Rene’ – Chateaubriand provided exemplary accounts of the anchorless,
homeless human subject (a ‘stranger among men’, Chateaubriand 1978b,
p. 716, 1856,p.298) driven by passions that could find no satisfactory object
within the realm of finite relations. This ‘unsettled’ state of a soul whose
passions constantly transcended their objects was unknown, Chateaubriand
claimed, in ancient classical cultures. The literature, mythology and cultural
institutions of Greece and Rome were inadequate to the needs of modern
man. The modern subject was defined by the infinite (indeterminate, insa-
tiable) nature of its yearning, a yearning that could only be stilled through
identification with the infinite divine power that was the source of the split
between desire and object, between self and world (Chateaubriand 1978b,
pp. 714–16, 602–5, 1856,pp.296–8, 184–7). The stories, doctrines, rituals
and aesthetic symbols of Christian culture both recognised this contradic-
tion of finite subjectivity, whose striving could only be stilled in the collapse
of the world or the death of the self, and provided it with appropriate thera-
peutic solutions.
Much more than Schleiermacher, Chateaubriand presented a conception
of subjectivity as an infinite and ultimately futile desire for fulfilment in the
world of natural and historically determinate objects. Resolution or satis-
faction of the finite subject’s infinite yearnings could only be represented
in aesthetic reconstructions of the primal undifferentiated unity of subject
and object, self and world in prehistoric culture or the mother–child sym-
biosis, or through a dissolution and transcendence of the body and time.
The infinite object to which the yearning of the subject was directed was
necessarily transcendent, existing outside of the differentiated world of sub-
jects and objects in time and space. Christianity’s ‘genius’ for Chateaubriand
was that it both reflected the sufferings of the modern individual subject
and provided the institutions to assuage those sufferings. Its doctrines and
rituals penetrated to the depths of the inherent relationship between love
and death, desire and dissolution in modern consciousness and offered a
transcendent redemption as the only way of stilling the infinite yearning of
the finite subject.
5
5 Chateaubriand’s emphasis on the Christian connection between a vision of man as fallen and God
as a transcendent father is especially present in Chateaubriand 1856,Parti, where he presents this
Christian per spective as a purified ‘natural religion’ implicit in all human experience.
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Chateaubriand’s principled pessimism about the possibility of achieving
earthly satisfaction for the self’s infinite longings under the conditions of
finite embodied, temporal selfhood produced a vision of the institution-
alised church rather different from Schleiermacher’s. For Chateaubriand
the ‘church’ was synonymous with the institutional and symbolic forms of
a unified, Catholic Christian culture as he imagined it existing in Europe
before the Reformation, and to some degree up to the French Revolu-
tion. The church provided aesthetic consolations for the suffering of fini-
tude, images of the loveliness of death as the fulfilment of life, but it also
represented the discipline that the transcendent divinity imposed on finite
creatures seeking to attain the infinite within the restrictions of earthly exis-
tence. As a disciplinary society, articulating the claims of the transcendent
against the over-reaching passions of the finite, the church was inevitably
involved in the power relations of earthly life, and Chateaubriand had no
difficulty accepting the necessity of an institutionalised church as the cen-
tre of Christian culture and religious society. Only by permeating human
institutions with its message of the vanity of earthly ambitions could reli-
gion moderate the consequences of the endless striving to make nature
and history conform to the desire for absolute unity. The vast and com-
plex institutional structure of established Christendom that had evolved
since the era of the apostolic church, in Chateaubriand’s view, was the
appropriate articulation of a culture that recognised the paradoxical passions
of selfhood. As modern forms of homelessness became more prevalent
in the post-revolutionary era, a restoration and invigoration of these cul-
tural institutions was urgently required. A viable church was needed to
save earthly communities from the ravages of infinite desire. Chateaubriand
revealed little consciousness of the inherent or potential tensions between
state and church. Emancipating the church to do its cultural work of dis-
ciplining utopian hopes for secular redemption was seamlessly integrated
with the political functions of maintaining peace and stability. Display-
ing the inherent limitations of temporal community, religious communities
placed a brake on the political hopes raised by reformist and revolutionary
claims.
6
6 Chateaubriand 1856,Partvi is devoted to an expansive listing and praise of the services performed
by the church as a civilising power in European society, in fact as the civilisation of Europe. Near
the end of the book Chateaubriand claims that a reinvigorated church will overcome the degeneracy
of the revolutionary era and re-establish the proper hegemony of spiritual power within society
(Chateaubriand 1856,p.643, 1978b, p. 1053).
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