Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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John E. Toews
submission to the transcendent will operated not in some universal realm
ruled by a spiritual church, but always within the positive historical
development of the national community (Butler 1982; Helmstadter 1985,
pp. 3–42).
Gladstone’s tendency to merge the state and church was also present in
the ‘liberal’ or ‘Broad Church’ wing of post-Coleridgean church reformers.
The loose group of religious philosophers (Frederick Maurice) and histor-
ical critics (Connop Thirlwall, J. C. Hare) gathered under this rubric are
usually perceived primarily in terms of their continuation of Coleridge’s
interest in the historical processes by which the divine idea manifested
itself within the national community and its intellectual ‘clerisy’. In general
they tended to emphasise the ways in which the national church should be
broadened to encompass the totality of religious positions within the cul-
ture, positions that were themselves dimensions of a historical dialectic in
which oppositions were eventually grasped as reciprocal dimensions of the
national organism. The function that Gladstone fulfilled in relation to the
Oxford Movement (clarifying its political dimension) was provided in this
case by the f amous schoolmaster of Rugby, Thomas Arnold (1795–1842).
Like Gladstone, Arnold was driven by a vision of the state as an order-
ing of social life that went beyond the balancing of interests and included
the production of moral life among its subjects. Church and state were
thus institutions aiming at the same end. Their institutional separation
might have been historically justified in the past but it was not intrinsi-
cally necessary to the perfection of their goals. Arnold perceived an imma-
nent historical development towards an ethical society in the history of
the state. The church was a representation of this dimension as long as
the state had not fulfilled its own purpose. Once the spiritual community
of the church was internalised as the conscience of the nation, however,
the church would become superfluous, or would simply become the real
substance of the political order, now characterised as a ‘Christian King-
dom’: ‘the state in its highest perfection becomes the church’ (Arnold 1874,
pp. 331–2). Unlike Gladstone however, Arnold thought that in order for the
church to fulfil itself in this fashion it would have to encompass the broad
spectrum of confessional difference within its doctrines and institutions.
In Arnold, dependence on transcendent authority for the t asks of moral
reform tended to become a ‘historical’ stage in the development of Christian
community.
What we might called the ambivalent Menaissian inheritance was also car-
ried forward and developed by the two most distinguished English Catholic
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Church and state
intellectuals of the nineteenth century: John Henry Newman, who had fol-
lowed the logic of the search for a secure ground for meaning and value in
a ‘conversion’ to Catholicism in 1845, and Lord John Acton (1834–1902),
who had enriched his indigenous Catholic heritage with a cultural educa-
tion in both French and German traditions of Catholic church renewal and
cultural reformation. Both struggled with the relationship between their
own affirmation of faith in the transcendent authority of Catholic doc-
trine as the only stable ground for truth, meaning and moral certainty in a
world of subjective interpretation, cultural relativism and historical differ-
ence and their equally strong critical consciousness of the ways in which the
articulation of that authority might itself be deceptively connected to the
particularities of finite subjectivity and historical contingency. Both were
caught in the paradox of seeking to affirm the embodiment of absolute
truth in historical revelation and historical institutions, while expressing
their critical distance from any particular terrestrial claim, like that of Pius
IX in his Syllabus of Errors of 1864, to fully represent this embodiment.
Newman became, next to Kierkegaard perhaps, the most acute nineteenth-
century analyst of the ways in which the absolute commitment of religious
faith operated therapeutically to still the psychological need for certainty
only if it was not actually perceived as a product of psychological need, but
rather as an encounter with a transcendent reality outside the self.
12
Acton
dealt more directly with the political paradox that the critical ability to assert
human freedom against the terrestrial determinations of history required a
conscience formed in absolute obedience to a power that spoke with the
voice of transcendent truth.
13
Both remained in the Catholic Church after
1870, reluctantly subordinating their critical consciousness to the need for
an absolute moral power, speaking with transcendent authority, in order to
sustain their own moral ‘independence’ from the corrupting influence of
immanent historical powers.
14
In Prussia the inner reform of the Evangelical State Church according to
the ideals of a free church operating as the deputy of transcendent authority
12 Newman’s moral reasoning concerning the necessity and the paradoxical near-impossibility of reli-
gious faith and his account of the ways in which the search for the absolute certainty of faith
determined his intellectual itinerary and conversion to Roman Catholicism are articulated in New-
man 1870 and 1967.
13 Acton published no books during his lifetime. His views were expressed in occasional essays and
lectures. Two collections that highlight his writing on liberty and the relationship between moral
authority, transcendent truth and terrestrial powers are Acton 1952 and 1958.
14 There is a thoughtful comparison of Acton and Newman’s responses to the papal claim to infallibility
in Chadwick 1998,pp.115–38.
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John E. Toews
became a part of the political agenda of the state after 1840. Two spokesper-
sons for this agenda, the legal philosopher Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802–61)
and the royal adviser and ministerial official Christian Bunsen, reproduced
the Gladstone/Arnold tension from the perspectives of conservative and
liberal political reform.
Stahl approached the question of state–church relations from the per-
spective that ethical communities were not produced through a process of
immanent development manifesting and actualising the inherent ‘idea’ of
the national culture, but through a double (political and religious) act of
submission to authority. The political structure of the national organism was
restricted to the coercive imposition of obedience to abstract norms. The
subjective ethical transformation of this external obedience into a willed,
internal obedience was the function of the church. The national church
and the Church of Christ were synonymous. The task of interpreting the
guiding principle of the national idea and cultivating it among individual
subjects was not a job for the philosophers and historians of a secular clerisy
but a theological and ecclesiastical undertaking, a task of interpreting and
preaching the divine will of a transcendent divinity. The state became a
Christian state, an ‘ethical realm’, when external submission to coercive
force became voluntary obedience to a higher will. But this internalisation
of the will of the father could never be fully accomplished within the soci-
ety of finite, ‘fallen’ individuals. The ‘ethical realm’ would always remain a
divided world in which internal obedience to the divine will could never
fully displace the necessity for external obedience to divinely instituted
coercive power.
15
For Stahl, the purification of German Protestantism for the purposes
of fulfilling its cultural function entailed a return to the absolute validity
of the confessional creeds and institutions of Reformation Lutheranism.
Bunsen, on the other hand, saw the development of church doctrine and
institutions in terms of progressive historical development of the Christian
idea. This development involved an expansion of church membership to
all members of the national community and an assimilation of church doc-
trine to the liberal ideals of individual autonomy and voluntary communal
identification. The full appropriation of the Christian idea demanded the
participation of all individuals as autonomous subjects in the ethical life of
the nation and state. The only legitimate authority in a free church and a
15 Stahl’s positions were theoretically formulated in Stahl 1833,esp.ii,pt.1,pp.70–190. The church
reform component of his theory was explicated in Stahl 1840.
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Church and state
free state was the authority internalised by a free inward disposition. Liberty
of individual conscience and therefore political liberty were prerequisites
for the actualisation of the true church. On the other hand, political liberty
could only be sustained by consciousness of participation in divine author-
ity. Christianity only became real in associative life. National culture and
the state were essential to the substance of the Christian idea as a life lived in
full transparent participation in the community. The perfected state was the
objectified ethical life of the Christian religious community. For Bunsen, as
for Arnold, therefore, the perfected church ultimately overlapped with the
perfected state. The goal of church reform was the union of the spiritual and
temporal dimensions of being in ethical life. Its promise for and vision of the
future was ‘that the harmonious reciprocity of power between heaven and
earth is restored, the chasm between the visible and the invisible is spanned,
the barrier between the secular and spiritual is broken down’ (Bunsen 1845,
pp. 84–6).
Although Bunsen, like Stahl, saw himself as an heir of Schelling and the
intellectual traditions of romantic historicism, his position in the 1840sand
1850s often seemed virtually indistinguishable from mainstream Hegelian-
ism. The difference lay in his claim that the ultimate fulfilment of the divine
idea on earth occurred within the actual experience of the ethical life of
the community, rather than in philosophical, ‘scientific’ comprehension of
that life. A correlate of this difference was that Bunsen also interpreted the
fulfilment of the Christian idea in the state as a fulfilment within the asso-
ciative life of a political organised Christian culture, but not specifically
within its governmental and legal institutions. During the 1830sand1840s,
however, the Hegelian inheritance was itself undergoing a process of frag-
mentation and revision. Most significantly, the divisions of the school over
the question of whether or not reason was fully actualised in the historical
present was displaced in the late 1830s by divisions over the transcendent
and immanent content of the divine idea. In the critical works of David
Friedrich Strauss, Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach the divine idea was
redefined as the idea of humanity or ‘human essence’. Religious experience
was revealed as Man’s relation to his essential self , projected into stories of
the relation between mankind and a transcendent other. In this radical pro-
cess of humanisation and historicisation of the relation between sacred and
secular, the transcendent and the immanent, the polar relationship between
church and state as two forms of community was first dissolved and then
reconstituted in a purely secular fashion. Once the nature of the transcen-
dent as a self-projection of the immanent was understood, church society
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John E. Toews
dissolved into political society. In a ‘free’ state the transcendent became sim-
ply the essentially human, constituted as the normative identity of the polit-
ical community. The representation of human essence in religious dogma
and myth was translated into the secular activity of representing the evo-
lution of mankind in its cultural forms. Politics displaced religious practice
as the site of authentic ethical life, and cultural studies (literature, science,
philosophy and art) displaced theology as the true self-representation and
self-comprehension of that life. The language of church and state, however,
could be reconstituted in metaphorical form to mark the difference between
essence and existence within the realm of secular, this-worldly being. The
relations of representation and rational self-understanding directed towards
the meaning of the essentially human could be articulated in the activity of
a scientific or aesthetic or philosophical clerisy of a ‘church of humanity’.
The worship of essential humanity as the normative model for individ-
ual existence and the disciplined self-conscious pursuit of the practices of
human self-realisation (love and work) could become elements of a ‘reli-
gion’ of humanity. The concept of transcendence was restricted to a purely
historical meaning – marking the distinction between the historical present
and the goal of historical development, between the actuality of empirical
humankind and the essential humanity that was being created through the
dynamics of development within this actuality. ‘Church’ and ‘state’ thus still
retained a core of meaning in referring to the difference between present
and future, appearance and essence. But the persistence of this difference
also required the creation of a clerisy to mediate ‘Ideas’ or essential ends
with the realities of existing practices. The ‘church’ of the already illumi-
nated and sanctified, and thus of potential educators and edifiers, could be
reconstituted as an institutionalised body of intellectual midwives mediating
between present estrangement and future reconciliation, present misery and
future happiness, between the present gap between essence and existence
and their future reconciliation. At both national and universal ‘human’
levels, the problems articulated in theories of church and state did not dis-
appear in the process of their translation into secular, humanist terms. The
conceptual distinctions articulated in those theories maintained their rele-
vance within all secular ideologies and secular movements whose aim was
a process of historical redemption leading to the formation of an ethical
community.
16
16 This process of translation as appropriation of substance and rejection of ‘form’ is very evident in
three major works of Hegelian humanism: Bauer 1840, Feuerbach 1841 and Strauss 1840–1.
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Church and state
The translation of church–state theory into secular ideological conflict
was also present in France among the heir s of Saint-Simon. Beginning with
Auguste Comte’s early defection in the 1820s, the school split into two
‘ecclesiastical’ parties. Those who went Comte’s way tended to believe in
the power of empirical knowledge and rational understanding to compre-
hend the totality of human culture in its historical development, and thus
gave priestly status to men of science. By the 1840s, however, Comte was
himself elaborating this science of humanity in its historical totality into an
ethical practice and religious system, which mimicked the liturgical, sacra-
mental and organisational patterns of the Catholic Church, including the
construction of a clerical hierarchy presided over by a ‘Pope of Humanity’.
The other wing of the school, building on Saint-Simon’s final prophecies of
a future practical religion of fraternal love, placed their hopes in the ability
of the emancipated power of the passions, of sexuality and love, to create a
new ethical order. Like the Comtean Positivist Church, the Saint-Simonians
created an elaborate hierarchical organisation and set of rituals around their
commitment to correct theories of the idea of humanity and its historical
actualisation.
17
The theoretical and institutional separation of church and state was
grounded on the perception that life in community was built on a double
relationship, to the ‘others’ within the horizontal relations of communi-
cation, sociability and power, and to the ‘other’ beyond these relations,
which gave them ultimate meaning, which ‘grounded’ them in a ‘higher’
truth and a ‘higher’ reality. To what extent was this ‘other’ itself histori-
cal? To what extent could this ‘absolute’ other be appropriated within the
horizontal relations of associative life? Questions about the historicity of
meaning, essence, truth, were at the core of nineteenth-century theories of
the relations between church and state.
4 Historicism and church–state relations: the case of Ranke
Historical narratives of cultural development and historical philosophies
attempting to mediate the dynamic relations between essential truths and
particular empirical contingencies played a prominent role in the formula-
tion and presentation of different perspectives on the church–state relation
17 The works of Frank Manuel provide the most sympathetic accounts of the religious and ecclesiastical
components in the Saint-Simonian and Comtean traditions. See especially Manuel 1962,butalso
Charlton 1983.
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John E. Toews
in nineteenth-century thought. One could say that it was the problem of
historicity above all that provided the central issue in the discussion of rela-
tions between the sacred and the secular, the temporal and the spiritual,
the transcendent and the immanent. At both the personal and collective
levels, historical understanding was the primary medium for establishing
the meaning of the particular, and the historical process was imagined as
the site where the ethical community was to be realised.
The historians Jules Michelet (1798–1874) and Lord Acton might serve
as exemplar y figures for displaying the contrast between immanent and
transcendent historical perspectives. Identifying himself with the dynamic
life forces of the divine idea in its national form, Michelet merged the
sacred truth of ultimate identity with the divine Idea into the historical
construction of the national Idea as an ethical community. The separation
of ecclesiastical institutions from the cultural forms of a common national
life became a hindrance rather than an aid to the ultimate reconciliation of
human beings with their divine essence. Standing on the ground of faith
in the transcendent reality of truth and value embodied in Christian revela-
tion and its mediating institutions, Acton portrayed historical development
in terms of the critical dichotomous relations between universal values
grounded in transcendent truths that entered into historical reality through
human actions motivated by the commands of conscience grounded in reli-
gious faith and the immanent contingencies and relative necessities of an
associative life shaped by the interests and desires of finite, ‘fallen’, creatures.
It was in the work of Leopold von Ranke, the ‘father’ of modern histo-
riography, however, that this dichotomy was most clearly displayed as an
internal dynamic of historical understanding and representation.
In 1841 Ranke was appointed official historiographer of the Prussian state,
an appointment which he saw as a confirmation of his personal identification
with the ‘partisan commitment to the positive and historical’ (Ranke 1867–
90, liii/liv,p.273) of the ‘Christian-German’ reform party that had come
to power with the accession of Frederick William IV to the throne in
1840, and which included Schelling as its official philosopher and Bunsen
and Stahl as two of its most prominent ideologues. Three sets of tensions
marked this convergence of Ranke’s historiographical perspective and the
historical actuality of the Prussian regime: between national culture and
state, between immanent and transcendent divinities as foundations of the
church and ethical life, and between the ‘positive and historical’ on the one
hand, and a meta-historical narrative of personal redemption and cultural
reconciliation on the other.
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Church and state
From the time of his formative political awakening in 1816–18 and sym-
pathetic identification with the cultural politics of nationalist student fra-
ternities and their heroes from the Wars of Liberation against Napoleonic
France, Ranke’s outlook was framed within a tense duality between two
models of ethical community. His most obvious commitment, at least dur-
ing the 1820s, was to a conception of social relations, law and political
institutions as expressive ‘objectifications’ of the distinctive characteristics
of the innate ‘national genius’, the collective subjective individuality or spirit
of national ‘peoples’.
18
His first major historical work conceptualised mod-
ern European history as an evolving family of national individualities; his
second demonstrated the impossibility of successfully imposing centralised
political uniformity on the vital, intractable resistance of national cultures
(Ranke 1824, 1827).
This romantic historicist conception of political institutions as the exter-
nal expressive forms of the underlying, pre-rational identities of national
peoples remained a critical component of Ranke’s political vision, but by
the early 1830s it was increasingly in tension with a different model, also
traceable to Ranke’s student years, a model in which ethical life was con-
ceived as the voluntary association of autonomous individuals obeying only
those laws they had freely imposed upon themselves. For Ranke this type
of intersubjective identity was grounded not in the pre-rational ‘nature’ of
the collective national subject, but in a shared commitment to the transcen-
dent grounds of autonomous selfhood through religious faith. As Ranke
became disillusioned about the prospects of a spontaneous political forma-
tion of the people into an ethical community after 1830, his works tended
to emphasise the need for a transcendent foundation of ethical life. The
organising force of ‘Ideas’ as the inherent essences of national cultures was
matched by the power of transcendent ‘Ideas’ to intervene in the imma-
nent historical process. In his great multivolume works of the 1830sand
1840s, The History of the Popes and German History during the Age of the
Reformation, the transcendent religious ‘Idea’ provided the objective ground
for the transformation of the national ‘Idea’ into the unique moral self of
the state. His histories of the emergence of modern nation states were not
restricted to describing the expressive actualisation of national individual-
ities, but became histories of relations between religious universality and
18 This emphasis on innate national identity was evident from an early essay (1818) entitled ‘Aus den
Papieren eines Landespfarrers’ in Ranke 1964–75, iii,pp.474–82 to his political essays of the 1830s
like ‘Ueber die Trennung und Einheit von Deutschland’ (1832), in Ranke 1867–90, xlix/l,p.134.
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John E. Toews
national individuality, between church and state, between transcendent and
immanent deities.
19
This shift in Ranke’s conceptions of ethical life towards a tense reciprocity
between obedience to the inner voice of national identity and obedience
to the transcendent truth of universal relig ion was tied to a change in
his religious conceptions. His earlier loyalty to an impersonal pantheistic
deity informing all natural and historical phenomena (Ranke 1964–75, i,
pp. 117, 141–2) was gradually displaced by belief in a transcendent personal
divinity as creator-father (Ranke 1964–75, i,pp.119–20, 126–8, 131, 155).
Religious obedience now operated primarily as a way to discipline the
rebellious, sinful, fallen self, rather than to express identity with one’s innate
‘nature’. As R anke, in the wake of what he perceived as the revolutionary
threat of elemental forces of social disintegration and egoistic self-interest
after the revolutions of 1830, turned his attention to problems of the dis-
cipline and moralisation of nature, his theology became more patriarchal,
personalist and transcendent. The authentic freedom that informed the idea
of ethical community as an association of self-legislators required a puri-
fying restoration of the living essence of personhood through voluntary
submission to the revealed will of a transcendent father. Ranke concluded
the final volume of The History of the Popes with the hopeful projection that
contemporary Christianity was moving towards a recovery of the original
apostolic faith in ‘the true and eternal principles of pure and spiritual reli-
gion’. Faith in immutable transcendent truth would ‘appease and reconcile
all enmities’: ‘High above all conflict – this hope we can never relinquish –
there will yet arise from the ocean of error the unity of conviction . . . the
pure and simple consciousness of the ever-enduring all-pervasive presence
of God’ (Ranke 1901, iii,pp.173–4).
20
But could this spiritual apprehen-
sion of the purified Christian idea, which informed spiritual communion
under the universal rule of a transcendent father, also forge a genuine rec-
onciliation between the concrete individualised life of national cultures
and universal forms of ethical community? This, for Ranke, was the ‘Ger-
man Question’ as addressed in his HistoryofGermanyduringtheAgeofthe
Reformation.
In Ranke’s account of the German Reformation, Luther played a heroic
role in redefining the relations between the sacred and secular orders. First,
19 See especially Ranke 1867–90, xxxvii,pp.1–8; and the opening pages of Ranke 1925–6.
20 This passage was excised after the first edition and does not appear in Ranke 1867–90.
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Church and state
he rediscovered the transcendent foundations of moral life in their origi-
nal apostolic purity, freed from all of the corrupting historical accretions
of material interest, overweening personal power, and centralising institu-
tional ambition. Second, he connected the re-established relation to the
transcendent to the historical demands of the German national idea as it
pushed for self-determination and self-expression. The universal Christian
idea organised and energised the slumbering potency of the national genius,
providing it with transcendent foundations and a world-historical, universal
mission. Germany made its historical bid to become an organised political
self, to attain the moral personality of a state, under the guidance of universal
religious values internalised as the Protestant conscience.
However, Ranke also tied the Reformation to ‘the totality of the spir-
itual movement’ from which it originated and which it infused with a
new energy and an epochally significant historical form (Ranke 1925–6, ii,
p. 69). The Reformation was both a theolog ical and a political event in a
pan-European sense. By recovering the purity of the original Christian idea
as a direct relation between the autonomous subject and its infinite source
it redirected all of Europe back to its ethical foundations. By emancipating
the political realm from ecclesiastical domination (separating the sphere of
the state from the sphere of religion) it served as a general exemplar of the
emancipation of the concrete historical life of national peoples from the
chains of a centralising, hierarchical spirituality. Paradoxically, the release of
personal piety from earthly mediations, its rediscovery as a direct encounter
of the finite human subject with the transcendent divine personality, also
released the immanent impulses animating the associations of national life.
The Reformation thus projected, as a future goal and redefined historical
purpose, the reconciliation of immanent and transcendent ‘Ideas’, of mater-
nal and paternal forms of divinity, in the ‘deeper life’ from ‘which they both
emanated’ (Ranke 1925–6, i,p.3).
Ranke concluded his history of the German Reformation with a chapter
on secular humanist scholar ship and artistic culture in the sixteenth century.
The religious reconstitution of the relation to transcendent authority stim-
ulated the rediscovery of the earthly wisdom of the ancients and also pro-
moted the free scientific investigation of the immanent relations of natural
and historical life. By instigating this great movement of European schol-
arship, art and philosophy, Ranke believed the Reformation had played an
essential role in ‘universal spiritual progress’, even though the completion
of the Reformation project – the creation of an integrated ‘positive and
643