God: Some Conversations (review)

BOOK REVIEWS89 as such until W. I. Hull introduced it (much to the wrath or astonishment of German historians, some of whom are as objective as he aimed at being), remains unsolved. Nieper has collected valuable material in this study based upon original research lending color to a variety of leading pietists and carrying the investigation of this phase of German Protestantism beyond the pioneering works of eminent church historians like Goebel, Goeters, Rembert, and a number of Dutch historians. (An error on p. 77 ought to be corrected : Fox, Barclay, Keith, and Furly are called "followers of Penn.") At a time like this a quiet and scholarly contribution of this caliber to the understanding of German-American relations is most encouraging. The Latin type in which the book is printed may facilitate its use by English readers. George School, Pa.William Hubben. God: Some Conversations. By Johann Gottfried Herder. A Translation with a Critical Introduction and Notes by Frederick H. Burkhardt. New York, Veritas Press, 1940. xiv + 247 pp. $2.50. PROFESSOR BURKHARDT deserves much credit for bringing to the attention of the English-speaking world these fine conversations on God which Herder first published in 1787 and which appeared in a second, revised edition in 1800. The Conversations and his famous Ideas toward a Philosophy of Mankind must be considered as Herder's most important and most influential works. The former owes its immediate origin to the controversy over Spinoza's philosophy which had broken out in 1785 between Jacobi and Mendelssohn, and in which nearly all philosophical and religious leaders of the German Enlightenment soon took part. For Herder, an ardent admirer though by no means a blind follower of Spinoza, this controversy was a welcome opportunity to come to the rescue of the defamed philosopher and, in doing so, to state unmistakably his own views about God, world, and mankind—in a word, his own religion. Herder, as "Generalsuperintendent" of the Lutheran Church of Sachsen -Weimar, was expected to hold strictly theistic conceptions of God; but he always felt a strong inclination toward pantheism—and a Leibnizian -Shaftesburyan optimism which he heroically tried to integrate into a more or less harmonious whole. Nowhere did Herder's constant endeavor to synthesize apparently irreconcilable views find a more characteristic expression than in these conversations, in which Herder as Theophron shows Philolaus, a prejudiced anti-Spinozist, the way to a better understanding of Spinoza's philosophy and a more liberal interpretation of his religious concepts. These pedagogically arranged conversations, however, which toward the end are shared by Theophron, by no means constitute an objective presentation, but a highly subjective, radical transformation Vol. 30, No. 2. Autumn 1941 90 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION of Spinoza's logical pantheism into a dynamic panentheism in which no more of Spinoza is left than the very general principle of the reciprocal immanence of God and world. ("Pantheism" implies identity of God and the world; "panentheism," a God working through and in the world, but not identical with it.) Thus the mathematical formalism of Spinoza is replaced by a dynamic conception of the world, which frees the individual from the shackles of hopeless determinism and again enables him to strive for and create a world of spiritual values which restores free will and human dignity. These conclusions which Herder found with the help of Leibniz and Shaftesbury are of tremendous importance. They do not only form a bridge to the past Kantian monism manifested by Schelling, Fichte, Hegel, and the romanticists; they were also largely instrumental in protecting occidental thinking from falling into a kind of oriental nirvana with which it was dangerously threatened through Spinoza's quietism. Seen from this standpoint, the Conversations are perhaps of even greater importance than the Ideas, and it may be hoped that they find as many intelligent and serious readers as they deserve. Mr. Burkhardt has done everything humanly possible to pave the reader's way to this rare gem in German letters. His translation does not pretend to be "literary," but rather "literal," though it would be wrong to take the latter word in too literal a sense. Very often a long sentence of the...