Der Religionsphilosoph Johannes Hessen (1889-1971): Ein Gelertenleben zwischen Modernismus und Linkskatholizismus by Chrisoph Weber (review)

book reviews315 pp. 51-53). The Nazi poUcy of Gleichschaltung was not a matter of "synchronization " (p. 120), but of forcing into line. On page 154, read Gegensatz for Gegenstand. Nonetheless, despite some weaknesses,this book is an informative addition to recent Uterature on twentieth-century theology. John P. Galvin The Catholic University ofAmerica Der Religionsphilosoph Johannes Hessen (1889-1971): Ein Gelertenleben zwischen Modernismus und Linkskatholizismus. By Chrisoph Weber. [Beiträge zur Kirchen- und Kulturgeschichte, Band 1.] (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 1994. Pp. 693. $97.95.) The subject of this four-part study is the tumultuous life ofJohannes Hessen, a priest and philosopher of religion at the University of Cologne, who in the course of his life managed to run afoul of church hierarchy, university faculty, the National SociaUst regime, and the poUtics of the Bundesrepublik in the 1950's. A major part of the book is devoted to Hessen's "marginaUzation within the Church," the reason, the author charges, why he is largely forgotten today (p. 23). Leaving the judgment of the merits of Hessen's thought to philosophers , the author undertakes to document historically "the struggles of an independent mind in the age of ideology" (p. 23). The task is difficult, not least because of the relative scarcity and incompleteness of available sources, a situation not improved by Hessen's own highly selective retrospective in 1959, entitled Geistige Kämpfe der Zeit im Spiegel eines Lebens. The author accordingly provides readers with a valuable array of relevant documents, including unedited archive materials, in the last three parts of the study (over two-thirds of the book). Theyzrsi part of the book is an introduction to Hessen's phflosophy of reUgion as weU as the many conflicts spawned by it (more on this later). The second part is a collection of short but Uluminating excerpts from Hessen's writings. The third part, entitled "six dossiers on his life and struggles," assembles materials on his difficulties with ecclesiastical authorities (including a critical piece by Karl Rahner),University of Cologne documents from 1924 to 1950 (including a recommendation by Max Scheler, his Habilitationsvater), correspondence regarding his suspension by the Archbishop of Cologne in 1928, State Police reports about Hessen from 1942-43, letters concerning the restoration of his academic status after the war (including a favorable review by Karl Jaspers), and documentation of his poUtical activity against rearmament in the 1950's. Thefourth part of the study is an extensive register of Hessen 's writings as weU as those of collaborators and critics, interlocutors and reviewers. The author identifies Hessen as an eclectic "modernist," bent on appropriating Neokantian, critical realist, and phenomenological insights into the Augus- 316book reviews tintan tradition of Catholic philosophy, on the way to establishing an epistemological and axiological foundation of religion. A valuable portrait of influences on the young Hessen (especiaUy Hermann Lotze, Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Eucken , and Georg Herding) is given along with a regrettably all too condensed review of his major works, including Die Religionsphilosophie des Neukantianismus (1919), Wertphilosophie (1937), Piatonismus und Prophetismus (1939), lehrbuch der Philosophie (3 vols., 1947-1950), and Religionsphilosophie (2 vols., 1948). With his rejection of rational proofs of God's existence and their impUcations for the relation between philosophy and theology, Hessen is portrayed as a philosopher of religion ahead of his time, more prescient than Przywara and Guardini regarding the need to move beyond Neo-Scholasticism to historical-critical thinking. The bulk of the study is devoted to recounting the major controversies that erupted over Hessen's work: the 1928 censure of his Die Weltanschauung des Thomas von Aquin and Erkenntnistheorie foUowed by his (temporary) suspension from priestly functions the same year, the Church censor's problems with his 1932 pacifist essay Der Sinn des Lebens (in which he identifies Christianity and sociaUsm) and other works from the 1930's, his suppression by the National SociaUst regime (which, in addition to forcing tiim out of the university, interdicted the printing of four of his books and forbade him from making pubUc addresses, apparently for his rejection of racism), his lengthy and ultimately successful struggle after the war to have his ftdl academic status reinstated, the postwar censure of...