Glorious Abasement: John Betz on the Prophetic Critique of J. G. Hamann
released 11/8/2019
Theologian John Betz discusses the eighteenth-century philosopher and translator, Johann Georg Hamann, critic and contemporary of Immanuel Kant and other prominent figures of the German Enlightenment. Hamann, even from the early stages of the Enlightenment, saw and argued that the project of modernity would lead to its own destruction. Hamann argued that reason could not, by itself in a pure form, give a complete account of reality, for he saw that the modern ideal of “pure reason” is a fiction. Reason, he argued, is always embedded within an historical culture and language from which one can never fully be detached. In his evaluation, Hamann anticipated the postmodern critics of the twentieth century; however, he avoided the nihilism of postmodernism by observing the revelatory character of language and history. By focusing on the divine kenosis or humility of God, who creates, reveals, and condescends to humanity through His Word, Hamann maintained that man’s pursuit of truth is always contingent on God’s Word in special and general revelation through history and creation. Throughout the interview, Professor Betz describes the centrality of God’s condescension in Hamann’s understanding of knowledge and reason. It is through the humility of God in his condescension to communicate to man that Hamann recognizes the Promethean project of modernity to attain enlightenment from man’s resources alone.
54 minutes
PREVIEW
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“Of course, few serious critics, not even Hamann, would reject the principles of the Enlightenment tout court — say, the principles of popular representation or freedom of religion. Inasmuch, however, as the Enlightenment proposed a doctrine of reason that required no faith, a vision of society that required no tradition, and a politics that required no God (the source of all light and being), in Hamann’s view the ‘Enlightenment’ was a misnomer, resting upon principles that were not only historically but ontologically and noetically defective. In short, to him it represented not the dawning of a bright new age, but a deceptive ‘northern light,’ which would bring about a new age of spiritual darkness. To be sure, the Aufklärer thought of themselves as guides, ‘guardians’ to the ‘dependents’ who had not yet been liberated from the ignorance of superstition and the heteronomy of tradition. In Hamann’s view, however, they were nothing of the kind: they were not messianic saviors to a world lying in darkness, in a secular parody of religious expectation, but hypocritical demagogues masquerading as angels of light (cf. 2 Col. 11: 14).
“The source of the hypocrisy, in Hamann’s view, lay in the Enlighteners’ doctrine of reason, specifically their claim that reason is free — ‘pure’ — of the contingencies of history and tradition. To Hamann, simply from a philosophical perspective, this was nonsense. For reason, he argued, is not accidentally but essentially a matter of language; and language, in turn, is obviously bound up with history and tradition. And yet it was precisely upon such dubious grounds that the Enlighteners presumed to dispense with tradition, indeed to arrogate for themselves the authority hitherto afforded historical revelation — whereby the run-of-the-mill Aufklärer could suddenly think himself a greater authority than Moses. Moreover, as Hamann prophetically perceived, it was upon this dubious foundation that the Enlighteners sought to advance a specific political agenda, to inaugurate a new, essentially ahistorical and therefore purely secular society, one that could function not only without divine revelation, but as if there were no God (etsi Deus non daretur). In other words, Hamann foresaw in the Enlighteners’ political dream a society that would be for all intents and purposes atheistic — a society for which any revelation, however true, and any prophetic testimony, however saintly, would be fundamentally irrelevant, extrinsic to the concerns of government, allowed perhaps at the margins as a matter of subjective, merely personal opinion, but deprived of any objective legitimacy in matters of state and public policy.
“As Hamann anticipated, however, the price of so strict a separation of reason from religious tradition (of philosophy from theology) would be reason’s own demise, and with it the creation of a moral vacuum, inasmuch as for him reason has no integrity apart from history and tradition (reason too, he argued, has a genealogy), and can attain no enlightenment apart from grace and revelation. Indeed, admitting only the dim light of reason alone, refusing to admit the clarifying, supernatural light of faith, the Enlighteners would bring about no ‘cosmopolitical chiliasm,’ but rather, as Hamann prophesied five years prior to the French revolution, new forms of violence perpetrated by those ostensibly under their ‘tutelage.’”
— from John R. Betz, After Enlightenment: The Post-secular Vision of J. G. Hamann (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009)
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