The German Soul in its Attitude Towards Ethics and Christianity, the State and War: Two Studies
(This book an EXACT reproduction of the original book publ...)
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Eternal Life a Study of Its Implications and Applications
(This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)
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The Mystical Element of Religion, as studied in Saint Catherine of Genoa and her
(Amongst the apparent enigmas of life, amongst the seeming...)
Amongst the apparent enigmas of life, amongst the seemingly most radical and abiding of interior antinomies and conflicts experienced by the human race and by individuals, there is one which everything tends to make us feel and see with an ever-increasing keenness and clearness. More and more we want a strong and interior, a lasting yet voluntary bond of union between our own successive states of mind, and between what is abiding in ourselves and what is permanent within our fellow-men; and more and more we seem to see that mere Reasoning, Logic, Abstraction,all that appears as the necessary instrument and expression of the Universal and Abiding,does not move or win the will, either in ourselves or in others; and that what does thus move and win it, is Instinct, Intuition, Feeling, the Concrete and Contingent, all that seems to be of its very nature individual and evanescent.
Friedrich von Hügel was an influential Austrian Roman Catholic religious writer, Modernist theologian.
Background
Baron Friedrich von Hügel was born in Florence, Italy, on May 5, 1852, the son of an Austrian diplomat and his Scottish wife, recently converted to her husband's Catholic faith.
Soon after his father's death in 1870 the young man fell gravely ill with typhus. This left him with impaired hearing, which became worse as he grew older. Deprived of normal social opportunities, Friedrich turned to reading and amateur scholarship, learning some Hebrew, with a nearby rabbi's help, while pursuing his scientific work.
Education
Friedrich's early education was provided by tutors at home; indeed, he never attended school or college and was largely self-taught throughout his life. A Quaker tutor introduced him to the study of geology, which became his lifelong avocation.
Career
On a trip to Paris he met the Abbé Huvelin, a gifted counselor who had a lasting influence on von Hügel's somewhat troubled spiritual development.
Von Hügel's books were published only after he was 56 years old, the products of a fully matured, still vigorous mind. The longest and perhaps best-known, Mystical Element of Religion (1908), grew out of long study of St. Catherine of Genoa; in it he wrestled with the charges of psychological abnormality in the mystic's experience, insisted on the mystic's right to be heard both inside and outside the Church, and defended his view that direct experience of a divine reality can be attained.
In 1912 a second book appeared, Eternal Life, interpreting this central theme in the Gospel of John in fresh, robust fashion. A shorter work titled The German Soul (1916) sought to counteract the then-current diatribes against everything German. Two volumes of Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion (1921 and 1926) gathered together some of the baron's papers and lectures on diverse topics dating back to 1904. These books greatly extended their author's influence as a seminal thinker in a field too long dominated by "scholastic and theoretical" rather than "mystical and positive" approaches, to adopt one of von Hügel's favorite contrasts. Although his poor health prevented him from giving the Gifford Lectures for 1924-1925, the unfinished manuscript was published in 1931 as The Reality of God. The slow, strenuous development of von Hügel's thought is better traced in two volumes of correspondence with his wide circle of friends, including thinkers such as Wilfrid Ward, Clement Webb, Ernst Troeltsch, Rudolf Eucken, Maurice Blondel, and Louis Duchesne. This material is contained in Selected Letters 1896 to 1924 (edited by Bernard Holland); a more intimate glimpse of the baron's thought processes is given in Letters from Baron von Hügel to a Niece, Gwendolyn Greene. They make lively reading as they disclose an honest mind at grips with "indefinitely apprehensible truth. "
Never thoroughly at home in English, von Hügel's style of writing often seems "uncouth and ponderous, " as Dean Inge once remarked. However, it contains sentences and phrases of memorable vibrancy as well, which accurately reflect the rock-like quality of the writer's thinking-in constant dialogue with itself, utterly candid, and without any flourish of finality.
In him, as in his thought, intellectual honesty kept intimate company with a sincerity of spirit; this may well be the source of von Hügel's influence and importance. Further Reading There are three useful biographies of von Hügel in English. Michael de la Bedoyère, The Life of Baron von Hügel (1951) gives the fullest account of his personal development, family relationships, and influential friendships. L. V. Lester Garland, The Religious Philosophy of Baron F. von Hügel (1933) provides the best overview of salient features in his thought, with ample and well-chosen quotations from letters and occasional papers as well as longer works. Maurice Nédoncelle, Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1937), with an extensive bibliography of material by and about the baron, is chiefly interested in his struggle with Catholic orthodoxy.
Problems of biblical interpretation interested him always and soon brought him into contact with the Modernist movement through its leading representatives, Alfred Loisy in France and George Tyrrell in England. Just what part he played in Modernism has been much debated. Never sympathetic toward fundamentalist and absolutist tendencies within his own church, he tried to keep an open mind in matters such as the historical-critical study of Scripture or the claims of papal primacy in defining dogma. So he could, and did, encourage Loisy and Tyrrell, the enfants terribles of Modernism, in their researches and hypotheses while refusing to follow them into rebellion against Church authority.
When his friends were censured by the Vatican and the papal encyclical Pascendi (1907) brought public debate to an end, von Hügel's own writing escaped being placed on the Vatican's index of forbidden books and his influence as an ecumenical thinker was secured.
He thus remained an independent, deeply provocative thinker whose writings will no doubt continue to intrigue and inspire others who concern themselves with the truth of Christian faith
Views
The baron thought habitually in both/and rather than either/or terms; he called his method a "critical realism" that takes first-order experience as evidential but insists upon the need for second-order reflection and qualification. Resisting oversimplification, he studied religious phenomena as a "complex of characteristics" to be approached dialectically, fully aware of the genuine tensions they present, unwilling to presume to solve in theory what may only be resolved in practice. His treatment of the "problem of evil" is a good example of his method, as is also his treatment of "miracle" over against both nature and the supernatural. For von Hügel, mystery and reality are two ways of saying the same thing-or, rather, the whole of things-each of which would be strictly unthinkable without the other.
Connections
In 1873 the baron was married to Lady Mary Herbert who, like his mother, was a recent Catholic convert. Their family consisted of three daughters, for whose religious education the father took personal responsibility. They lived first in Hempstead, then in Kensington, London.