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At Halle theological and philological educational traditions are interwoven in many ways; and first of all in the historical figure of August Hermann Francke, patron saint of the town, so to speak: that pietistic pedagogue who at the end of the seventeenth century—in other words, soon after the foundation of the university—formed in Halle the famous Francke Foundation of schools and orphanages, and in his own person and by its influence united the religious interest with the humanistic and linguistic. And then the Castein Bible Institute, first authority for the revision of Luther’s language work, it too establishes a link between religion and textual criticism. Also there was active in Halle at that time an outstanding Latinist, Heinrich Osiander, at whose feet I ardently desired to sit; and more than that, as I heard from Adrian, the course in Church history given by Professor Hans Kegel, D.D., included an extraordinary amount of material for a student of profane history, which I wished to avail myself of, as I intended to elect history as my subsidiary course.

Thus there was good intellectual justification when, after studying for two semesters in Jena and Giessen, I decided to draw my further nourishment from the breast of Alma Mater Hallensis. And my imagination saw an advantage in the fact that it was identical with the University of Wittenberg, the two having been united when they were reopened after the Napoleonic Wars. Leverkühn had matriculated there a half-year before I joined him, and of course I do not deny that his presence had played a weighty, yes, a decisive part in my choice. Shortly after his arrival, and obviously out of some feeling of loneliness and forsakenness, he had even proposed to me to join him; and though some months would have to pass before I answered his call, I was at once ready, yes, probably would not have needed the invitation. My own wish to be near him, to see how he went on, what progress he made and how his talents unfolded in the air of academic freedom, this wish to live in daily intercourse with him, to watch over him, to have an eye on him from near by, would very likely have been enough of itself to take me to him. And there were besides, as I said, sufficing intellectual grounds.

Of course in these pages I can only picture in a foreshortened form, just as I did with his school-days, the two years of our youth that I spent at Halle with my friend; the course of them interrupted, indeed, by holidays in Kaisersaschern and at his father’s farm. Were they happy years? Yes, they were, in the sense that they were the core of a period when with my senses at their freshest I was freely seeing, searching, and gathering in. Happy too in that I spent them at the side of a childhood companion to whom I clung, yes, whose life-problem, his being and becoming, at bottom interested me more than my own. For my own was simple, I did not need to spend much thought on it, only to ensure by faithful work the postulates for its prescribed solution. His was higher and in a sense more puzzling, a problem upon which the concern about my own progress always left me much time and mental energy to dwell. If I hesitate to describe those years by the epithet “happy”—always a questionable word—it is because by association with him I was drawn much more effectively into his sphere of studies than he into mine, and the theological air did not suit me. It was not canny, it choked me; besides, it put me in an inward dilemma. The intellectual atmosphere there had been for centuries full of religious controversy, of those ecclesiastical brawls which have always been so detrimental to the humanistic impulse to culture. In Halle I felt a little like one of my scientific forebears, Crotus Rubeanus, who in 1530 was canon at Halle, and whom Luther called nothing else than “the Epicurean Crotus” or “Dr. Kröte, lickspittle of the Cardinal at Mainz.” He even said “the Divel’s sow, the Pope,” and was in every way an intolerable boor, although a great man. I have always sympathized with the embarrassment that the Reformation caused to spirits like Crotus, because they saw in it an invasion of subjective arbitrariness into the objective statutes and ordinances of the Church. Crotus had the scholar’s love of peace; he gladly leaned to reasonable compromise, was not against the restitution of the Communion cup—and was indeed put after that in a painfully awkward position, through the detestable harshness with which his superior, Archbishop Albrecht, punished the enjoyment of the Communion at Halle in both kinds.

So goes it with tolerance, with love of culture and peace, between the fires of fanaticism.—It was Halle that had the first Lutheran superintendent: Justus Jonas, who went thither in 1541 and was one of those who, like Melanchthon and Hutten, to the distress of Erasmus, had gone over from the humanistic camp to the reformers. But still worse in the eyes of the sage of Rotterdam was the hatred that Luther and his partisans brought down upon classical learning—Luther had personally little enough of it—as the source of the spiritual turmoil. But what went on then in the bosom of the Universal Church, the revolt of subjective wilfullness, that is, against the objective bond, was to repeat itself a hundred and some years later, inside Protestantism itself, as a revolution of pious feelings and inner heavenly joy against a petrified orthodoxy from which not even a beggar would any longer want to accept a piece of bread: as pietism, that is, which at the foundation of the University of Halle manned the whole theological faculty. It too, whose citadel the town now long remained, was, as formerly Lutheranism, a renewal of the Church, a reform and reanimation of the dying religion, already fallen into general indifference. And people like me may well ask themselves whether these recurrent rescues of a hope already declining to the grave are from a cultural point of view to be welcomed; whether the reformers are not rather to be regarded as backsliding types and bringers of evil. Beyond a doubt, endless blood-letting and the most horrible self-laceration would have been spared the human race if Martin Luther had not restored the Church.

I should be sorry, after what I have said, to be taken for an utterly irreligious man. That I am not, for I go with Schleiermacher, another Halle theologian, who defined religion as “feeling and taste for the Infinite” and called it “a pertinent fact,” present in the human being. In other words, the science of religion has to do not with philosophical theses, but with an inward and given psychological fact. And that reminds me of the ontological evidence for the existence of God, which has always been my favourite, and which from the subjective idea of a Highest Being derives His objective existence. But Kant has shown in the most forthright words that such a thesis cannot support itself before the bar of reason. Science, however, cannot get along without reason; and to want to make a science out of a sense of the infinite and the eternal mysteries is to compel two spheres fundamentally foreign to each other to come together in a way that is in my eyes most unhappy and productive only of embarrassment. Surely a religious sense, which I protest is in no way lacking in me, is something other than positive and formally professed religion. Would it not have been better to hand over that “fact” of human feeling for the infinite to the sense of piety, the fine arts, free contemplation, yes, even to exact research, which as cosmology, astronomy, theoretical physics, can serve this feeling with entirely religious devotion to the mystery of creation—instead of singling it out as the science of the spirit and developing on it structures of dogma, whose orthodox believers will then shed blood for a copula? Pietism, by virtue of its overemotional nature, would indeed make a sharp division between piety and science, and assert that no movement, no change in the scientific picture, can have any influence on faith. But that was a delusion, for theology has at all times willy-nilly let itself be determined by the scientific currents of the epoch, has always wanted to be a child of its time, although the time (in greater or less degree) made that difficult for it and drove it into an anachronistic corner. Is there another discipline at whose mere name we feel ourselves in such a degree set back into the past, into the sixteenth, the twelfth century? There is here no possibility of adaptation, of concession to scientific critique. What these display is a hybrid half-and-half of science and belief in revelation, which lies on the way to self-surrender. Orthodoxy itself committed the blunder of letting reason into the field of religion, in that she sought to prove the positions of faith by the test of reason. Under the pressure of the Enlightenment, theology had almost nothing to do but defend herself against the intolerable contradictions which were pointed out to her: and only in order to get round them she embraced so much of the anti-revelation spirit that it amounted to an abandonment of faith. That was the time of the “reasonable worship of God,” of a generation of theologians in whose name Wolff declared at Halle: “Everything must be proved by reason, as on the philosophers’ stone”: a generation which pronounced that everything in the Bible which did not serve “moral betterment” was out of date, and gave out that the history and teaching of the Church were in its eyes only a comedy of errors. Since this went a little too far, there arose an accommodation theology, which sought to uphold a conservative middle ground between orthodoxy and a liberalism already by virtue of its reasonableness inclined to demoralization. But the two ideas “preserving” and “abandoning” have since then conditioned the life of “the science of religion”—ideas both of which have something provisional about them, for theology therewith prolonged its life. In its conservative form, holding to revelation and the traditional exegesis, it sought to save what was to be saved of the elements of Bible religion; on the other hand it liberally accepted the historico-critical methods of the profane science of history and abandoned to scientific criticism its own most important contents: the belief in miracles, considerable portions of Christology, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and what not besides. But what sort of science is that, which stands in such a forced and precarious relation to reason, constantly threatened with destruction by the very compromises that she makes with it? In my view “liberal theology” is a “contradictio in adjecto,” a contradiction in terms. A proponent of culture, ready to adapt itself to the ideals of bourgeois society, as it is, it degrades the religious to a function of the human; the ecstatic and paradoxical elements so essential to the religious genius it waters down to an ethical progressiveness. But the religious cannot be satisfied in the merely ethical, and so it comes about that scientific thought and theological thought proper part company again. The scientific superiority of liberal theology, it is now said, is indeed incontestable, but its theological position is weak, for its moralism and humanism lack insight into the dæmonic character of human existence. Cultured indeed it is, but shallow; of the true understanding of human nature and the tragic nature of life the conservative tradition has at bottom preserved far more; for that very reason it has a profounder, more significant relation to culture than has progressive bourgeois ideology.

Here one sees clearly the infiltration of theological thinking by irrational currents of philosophy, in whose realm, indeed, the non-theoretic, the vital, the will or instinct, in short the dæmonic, have long since become the chief theme of theory. At the same time one observes a revival of the study of Catholic mediæval philosophy, a turning to Neo-Thomism and Neo-Scholasticism. On these lines theology, grown sickly with liberalism, can take on deeper and stronger, yes, more glowing hues; it can once more do justice to the ancient æsthetic conceptions which are involuntarily associated with its name. But the civilized human spirit, whether one call it bourgeois or merely leave it at civilized, cannot get rid of a feeling of the uncanny. For theology, confronted with that spirit of the philosophy of life which is irrationalism, is in danger, by its very nature, of becoming dæmonology.

I say all this only in order to explain the discomfort caused in me at times by my stay in Halle and my participation in Adrian’s studies, the lectures that I followed as a guest hearer in order to hear what he heard. I found in him no understanding for my uneasiness. He liked to talk over with me the theological problems touched on in the lectures and debated in the seminar; but he avoided any discussion that would have gone to the root of the matter and have dealt with the problematic position of theology among the sciences, and thus he evaded precisely the point which to my easily aroused anxiety was more pressing than all the rest. And so it was in the lectures as well: and so it went in association with his fellow-students, the members of the Christian Students Union Winfried, which he had joined on external grounds and whose guest I sometimes was. Of that perhaps more later. Here I will only say that some of these young people were the pale-complexioned “candidate” type, some robust as peasants, some also distinguished figures who obviously came from good academic circles. But they were all theologians, and conducted themselves as such with a decent and godly cheerfulness. How one can be a theologian, how in the spiritual climate of the present nay one comes on the idea of choosing this calling, unless, indeed, it were simply by the operation of family tradition, they did not say, and for my part it would have been tactless and prying to cross-examine them. A forthright question on the subject could at most have been in place and had any chance of results in the course of a students’ evening jollification, when tongues and brains were loosened and livened by drink. But of course the members of Winfried were superior; they condemned not only duelling but also “boozing,” and so they were always sober—that is, they were inaccessible to questions they might not like to answer. They knew that State and Church needed ghostly officers, and they were preparing themselves for that career. Theology was to them something given—and something historically given it certainly is.

I had to put up with it too, when Adrian took it in the same way, although it pained me that regardless of our friendship, rooted in early days as it was, he no more permitted the question than did his comrades. That shows how little he let one approach him; what fixed bounds he set to intimacy. But did I not say that I had found his choice of a profession significant and characteristic? Have I not explained it with the word “Kaisersaschern”? Often I called the thought to my aid when the problem of Adrian’s field of study plagued me. I said to myself that both of us had shown ourselves true children of that corner of German antiquity where we had been brought up, I as humanist and he as theologian. And when I looked round in our new circle I found that our theatre had indeed broadened but not essentially changed.