Bruno Bauer

Bauer, Bruno (1809–82)

The career of the Hegelian theologian Bruno Bauer is marked by his sudden turn from a reasoned defender of Christianity into one of its most extreme critics. His radical interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, which he first used to defend orthodox biblical hermeneutics, ultimately led him to become, as one of his admirers said, the ‘Robespierre of theology’. As the leader of the so-called ‘Young Hegelian’ school, Bauer was one of Hegel’s most gifted students. However, his condemnation of theology in general and his thesis that the New Testament was merely the fictional product of an unknown author contributed to the general distrust of Hegelianism among religious thinkers. Although his many theological and historical writings now remain largely unread, his ‘Critical Philosophy’ and his radical atheism exerted a strong influence upon Marx, who was his student and friend, and is still evident in such contemporaries as Jürgen Habermas.

1 The Young Hegelian

Bauer entered the University of Berlin in 1828, and gave himself completely over to Hegelianism. From the earliest period of his career until his death, Bauer was concerned with the ‘reconciliation’ of Hegelianism and orthodox religion – the theme of his doctoral dissertation and final works (see Hegel, G.W.F. §8; Hegelianism §2). However, as his thought developed, Bauer took ‘reconciliation’ to mean that the religious mind, which had created a history of God out of its own unconsciousness, could only cure itself by coming into a full and critical self-consciousness towards its own unconscious fantasies.

In his first years as a lecturer, Bauer published forty-three articles and reviews. In these first writings, it was his intention to elevate theological consciousness to a speculative level which would resolve the debates between faith and critical reason, a resolution which would occur in the higher synthesis of Hegelian speculation.

In 1835, David F. Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus) was published (see Strauss, D.F. §1). For Strauss, the New Testament was fundamentally a literary creation generated out of the Messianic expectations of the Jewish people, having little or no historical foundation. The miracle stories were merely pre-Christian ‘myths’. The orthodox Hegelians, whose careers were threatened by Strauss’ claim that his work was inspired by Hegel, asked Bauer to refute Strauss. Bauer’s reply to Strauss, which appeared in a series of articles, attempted to demonstrate that such gospel miracles as the Virgin Birth were the necessary consequences of the historical development of human self-consciousness. Bauer’s refutation contained the seed of Bauer’s own radical view of the Gospels: that they were merely the fictional creations unconsciously designed to satisfy the needs of the religious mind for some external salvation.

In 1838, Bauer first formulated his own view of the relationship between philosophy and religion in a two-volume work: Die Religion des Alten Testaments in der geschichtlichen Entwicklung ihrer Principien dargestellt (The Religion of the Old Testament Presented in its Historical Development and Principles). This work continued Bauer’s efforts to treat the Gospel stories as the unconscious expressions of the religious mind, and to trace their historical development. By 1840, he had written a number of multi-volume studies devoted to explaining that biblical history was fundamentally an imaginative exercise of the religious mind, with little or no actual basis in fact. This thesis was set forth in his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte des Johannes (Critique of the Gospel of John). From this point on, Bauer would identify his own position as that of ‘critic’ and would term his philosophy ‘criticism’.

By the end of June 1840, Bauer began another major study of the gospels, the three-volume Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Critique of the Synoptic Gospels). In this work the problem of whether or not Jesus was in fact a historical figure was finally resolved: ‘To the question of whether Jesus was an authentic historical figure we replied that everything relating to the historical Jesus, all that we know of him, relates to the world of fancy, to be more exact – to Christian fancies. This has no connection with any man who lived in the real world’. In the autumn of 1840, Bauer concluded the writing of Die Posaune des jüngsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen: Ein Ultimatum (The Trumpet of the Last Judgement Against Hegel the Atheist and Antichrist: An Ultimatum). This anonymous work was to rally all the various interpreters of Hegel into one camp from which they could enter into what he termed ‘The Campaign of Pure Criticism’. It asserted that the prudent ‘Old Hegelians’ associated with German academic life had consciously concealed the total incompatibility of Hegelian philosophy with traditional Christian belief and conservative political order.

In the early 1840s Bauer was the leader of Berlin’s notorious club, ‘The Free Ones’. This group was the focal point of the radical ‘Young Hegelians’ – a forum for the discussion of atheism and radical politics. Among the participants were his own brother Edgar, the young Friedrich Engels, and a new friend, the radical individualist Max Stirner. However, by 1844, Bauer’s theoretical and theological concerns were rapidly losing their importance among the radical Hegelians, as they were becoming more concerned with applying their theory towards the practical overthrow of the reactionary forces controlling German political life. Concerned with revolutionary deeds, and preparing for the establishment of a new democratic order, the new generation of radicals rejected Bauer’s speculative ‘Terrorism of Pure Theory’. Within a few years, Bauer’s influence upon such revolutionary Hegelians as Marx and Engels came to a end.

2 Later years

In 1843, Bauer wrote Das Entdeckte Christentum (Christianity Exposed), a work intended to bring about a general appreciation of atheism through a rough dissection of Christian attitudes. His belief that the Enlightenment and its ‘Age of Reason’ embodied his Hegelian trust in the rationality of the real occasioned his next project, the four-volume Geschichte der Politik, Cultur und Aufklärung des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (History of the Politics, Culture and Enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century). In 1846, having concluded his final volume, he continued his historical studies with the issue of the two-volume Geschichte Deutschlands und der Französischen Revolution (History of Germany and the French Revolution). These works constituted a complete cultural and political history of the Enlightenment. Given Bauer’s scorn of pietistic Christianity and his admiration for the atheists of the Enlightenment, it is not surprising that he considered it to be mankind’s greatest age.

In 1847, Bauer, with his usual energy, wrote a three-volume study looking back upon the political events of his own lifetime: Vollständige Geschichte der Parteikämpfe in Deutschland 1842–1846 (The Complete History of Party Struggles in Germany During the Years 1842–1846). Contrary to its title, the third volume covered only the events up to 1844; a fourth volume was to extend the time frame to 1847. But the Revolution of 1848 intervened, and the final volume was never completed. The volumes are a chronicle of disappointments, from the first deceptively liberal appearance of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, to the increasingly oppressive measures taken by both state and church throughout the 1840s to stifle democracy. They are bitter works, angry at the passivity of the people, and their temper was reflected in shorter articles of the same period, such as ‘Die Gattung und die Masse’ (‘The Genus and the Crowd’).

In 1852, Bauer returned to theological subjects, and composed Die theologische Erklärung der Evangelien (The Theological Explanation of the Gospels) – intended to be the fourth and final volume of his earlier series, Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. This particular volume brought to a close his criticism of Strauss’ ‘Tradition Hypothesis’ and Bauer developed his theory of the Urevangelist – the actual writer who composed the original fictional life of Jesus.

In the next year, with the Crimean War imminent, Bauer wrote a series of studies dealing with the relationship of Russia to the rest of Europe. The first, in 1853, was Rußland und das Germanentum (Russia and the Germanic World). It warned of the growing power of Russia, and was followed by other studies focused upon the same issue, such as his 1854 Deutschland und das Russentum (Germany and the Russian World). This work was a model for later German nationalistic philosophies of history, in which Germany was seen as the destined, yet scorned, leader of the West.

In 1859, after a few years in various insignificant editorial posts, Bauer became the associate of Hermann Wagener, the editor of such ultra-conservative papers as the Staats-und-Gesellschaftslexikon, Kreuzzeitung and Berliner Revue. Wagener was not only scornful of the weak democratic forces in Prussia, but virulently anti-Semitic. However, Bauer’s anti-Semitism, as his early essay on the ‘Jewish Question’ indicates, was not an expression of Prussian nationalism, but concerned the nature of the Jewish religion itself. He condemned Judaism as the source and support of Christianity – the prime obstacle to human progress. Bauer wrote no anti-Semitic articles for Wagener.

In his last works, which he produced sporadically until his death in 1882, Bauer fully developed the theory which he had first proposed in the early 1840s – that it was not Jesus or Paul, but Seneca and Philo who were the spiritual creators of the basic gospel story. Today, Bauer’s biblical studies are almost totally forgotten, and perhaps rightly. However, his reading of Hegelianism as a revolutionary and atheistic humanism not only set the general course of Young Hegelianism, but remains a viable perspective.