© 1977 by American Academy of Religion
Abstracts of Articles |
Religio Eruditi: Some Letters of Friedrich Heiler (1918)
Paul Misner (Ph.D., University of Munich) of Everett, Massachusetts, was Fulbright Research Fellow at the University of Marburg, 1975–76. He is the author of Papacy and Development Newman and the Primacy of the Pope (E. J. Brill, 1976), Friedrich von Hugel-Nathan Soderblom-Friedrich Heiler. Briefwechsel 1909–1931 (Verlag Bonifacius, 1977), and numerous articles.
The three letters here translated came from the pen of a young doctor of philosophy at the University of Munich at a critical juncture in his personal and professional development. They explain to the Lutheran Archbishop of Uppsala, Nathan Söderblom, how it was that Heiler, a Catholic and apparently no stranger to Catholic traditions of devotion and mysticism could treat Protestant piety with such appreciation in his newly published dissertation, Prayer. Modernism had captivated him and the antimodernist reaction in his church had alienated him. Harnackian scholarship fascinated him and a period of intense occupation with the New Testament had brought him to a remarkable degree of affinity with Lutheran piety as he saw it exemplified in Swabian parishes. Moreover, Soderblom's works in comparative religions and his moderate Liberal Protestant stance in theology seemed to offer him a model for what he most desired in life, a way of combining scholarly research in religion with personal piety and church ministry.
In the second and third letters he describes how he has shaken off the last inner ties to Catholicism and clearly foreshadows his passage to Lutheranism, which would take place ten months later under Soderblom's eyes in Sweden. They also contain a gripping description, written under the direct pressure of the moment, of the conflict between his notion of what the scientific study of religion entailed and what the academics in the philosophy faculty at Munich (as elsewhere) insisted it could only be. (The conflict between strict objectivity and penetration into the religious character of the object of study would flare up again forty years later when Heiler was at the height of his career as a historian of religions at Marburg.)
In some detail Heiler sets forth the reasons why it has become impossible for him to remain a Roman Catholic, despite his need for a Christian faith-community in which he might worship. He sees Catholicism as syncretistic and as a proper home for mystics. Heiler considers himself, however, to belong more in the line of that prophetic piety which Söderblom had worked out as an ideal type distinguished from the mystical form of personal religion. His brand of scholarship was not orthodox enough to be tolerated by the Catholicism of the day either.