Another in an occasional series...  

Gossman's book is a lovely study of the cultural and intellectual milieu of the Swiss city of Basel in the second half of the nineteenth century, when its university hosted such intellectuals as Jacob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, to name only the two most famous, among its faculty.  It is a rich and lovely work of history, still rewarding to read.

This is a book I bought when it came out--I assume I got it on one of those postal "book club" things that used to be so popular, before the chains and before Amazon--and it has fed me several times.  At first I read it for its information on Nietzsche, and on the intellectual life of a small, politically marginalized German-speaking city in the nineteenth century--where quiet, quaintness, and intellectual intensity could productively cohabit, or so I imagined, maybe even dreamed.  (This--the cultural productivity of marginality--is an old story, and one that thinkers as diverse as Mircea Eliade and Homi Bhabha have explored.)  Then, later, I returned to it for a way of understanding some of the background of Karl Barth, one of the behemoths of twentieth-century Christian theology.  (Maybe the behemoth--some say he's the most important Christian theologian since Calvin, and while Schleiermacher has a case to make as well, there's no one else in the same league.  Whether that is entirely a compliment to Barth is another question.)  The book has been there, on my shelves, for two decades now, taken down maybe once a year on average, but really taken down a number of times in close succession maybe every five or so years, to be honest.

I've returned to it now because I have been trying to make sense of the thought of Franz Overbeck, one of the central figures in Gossman's book.  Overbeck is perhaps the first person (at least that I can think of at present) to launch a critique of the liberal Christianity that was emerging in Germany in his time, a liberal Christianity that embedded religion so firmly in culture, he feared, as to make it impossible to differentiate the one from the other; when this was coupled with the emergence of the modern Prussian state, you had a form of Christianity weaponized for modern techno-militaristic nationalism.  Which turned out to be right (which is why Barth, almost alone among twentieth-century theologians, really appreciated Overbeck).  That critique of the kind of theology that traces its roots back to Schleiermacher remains a powerful fact that any theological account today really ought to grapple with.  (A theologian like Barth, again, certainly grappled with it, though in the end he came to a more charitable, and I would say mature, appreciation of Schleiermacher's project than did Overbeck.)  It's worth considering on its own.

But I'm also reading Overbeck because, alongside his critique of Christian liberal theology, he also critiqued the tradition of Patristics and early Christian literature that was developing in the nineteenth century as well.  This was a critique built both on his fundamental critique of nineteenth century German liberal theology, and on a distaste--shared with his close friend Nietzsche--for the teaching of the classics, as a form of Bildung, in nineteenth century German pedagogy.  (Not research on the classics, but teaching of the classics.)  In this work, Overbeck argued that scholars kept treating early Christian literature as somehow distinct from Classical Greek and Latin literature, and thus managed to avoid confronting the overlap between them.  In this he was seriously ahead of his time; his insistence on seriously contextualizing the earliest moments of Christian history--which inevitably meant their enmeshment with not just contingencies but with awkward Greco-Roman normativities that perhaps still shadow all later Christianities but which may not seem deeply connected to a kerygmatic core of the teachings of Jesus and the lessons of the early churches--foreshadowed a great deal of scholarship on early Christianity (including the Church fathers) in the past half-century (and even, I would argue, the rise of "late antiquity" and "early Christian literature" as field descriptors competing, more or less self-consciously, to replace "Patristics" as the recognized legitimate scholarly field).  

More pointedly still, for my purposes, the core conviction that motivated both these critiques--the theological one and the historiographical one (to distinguish, but not divide them)--is that the original Christianity was an apocalyptic sect, which was rewritten, especially in the third and fourth centuries, as a philosophy of worldly success.  It should have died out when prophecy failed, and that it didn't is no reason to continue to expect the zombified corpse to show signs of real life.  Or that is his argument.

For me as a theologian that's obviously an important point.  For me also, as I continue to try to think about how to be an intellectual descendant of Augustine, that's equally an important point.  Because one thing about Overbeck's critique is that it seems to rest most firmly on those who accommodated; thus he complains about Eusebius and Jerome.  As regards Augustine he is more circumspect; that's interesting to me.  But more immediately, it also suggests something of the way that Augustine scholarship must be confronted with Overbeck's suspicions.  My own thinking on Augustine is no exception to this.

Finally, to return to Gossman.  On this reading, almost by accident, I found another interesting thing in his book.  I'm impressed with Gossman's suggestion, in the final pages of the last chapter, that Burckhardt's example for historiography is a rival alternative to the dominant state-oriented historiography that developed in Germany from the 1840s through the 1940s.  Both kinds took their bearings from the Romantic critique of Enlightenment, and the attention to locality and thick culture, but where the main German model came to focus more and more on the state, and on political history as leading ineluctably to the triumph of the state, Burckhardt's account kept alive the idea of a cultural history as distinct from (not separated from) politics.  (Gossman points out the value of Wilhelm von Humboldt in this regard, which seems deeply right to me.)  They are, in a historiographical idiom, two ways of developing some core Romantic insights that have continued to haunt us even to today. 

Consider the recent re-emergence of "Christian nationalism" in the United States (or perhaps its unavoidable reassertion of its long-term, always already here presence).  More theoretically, consider Jeff Stout's critique (in Democracy and Tradition) of MacIntyre as effectively a Romantic (I think this is fair).  The struggles we are facing continue to be ones whose terms were in some important ways set by Romantic thought.  Given the promise of a reasserted Romantic model of agency and human being, in various ways, in recent years--I think of Robert Pippin, Douglas Hedley, and Jennifer Herdt as three exemplary thinkers trying to develop this--the suggestion of another path forward through the nineteenth century seems to me worth investigating further.  Perhaps there are still lessons in the past for the future.