Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Strauss, David Friedrich

STRAUSS, (1808-1874), author of the Leben Jesu, was born at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart, January 27, 1808. He was the son of a small tradesman who loved literature and thought more than business, and his mother was a bright intelligent woman whose piety was practical rather than meditative, while she had an open eye for the beauties of art and nature. In his thirteenth year the boy was sent to the evangelical seminary at Blaubeuren, near Ulm, to be prepared for the study of theology. Amongst his school-fellows were youths destined to become equally distinguished with himself, of whom he has given sketches in his Christian Märklin. Amongst the principal masters in the school were Professors Kern and F. C. Baur, who infused into their pupils above all a deep love of the ancient classics. In 1825 Strauss passed from school to the university of Tübingen. The course of study was two years of philosophy and history and three of theology. The professors of philosophy failed to interest him, and he accordingly followed pretty much his own devices in this field, devoting himself especially to Schelling, the writers of the romantic school, Jacob Böhme, and even to somnambulistic and other modern superstitions. In 1826 his previous teachers, Kern and Baur,

removed to Tübingen, and the latter introduced him to the writings of Schleiermacher, which awoke his keen dialectical faculty and delivered him from the vagueness and exaggerations of romantic and somnambulistic mysticism, while for a time he found satisfaction for his religious nature in Schleiermacher's idea of religion. In the last year of his stay at Tübingen he read with Märklin Hegel's Phänomenologie, which was the beginning of his abandonment of Schleiermacher for Hegel In 1830 he passed his examination brilliantly, and became assistant to a country clergyman, and was greatly beloved as preacher and pastor by the parishioners. After nine months in this position he accepted the post of professor in the high school at Maulbronn, having to teach Latin, history, and Hebrew. Here also he was most successful and highly valued. But in October 1831 he resigned his office in order to study under Schleiermacher and Hegel in Berlin. Hegel died just as he arrived, and, though he regularly attended Schleiermacher's lectures, it was only those on the life of Jesus which exercised a very powerful influence upon him. It was amongst the followers of Hegel that he found kindred spirits. Under the leading of Hegel's distinction between &ldquo;Vorstellung&rdquo; and &ldquo;Begriff,&rdquo; he had already conceived the idea of his two principal theological works—the Life of Jesus and the Christian Dogmatics. In 1832 he returned to Tübingen and became repetent in the university, lecturing on logic, history of philosophy, Plato, and history of ethics, with great success. But in the autumn of 1833 he resigned this position in order to devote all his time to the completion of his projected Life of Jesus. In a year the manuscript was finished, and in 1834 the first volume and in 1835 the second were given to the world. The work produced an immense sensation and created a new epoch in the treatment of the rise of Christianity. The chief replies to it were by Tholuck, Neander, A. Schweizer, Ullmann, and Bruno Bauer. In 1837 Strauss replied to his critics (Streitschriften zur Vertheidigung meiner Schrift über das Leben Jesu). In the third edition of the work (1839), and in Zwei friedliche Blätter, he made important concessions to his critics, which he withdrew, however, in the fourth edition (1840, translated into English by George Eliot, with Latin preface by Strauss, 1846). In 1840 and the following year he published his Christliche Glaubenslehre (2 vols.), the principle of which is that the history of Christian doctrines is their disintegration. Between the publication of this work and that of the Friedliche Blätter he had been elected to a chair of theology in the university of Zurich. But the appointment provoked such a storm of popular ill-will in the canton that the authorities considered it wise to pension him before he entered upon his duties, although this concession came too late to save the Government. With his Glaubenslehre he took leave of theology for upwards of twenty years. In August 1842 he married Agnes Schebest, a cultivated and beautiful opera singer of high repute, but not adapted to be the wife of a scholar and literary man like Strauss. Five years afterwards, when two children had been born, a separation by arrangement was made. Strauss resumed his literary activity by the publication of Der Romantiker auf dem Throne der Cæsaren, in which he drew a satirical parallel between Julian the Apostate and Frederick William IV. of Prussia (1847). In 1848 he was nominated as member of the Frankfort parliament, but was defeated. He was elected for the Würtemberg chamber, but his action was so conservative that his constituents requested him to resign his seat. He forgot his political disappointments in the production of a series of biographical works, which secured for him a permanent place in German literature (Schubart's Leben, 2 vols., 1849; Christian Märklin, 1851; Frischlin,

1855; Ulrich von Hutten, 3 vols., 1858-60, 4th ed., 1878; H. S. Reimarus, 1862). With this last-named work (see ) he returned to theology, and two years afterwards (1864) published his Leben Jesu für das Deutsche Volk (4th ed., 1877). It failed to produce an effect comparable with that of the first Life, but the replies to it were many, and Strauss answered them in his pamphlet Die Halben und die Ganzen (1865), directed specially against Schenkel and Hengstenberg. His Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte (1865) is a severe criticism of Schleiermacher's lectures on the life of Jesus, which were then first published. From 1865 to 1872 Strauss resided in Darmstadt, where he made the personal acquaintance of the princess Alice and the crown-princess of Germany, receiving from both ladies many marks of esteem. In 1870 he published his lectures on Voltaire (3d ed., 1872), which were written for the princess Alice and delivered before her. In the works of these years it seemed that the truth of Christianity had become still more problematic to Strauss, and this was more obvious than ever in his next and last important work, his confession, and final summary answer to the four great questions—Are we Christians? Have we still religion? What is our conception of the world? How are we to regulate our lives? (Der Alte und der Neue Glaube, 1872, 11th ed., 1881, English translation by M. Blind, 1873). The work produced a greater sensation than his first Life of Jesus, and not least amongst Strauss's own friends, who wondered at his one-sided view of Christianity, his professed abandonment of all spiritual philosophy, the strange inconsistencies of his thought, his scientific credulity, and the offensive form of his negations. To the fourth edition of the book he added a Nachwort als Vorwort (1873). The same year symptoms of a fatal malady appeared, and death followed February 7, 1874. Though his last book renounced in almost frivolous language the hope of immortality, he read Plato's Phædo in the Greek during his last days, and Zeller says &ldquo;his friends bade him adieu with feelings such as Plato has described at the end of that dialogue.&rdquo;