Only a God Can Save Us

Tue, 01 Aug 1995 00:00:00 -0400

Heidegger and Christianity By John Macquarrie.
Continuum 144 pages, $19.95

The Magus of the North

Wed, 01 Jun 1994 00:00:00 -0400

Normally, convention dictates that when reviewing a book by a well-known scholar one should devote one’s opening comments to an assessment of that scholar’s achievements. A sense of what is practicable in so short a space prompts me otherwise. With his acuteness of intellect, range of interest, the sheer magnitude of his published work and extracurricular activities, Isaiah Berlin makes the task for anyone attempting a life- synopsis dauntingly difficult.

Berlin has published essays on Belinsky, Tolstoy, Marx, Pasternak, Schiller, Turgenev, Montesquieu, Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, Mill, Vico, Verdi, Hobbes, Locke, Ben-Gurion, Nabokov, and Disraeli; and books on such themes as human freedom, personal identity, nationalism, the Enlightenment, and the philosophies of history, science, and art. At Oxford he has been a Fellow of New College (1938- 50), Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory (1957-67), first President of Wolfson College (1966-75), and a Fellow of All Souls where he is now. During World War II he served the British Foreign Office in Washington and Moscow. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He still makes regular appearances on the BBC and has for many years been a director of the Royal Opera House. Berlin is not a scholar; he is his own cottage industry.

There is therefore surprising that so universal a figure enjoying in late life such well-earned fame and influence would turn the powers of his pen not to the suffering economy of his adopted nation, nor to peace in the Middle East (a theme close to his Jewish heart), nor any other current issue of weight, but instead to an obscure, isolated, altogether neglected thinker from another time and place. Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), German philosopher and sometime theologian, had been resting peacefully in relative oblivion, great fodder for the occasional dissertation but otherwise banished to footnotes and appendices. Resting, that is, until Berlin took it upon himself to rescue him. Convinced that this self-styled oracular sage- the “Magus of the North” he liked to be called-had something to say to our time and place, Berlin applied his customary powers of sympathy and imagination to penetrate some of history’s most notoriously opaque writing. The result, artfully edited by Berlin’s long-time assistant, Henry Hardy, is a clear and convincing account of one of the modern period’s most unique and original thinkers who, having refused to countenance their advent, began discussion on some of the very issues that still stupefy our own best and brightest.

Hamann was born in Konigsberg, home of Immanuel Kant, who both admired and befriended Hamann despite the latter’s sometimes vicious attacks on Kantian rationalism. In no sense a professional philosopher-he called himself an “ignoramus,” his mind “a blotting paper,” and his style a mix of “fragments, leaps, and hints”-Hamann made his living as a secretary- translator and later as a government warehouse manager. He never married but did live in his later years with one of his father’s servants to whom he remained faithful all his life and with whom he had four children. He was fond of food and drink and travelled on business to England and Germany, Poland once, but otherwise lived within his meager means.

Hamann’s conversion to pietistic Christianity at the age of twenty-eight centered on a devout, daily reading of the Bible-a practice he never abandoned. The pillars of his faith were few and straightforward: that the Bible, nature, and history are keys to self-understanding; that self-understanding is the key to an understanding of God. His defense of them was equally tenacious: faith is essentially a mystical relation between the soul and God, impervious to analytical reason and therefore beyond reach of the philosophers. Testimony to the power of this simple if not entirely original vision came from a certain Russian Princess named Golitsyn, a wealthy Catholic who looked upon Hamann as a saint and who made sure his last years were spent in comfort. He died in her house in Munster and is buried nearby, “a peculiar and enigmatic figure,” writes Berlin, “to the end.”

Ever since Hegel wrote a long and inflammatory review of his work, Hamann has been considered an irrationalist too ambivalent and paradoxical to merit attention. In Berlin’s estimate this is not far from the truth: “It does not matter where in [Hamann’s] writings one begins,” he comments,

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Only a God Can Save Us

The Magus of the North