Institute of France. Besides these, Heeren wrote brief biographical
sketches of Johann von Müller (Leipzig, 1809); Ludwig Spittler
(Berlin, 1812); and Christian Heyne (Göttingen, 1813). With
Friedrich August Ukert (1780–1851) he founded the famous historical
collection, Geschichte der europäischen Staaten (Gotha, 1819 seq.),
and contributed many papers to learned periodicals.
A collection of his historical works, with autobiographical notice, was published in 15 volumes (Göttingen, 1821–1830).
HEFELE, KARL JOSEF VON (1809–1893), German theologian, was born at Unterkochen in Württemberg on the 15th of March 1809, and was educated at Tübingen, where in 1839 he became professor-ordinary of Church history and patristics in the Roman Catholic faculty of theology. From 1842 to 1845 he sat in the National Assembly of Württemberg. In December 1869 he was enthroned bishop of Rottenburg. His literary activity, which had been considerable, was in no way diminished by his elevation to the episcopate. Among his numerous theological works may be mentioned his well-known edition of the Apostolic Fathers, issued in 1839; his Life of Cardinal Ximenes, published in 1844 (Eng. trans., 1860); and his still more celebrated History of the Councils of the Church, in seven volumes, which appeared between 1855 and 1874 (Eng. trans., 1871, 1882). Hefele’s theological opinions inclined towards the more liberal school in the Roman Catholic Church, but he nevertheless received considerable signs of favour from its authorities, and was a member of the commission that made preparations for the Vatican Council of 1870. On the eve of that council he published at Naples his Causa Honorii Papae, which aimed at demonstrating the moral and historical impossibility of papal infallibility. About the same time he brought out a work in German on the same subject. He took rather a prominent part in the discussions at the council, associating himself with Félix Dupanloup and with Georges Darboy, archbishop of Paris, in his opposition to the doctrine of Infallibility, and supporting their arguments from his vast knowledge of ecclesiastical history. In the preliminary discussions he voted against the promulgation of the dogma. He was absent from the important sitting of the 18th of June 1870, and did not send in his submission to the decrees until 1871, when he explained in a pastoral letter that the dogma “referred only to doctrine given forth ex cathedra, and therein to the definitions proper only, but not to its proofs or explanations.” In 1872 he took part in the congress summoned by the Ultramontanes at Fulda, and by his judicious use of minimizing tactics he kept his diocese free from any participation in the Old Catholic schism. The last four volumes of the second edition of his History of the Councils have been described as skilfully adapted to the new situation created by the Vatican decrees. During the later years of his life he undertook no further literary efforts on behalf of his church, but retired into comparative privacy. He died on the 6th of June 1893.
See Herzog-Hauck’s Realencyklopädie, vii. 525.
HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH (1770–1831), German philosopher, was born at Stuttgart on the 27th of August 1770. His father, an official in the fiscal service of Württemberg,
is not otherwise known to fame; and of his mother we hear
only that she had scholarship enough to teach him the elements
of Latin. He had one sister, Christiana, who died unmarried,
and a brother Ludwig, who served in the campaigns of Napoleon.
At the grammar school of Stuttgart, where Hegel was educated
between the ages of seven and eighteen, he was not remarkable.
His main productions were a diary kept at intervals during
eighteen months (1785–1787), and translations of the Antigone,
the Manual of Epictetus, &c. But the characteristic feature
of his studies was the copious extracts which from this time
onward he unremittingly made and preserved. This collection,
alphabetically arranged, comprised annotations on classical
authors, passages from newspapers, treatises on morals and
mathematics from the standard works of the period. In this way
he absorbed in their integrity the raw materials for elaboration.
Yet as evidence that he was not merely receptive we have essays
already breathing that admiration of the classical world which he
never lost. His chief amusement was cards, and he began the
habit of taking snuff.
In the autumn of 1788 he entered at Tübingen as a student of theology; but he showed no interest in theology: his sermons were a failure, and he found more congenial reading in the classics, on the advantages of studying which his first essay was written. After two years he took the degree of Ph.D., and in the autumn of 1793 received his theological certificate, stating him to be of good abilities, but of middling industry and knowledge, and especially deficient in philosophy.
As a student, his elderly appearance gained him the title “Old man,” but he took part in the walks, beer-drinking and love-making of his fellows. He gained most from intellectual intercourse with his contemporaries, the two best known of whom were J. C. F. Hölderlin and Schelling. With Hölderlin Hegel learned to feel for the old Greeks a love which grew stronger as the semi-Kantianized theology of his teachers more and more failed to interest him. With Schelling like sympathies bound him. They both protested against the political and ecclesiastical inertia of their native state, and adopted the doctrines of freedom and reason. The story which tells how the two went out one morning to dance round a tree of liberty in a meadow is an anachronism, though in keeping with their opinions.
On leaving college, he became a private tutor at Bern and lived in intellectual isolation. He was, however, far from inactive. He compiled a systematic account of the fiscal system of the canton Bern, but the main factor in his mental growth came from his study of Christianity. Under the impulse given by Lessing and Kant he turned to the original records of Christianity, and attempted to construe for himself the real significance of Christ. He wrote a life of Jesus, in which Jesus was simply the son of Joseph and Mary. He did not stop to criticize as a philologist, and ignored the miraculous. He asked for the secret contained in the conduct and sayings of this man which made him the hope of the human race. Jesus appeared as revealing the unity with God in which the Greeks in their best days unwittingly rejoiced, and as lifting the eyes of the Jews from a lawgiver who metes out punishment on the transgressor, to the destiny which in the Greek conception falls on the just no less than on the unjust.
The interest of these ideas is twofold. In Jesus Hegel finds the expression for something higher than mere morality: he finds a noble spirit which rises above the contrasts of virtue and vice into the concrete life, seeing the infinite always embracing our finitude, and proclaiming the divine which is in man and cannot be overcome by error and evil, unless the man close his eyes and ears to the godlike presence within him. In religious life, in short, he finds the principle which reconciles the opposition of the temporal mind. But, secondly, the general source of the doctrine that life is higher than all its incidents is of interest. He does not free himself from the current theology either by rational moralizing like Kant, or by bold speculative synthesis like Fichte and Schelling. He finds his panacea in the concrete life of humanity. But although he goes to the Scriptures, and tastes the mystical spirit of the medieval saints, the Christ of his conception has traits that seem borrowed from Socrates and from the heroes of Attic tragedy, who suffer much and yet smile gently on a destiny to which they were reconciled. Instead of the Hebraic doctrine of a Jesus punished for our sins, we have the Hellenic idea of a man who is calmly tranquil in the consciousness of his unity with God.
During these years Hegel kept up a slack correspondence with Schelling and Hölderlin. Schelling, already on the way to fame, kept Hegel abreast with German speculation. Both of them were intent on forcing the theologians into the daylight, and grudged them any aid they might expect from Kant’s postulation of God and immortality to crown the edifice of ethics. Meanwhile, Hölderlin in Jena had been following Fichte’s career with an enthusiasm with which he infected Hegel.
It is pleasing to turn from these vehement struggles of thought to a tour which Hegel in company with three other tutors made through the Bernese Oberland in July and August 1796. Of this tour he left a minute diary. He was delighted with the varied play of the waterfalls, but no glamour blinded him to the squalor of Swiss peasant life. The glaciers and the rocks called forth no
