“The Teaching of Jesus” by Franz Brentano

On March 17, 1917, Franz Brentano died near Zurich at a ripe old age, after a philosopher's life that had gone through changing fortunes. But the inner walk on earth of this personality was much more eventful. This life was dedicated to the search for truth in the most serious sense. Franz Brentano's uncle was Clemens Brentano, the German poet of Romanticism. The family was devoutly Catholic. Clemens Brentano was the son of Maximiliane Brentano, a friend of Goethe. The great poet immortalized the high-minded figure of Maximiliane in his Werther as “Fräulein von B.”

Franz Brentano was influenced by the intellectualism and Catholicism of the Brentano family. But the effect was a very peculiar one. He had a flair for the intellectual world; but he lacked the romantic lightness to live in these worlds, beyond the bounds of logic, on the wings of fantasy, like his uncle Clemens. And he had a deep love for devotion to knowledge that arises from pious feeling; but his scholastic-Aristotelian training prevented him from receiving the truth in the form of revelation; his heart longed for religion; his mind longed to see through the content of the truth.

He first became a Catholic priest, not only because of the external circumstances of a Catholic family, but out of a genuine inner calling. And he was a priest in his youth, also in the sense that he considered the use of the intellect for one's own purposes to be sinful compared to belief in revelation. But he was also a zealous theologian. His keen intellect was developed in the most brilliant way by scholasticism and Aristotelianism. The romantic heritage of his family seems to have been transformed in him entirely into logical conceptualization and connected with the highest conscientiousness for the truth. Unconscious, half-conscious doubts rummage in the depths of the soul. The pious Catholic does not allow himself to give in to them.

So the declaration of the dogma of infallibility hits him. He had to prepare that famous memorandum on the dogma for Bishop Ketteler, which the bishop then presented at the bishops' conference in Fulda. Brentano had been inwardly disillusioned by the writing of this memorandum on the Catholic Church. His devout Catholic sense would have forbidden him even to think of a dogma that already existed. But the dogma of infallibility did not yet exist when he found himself called upon to examine it. He was allowed to examine it – and after the examination he found that in his heart he could no longer find his way back to the Catholic Church. The Church had accepted the dogma that he, out of his Catholicism, had to reject.

Franz Brentano left the Church and became a freelance philosopher. He brought to philosophy the art of strictly logical conceptualization. Aristotelianism, with its ascent from the observation of the senses to the comprehension of the spiritual in ingeniously formed concepts, had become second nature to Brentano. — Thus, as a philosopher, he wanted to find his way into the age in which knowledge of nature had become the guiding principle in all scientific methodology. One of his first philosophical writings was the one in which he propounded the proposition that true philosophy must make use of no other methods than those of genuine natural science. It was with this attitude that he set out to write a psychology in the 1870s. It was intended to be a work in several volumes. But only the first volume appeared. In my book Von Seelenrätseln (Dornach 1960, page 95), I have attempted to explain the reasons why Brentano was never able to complete, or even continue, his psychology. There one finds the view developed that the soul phenomena are precisely those that a person who truly understands the essence of the scientific method will want to observe through a kind of knowledge developed through spiritual vision. At first he will adhere to this method within the limits of the natural field, but by its very application he will convince himself that the soul in its activity and essence can only be recognized when the ordinary consciousness, going beyond itself, develops the faculty of exact vision. To this vision the processes of soul and spirit open themselves. Brentano did not want to proceed to such vision. He wanted to penetrate into the realm of mental phenomena using the methods of natural science. In doing so, he only got as far as elementary mental processes. But in his own opinion, a psychology that only gets as far as the formation and concatenation of ideas, the shaping of attention and memory, and so on, is worthless. True psychology must arrive at the knowledge of that which remains as man's better part when the body decays. But such a psychology can only be arrived at through exact observation. Brentano did not want this, and so he was unable to find any content for the higher parts of psychology. He could not find it by using the scientific method. His highly developed scientific and intellectual conscientiousness did not allow him to merely provide formalism.

Throughout his life as a philosopher, Brentano wrestled with the riddles of the world, which only yield to knowledge through exact observation. His struggle was a magnificent one. Anyone who followed his writings during his lifetime was deeply drawn to the tremendous work of knowledge of this philosopher, if they had the organ for it.

According to his devoted students, a rich legacy of Franz Brentano's work now exists. It is to be published in the course of time. His students will be most gratefully indebted.

The first publication from this estate gives us an idea of what we can expect from it. It contains – with an excellent introduction by Alfred Kastil – Brentano's “The Teaching of Jesus and its Permanent Significance, with an Appendix: A Brief Presentation of Christian Doctrine” (Leipzig, Felix Meiner publishing house, 1922).

The beginning and end of Brentano's work of knowledge are before the soul of the reader through this writing. What the philosopher has to say about the teachings of Jesus emerges from two foundations: from an intimate understanding of the Gospels and from a conscientious striving for knowledge that is directed towards the sharp formation of ideas. Through the interaction of what he builds on these two foundations, the following emerges in Brentano's soul: i. Jesus' moral teaching; 2. Jesus' teaching about God and the world and about his own person and mission; and 3. a “Concise presentation of Christian doctrine.” In the same way, what he presents as a detailed critique of Pascal's presentation of Catholicism arises for him.

The same break in Brentano's world view that was established in his treatment of psychology can also be found in his position on Christianity. The conviction towards scientific thinking that arose from his research using the scientific method became the hallmark of his entire world view. And so he also struggles with the person of Jesus, in whom he cannot find the divine presence of the Christ. How strongly Brentano's words resonate with a view that approaches the secret of Christ with exact observation and discovers in Jesus the Christ as a supernormal, supermundane divine being (page 37): “The world-view of Jesus was therefore not only geocentric centric, but also Christocentric, and in such a way that not only the whole history of the earth, but also that of pure spirits, both good and bad, is organized around the person of the one man Jesus, and in every respect can only be understood through the purposeful relationship to him. The world is a monarchy not only in view of the one all-powerful God, but also in view of the creature that before all others bears his image.” And yet, the ideas that Brentano develops of Christ Jesus do not culminate in such a spiritual form that can be felt as reality. This can only be the case with a world view that rises from natural science to a spiritual science, from a historical knowledge of external events to an exact view of the supersensible activity of the spiritual realm in historical life. Jesus can be found through a knowledge of history modeled on natural science; the Christ can only be found through a genuine spiritual knowledge. (This does not mean, of course, that the devout Christian does not find the Christ. He finds him in his emotional experience. But knowledge of the Christ can only be gained in the way described. And it was this way that Brentano was striving for.) Through his attitude toward natural science thinking, the philosopher Brentano blocked the way into the spiritual region to which he was, after all, directed.1In the circle of Brentano's students, my view of Brentano's difficulties with psychology has been challenged. I would gladly admit that those close to the philosopher may know more about this than I do; but I am now substantially strengthened in my judgment of Brentano's work, particularly by his “Lehre Jesu” (The Teaching of Jesus). He has therefore not completely rediscovered the path to Christ, which he lost through his confrontation with Catholic dogma. It is precisely through what a venerable seeker of truth could not find that Brentano is one of the most important philosophical phenomena of the present day.