Ernst Haeckel's Religion of Evolution
Monism and Naturphilosophie, a pagan Weltanschauung for the modern man?
“One of the most distinctive features of the expiring century is the increasing vehemence of the opposition between science and Christianity. That is both natural and inevitable.” wrote zoologist Ernst Haeckel in his 1899 work, The Riddle of the Universe. Haeckel, known to history as “The German Darwin” and coiner of the term “ecology”, found himself in a firm position of experience and authority to make this declaration. His promotion of principles of evolution from his professorship in Jena quickly boiled over into the larger Kulturkampf between Bismarck and the Catholic Church. From the beginning, Darwin’s new model of creation has posed a dangerous threat to the traditional view of the Genesis of mankind, and the minds and institutions of Christianity have gone great lengths to wage a holy war against this philosophy, one that rages on still today. Haeckel, as a former Evangelical and convert to Darwinismus, played an interesting role in this war by attempting to not fight natural philosophy, nor find a home for religion in its gaps, but to weave a new religion on the foundation of natural philosophy itself, which he called Monism.
This monism was for Haeckel the answer to a centuries-long question that had nagged at the great minds of Germany since Goethe, the question of this great riddle of the world—Welträthsel—what is the nature of the world? What principle unifies existence? Haeckel tells us that the key to the answer is the principle of evolution:
We have at least attained to a clear view of the fact that all the partial questions of creation are indivisibly connected, that they represent one single, comprehensive “cosmic problem,” and that the key to this problem is found in the one magic word—evolution. The great questions of the creation of man, the creation of the animals and plants, the creation of the earth and the sun, etc., are all parts of the general question, What is the origin of the whole world? Has it been created by supernatural power, or has it been evolved by a natural process? What are the causes and the manner of this evolution? If we succeed in finding the correct answer to one of these questions, we have, according to our monistic conception of the world, cast a brilliant light on the solution of them all, and on the entire cosmic problem. (Die Welträthsel)
Though recognized as a great zoologist and thinker of evolution, it is his late-life construction of the monist philosophy and battle with the institutions of Christianity in which his contributions continue to give breath. Through his life work with evolution, Haeckel presents a fundamentally new religion; one that doesn’t merely survive the assault of rationalism and natural philosophy against religion, but uses it as its foundation. In our day especially with an apparent failure of the world religions to respond to the charges, monism deserves an audience to its case.
Deists, Science, and Rome
On the Origin of Species was published in November of 1859, and was one of the final salvos fired in the debate between creationism and evolution. Darwin’s legacy is in fact ending this debate in academia, not starting it. By this time, developments in the field of geology had already rendered literalist interpretations of Genesis obsolete, and Lamarckism was in full swing. Towards the end of the 19th century, Darwin had negotiated a comfortable relationship between Christianity and his theory where evolution is interpreted as a device of God’s creation, rather than a refutation of him. However, what Darwin was suggesting was not a slight reimagination of scripture. What was becoming undeniable were two things: the complete lack of a requirement of a creator to explain human existence, and more importantly, that man was not as privileged and unique as previously thought.
For the most part, Christian institutions saw the writing on the wall and played nice. Aside from the expressly anti-Darwinian sentiments best exemplified in the United States with its ban of Darwinism in education, Christianity accepted that evolution was here to stay. But this does not mean they were entirely accepting of the shifting narrative, in fact, they went great lengths to ensure that the priest still had a seat at the table. Pressure was applied wherever possible to keep God in the conversation.
One reason for this is that evolution drove deeper an old wedge between two types of Christianity: Protestant deism and Romanist theism. Deists had by this time already “downgraded” God to a static principle of sorts, rather than an active being as described by the dualistic theism of old. Deism allowed for the actions of the world to regulate themselves without the intervention of a creator, and in so found a great adoration for the natural sciences. Reason was the method in which God revealed himself to mankind, not revelation. And so the great strives of progress and natural philosophy illuminated the Protestant nations, particularly Britain and Germany, while Rome was left to point out and control the widespread social consequences that came with such a dramatic change. Evolution was one such battleground.
It is from this philosophy and idea of a self-regulating universe that monism was allowed to spring forth. Deists may have brought Heaven and Earth a bit too close for comfort for Rome, but Haeckel’s monism made them synonymous. In a way, the critics were correct that this was a final step on the road to the abandonment of Christianity. Haeckel certainly saw it this way, leaving the Evangelical Church to found the basis of a new religion.
Origins: Goethe’s Naturphilosophie
One of Haeckel’s first attempts to describe the religious philosophy he advocated for came in a 1892 lecture delivered near Dresden, titled Monism as Connecting Religion and Philosophy. The preceding lectures of this conference were hyperspecialized talks on taxonomy, earthquake classifications, and evolution. What Haeckel had in mind was something much broader and much more significant, he proposed a compromise to settle the centuries-long war between science and religion, the false dichotomy of Christianity and Atheism:
The monistic idea of God, which alone is compatible with our present knowledge of nature, recognizes the divine spirit in all things. It can never recognize in God a "personal being," or, in other words, an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form. God is everywhere. As Giordano Bruno has it: "There is one spirit in all things, and nobody is so small that it does not contain a part of the divine substance whereby it is animated." Every atom is thus animated, and so is the ether; we might, therefore, represent God as the infinite sum of all natural forces, the sum of all atomic forces and all ether-vibrations. It comes virtually to the same thing when (as was done here by a speaker on a former occasion) God is defined as "the supreme law of the universe," and the latter is represented as the "working of universal space. (ibid)
Such an idea of God to the monist is the logical conclusion of natural philosophy. The workings of nature have shown themselves to be self-regulated by remarkably simple and mundane laws, which require no Creator to explain its origin or its sustenance. Just as the existence of the diversity of plants and animals can be explained by gradual, self-regulated change over time, so can the orientation of the Earth, Sun, and the universe itself.
Though it may sound like atheism, it is anything but the sort. In fact, it is a culmination of the “religion” of Goethe - Naturphilosopie. Goethe himself shared this primacy of natural philosophy & reason over revelation, even formulating one of the first concepts of evolution by theorizing a common ancestor in diverse forms of plants in 1790 and linking the premaxilla of humans to that of other mammals. Goethe was uniquely and devoutly religious to- not necessarily the Christian God- but to the world and to human experience, which was represented by a single unifying force: nature.
In his life, he was referred to by his Christian contemporaries as “The Great Heathen”. To commit the great sin of simplifying Goethe, I believe the charge was more or less correct: he was a polytheist. Goethe’s beliefs are too complex to cover in depth here, but I will defend the idea of his polytheism thus: He had a genuine reverence for Greek paganism, though he likely did not share the superstition of the Greeks, one needs only to take a good look at his great work Faust to see this adoration. This work is many things, though it is, in part, Goethe’s attempt to unify Germany and Greece through Gretchen and Helen of Troy. The Christian schematic of God, angels, and demons sets the scaffolding for Faust, however Goethe makes a few modifications to Christian orthodoxy. Namely, Gretchen and Faust are redeemed not by their guilt and suffering, but through the striving which defines the human experience.
It is this concept of Naturphilosophie, the human experience as it relates to nature and the daily creative, striving act, that Goethe permanently imprinted upon the Germanic consciousness; and Haeckel was a zealous believer Goethe’s influence on the Monistenbund cannot be overstated. Indeed, it is difficult to find a writing of Haeckel’s that does not name that great German. He concluded Die Welträthsel with a quotation from Goethe’s Das Göttliche:
We may, therefore, express a hope that the twentieth century will complete the task of resolving the antitheses, and, by the construction of a system of pure monism, spread far and wide the long-desired unity of world-conception. Germany’s greatest thinker and poet, whose 150th anniversary will soon be upon us—Wolfgang Goethe—gave this “philosophy of unity” a perfect poetic expression, at the very beginning of the century, in his immortal poems, Faust, Prometheus, and God and the World,
By eternal laws
Of iron ruled,
Most all fulfill
The cycle of
Their destiny
The Fallacy of Anthropocentrism
Once it was accepted that nature and its evolution was the key, Haeckel and the monists began fleshing out a robust philosophical and religious system based on this inquiry: what does nature tell us? Haeckel gives complex arguments, often pointing to the substance theory of Spinoza, but the premise can be illustrated by the following trajectory:
Where did man come from? You follow his evolutionary history and phylogeny, and you discover that he comes from the same place all life did. Where did this universal common ancestor come from? At the very bridge of chemistry and biology, carbon and hydrogen folding itself in stable and replicable patterns. Where do the elements come from? The Earth and its seas, the Sun and stars? Chemistry becomes physics, and soon physics becomes theoretical mathematics. Across this entire chain, nothing novel has been generated. It has been substance- matter, force, and energy transformed- which has been inquired into throughout.
What the Scientific Revolution told the West was very simple. Humanity is not as unique as we thought it was, anthropocentrism is a fallacy. This great “revelation” of the 19th Century tore down three beliefs of the West in particular which largely hinged on anthropocentrism: belief in a personal Creator, the immortality of an individual soul, and the free will of individuals.
Our monistic view, that the great cosmic law applies throughout the whole of nature, is of the highest moment. For it not only involves, on its positive side, the essential unity of the cosmos and the causal connection of all phenomena that come within our cognizance, but it also, in a negative way, marks the highest intellectual progress, in that it definitely rules out the three central dogmas of metaphysics—God, freedom, and immortality. In assigning mechanical causes to phenomena everywhere, the law of substance comes into line with the universal law of causality. (Die Welträthsel)
Haeckel’s identification of a single substance as a matter of science relies on the unity of two distinct theories, Lavoisier’s law of conservation of mass and the law of conservation of energy which, by Haeckel’s time, was being revolutionized by Mayer’s equivalence principle. In essence, both mass and energy are ultimately equivalent and transferable because they stem from the same ontology. Haeckel lived long enough to see this belief enshrined as scientific dogma through Einstein’s special relativity, E = mc2. Interestingly, Einstein was very familiar with the Monistenbund, often giving private lectures to members.
The enterprise of the modern scientist has shown that substance (mass and energy) is immortal, eternal, in all things, and all things are substance. In short, substance is God. This is the basis of Haeckel’s monism:
[…] God, as an intramundane being, is everywhere identical with nature itself, and is operative within the world as “force” or “energy.” The latter view alone is compatible with our supreme law—the law of substance. It follows necessarily that pantheism is the world-system of the modern scientist. (Die Welträthsel)
A Monistic Catechism
Dr. L. Frei devised a "Monistic Catechism," of which Haeckel says: "I have read with keen interest the catechism teaching the monistic aspect of the world; it covers the ground well and is bound to gain universal approval and success.” In it contains some interesting stances on questions which have long been the staple of the religious enterprise.
As Aquinas made certain inferences from the Aristotelian conception of God, so too did Haeckel and the monists made a number of inferences from Goethe and Spinoza’s. If substance is eternal and immortal, then so too is the thing which is compromised by it- the universe- never created, and never to die. The eternal becoming and passing of individual things, life and death, does not necessarily entail a supernatural aspect. Nor does the human capacity for reason, which Haeckel has (so far) correctly hypothesized is due to the evolution of the human brain, and is differentiated from the rest of the animal kingdom by degree of capacity, rather than by kind.
Below are a few interesting excerpts from Frei’s Catechism.
14. Is there a moral order of the universe?
Nothing but a negative answer may be gained through a perfect understanding of the preceding chapters. There being no room for a moral order in the physical and chemical constitution of the universe and in the history of the organic world existing for countless years, there are no other laws prevailing in the history of nations than the all dominant precepts of nature. The struggle for existence is not fought out and decided by the moral order, but by the physical and intellectual excellence, activity and superiority of the individual.
23. What do we call "soul"?
According to notions received from the ancients the soul is separable from the body. However, modern science, finding expression in monism, defines it to be the sum total of all manifestations exercised by the living organism, thus being a synonym of character, propelling, driving force or energy governing the whole universe down to the minutest atom.
30. How about the much talked-of freedom of the will?
This human attribute as preached both by believers and unbelievers cannot hold out against the judgment of pure reason. Every activity and utterance of the soul as well as every act of the will is limited and conditioned by the organization of the individual on one side and by the influences from without on the other. The freedom of the will is only apparent and everybody acts according to the character or kind of pursuits acquired or inherited from progenitors. Circumstances decide at the impulse of the moment, but are limited by laws governing emotions, the strongest one usually prevailing.
55. Where does the monist look for his ideals of beauty?
In the beautiful forms of nature and in the products of human skill as far as the latter are true imitations of nature and adapted to some purpose or end.
A New Paganism?
Seeing the framework of this Weltanschauung laid out, some may have noticed, despite its primacy of materialism, a peculiar similarity to the pre-Christian religiosity of Europe. It seems remarkably pagan. But to what extent?
In a previous post, Returning to a World-Accepting Religiosity, I examined characteristics of the evolution of religiosity from its primitive to modern forms. A number of criteria could be used to differentiate pagan religiosity from the Christian tradition. Paganism bases truth on experience and not revelation, concerns itself with orientation within the world rather than escaping it, and views reality as divinely animated substance. These three traits fit perfectly in Haeckel’s monistic worldview, in fact, they are presuppositional to its establishment.
Haeckel was not the first to describe the universe this way, and he certainly was not the first monist. Just as Goethe attempted to synthesize Germany with Ancient Greece in terms of literature and culture, Haeckel too found his modern science of evolution in remarkable harmony with the philosophy of Greece.
This entire enterprise of attempting to describe all of existence under a single unifying principle is well-attested in the ancient debates between Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Thales, who each identified the first principle as fire, infinity, and water, respectively. Haeckel is in fact a willing participant in this debate, and his use of the term “substance” may as well translate to Ἀρχή.
Additionally, the monist description of a sort of “soul” underlying all of existence, which could be identified with God, would find good company in the work of the Neoplatonic School of Athens. Plotinus identified this Nous - World Soul, as his own vision of substance/arche. Indeed, Neoplatonism was expressly monistic, and it was the writings of Plotinus in which thinkers like Descartes, Spinoza, Goethe, and Haeckel contemplated the idea of substance. If Haeckel’s science of evolution can find a plug-in with Neoplatonism at Plotinus’s first principle, then the entire Neoplatonic religion, with its gods and theurgy, could potentially follow.
This is not to say Haeckel and the monists were secretly pagan and were inches away from invoking the gods. But they were interested in the gentle passing of Christianity to history, and in its stead, the creation of a fundamentally new religion based on science, reason, and nature. Pagan superstition would have not found a home in Jena. It just so happens that in doing so, they revived several key aspects of the old religion of Europe to get there. It does appear that Haeckel’s monism provides an interesting way to get to Wotan from science, as outlandish as it may seem on the surface.
However, if a monist were to respond to the charge of paganism, they would likely state that it, just as valid as Confucianism or Buddhism, is but one path to reach the same conclusion. Humanist plurality was well established in the Monistenbund.
Conclusion
Religion has been the victim of a brutal massacre at the hands of scientific materialism. The Church encapsulated all of reason and all of existence in the medieval, but today, it must begrudgingly mumble off its compliance with science in a number of novel contortions which the Church itself is not sure are acceptable. Science and reason set the tone and the barriers of the discussion, and religion can only interpret its explanatory power in its own creative ways.
For this reason, the search for a religion that can survive scientific materialism is essential for those who still crave religion at all. Haeckel, one of the most consequential scientists to have ever lived, thought he had the answer. Not only does his monism survive science, it is formulated firmly upon its basis. It’s for this reason, and the monist’s intentional openness to the scientific process, that Haeckel’s statements and predictions about the universe have remained intact despite over a century of titanic changes in our understanding of nature and the universe. It appears he was on to something.
The Monist League didn’t survive long after Haeckel’s death in 1919, as it was completely gutted by the disaster of the Great War. By 1933, the miserable husk of its remains was disbanded to promote the new religion of Germany, National Socialism. However, Haeckel’s spirit very much lived in through that regime and to the modern religious and ecological landscape.
In denying the existence of a transcendent God and stressing the immanence of spirit within matter, Haeckel intentionally rejected the ethical demands of the conventional revealed religions, and he argued forcefully against the supposition of the uniqueness of man or the prospect of historical progress. According to his Monist philosophy, the political realm operated not in progressive linear stages, but according to the ultimate cyclical destiny of the cosmos, and therefore society could not be organized in any other way than as blindly adhering to the morally indifferent laws of nature. To subvert nature and its amoral rules would inevitably and fatally weaken mankind and lead to its racial and physical demise—an accusation that he leveled at Christianity with its roots in ethically imbued Judaism and the Mosaic code. Political life for Haeckel meant simply carrying out the will of nature, and he argued indefatigably on behalf of the idea that politics had to be understood as applied biology—an idea that would, in time, become one of the cardinal theoretical political principles of National Socialism.
The Scientific Origins of National Socialism, Daniel Gasman
To conclude, I leave a rather beautiful statement from Haeckel in his Monism as Connecting Religion and Science speech, regarding how he finds meaning in this philosophy.
The school of the twentieth century, flourishing anew on this firm ground, shall have to unfold to the rising youth not only the wonderful truths of the evolution of the cosmos, but also the inexhaustible treasures of beauty lying everywhere hidden therein. Whether we marvel at the majesty of the lofty mountains or the magic world of the sea, whether with the telescope we explore the infinitely great wonders of the starry heaven, or with the microscope the yet more surprising wonders of a life infinitely small, everywhere does Divine Nature open up to us an inexhaustible fountain of aesthetic enjoyment. Blind and insensible have the great majority of mankind hitherto wandered through this glorious wonderland of a world; a sickly and unnatural theology has made it repulsive as a "vale of tears." But now, at last, it is given to the mightily advancing human mind to have its eyes opened; it is given to it to show that a true knowledge of nature affords full satisfaction and inexhaustible nourishment not only for its searching understanding, but also for its yearning spirit.
Monistic investigation of nature as knowledge of the true, monistic ethic as training for the good, monistic aesthetic as pursuit of the beautiful—these are the three great departments of our monism: by the harmonious and consistent cultivation of these we effect at last the truly beatific union of religion and science, so painfully longed after by so many to-day. The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, these are the three august Divine Ones before which we bow the knee in adoration; in the unforced combination and mutual supplementing of these we gain the pure idea of God. To this "triune" Divine Ideal shall the coming twentieth century build its altars.
Suggested Reading
Video: Great Authors - Goethe, Faust Michael Sugrue
A full catalogue of Haeckel’s beauitful Kuntesforms der Natur
I need to reread this, and thank you for writing it, but I am immediately reminded of Fr. Seraphim Rose’s discussion of “God as Creator” in chapter 3 of The Orthodox Way. There is a lot of the same language about God being present even at the atomic level. They call this Panentheism which I think is an apt descriptor of the Orthodox view of God. You might find more purchase in this perspective of the Christian God than the “rational even unto death” cyborg that the Catholics sometimes create
Was a literal Genesis creation story ever the consensus in 19th century Germany? I haven’t seen much investment in YEC outside some heinous Protestant camps.