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Om det Religiøse i dets Enhed med det Humane. Et positivt Supplement til „Problemet om Tro og Viden“ (Copenhagen: P. G. Philipsens Forlag, 1869; [IV] + 211 pp., printed by Bianco Lunos Bogtrykkeri) is the book Hans Brøchner promised at the end of the 1868 volume. Problemet om Tro og Viden had been historical-critical, and its result, as Brøchner says on his first page, “from the nature of the case, had essentially to be negative”: faith in the sense of positive religion and knowledge are incongruent, and cannot be held together in one consciousness without discord. This is the positive half — the attempt to show that everything the positive religions place on revelation can be carried by a rational ethics, and that the religious and the human, so far from being opposed, are one. Both books are in this collection, in Danish and in English, and they are meant to be read as a pair.
Complete, in both languages: printed pp. 1–211, comprising the Indhold, the untitled Indledning (pp. 1–4), divisions I (5–29), II (30–63) and III (64–201), the Slutning (202–210), and the author’s Trykfeil leaf (211). Transcribed from the Royal Danish Library scan of the copy at shelfmark DA 1.-2.S 3 8°.
The three divisions are:
This is a diplomatic edition. Nineteenth-century orthography stands as printed — Christendommen, Theologie, høiere, aa, capitalised nouns — and printer’s errors are transcribed as printed, logged in a comment at the site, and never silently corrected. The quote-balance counts therefore drift off zero on purpose.
Page map. Uniform across the whole book: printed p. N = PDF page N + 11, so printed 1–210 are PDF 12–221 and the Trykfeil leaf is PDF 222. Verified by rendering the head band of every leaf and reading all 211 folios by eye; the offset holds with no exceptions. Three leaves carry no folio by design — p. 1, p. 5, and the errata leaf.
Emphasis. The book’s only emphatic device inside a paragraph is
letterspacing (Sperrsatz), and it is used heavily, on whole phrases rather
than single words. Bold Fraktur occurs only in display heads and in the
top-level entries of the Indhold, never inside a paragraph. All letterspacing is
rendered \emph{}.
The compositor is inconsistent, and this is the edition’s most persistent
technical problem. A run often stops at a line break, or inside a word, or
inside a word that is not broken at all: Aands-functioner (p. 6),
Tidsbestemmelsen (p. 18), Væsenstotaliteten (p. 19), Livsforhold i
Betydning (p. 32), Væsensbestemmelsen (p. 178, whole word, spaced in the
first element only), ideelle Moment (p. 190). Twice a single run is carried
across a page break inside a broken word — Syn- / dens Begreb at pp.
194/195, and Syn- / den selv at pp. 195/196. All of it is reproduced rather
than regularised. Where the English compound divides at the same joint it
divides there; where it cannot, the run falls on the corresponding element and a
comment records what the printing does. Either way the run count is
preserved, which is what the parity check tests.
Antiqua and Greek. Latin words are set in antiqua within the Fraktur, and
the antiqua may itself be letterspaced or not, page by page — causa sui and
causa finalis are spaced on p. 68, modus (p. 83) and eo ipso (p. 89) are
tight, and conditio sine qua non on p. 59 is half and half. The clearest case
is p. 192, where sub specie æterni stands twice on the one page, spaced at its
first occurrence and tight nine lines later. Spaced antiqua is encoded
\emph{\textit{…}} and tight antiqua \textit{…}; the distinction is invisible
in English, where italic already does duty for emphasis, and is kept
mechanically so the two files stay comparable. Proper names stay in Fraktur and
are letterspaced instead — not one name was found set in antiqua anywhere in the
book. Greek is always antiqua italic with accents; neither OCR witness reads any
of it, so all 53 runs were caught by eye, page by page.
Rules. Thirty-four short centred rules stand in pp. 1–210, and the book uses them in two roles which this edition treats differently. Sixteen are head ornaments, standing immediately above or below a display or run-in head; they belong to the setting of the head and are not transcribed. The other eighteen — division-closing rules and mid-page thought-breaks — are transcribed uniformly. Five of them are printed as double rules, at pp. 4, 29, 63, 201 and 210, that is at the close of the Indledning and of each division and of the Slutning; every other rule in the book is a single hairline. The distinction is recorded at each site rather than reproduced typographically.
Footnotes are printed *) and **) and reset on every printed page —
proved on pp. 16 and 17, which each carry two. footmisc[perpage] is wrong
here, since it resets on the typeset page.
Where the Indhold disagrees with the heads. In eight places the book’s own
contents leaf and its printed heads genuinely differ, and both readings are
recorded rather than normalised into agreement — the disagreement is a datum.
They range from a single letter (p. 90, head Det menneskelige Væsens Begreb,
Indhold De) through enumerator styles (1) for 1. at pp. 190 and 192,
2) for 2. at p. 164) to word order (p. 168, head α) Ophævelsen af Skylden,
Indhold α) Skyldens Ophævelse). The Indhold also contradicts itself: it places
2. Forsoningen, dens Kilde og Maal at 167–201, though the head is printed on
p. 164 and its own first sub-entry is given as 165–167. Two body heads have no
Indhold entry at all (pp. 193 and 195). Six rubric lines appear in the contents
and nowhere in the body, and are not introduced into it.
For this reason the Indhold is translated as a list rather than replaced by a generated table of contents, which is what the sibling volume does. Here it is a bibliographic object in its own right, and all of it is reproduced.
The author’s errata. The Trykfeil leaf carries three blocks, and only the first belongs to this book: p. 62, line 24, printed fra det, to read for det. It is transcribed as printed at p. 62, flagged there, and not applied. The other two blocks are errata for Problemet om Tro og Viden (nine items) and for Et Svar til Prof. R. Nielsen, 2det Oplag (two items), and are reproduced as printed. In the English the leaf’s rubric is translated — Side → Page, læs: → read: — while the words being corrected stay in Danish, since each erratum is about a Danish sort in a Danish line and has no referent in the English. Note the heading’s spelling: Trykfeil:, with -ei-.
Twenty-two further printer’s defects are logged at the site: hinandes for hinandens (p. 7), Inhold for Indhold (p. 26), Tilintetgjørrelse with a doubled r (p. 43), Asolutes for Absolutes (p. 68), a doubled article in i den den gode Villies (p. 167), man for men (p. 168), Naturexisteniserne (p. 169), gjennm for gjennem (p. 195), and a comma standing inside Dogmet om det, Supranaturale (p. 202), among others. Most are orthographic and do not survive translation; the two that do — the doubled article and the stray comma — are reproduced in the English. Several claimed defects were examined and rejected, and are recorded as rejected so they are not re-litigated.
How the translation was checked. Not by reading, which catches almost none of this, but by counting both files mechanically with comments stripped. The final figures, over pp. 1–211:
| Danish | English | |
|---|---|---|
| emphasis runs | 2086 | 2086 |
| footnotes | 41 | 41 |
| footnote-counter resets | 36 | 36 |
| transcribed rules | 20 | 20 |
| antiqua Latin | 36 | 36 (+1 on the title page) |
| display and chapter heads | 21 | 21 |
| run-in heads | 8 | 8 |
| Greek runs | 53 | 53 |
| question marks | 5 | 5 |
| quotation marks, open / close | 121 / 121 | 121 / 121 |
| page markers | 211 | 211, aligned |
The one extra antiqua run is the Danish original title, set in italic beneath the English one on the translation’s title page: an editorial addition, not a divergence in the body.
The check earned its keep. It found a title italicised in English that the printing sets plain (p. 1); a dropped run on bevidst (p. 21); three places where one Danish run had become two English ones, or lost a half; a quotation pair supplied at p. 32 where the printing marks the quoted phrase with a colon alone; a printed dash pair flattened at p. 59; two wrong sentence-final marks (pp. 106 and 164); and, most seriously, two passages at pp. 120 and 122 where a quotation had been rendered as reported speech, silently dropping the printing’s quotation marks. None of these was visible on reading.
Punctuation within the sentence is not under that rule. The translation sets more em-dashes than the Danish, as every other completed pair in this collection does — the sibling volume at a ratio of 1.3, others considerably higher — since rendering a Danish comma-bounded apposition with an English dash pair is ordinary translation practice and not a defect. What the dash count is good for is the opposite direction: a page where the English has fewer dashes than the printing may have dropped one the compositor actually set. After the p. 59 repair, no page in the book does.
The argument of division III is the part most likely to interest a reader coming from Kierkegaard or from the Danish Hegelians. Brøchner’s problem is that a rational ethics has to account for guilt without borrowing the machinery of the positive religions: without a will whose law is heterogeneous with reason, without an inherited corruption of nature, without a satisfaction accepted by divine fiat. His solution turns on a claim about the structure of the evil will — that in willing itself in isolation it works with a force borrowed from the essence it is fighting, hollows itself out, and generates in the essence a discord that shows up in consciousness as anxiety, and that at the point where that anxiety becomes anxiety for the essence’s own dissolution the relation reverses and repentance becomes possible (pp. 152–164). Reconciliation is then not a transaction but a redintegration, and the force actualised by the evil willing is converted, not annulled: repentance, “in opposition to what Fichte would have it,” effects an increase of force (p. 172).
Three conditions have to be met for the ideal to be actualised (p. 168): that guilt can be made good, that the ethical can become a determination of totality for a human life, and that the individual life can acquire a determinateness by eternity. The third is where the book is least comfortable. Brøchner rejects personal immortality in the ordinary sense — an existence continued into infinity would give only “an infinitely continued approximation,” never eternity’s correlate (p. 183) — and what he offers instead is the individual spirit taken up “as a moment in the Eternal’s life,” with a moment of completion at death in which the divided force is gathered into an undivided energy, for every individual whatever the kind of the will has been (pp. 186–189). Whether that preserves anything a reader would recognise as the person is a question the book raises and does not settle.
The Feuerbach section (pp. 97–126) is the fullest engagement in Danish philosophy of the period, and it is generous: Brøchner takes the projection thesis seriously as an account of what the positive religions do, and then argues that it does not touch the religious relation as he has defined it. Feuerbach’s man makes himself poor in order to enrich God; Brøchner’s does not have to, because the principle is immanent. The closing comparison of divisions III.1 and III.2 (pp. 190–201) sets his own view against Spinoza and Hegel on one side — both, he argues, share an abstract conception of eternity that dissolves the individual and with it the ethical — and against the Christian doctrine of reconciliation on the other, where the argument becomes sharp: election of grace is the point at which the arbitrariness of the divine will “comes forward in its greatest sharpness,” and Calvin’s et horribile decretum and Luther’s gloss on the Gospel are quoted to show that the consistent theologians saw it.
The Slutning is worth reading on its own. It is partly a summary, partly a programme — “the religion of actuality, which is not to be founded or created, but only to be shown as being” (p. 206) — and partly a settling of accounts. The last three pages dismiss a “so-called Religionsphilosophie” (Rasmus Nielsen’s) for postulating rather than proving the self-limitation of knowledge, issue an open challenge to Danish theologians to attack his criticism directly rather than indirectly, and answer in advance any charge of atheism “only with the silence which is that of contempt.”