Content area
Full Text
Der Religionspbilosoph Johannes Hessen (1889-1971): Ein Gelertenleben zwischen Modernismus und Linkskatholizismus. By Chrisoph Weber. [Beitrage zur Kirchen- und Kulturgeschichte, Band 1.] (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 1994. Pp. 693. $97.95.)
The subject of this four-part study is the tumultuous life of Johannes Hessen, a priest and philosopher of religion at the University of Cologne, who in the course of his life managed to run afoul of church hierarchy, university faculty, the National Socialist regime, and the politics of the Bundesrepublik in the 1950's. A major part of the book is devoted to Hessen's "marginalization within the Church,' the reason, the author charges, why he is largely forgotten today (p. 23). Leaving the judgment of the merits of Hessen's thought to philosophers, the author undertakes to document historically "the struggles of an independent mind in the age of ideology" (p. 23). The task is difficult, not least because of the relative scarcity and incompleteness of available sources, a situation not improved by Hessen's own highly selective retrospective in 1959, entitled Geistige Kampfe der Zeit im Spiegel eines Lebens. The author accordingly provides readers with a valuable array of relevant documents, including unedited archive materials, in the last three parts of the study (over two-thirds of the book).
The first part of the book is an introduction to Hessen's philosophy of religion as well as the many conflicts spawned by it (more on this later). The second part is a collection of short...