Joachim Wach

Religious Scholar

• Born: January 25, 1898
• Birthplace: Chemnitz, Germany
• Died: August 27, 1955
• Place of death: Orselina, Switzerland

German-born American theologian

Wach distilled the descriptive requirements for a scientific definition of religious experience from his general theory of knowledge and understanding. He created the modern academic field of the history of religions out of and in contrast to preceding notions of comparative religion.

Areas of achievement Religion and theology, historiography, philosophy

Early Life

Joachim Wach (YOH-ahk-ihm vahk) was born the eldest child of three, to Felix Wach, who was food comptroller of Germany during World War I, and his wife, Katharina von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Joachim’s paternal grandparents were Adolf Wach, prominent juridical counsellor to the king of Saxony, and subsequently professor of law, first at the University of Rostock, later at the University of Leipzig, until his death in 1926; and Lily, the youngest daughter of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. Joachim’s mother was the granddaughter of Paul, brother to the composer Felix. While the two lines were thus related, they distinguished by the hyphen in the name their common descent from the brothers’ grandfather, the eminent Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

The immediate family had means and influence in imperial Germany. Wach, while of remote Jewish ancestry and prosperity, was reared Lutheran, though with a governess who was devoutly Roman Catholic. Through her he had a childhood audience with the bishop of Wurzburg, who gave him religious pictures that entered into his play at mass with his brother and sister.

The Latin of that tradition came as easily into his formative years as did the variety of cultural influences of his exposures to international acquaintances connected with both the academic world and the royal courts of Saxony and, through an aunt, Sweden. The family estate overlooked the Elbe River near Dresden, but, with the family fortune, it was confiscated by Adolf Hitler.

Aside from familial contacts and activities, involving music, drama, literature, and poetry read and performed Wach’s early education included classical and modern languages. In 1916, he completed examinations at the Vitzhumsche gymnasium in Dresden, was commissioned a German army officer, and was sent to the Russian front, accompanied by his boxes of books. He learned Russian and Arabic while on duty, completed a summary of the history of Greek philosophy for his sister, and was forced to encounter, both as a philosophical and as an existential issue, the matter of death. These ingredients came together in his personal religious life and in his intellectual development.

Life’s Work

At the end of World War I, Wach began his serious studies in the history and philosophy of religion at Leipzig. He spent the year 1919 at the University of Munich, under the tutorage of a slightly older, comparably minded instructor, Friedrich Heiler, with whom Wach, at the other’s insistence, read Sanskrit, and by whom he was introduced to Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (1920; The Idea of the Holy, 1923). After the year 1919, Heiler went to Uppsala, Sweden, to study with Archbishop Nathan Soderblom, who had previously held the chair of religions at Leipzig. Heiler returned in 1920 to the position at Marburg, which he held for the rest of his life, and remained a close friend and continuing influence on Wach.

Wach went on to Berlin, where he came into contact with the major historians of Christian thought and institutions, Adolf von Harnack and Ernst Troeltsch, before returning in 1922 to Leipzig to receive his doctor of philosophy degree for a dissertation begun with Heiler. The method, scope, and structure of Wach’s mind were already in evidence in this preliminary work.

Wach’s concern for phenomenology grew out of his contact with Edmund Husserl at Freiburg, and similar attentiveness to the history of literature was a by-product of his attending the lectures of Friedrich Gundolf at Heidelberg. By early 1924, Wach had completed a more systematic study on Religionswissenschaft: Prolegomena zu ihrer wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundlegung (1924; the science of religion: prolegomena to its epistemological foundations) and was appointed privatdocent in the faculty of philosophy at Leipzig, where his grandfather was still active. Successively thereafter, Wach published (1925) a summary of the fundamental notions of Mahayana Buddhism and a survey of the influence of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg on Wilhelm Dilthey, whose philosophy of history was crucial to Wach’s own thought.

Wach was ready to lay out his major study of human “understanding,” Das Verstehen: Grundzuge einer Geschichte der hermeneutischen Theorie im 19. Jahrhundert (1926-1933), in a series of three volumes illustrative of sequential developments in general interpretive theory. The first volume appeared in 1926 and explained the general German intellectual situation in “hermeneutics,” or theory of interpretation, at the outset of the nineteenth century, with focal attention on the liberal Berlin court preacher and theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher. The second volume followed in 1929 with a survey, after a lengthy and erudite introduction, of the divergent notions of interpretation applied to biblical materials from Schleiermacher, through twenty-two mid-century German academics, to the conservative proponent of the Erlangen “school,” Johann Hofmann. In that same year, Wach gave his inaugural lecture as professor in Leipzig on the philosophical history of the nineteenth century and the theology of history, and, in 1930, he was awarded the degree of doctor of theology from Heidelberg. Volume three, dealing with “understanding in historical research” from before Leopold von Ranke at the outset of the nineteenth century to the positivistic Germans who dominated its midyears, did not appear until 1933.

The interim had seen Wach’s publication of Einführung in die religionssoziologie (1931; introduction to religious sociology) and Typen religiöser Anthropologie (1932; types of religious anthropology). The former was systematic, the latter comparative of Eastern and Western intellectual traditions. In 1934, Wach brought to fruition his consideration of Das Problem des Todes in der Philosophie unserer Zeit (1934; the problem of death in the philosophy of our times). All of this output, and much of its mode of treatment, suffered a severe and jarring impact from the Nazi movement, which forced the government of Saxony to dismiss Wach from his academic post on April 10, 1935.

Fortuitously, Wach had received but days before, from an old friend, Robert Pierce Casey of Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, the invitation to be visiting professor. In spite of concern for his family and friends, whom he would have to leave behind to the terrible events of war and the Holocaust, Wach accepted. His family moved into a small villa at Orselina above Locarno in Switzerland, to which he could be a periodic visitor. His father died late in the war, his spirit broken by the tragedy of such vast destruction to all that had been their previous life; his brother survived to become a Lutheran pastor in the new East Germany.

Wach never turned back. He settled readily into the life of the United States and was naturalized as a citizen in 1946. He became an active communicant in the Protestant Episcopal church. His visiting professorial status was regularized in 1937 at Brown, and he was called to head a newly created Department of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago in 1946. At Chicago, Wach had doctoral candidates, and the desired involvement in the total life of a theological faculty. In both institutions, he displayed concern not merely for the relation of religion to the modern secular university but especially for the students under the impact of secular modernity. He gave generously of time and energy to collective student affairs and to individual counseling needs.

Wach was a devout churchman, though never ordained. He was ill equipped to handle modern gadgets, even something as simple as the plugging in of a radio, for which he depended on those students of whom he was most fond and whose company he enjoyed. He got acquainted easily and remained available a most comforting figure among awesome faculty to the new student. He knew one by name from the first introduction. Yet his systematic mode when lecturing would not tolerate a late arrival.

Wach had the disciplined mind of one trained in the late nineteenth century’s academic ideals of “abandoning the haphazard” in scholarship, with none of the arrogance of an elitist. He demanded a precision of time, of vocabulary, and of style illustrating a touch of formality within a gentle warmth of humanity. He knew the key figures of the world’s religions and tried to make them accessible to his students, not only in books but also in person at a level of both intellectual rigor and spiritual depth.

He was working on a major synthesis, The Comparative Study of Religions (1958), when he was stricken, while visiting his mother and sister, by a severe heart attack from which he succumbed within a few weeks. This study and other manuscripts survived and have received posthumous publication.

Ironically, only weeks before Wach’s death, in an effort to recompense “that great injustice which the Nazi government had done to this outstanding representative of German science,” as his lifelong friend Heiler expressed it, the state of Hesse offered Wach the chair of systematic theology at Marburg once held by Rudolf Otto. In commitment to all that had become the new repository for his life’s work, he declined to accept.

Significance

Wach tried to find those few unifying definitions by which the great variety of phenomena of religious experience could be understood. He perceived that it was not humanly possible to express with finality those dimensions that were traditionally described as godlike or divine or revelatory. He did think it conceivable to arrive at some generalizations indicative of the human responsive posture toward the essential and substantive activities. Encounters at Chicago with theologians and philosophers of emergent naturalism may have been at odds with Wach’s inherent Kantianism, but, when mediated by the Anglican archbishop, William Temple, “process” thought provided the kind of medium through which his own bent toward historically conditioned sociology could be given its dynamic form.

Wach identified the descriptive requirements for a scientific definition of religious experience in a few fundamental propositions. Religious experience is the total response of the total human personality to that which is apprehended as ultimate reality. This experience is the most intense of which the human is capable, and this experience impels the human to act. In the analysis of the religious experience, all expression falls within three categories: theoretical, practical, and sociological. Wach affirmed that religion cannot be the perspective of one. Even the psychological dimension of the experience must have a communal component, if it is to qualify as religious.

In contrast to Mircea Eliade, who succeeded Wach at Chicago and who sought to create a history of religions from the diverse phenomena without reference to variations in time and space, Wach saw the unity and universality of all religious experience within a system of metaphysical principles whose fundamental ingredient was understanding. That understanding required expression, with due reference to the whole history of human modes of thought and conscientious concern for a theory of human inquiry. Only then might one propound the nature of revelation as the empirical element in knowledge, which does not exclude but lies beyond human thought. Wach concluded that “the real history of man is the history of religion.”

Bibliography

Alles, Gregory D. “Wach, Eliade, and the Critique from Totality.” Numen 35 (1988): 108-138. An evaluative essay reflecting on the comparisons and contrasts between Wach and his successor.

Eliade, Mircea, and Joseph M. Kitagawa, eds. The History of Religions: Essays in Methodology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959. Within a volume collected in honor of Wach, Kitagawa’s initial essay, “The History of Religions in America”(pages 1-30), places Wach within the context whereby a field of academic study was defined by his transitional role.

Kitagawa, Joseph Mitsuo. “The Life and Thought of Joachim Wach.” In The Comparative Study of Religions. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. To accompany the posthumous publication of the manuscript, on which Wach was working at the time of his death, his former student and colleague wrote a major biographical statement. The volume is an outgrowth of a series of lectures given in India in 1952 and in American universities in 1954-1955.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Nature and Program of the History of Religions Field.” Divinity School News 23, no. 4 (November 1, 1957): 13-25. The reconstruction of a department after the death of Wach and before the assumption of dominance by Eliade provided occasion to discuss Wach’s understanding of “the history of religions” and the two kinds of “sociology of religion.”

Wach, Joachim. “The Meaning and Task of the History of Religions (Religionswissenschaft).” In The History of Religions: Essays on the Problem of Understanding, edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa, Mircea Eliade, and Charles H. Long. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. In the first volume of a series of Essays in Divinity, reflecting the Chicago school, a translation of an article from Wach’s German of 1935 was given priority of place to demonstrate the complete difference in method and interest of history of religions from comparative religion, whose transition Wach’s appearance at Chicago had accomplished.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Understanding and Believing: Essays. Edited with an introduction by Joseph M. Kitagawa. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. A series of minor writings on a variety of topics, some unpublished, some newly translated, were offered as memorial when Wach’s manuscripts were gathered. A bibliography of Wach’s works from 1922 to 1955 is included.

Wood, Charles Monroe. Theory and Religious Understanding: A Critique of the Hermeneutics of Joachim Wach. Missoula, Mont.: American Academy of Religion, 1975. Originally a doctoral dissertation at Yale (1972), this study examines Wach’s method of interpretation as a derivative of his philosophical perspective on human knowledge and understanding.

Ziolkowski, Eric J. “Wach, Religion, and ’The Emancipation of Art.’” Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 46, no. 4 (1999): 345. Traces the development of Wach’s writings on religion and the idea of the emancipation of art from religious influence.