Introduction
One of the most talked-about books among German classical philologists in the mid-1830s was Petrus Hofman Peerlkamp's 1834 commentary on Horace's Odes.Footnote 1 The book prompted a “deluge” of responses, as one historian put it, most of which aimed to prove, “with the degree of knowledge and taste bestowed upon them by the muses,” that Horace's Odes were not as badly corrupted as Peerlkamp maintained.Footnote 2 This controversy had only just begun, however, when another iconoclast study claimed the attention of many: David Friedrich Strauss's Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus) (1835).Footnote 3 Although the debates prompted by the two books were in many ways incomparable, with Strauss's attack on the reliability of the Gospels causing greater turmoil in educated middle-class circles than Peerlkamp's revisionist views on Horace, there were also similarities.Footnote 4 Perhaps the most striking parallel was that Strauss and Peerlkamp were both accused of “hypercriticism,” with Hyperkritik being a technical term for an excessively critical attitude vis-à-vis the historical record. In both cases, moreover, this accusation had ramifications beyond the realm of textual scholarship. Hypercriticism was associated with a lack of respect for tradition that was religiously heterodox and, in the reactionary climate of the 1830s, potentially politically subversive. As the Gymnasium teacher and Horace specialist Lobegott Samuel Obbarius put it in a review of Peerlkamp's book, “I find in this publication the sad sign of a literary Sansculottism, for which nothing is sacred and inviolable anymore, which only wants to put its beloved I on the throne,” and for this reason “is closely connected to the political Sansculottism that is haunting France and parts of Switzerland and southern Germany.”Footnote 5
What is remarkable about this argument is not that it accused Peerlkamp of a scholarly vice—a way of behaving, reasoning, or writing that scholars regarded as detrimental to their work—but that it offered a symptomatic reading of this vice, in which Peerlkamp's hypercriticism served as evidence of an iconoclastic attitude that was manifesting itself in the worlds of learning and politics alike.Footnote 6 Similarly, when the Thuringian pastor Johann Friedrich Weingart accused Strauss of “immoral Sansculotism of the highest kind,” he was treating Das Leben Jesu as evidence of “the efforts of several talented minds … to demolish the sacred laws of the eternal world order.” Without discussing Strauss's arguments in any detail, he presented “hypercriticism in the field of scholarship” as an acute religious and societal danger.Footnote 7 These symptomatic readings of Peerlkamp's and Strauss's hypercriticism were not unique: the nineteenth century saw a broader tendency to turn hypercriticism from a scholarly vice into a pejorative label that nonspecialist authors could use to discredit unwelcome research findings or entire bodies of scholarly literature. Although hypercriticism never ceased to be a scholarly vice—it continued to be invoked in methodology manuals and learned periodicals—the most striking development between the 1830s and the 1880s was its appropriation and use by authors who perceived “critical” scholarship as a threat to deeply held beliefs.
There are two reasons why this history merits attention. First, compared to prejudice, speculation, and dogmatism, hypercriticism is a scholarly vice of little renown. Although much discussed by nineteenth-century historians, philologists, and biblical scholars, it has so far been ignored in the historical literature on scholarly virtues and vices.Footnote 8 Also, whereas the conceptual history of “criticism” (Kritik) before and after Immanuel Kant has been traced in some detail,Footnote 9 this is not the case for the term's two principal others, Unkritik and Hyperkritik.Footnote 10 The first objective of this article, therefore, is to fill this lacuna by mapping the vicissitudes of hypercriticism in and around the fields of classical philology and biblical scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany.Footnote 11
More important, however, is the article's second, methodological aim. While scholarly virtues and vices are receiving growing historiographical attention, the case of hypercriticism poses a challenge to one of the currently most prominent approaches in the history of the humanities: a praxeological approach that seeks to embed scholarly virtues and vices in academic research practices like reading, editing, drawing, and measuring.Footnote 12 Lorraine Daston adopts such an approach by interpreting objectivity as cherished by historians in the Rankean tradition as a virtue originating in “the practices of the new-style scientific historian.” While acknowledging that Ranke's pupils disagreed about the meaning and importance of objectivity, Daston argues that the term's core meaning was shaped by the broadly shared practice of collecting sources and subjecting them to “source criticism” (Quellenkritik).Footnote 13 Similarly, with examples from the same Rankean tradition, Markus Krajewski states that the virtue of exactitude emerged out of, and contributed to, “practices of excerpting, copying, paraphrasing, redescribing” and techniques like the card index as a “medium for storing and processing historical facts.”Footnote 14 By emphasizing the entanglement of ideals and practices, this praxeological approach helpfully prevents scholars’ talk of virtues and vices from evaporating into mere language. The price paid for this, however, is that the rhetoric of virtue and vice—that is, the way in which people spoke about objectivity, exactitude, and hypercriticism—disappears from attention, especially insofar as virtues and vices were invoked outside the academic realm, by people without much firsthand experience of scholars’ research practices. What the praxeological approach hides from view is what Lutz Raphael calls the “scientification of the social,” or the appropriation of scholarly terms by people outside the academic establishment.Footnote 15
To remedy this deficiency, this article proposes a rhetorical approach, attentive to how scholarly virtue terms and their negative counterparts, scholarly vice terms, were used both in and outside the academic realm to articulate evaluative stances towards ongoing scholarly developments. This rhetorical approach does not, of course, deny the importance of praxeological research. Insofar as the term “hypercriticism” was used by classical philologists and biblical scholars themselves, there is a sense in which it emerged out of reflection on the risks inherent to conjectural reasoning, or out of evaluative practices in which scholars assessed the credibility of specific conjectures. Seen from this perspective, hypercriticism was intimately connected to philology's quest for authenticity and commitment to correcting errors.Footnote 16 Unlike the praxeological approach, however, the rhetorical approach proposed in this article does not limit itself to the scholarly realm. It seeks to trace how scholarly virtues and vices were invoked in multiple contexts, not only by specialists but also by schoolteachers entrusted with the task of teaching Homer or pastors worried about the latest advances in biblical scholarship. It seeks to understand why technical terms like Hyperkritik found their way among nonspecialists and, more specifically, what uses these nonspecialists made of idioms imbued with the authority of “science” (Wissenschaft). If praxeological research explores the relationship between scholars’ virtues and their research practices, then the rhetorical approach supplements this by tracing scholars’ talk of virtue and vice across genres, with special attention to the rhetorical stances and strategies that this vocabulary allowed for.Footnote 17
The article proceeds in five steps. After a sketch of the emergence and consolidation of hypercriticism as a scholarly vice term prior to the 1830s, it examines how the expression acquired public prominence in the controversies provoked by Peerlkamp and Strauss. It goes on to examine how, in the half-century following these debates, Hyperkritik transformed from a personal vice into a pejorative shorthand for questionable trends in classical philology and biblical scholarship at large. Although academic researchers continued to use the term ad hominem, the third quarter of the century saw especially Gymnasium teachers and Protestant clergy using Hyperkritik more generically, sometimes to the point of reifying it into an evil power threatening neo-humanist education or Christian faith. A brief comparison across confessional borders reveals that Jewish and Roman Catholic authors also contributed to this discourse. With its implied commitment to “healthy,” unexaggerated criticism, the notion of hypercriticism allowed them to pose as guardians of true scholarship—an attractive stance for authors who were frequently denied a claim to scientific status because of their religious allegiances. In its concluding remarks, the article suggests that, in this respect, hypercriticism was not unique: several other scholarly virtue and vice terms also found their way into religious and political controversies.
The emergence of the term
The idea that criticism could overstep its bounds, especially in relation to canonical texts, was, of course, not new. Antoine Godeau and Jean Mabillon were only two of many seventeenth-century authors who warned that criticism “should remain within its limits”; that is, refrain from applying its ingenious tricks to Scripture, while also avoiding “criticism only for the sake of practicing criticism,” driven by passions detrimental to faith and scholarship alike.Footnote 18 There was, moreover, no lack of labels for designating such impertinent behavior. While Momus, the Greek deity who had dared to criticize his fellow gods at Olympus, was an identification figure for religious and literary critics throughout the early modern period, his name also served as a byword for excessive criticism (with Luther at some point calling Erasmus a “true Momus” who “mocks and trifles with everything”).Footnote 19 Pyrrho, likewise, lent his name to excessive doubt, with the specter of Pyrrhonism haunting the early eighteenth-century Republic of Letters not unlike the threat of hypercriticism would do in nineteenth-century Europe.Footnote 20 Like skepticism, moreover, Pyrrhonism was a term that could be used derogatorily. Calling someone a Pyrrho redivivus, analogous to how Luther called Erasmus a Momus, amounted to diagnosing them with pathological doubt.Footnote 21
While hypercriticism belonged to the same word field as Pyrrhonism and skepticism, it was not nearly as old.Footnote 22 Originating in the sixteenth century, hypercritica had entered scholarly parlance as shorthand for responses to criticism or reflections on the critic's task.Footnote 23 Already in the early seventeenth century, however, the term was used accusatorily (“the hypercriticall controller of Poets,” “too Hypercritical upon so short a Digression”), with the prefix denoting an excess of critical zeal.Footnote 24 Dictionaries codified this meaning by defining the hypercritic as someone “above, or passing the common sort of Criticks, a Master Critick,” “over critical,” “over exact,” engaged in “more than ordinary Judgment or Censure.”Footnote 25 The hypercritic so defined was an embodiment of virtue turned into vice (“that hypercriticall Momus”) and, as such, an object of contempt and ridicule.Footnote 26 Gilles Ménage's 1638 satire on the French Academy, ironically addressed “to our academic lords, our lords the hypercritics, sovereign arbiters of words,” is a case in point.Footnote 27 “Here is the hypercriticism,” wrote Ménage on another occasion, “which sovereignly judges all works: which censors my books; which treats them as ridiculous.”Footnote 28 Clearly, Ménage hoped to return the compliment by turning the hypercritic into a figure of mockery—not unlike the pedant whose vices had been ridiculed by generations of French and Italian playwrights.Footnote 29 Hypercritics, wrote another French critic, are men with “very sharp eyes to see the slightest faults, and who take pleasure in noticing them.”Footnote 30 By the early eighteenth century, then, hypercriticism had come to denote a reduction ad absurdum of what criticism was supposed to be. It symbolized both excessiveness (criticism gone too far) and absurdity (too obviously wrong to be taken seriously).
Although older meanings of the term did not immediately disappear—throughout the eighteenth century, it remained possible to sign a letter to the editor with “Hypercriticus”Footnote 31—excessiveness and absurdity established themselves as dominant connotations. In the satirical prose of Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne, hypercritics were readers pedantic enough to correct the dinner scenes in a novel or to measure the accuracy of the narrated time between two events in Tristram Shandy with a “scholastic pendulum.”Footnote 32 Writing in 1763, a British author even proposed a Hypercritical and Anticritical Monthly Review, designed as a publication outlet for critics who, in Swift's memorable words, “travel through this vast World of Writings, to pursue and hunt those monstrous Faults bred within; to drag out the lurking Errors, like Cacus from his Den, to multiply them like Hydras Heads, and rake them together like Augea's Filth.”Footnote 33 This tradition of ridiculing hypercriticism would persist until well into the nineteenth century.Footnote 34
If Swift made fun of overzealous literary critics, textual scholars also came to be seen as susceptible to excessive criticism.Footnote 35 In the overlapping communities of classical philologists and biblical scholars, Hyperkritik became a word of disapproval for conjectures or emendations that were too radical to be convincing. When Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, commenting on a passage in Plutarch on Sophocles’ tragedies, proposed to substitute the name of Sophocles for Euripides, a reviewer objected that this was “hypercriticism and learned chicane.”Footnote 36 Another reviewer admitted that the authenticity of many speeches recorded by ancient historians was doubtful. Dismissing all of them as unreliable, however, would be excessive: “That is obviously a hypercritical judgment!”Footnote 37 Also, in response to Johann David Michaelis's hesitations regarding “the elect lady and her children” in 2 John 1—why does the apostle not mention the lady's husband?—the Jena theologian Samuel Gottlieb Lange responded, “This is real hypercriticism. Where would we end up if we were offended by something like this?”Footnote 38 Lange's rhetorical question is an interesting one because of its implied slippery-slope argument. Although charges of hypercriticism were often prompted by small points of disagreement, they derived their force from the suggestion that an author's interpretive habits would have devastating consequences if applied not to a single Bible verse or line of Horace, but to all of Scripture or the whole Horatian corpus.
This potential for presenting specific conjectures, often at the level of single words, as evidence of an unbounded Pyrrhonism with potentially dangerous implications for other texts became characteristic of Hyperkritik as used by classical philologists and biblical scholars in the decades around 1800. Was it appropriate (to give one more example from the German lands) for the editors of a medieval Latin abridgment of the Iliad to replace corpus by pignus or to emend icta into laesa for the sake of stylistic consistency? A reviewer of the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung believed it was not. In his eyes, a combination of “exaggerated critical willfulness” and “hypercritical anxiety” had caused the editors to make “many very arbitrary changes in the text.” What was un-Latin about Tydideus? Why should cerebrum revulsum be regarded as corrupted? And on what grounds did the editors reject the perfectly sensible proposal to read et Pirous una for Pigorius una? At stake in these questions was more than Homer's Iliad. Confronted with so many “useless conjectures heaped upon each other,” the reviewer could but wish that “the good genius of criticism” would prevent such hypercritical editing from becoming the norm—for otherwise, he feared, we would have to subject who knows how many other texts to similar surgical treatment.Footnote 39
Although the decades around 1800 saw the term being applied at ever larger scales, to the point that a German philologist in 1819 worried about “a hypercritical chasing … especially in classical literature,” the term's significance at this stage should not be overestimated.Footnote 40 Hypercriticism hardly played a role in the Fragmentenstreit of the 1770s or in the dispute unleashed by Friedrich August Wolf's Prolegomena zu Homer (1795). Wolf himself only rarely used the term, though in a telling way. Commenting on “the people outside”—a rhetorical figure similar to the “mob” (Pöbel) in German Enlightenment discourseFootnote 41—Wolf said to harbor no illusions about the fate of his Homer criticism: the unenlightened public will dismiss it “as a web of vain subtleties, as a learned chiromancy.” Indeed, ignorant readers will engage in “mockery about hypercritical questions,” using the vice term hypocritically, without knowledge of the issues at stake, but determined to counter this perceived attack on their beloved poet.Footnote 42 Clearly, Wolf associated Hyperkritik with a sense of mistrust that men of learning would provoke by prioritizing philological criticism over aesthetic appreciation of classical texts—which in retrospect was an accurate prophecy of things to come.Footnote 43
If hypercriticism played only a limited role in the controversies of the day, how can we explain that the term nonetheless became part of scholars’ repertoire of vice terms? What, if anything, did hypercriticism add to existing terms like “skepticism” and “Pyrrhonism”? Perhaps most decisive was the ascendency of Kritik in the study of literature, philology, and philosophy. As Giorgio Tonelli and others have shown, by the time Immanuel Kant published his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, Critique of Pure Reason), criticism had become a buzzword in the entire world of learning.Footnote 44 It captured the aspirations of literary reviewers just as those of source-critical philologists and philosophers dissatisfied with Wolffian or Leibnizian modes of thinking. Although Kritik in these various contexts meant very different things, the near ubiquity of the term offers a clue as to why hypercriticism was added to scholars’ repertoire of terms. In most of the examples surveyed so far, Hyperkritik was presented as a vice of men who took pride in their Kritik. Charges of hypercriticism were responses to scholars’ fascination with criticism.Footnote 45 Compared to skepticism or pedantry, then, hypercriticism had the advantage of conveying that a Momus-like questioning of each and everything was criticism gone too far—a perversion of something good. In the context of scholarly controversy, this was an attractive feature of the term. While objections to Kritik as such could easily prompt countercharges of Unkritik or dogmatism, Hyperkritik presupposed at least rhetorically a commitment to sound criticism. Hypercriticism, in other words, allowed authors to reject conjectures or arguments that they perceived as excessively critical while presenting themselves, in line with the demands of Wissenschaft, as advocates of “healthy” criticism.Footnote 46
Peerlkamp and Strauss
If we interpret the 1830s controversies with which we started against this background, the first thing to note is that charges of hypercriticism as leveled against Peerlkamp and Strauss broadly followed the patterns identified above. When Peerlkamp's reviewers complained about hypercriticism—“a work of hypercriticism,” “the editor's hypercriticism,” “the newest conspicuous instance of bold hypercriticism”—they did so, first of all, because of perceived excesses.Footnote 47 Peerlkamp judged large parts of Horace's Odes inauthentic because they failed to meet the impossibly high standard of what Peerlkamp regarded as Horace's own Latin. The ironic result, as one commentator put it, was that Peerlkamp “drove out Horace with Horace himself” (“Horatium ex Horatio ipso expulit”).Footnote 48 One line of defense against this mistreatment of a beloved poet was to say that stylistic consistency had been Horace's priority no more than it had been Shakespeare's or Goethe's.Footnote 49 “Horace is not a pedant or a pedantic and hypochondriac Dutch schoolmaster,” wrote the Gymnasium teacher Eduard Döhler; “he is a poet, a true poet at that, who enthusiastically writes for receptive minds, not for cold rational beings.”Footnote 50 Another argument, brought forward by Gottfried Bernhardy, was that Peerlkamp's hypercriticism was too subjective and arbitrary to qualify as Wissenschaft.Footnote 51 Last, but not least, there was the reductio ab absurdum, or the argument “that such a procedure can lead to nothing but bottomless criticism.”Footnote 52 It was in the context of this argument that “the dominance of a certain critical feeling … which recognizes nothing as true and genuine except that which meets its own subjective requirements” appeared most threatening to the sociopolitical order. As Obbarius rhetorically asked, “What would happen to our school system, what would happen to our ancient, revered authors if no authority … appears as sacred anymore?”Footnote 53 Although Lucian Müller exaggerated in reporting that Peerlkamp's book was treated as “a sign of ever-increasing moral corruption and the imminent end of the world,” he correctly saw that the critics’ real point of concern was not the textual integrity of Horace's Odes but the Pandora's box opened by critics who dared to call even the most venerable traditions into question.Footnote 54
As Marilyn Chapin Massey has argued, moral–political concerns played a role also in the debate provoked by Das Leben Jesu. Although Strauss's criticism of the Gospels was hardly more radical than that of Reimarus and Lessing in the 1770s,Footnote 55 his argument that Jesus was a product of the mythic imagination of his early followers had explosive potential in the political context of the 1830s. As the Young Hegelian philosopher Arnold Ruge pointed out in 1839, Strauss's replacement of the “genius” of Jesus by the “spiritual democracy” of Christian congregations that recognized, or created, Jesus as a figure of religious significance amounted to a democratization of Christianity.Footnote 56 This leads Massey to suggest that the Life of Jesus controversy was, among other things, a proxy for a debate on political freedom—allowing the educated middle classes to discuss democracy and revolution in the same veiled manner in which Karl Gutzkow's controversial novel Wally, die Zweiflerin (Wally the Sceptic) (1835), opened up a space for imagining alternatives to the existing religious–political order.Footnote 57
True as this may be, the dozens of commentators who accused Strauss of Hyperkritik mostly worried about other perceived impertinencies. The most important of these was the sacrilege that Strauss committed by applying his critical tools to the holy of holies, “condemning and torturing the most sacred life story to the most shameful death.”Footnote 58 Many a reviewer felt that Strauss's “tearing down of thousand-year-old sanctuaries” justified a tone of holy indignation.Footnote 59 Insofar as Strauss, like Peerlkamp, was charged with “immoral Sansculottism of the highest kind,” this was not so much an accusation of political radicalism as a declaration of protest against the profanity of ridiculing “the sanctuary of religion with bitter mockery.”Footnote 60 Second, reviewers spoke about hypercriticism in relation to Strauss's method, which many perceived as “negative,” “destructive,” or only engaged with “negating and contradicting.”Footnote 61 This referred not merely to Strauss failing to offer a convincing alternative to the views he demolished—the author's modest attempts in that direction did not satisfy even his closest sympathizersFootnote 62—but also, more importantly, to Strauss's rejecting the historicity of the Gospel narratives without giving serious consideration to historical sources that commentators believed to testify to the reliability of the Gospels. Along these lines, Ferdinand Guericke argued that Strauss's ignoring of positive witnesses (e.g. Eusebius and Papias of Hierapolis, in the case of Mark) was evidence of “a hypercriticism that destroys all historical ground, turning everything upside down.”Footnote 63
The superlative expressions used by many of Strauss's critics confirm that hypercriticism was a vice of excess. Time and again, critics spoke about “the most decisive hypercriticism” or “the most audacious and most malicious hypercriticism.”Footnote 64 A sense of excess also speaks from the adjective zügellos (“unrestrained”), as well as from Johann Ernst Osiander's portrayal of Strauss as a modern Icarus, plummeting down out of “the aerial region of myth and the ether of speculation.”Footnote 65 Perhaps the most intriguing testimony to Strauss's perceived excessiveness can be found in satirical accounts of the sort written by Julius Friedrich Wurm. This Protestant theologian took Strauss's methods ad absurdum by applying them to Luther, suggesting that the reformer had been but a figment of the sixteenth-century imagination.Footnote 66 Others even called the existence of Strauss himself into question: “The fact that in newspapers, critical journals, and literary magazines there is a lot of talk back and forth about a certain Dr Strauss, evaluating, praising, and blaming him, does not prove anything about the real existence of Dr Strauss. Dr Strauss is probably just the idea, the legend, the allegory of rationalism.”Footnote 67 Although not all satires on Strauss explicitly mentioned the vice of hypercriticism, the Dorpat theologian Carl Friedrich Keil was presumably not the only one who read them as parodic illustrations of the “absurdity” of Strauss's “hypercriticism.”Footnote 68
While the Life of Jesus controversy propelled the vice of hypercriticism to the center of attention, none of the connotations of the term reviewed so far were new. Excessiveness and absurdity were established layers of meaning, while mockery and reductio ad absurdum also belonged to scholars’ existing polemical repertoire. Even the fact that Peerlkamp and Strauss, each in their own way, came to be seen as personifications of hypercriticism was not new: Julius Ceasar Scaliger and Pierre Harduin had enjoyed such reputations too.Footnote 69 What was new, however, was that several commentators took Strauss's book as evidence of a hypercriticism that was gaining ground among biblical scholars or in the world of learning at large. Osiander, for one, stated that historical criticism, with its “eccentric negations,” had initially made “bold attacks in the profane field,” then “ventured even bolder ones on more authentic works, such as Plato's and Cicero's,” before entering the field of biblical scholarship.Footnote 70 Likewise, Strauss's archenemy, the conservative church politician Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, believed that the “unlimited arbitrariness” of Straussian criticism reflected a “general tendency of the age towards historical skepticism,” which had manifested itself in the study of Homer before gaining a foothold in biblical scholarship.Footnote 71 What is noticeable about these arguments is that they came close to attributing agency not to scholars with vicious habits, but to the vice of hypercriticism itself. By the 1830s, such reification was still rare.Footnote 72 Most commentators wrote in a more personal register about “Straussian hypercriticism” or about the Hyperkritiker that Strauss had become.Footnote 73 In retrospect, however, those who warned against the reified threat of “modern hypercriticism” or “newfangled hypercriticism” paved the way for things to come.Footnote 74
Classical philology
What, then, happened in the half-century after Peerlkamp and Strauss? Most conspicuously, hypercriticism transformed from a personal vice, to which only individuals were prone, into a pejorative that could denote entire fields or schools of thought. Hypercriticism became shorthand for traditions of scholarship that commentators believed to be excessively suspicious of the textual integrity of the Iliad, the Pentateuch, or the Pauline epistles. More specifically, “the sharp knife of hypercriticism” became a metonymical symbol of academic researchers who, in the eyes of their critics, denied the aesthetic qualities of Homer's poetry or the divine inspiration of the Bible.Footnote 75 In tandem with this, the term assumed an agency of its own, to the extent that “the hypercriticism,” with a definite article, came to be depicted as a force intent on destroying aesthetic education and Christian faith. Such reification, finally, was most common among nonspecialists; that is, among Gymnasium teachers and conservative Protestants whose love of Homer and the Bible exceeded their confidence in the critical work of academic scholars. These overlapping trends, however, did not manifest themselves with equal force everywhere: significant differences existed between fields as well as between confessions.
At first sight, the trends just mentioned largely seemed to bypass the field of classical philology. In the decades following the 1830s, the word “hypercriticism” appeared primarily in book reviews and in the small print of footnotes. In most cases, the term denoted artificial distinctions as between Anaea and the Anaeans in Sophocles’ Antigone or unwarranted emendations like the substitution of brutis for mutis in Tacitus’ Histories.Footnote 76 Also, following established usage, classical philologists used cautious phrases like “shouldn't we be allowed to assume, without being hypercritical” to justify a conjecture or, alternatively, to keep an interpretational problem unresolved in the absence of conclusive evidence (“Who dares to decide here …? Only hypercriticism could want to do it”).Footnote 77 Along similar lines, Friedrich von Raumer, writing about Xenophon's Anabasis, declared that “only a hypercriticism that puts small, insignificant things under the magnifying glass and ignores everything larger, could find another author for the Anabasis.”Footnote 78 In all of these cases, charges of hypercriticism referred to how individual philologists dealt with individual texts—not to an entire field or tradition of scholarship.Footnote 79
This personal focus of the vice term is confirmed by textbooks like August Boeckh's Encyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia and Methodology of the Philological Sciences) (1877). For Boeckh, hypercriticism was a “wandering path” on which “exaggerated doubt” led critical minds astray. He ranked it as a vice of excess, in the company of uninhibited political passion and “unbridled phantasy.”Footnote 80 Following in Boeckh's footsteps, the Homer specialist Arthur Ludwich associated hypercriticism with an “unbridled lust for divination” (effrenata divinandi libido), with all the ambiguous connotations with which this ancient philological term was imbued.Footnote 81 Additional evidence of hypercriticism retaining its personal focus is the fact that Peerlkamp's treatment of Horace remained a point of reference. Until at least the late nineteenth century, his name served as a byword for hypercriticism.Footnote 82 Tellingly, in 1899, a reviewer of a new Horace edition could declare that the editor's impertinences were reminiscent of Peerlkamp's “hypercritical subtlety,” even to the extent that “such a provocation to subjective criticism … has not been heard of since the days of Peerlkamp.”Footnote 83
Although none of this implied the existence of a hypercritical school, philologists had been hinting at this possibility ever since the Peerlkamp controversy, most concretely by delineating the philologist's task with Scylla and Charybdis metaphors or with the quasi-Aristotelian argument that criticism must steer a course between Unkritik and Hyperkritik.Footnote 84 Hermann Köchly, for example, wrote in 1842 that philologists must navigate between a faithful (“orthodox”) clinging to received texts and a “supposedly genial hypercriticism,” which “with contempt for everything that has been handed down historically, according to the subjective norm of aprioristically constructed principles, and even according to momentary whims molds the writings of the ancients in the most arbitrary way, especially by excising what is supposedly unauthentic.” Although Köchly only mentioned “the paradoxes of a Hoffmann–Peerlkamp” as an illustration of the latter, his rhetoric suggested that hypercriticism was a real-existing power that could make its impact felt across the discipline.Footnote 85 In 1873, Germany's leading classical philologist, Friedrich Ritschl, conveyed the same idea in arguing that research on ancient Jewish–Roman relationships had recently swung back and forth between “credulity” and “almost fanatical scepsis,” with the latter having reached an extreme in the “radical hypercriticism” of Heinrich Graetz. While Ritschl did not refute Graetz's arguments in detail, he, too, argued for a “golden middle road” between uncritical and hypercritical thinking.Footnote 86
Such depersonalized uses of the term circulated especially among Gymnasium teachers who were worried about a growing chasm between neo-humanist education (Bildung) and philological research (Forschung). As Bas van Bommel has shown, this concern manifested itself most markedly in the second half of the century, in response to academic philologists who seemed to care more about the scientific status of their field than about the exemplary function of the classics.Footnote 87 When Classics teachers complained about “disparaging hypercriticism” or a “more and more unbridled, all-consuming hypercriticism,”Footnote 88 they referred to an overdose of “book learning,” which treated classical authors as “mummies” and thereby contributed to students losing “the enjoyment of the Homeric poems” and the “desire and love of studying them.”Footnote 89 “The hunt for variants that emerges out of philological hypercriticism,” explained a Gymnasium teacher, is a “useless torment” for students: it gives them stones for bread by discussing copying errors instead of timeless beauty.Footnote 90 According to another teacher, such mind-numbing hypercriticism had its roots in Wolf, whose “extremely negative-critical” attitude in source-critical matters had “not only bequeathed itself to many philologists but also seeped into the Gymnasien of northern Germany.” As a result, Greek and Latin classes had been turned into propaedeutic philological seminars, in which the study of the Classics was pursued as an end in itself rather than as a means for familiarizing the youth with “the model of a public and private life built on the most exalted ideas.”Footnote 91
In short, while classical philologists continued to use hypercriticism as shorthand for a personal vice, a growing number of authors began to use hypercriticism as the proper name of a scholarly approach or academic trend. Prominent among these authors were schoolteachers who worried about the destructive effects of excessive philological criticism on neo-humanist education. Without exaggerating the distance between academic philologists and Gymnasium teachers in this period,Footnote 92 one might say that hypercriticism came to represent a threat that was felt especially by men entrusted with teaching the very texts that philologists were scrutinizing for discrepancies and inconsistencies.
Protestant biblical scholarship
In this respect, the field of biblical scholarship resembled that of classical philology.Footnote 93 When biblical scholars were accused of hypercriticism, the charges also came primarily from readers whose attitude towards the texts at stake was one of reverence more than suspicion. Also, most of these readers were no academic specialists. Although biblical scholars, just like classical philologists, used hypercriticism as a terminus technicus for unwarranted conjectures or exaggerated doubt,Footnote 94 the term found its widest application outside the pages of specialist journals, in the writings of pastors and others who felt that excessively critical scholarship was thwarting readers’ ability to read the Bible as God's Word. There was, however, a difference of intensity: complaints about “Old and New Testament hypercriticism” were more numerous and often also more emotional than teachers’ objections to the newest hypotheses in Horatian studies.Footnote 95 Tellingly, an 1893 gathering of Protestant clergy in Saxony featured several speakers who pulled out all the stops in cautioning that the authority of Scripture was “undermined more and more” by “negative criticism,” while simultaneously assuring their audience that, nonetheless, God's Word will outlive “the critical heroes of our days.”Footnote 96 That conference was not unique: there were plenty of occasions on which church members could hear pastors or theology professors defend “the glory of the Bible against the attacks of its critics” or sound a note of alarm about “what remains of the Old Testament” in the hands of Julius Wellhausen.Footnote 97 Perhaps the uncrowned king of the genre was the Greifswald theologian Otto Zöckler, who from the early 1860s to his death in 1906 issued a steady stream of warnings against “hypercritical skepticism,” “hypercritical arbitrariness,” and “hypercritical exaggeration,” especially, but not only, in biblical scholarship.Footnote 98 One wonders: what made the vice of hypercriticism such an attractive polemical device for conservative Protestants in Zöckler's generation?
To some extent, their criticism continued a tradition inaugurated with the Life of Jesus controversy. Although clear demarcations between liberal and conservative Protestants had not existed at that time, hypercriticism and related pejoratives, such as Afterkritik, had been used most frequently by authors suspicious of modern biblical criticism.Footnote 99 More generally, the term had always resonated most strongly among authors with high views of Scripture.Footnote 100 However, what had changed between the 1830s, when the debate had focused on “the hypercritical enterprise of Dr Strauss,” and the 1870s, when Zöckler found himself fighting a whole army of “hypercritical enemies of Christianity,” was the emergence of a theological and political divide between liberal and conservative Protestants.Footnote 101 By the early years of the Wilhelmine era, this divide had become broad enough for clergy and theologians to speak about distinct “parties” or “currents” (Richtungen) in the Protestant world.Footnote 102 Although liberals and conservatives were not the only parties—there were influential Vermittlungstheologen aiming for middle-ground positions—the religious press gave ample space to the opposed extremes of “traditional dogmatists” and “modern rationalists.”Footnote 103 A periodical like Der Beweis des Glaubens, to which Zöckler was a listed contributor, provided endless variations on the latter image, constantly warning its readers against “accusers and opponents of the faith,” whose “sharply negative criticism is trying to shake the historical facts of the Christian faith.”Footnote 104 It was especially in contexts like this, where suspicion of biblical criticism served as a shibboleth of orthodoxy, that hypercriticism came to serve as a rhetorical weapon, similar to how “dogmatism” was employed by liberal critics against conservative Protestants.Footnote 105
One reason why hypercriticism became a weapon of choice was that it allowed conservative biblical scholars to counter the liberal argument that their work was “unscientific.” If biblical scholars in the liberal camp made themselves guilty of a vice that was widely seen as violating scholarly standards, then conservatives could return the compliment by denying liberal theologians their exclusive claim to Wissenschaftlichkeit. This is precisely what Zöckler did. In an 1887 defense of the “scientific” aspirations of conservative theology, prompted by Emil Schürer's dismissive remark that Zöckler cum suis were advocating a relapse into seventeenth-century biblicism, he argued that “the principle of critical arbitrariness, fantastic guessing, and estimations based on subjective whims” that he saw at work in liberal biblical scholarship was at odds with established methodological standards.Footnote 106 Notably, this was not a charge of doctrinal heresy but of scholarly deficiency. Zöckler presented himself as a custodian of scientific criticism, committed to a virtuous mean between uncritical thinking and a “pseudoscientific hypercriticism” that was destroying “healthy and normal critical work” with an “overload of source-destroying perspicacity [quellenschneidende Scharfsinn].”Footnote 107
Second, although the vice of hypercriticism was occasionally attributed to individual authors, it was more common to speak generically about “the newer hypercriticism,” “omniscient hypercriticism,” or a “hypercritical current” (Richtung) in modern biblical scholarship—with the last of these phrases almost explicitly alluding to the Streit der Richtungen in German Protestantism.Footnote 108 At one point, Zöckler even discussed “the developmental phases of modern hypercriticism,” thereby turning an individual vice term into a long-term scholarly trend.Footnote 109 This was not without precedents. If hypercriticism had initially been attributed to individuals like Strauss, the rise to dominance of New Testament criticism as practiced in Tübingen by Friedrich Christian Baur and others prompted talk of a “hypercritical school,” “the hypercritical opinions of the Tübingen school,” and “Tübingen hypercriticism.”Footnote 110 By the 1870s, hypercriticism was no longer attributed only to figures “at the extreme left” but associated to a wide range of scholars, from Karl Heinrich Graf and Ferdinand Hitzig in Germany to Abraham Kuenen and Édouard Reuss elsewhere in Europe.Footnote 111 Increasingly, it was their names that epitomized the vice, in characteristic combinations like “Hitzig–Olshausian” or “Graf–Kuenenian” hypercriticism.Footnote 112 From there, it was only a small step to argue that a hypercritical attitude was characteristic of the whole “liberal army force” that Zöckler was fighting.Footnote 113
All this is strikingly reminiscent of how Gymnasium teachers depersonalized the vice of hypercriticism. In both cases, skepticism regarding traditional authorship claims or the textual integrity of canonical writings was not merely read symptomatically, as evidence of an excessively critical zeitgeist, but elevated into a defining mark of modern scholarship. As such, hypercriticism ceased to be an accusation requiring careful textual analysis: it became close to an emotionally charged “-ism,” overlapping with reified images of “liberalism” and “modernism” and used primarily for confessional boundary work.
Catholic and Jewish voices
As much as these internal Protestant quarrels contributed to hypercriticism becoming a polemical device, the term also resonated among Jewish and Catholic scholars, albeit in slightly different ways. Although a detailed comparison across confessional borders cannot be undertaken here, I will briefly attend to some Catholic and Jewish voices, if only to correct the impression that Gymnasium teachers and conservative Protestants were the only ones who worried about hypercriticism.
Catholic authors had a long history of dismissing Protestant scholarship as hypercritical. As early as 1817, a German Catholic polemicist railed against “modern philologists and hypercritical Bible researchers … who turn the comforting factual truths of revelation into myths.”Footnote 114 Strauss and the Tübingen school provided Catholic authors with even more reason to distance themselves from the “Protestant hypercriticism of our time.”Footnote 115 In Catholic cultural criticism, this Protestant hypercriticism became a trope that could easily be combined with “rationalism,” “Darwinism,” and “modern unbelief.”Footnote 116 This Protestant aberration, moreover, was seen as manifesting itself not only in biblical scholarship but also among church historians who dared to question the reliability of saints’ lives or the authenticity of relics.Footnote 117 While some authors associated hypercriticism with Protestant or Protestant-inspired assaults on the Catholic tradition,Footnote 118 others adopted the Protestant habit of measuring hypercriticism against the standard of “healthy criticism” rather than the authority of tradition.Footnote 119 In all cases, however, the threat of hypercriticism was located outside the Catholic community, among Protestants and nonbelievers. It was only in the so-called modernist crisis of the early 1900s, when Catholic biblical scholars like Alfred Loisy were diagnosed with heresies formerly reserved to liberal Protestants, that hypercriticism became a polemical device for internal use, though without losing its Protestant connotations.Footnote 120 Writing in 1905, the Breslau theologian Joseph Pohle spoke for many when he presented Loisy as a sad example of a Catholic scholar who had fallen under the spell of “Protestant hypercriticism.”Footnote 121
The Jewish case was different insofar as charges of hypercriticism were made internally at a much earlier stage. Initially, it was Protestant biblical scholars who exemplified the dangers of hypercriticism.Footnote 122 Heinrich Graetz, the Jewish historian whom Friedrich Ritschl had criticized for his hypercritical views, preferred to attribute the vice to “philologists of other faiths.”Footnote 123 In the early 1860s, however, he changed his mind. “For a decade,” Graetz wrote, Jewish exegetes have “started to emendate without end,” thereby creating a “hypercritical movement” almost as radical as the Tübingen school around Baur.Footnote 124 Most likely, this criticism was targeted at Abraham Geiger and Samuel David Luzzatto, two key representatives of the emerging “science of Judaism” (Wissenschaft des Judentums). In the 1850s, both of them had published controversial studies in biblical scholarship.Footnote 125 A decade later, Ludwig Philippson, the long-time editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, echoed Graetz in observing that “Jewish scholars, too,” were falling prey to “confused and confusing hypercriticism” in the study of the Pentateuch. Philippson, too, was referring to biblical scholarship as pursued under the aegis of the science of Judaism (of which, in passing, he denied the claim to scientific status with the argument that hypercriticism “is no science” but a mixture of “haphazard interpretation” and “arbitrary criticism”).Footnote 126
How hypercriticism reflected the changing entanglements of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish biblical scholarship, each with its own internal dynamics and investment in boundary work, is a topic for another occasion. For the purposes of this article, the examples just mentioned suffice to demonstrate that hypercriticism also found its way outside the Protestant world. More specifically, they show that for Catholic and Jewish authors, just as for most Classics teachers and biblical scholars of conservative Protestant inclination, hypercriticism was less a personal vice than a polemical shorthand for a skeptical attitude in matters of source criticism that was perceived as threatening canonical texts. Several Jewish and Catholic authors, moreover, followed Protestant models by criticizing hypercriticism, not on religious grounds, but with the argument that its exaggerations were detrimental to real science. It was a way of fighting the enemy camp with a weapon of its own, rejecting its iconoclasm in terms pretending to be “scientific.”Footnote 127
Conclusion
What this history of hypercriticism shows is that the vice term almost without exception conveyed more than unease about a specific emendation or conjecture. Even philologists objecting to something as detailed as the substitution of corpus by pignus used hypercriticism, not as shorthand for errors at the level of individual words, but as a diagnostic label for a spirit of revisionism that might have dangerous implications for other canonical texts. This was a context in which symptomatic readings of controversial studies like Peerlkamp's and Strauss's could flourish. Both books were read as manifesting not only their authors’ lack of virtue but also, more disturbingly, an iconoclastic attitude that reviewers feared was gaining ground in scholarship and politics alike. Among other things, such symptomatic readings enabled authors in subsequent decades to speak in even more generic terms about hypercritical schools and trends. The article has shown that such broad uses of the term were especially prevalent among Gymnasium teachers and Protestant clergy of conservative inclination who worried about the corrosive effects of critical scholarship on canonical texts, be it the Iliad or the Bible. In the second half of the century, the Streit der Richtungen among German Protestants even turned Hyperkritik into a polemical device, used for aims far removed from those of philologists hesitating between corpus and pignus. Nonetheless, the term's scientific connotations remained crucial for Protestant scholars as well as for most Catholic and Jewish authors: these connotations allowed them to challenge hypercriticism on “scientific” rather than confessional grounds. What this suggests is that hypercriticism found its way into the arena of religious controversy precisely because it was a scholarly vice, codified in philological manuals and used in learned periodicals.
These vicissitudes of the term fall outside the scope of praxeological approaches to the history of scholarly virtues and vices as advocated by Daston and Krajewski. As helpful as it is to examine the relationships between scholars’ catalogs of virtue and their day-to-day research practices, this article has shown that research practices capture only part of the story. Scholars’ talk of virtue and vice also drew on and contributed to broader, societal discourses of virtue and vice, while serving as intellectual ammunition in controversies at the intersection of science, religion, politics, and morality. This is why the praxeological approach should be supplemented with a rhetorical one, attentive to how scholarly virtues and vices were invoked in and outside the academic realm, by specialists and nonspecialists alike, as an idiom imbued with the authority of Wissenschaft. Such a rhetorical approach may help situate scholarly vocabularies in their societal contexts and elucidate the cross-fertilization between scholars’ standards of virtue and those circulating in other segments of society.Footnote 128 Moreover, in ways reminiscent of Raphael's “scientification of the social,” it may trace how scholarly virtues and vices found their way outside the walls of academia, as traveling concepts that challenge simple binaries between “insiders” and “outsiders” in the history of the humanities.Footnote 129
Drawing on such a rhetorical approach, follow-up research may want to carry the story of hypercriticism into the twentieth century. It may examine how hypercriticism was invoked in controversies like the Babel–Bibel–Streit,Footnote 130 used by influential scholars like Benedetto Croce and Johan Huizinga,Footnote 131 gradually gave way to other pejorative phrases like “historicism,”Footnote 132 yet persisted in historical methodology manuals and even came to enjoy renewed interest from postwar French thinkers like Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Derrida.Footnote 133 Just as interesting, however, would be a rhetorical analysis of other scholarly virtues and vices, such as dogmatism. A rhetorical approach may elucidate how critics of dogmatism from Immanuel Kant to anticommunists in Cold War America drew on a discursive repertoire established by seventeenth-century authors (Thomas Hobbes, Joseph Glanvill, Thomas Spratt) and codified in eighteenth-century Enlightenment texts. It is well equipped to explain why, in the post-Darwinian controversies of the 1870s and 1880s, accusations of dogmatism went back and forth, with “the Haeckels, the Spencers, and the Huxleys of the present day” being depicted as dogmatists just as routinely as opponents of Darwin found themselves accused of “narrow-minded dogmatism.”Footnote 134 A rhetorical approach may demonstrate, in other words, that scholarly virtues and vices not only mattered to academics but also found their way into sometimes unexpected corners of public attention.
Acknowledgments
This paper emerges out of the Scholarly Vices: A Longue Durée History project at Leiden University. Drafts were presented at The Making of the Humanities X (3 November 2022) and the Leidse Historische Kring (18 November 2022). I thank the audiences on both occasions for helpful feedback, Ian James Kidd for stimulating commentary, Paul Michael Kurtz and Arnoud Visser for detailed comments on a first draft, and the journal's editors and reviewers for suggestions that have much improved the argument. Funding was provided by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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