FRIENDS OF LIGHT
G75
FRIES
the gulf of pantheistic self-deification." And that this yave rise to "the wild, fanatic, pantheistic m3'sticism, which was for getting bej'ond Christ, bc^-ond all posi- tive revelation, all humanization of the divine, as we see it exeniplitied paiticularh' among a portion of the so-called Beghards (q. v.) . . . and the so-called Broth- ers and Sisters of the Free Spirit (q. v.). Among those of the Friends of God who by unwise speculation, and bj' an intoxication of self-forgetting love discarding ail calm reflection, "were unconsciously betrawd into effusions and expressions upon which that wild, fanat- ical pantheism afterwards seized and fastened itself," is reckoned Master Eckhart (q. v.), from whose writ- ings and sermons twenty-six propositions connected ■with a pantheistic mode of thinking, or verging upon such a mode of thinking, Iiad been drawn, were for- mally condemned. But he promptly retracted all those propositions which were found to be heretical or scandalous, "and in general sulnnitted himself to Ije corrected bj' the pope and the Church." These "pan- theistic and quietistic views" were earnestly opposed by Ruj'sbroek (q. v.) and by Tauler. The former es- peciall}' secured himself against the danger of panthe- ism by the prominence he gives to the will, " which he describes as the main-spring on which all develop- ment of the higher life depends." Another of the leaders of the Friends of God was the Dominican monk Heinrich Suso (q. v.), of Suabia, who, like Tauler, gave "prominencs to the mediation of Christ as necessary to the attaining to true communion with God, and was thus distinguislied from those pantheistic mystics who, notwithstanding mediation, were for sinking directly into the depths of the divine essence." Many of the leaders of tlie Friends of God were put to deatli by oi'- der of the Inquisition on the charge of being Beg- hards. Among these were Nicholas of Basel and two of his associates, Martin of Kcichenau, and a Benedic- tine and follower of Martin. Milman {Latin Christi- aniiy, p. 408) says that the influence of the doctrines taught by the Friends of God, especially of Tauler and his followers, were " seen in the earnest demand for ref- ormation by the councils ; the sullen estrangement, notwithstanding the reunion to the sacerdotal J'oke, during the Hussite wars ; the disdainful neutrality when reformation by the councils seemed hopeless ;" and that it is especially "seen in the remarkable book German Theolor/y^ attributed by Luther to Tauler him- self, but doubtless of a later period." — Ncander, Church History, v, 380 ; Herzog, Real-EncyMopadie, x, 159 ; Schmidt, Gottesfreunde im xiv Jahrhundert (Jena, 1855) ; Pfeiffcr, Deutsche Mystiker cks 14 and 15 Jahrh. ; INIil- man, Latin Christianity, viii, 301); Kurtz, Church Hist. i, 484 ; Bennet, in Methodist Quart. Rev. Jan. 1869, p. 45 sq. ; Theologia Germ'inica, edit, by Dr. Pfeifi^er and transl. by Susanna Winkworth. (J. H. W.)
Friends of Light. See Free Congregations.
Fries, Jacob Friederich, an eminent German, philosopher, was born at Barby August 23, 1773. lie was at first private tutor in Switzerland, became pro- fessor of philosophy in 1804, then successivel}- profess- or of mathematics at Heidelberg in 1805, and of the- oretical philosophy at Jena in 1816. In 1819 he was deposed for political reasons, but restored in 1824 as professor of natural philosophy and mathematics, and died there August 10th, 1843. The personal relig- ious life of Fries was not a happy one. His fatlier was a Moravian, but died when tlie son was only five years old. The school education to which he was suli- jected seems to have estranged him from Christianity when quite j'oung. While yet a young man, he wrote : "The lectures of Garve on imagination and supersti- tion have changed nn' religious sentiments. All the religious system in which I was bred has been over- thrown ; l)ut this causes mc no uneasiness. It was easy for me to throw the atonement overboard ; I have never had any dread of God ; the thought of the
H0I3' One has always been to me a thought of peace." In 1799, when his mother died, he wrote : " The belief in a reunion I leave to others ; I am not phantast enough to hold it." Yet in 1806 he wrote to a Mora- vian brother : " ily peace cannot compare with j-ours ; the deserted Penates will probably punish me for a long time yet." A sketch of his life has recently ap- peared, by E. L. D. Henke, J. F. Fries aus seinem handschriftlichen Nachlasse dargestellt (Leipzig, 1867, 8vo).
The professed aim of Fries in philosophy was to give a firmer basis to Kant's system than that philosopher himself had laid down. "He found two faults with Kant : 1st. The vicious logical arrangement of his doc- trine, by which he makes the value of his categories to depend on transcendental proofs, and that of his ideas on moral proofs, instead of rising, without sxny proof, to the immediate knowledge of reason. On this point Fries approaches the views of Jacobi. 2d. The con- founding of psychological ideas with philosoph}', prop- erly so called, and not properh' distinguishing the aids that psychologj' furnish to metaphysics from metaphys- ics themselves. He regarded the life and independence of Kant's practical philosophj^ as the most beautiful pai't of liis system. Fries maintains that he has rem- edied the errors of Kant, and that he has placed the doctrine of faith, which is tlie focus of all philosophical conviction, on a solid basis. And he asserts that he has eftectcd this by means of reseai'ches carried on in the spirit of Kant himself. Fries, as well as Kant, makes the limits of science his starting-point ; hence he arrives at pure faitli of reason in that which is eternal, a faith that is strengthened by presentiment (^Ahnung). Knowledge, or science, is onU' concerned with sensu- ous phenomena ; the true essence of things is the ob- ject of faith ; we are led liy feeling to anticipate, even amidst appearances, the value of belief, which is the offspring of the limitation itself of knowledge. Here again, in placing feeling and presentiment (Ahnuny) above science, Fries approaches the doctrine of Jacobi. His labors in connection with philosoi)hical anthropol- ogy, which he regards as the fundamental science of all philosophy, are of great interest. They contain particular theories on spiritual life, and particularl}^ on the three fundamental faculties of the mind — cognition, feeling (^Gemiith, the fiiculty of being interested), and the faculty of action, which is supposed to precede the two former. Afterwards follow theories on the three degrees of development — sense, huhit, understand- ing (as the power of self-command and self-formation) ; on the degrees of thought, qualitative and quantitative abstractions of the imagination, matliematical intui- tion, attention, the difference between the understand- ing and the reason, etc. His anthropological logic con- tains also some excellent views on tlie subject of rea- soning, method, and system. He regards practical philosophy as the theoiy of the value and end of hu- man life and of the world, or the theory of human wis- dom. It is there tliat you find flic last goal of all philosophical research ; it is divided into a moral the- ory and a religious theorv (theory of the final goal of the universe). The former may be also subdivided into general ethics, or theory of the value and end of human actions, theory of virtue, and theory of the state" (Tennemann, Manual Hist. Philos., revised by Morell, § 422).