KuruvillaPandikattu SJ
Ernst Haeckel: The Biologist and Pantheist who appreciated Christian Ethics
Ernst Haeckel, whose full name is Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel, was a German naturalist and evolutionist who was a fervent supporter of Darwinism and advanced novel theories regarding the evolutionary descent of humans. He lived from February 16, 1834, to January 9, 1919.
Haeckel was raised in Merseburg by his government-employed father. He attended the Universities of Würzburg and Berlin, where his professor Johannes Müller, a physiologist and anatomist, accompanied him on a summer voyage to investigate small marine organisms off the coast of Heligoland in the North Sea.
Such marine biology experiences greatly drew Haeckel towards zoology, but he diligently pursued a medical degree in Berlin in 1857, as his family had requested. He briefly practised medicine before getting his father’s permission to travel to Italy, where he painted and even pondered pursuing art as a vocation.
Haeckel’s reading of Charles Darwin’s 1859 book “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” marked a paradigm shift in his thinking. In the meanwhile, he earned a doctorate in zoology from Jena in 1861, where he also held the position of privatdozent. When he published his monograph on the Radiolaria that year, he expressed his agreement with Darwin’s theory of evolution. From that point on, he was a supporter of Darwinism, and he soon began giving lectures on the descent theory to both academic and lay audiences. In 1862, he was appointed extraordinary (that is, associate) professor of zoology. Darwin had explained evolution as the result of accumulating beneficial mutations being selected for by natural selection, which over time led to the emergence of new species. For Haeckel, however, this was just the beginning and had further implications. He was made full professor in 1865, and from that moment until his retirement in 1909 and eventual demise, he worked in Jena, Germany.
As ana young man, Haeckel was a devout and religious man. However, following his rehabilitation work in Italy and Sicily, he lost interest in any conventional faith. He should have found the beautiful excesses of southern Catholicism amusing, but instead he perceived them as a personal slight. His first wife Anna’s passing not only led him to give up formal observance, but the soul-crushing experience also made him opposed to the kind of superstition that would worship such a wicked creature.
Over the course of a quarter-century, Haeckel had stated both his positive and negative opinions on religion. The unfavourable review derided conventional religion’s anthropomorphic Deity doctrine and mocked its idea of an immaterial human soul. But Spinoza and Goethe were followers of his faith. When he was invited to Altenburg (about thirty miles south of Leipzig) to assist commemorate the 75th anniversary of the NaturforschendeGesellschaft des Osterlandes (The Natural Research Society of the Eastern Region), he used the opportunity to combine his critical and constructive criticisms. Haeckel was introduced before another speaker at the gathering on October 9, 1892, who made a somewhat annoying comment regarding the interaction between science and religion. So, Haeckel abandoned his prepared material and delivered the lecture impromptu. The following day, he typed it down from memory, adding details as needed. The speech was released in the popular press and as a brief monograph titled “Der Monismusals Band zwischen Religion und Wissenschaft,” which would see publication in its sixteenth edition shortly after Haeckel’s passing. It served as the basis for the even more popular book “The World Puzzle,” which was released in 1899.
Although Haeckel intended to eradicate all anthropomorphisms from religion, he believed that there was still something to be preserved from Christian and religious traditions. This was the moral tenet of traditional orthodoxy, particularly Christianity: “Doubtless, human culture today owes the greater part of its perfection to the spread and ennobling [effect] of Christian ethics, despite its higher worth often in a regrettable way being injured by its connection with untenable myths and so-called “revelation.”
The scientist Haeckel thus accepted Goethe’s description of religion as a “monistic religion of humanity grounded in pantheism.”
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