Arthur Drews

Arthur Drews

Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews (November 1, 1865–July 19, 1935) was a German historian of philosophy and philosopher, writer, and important representative of German Monist thought. He was born in Uetersen, Holstein, present day Germany.

Drews became professor of philosophy and German at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe. During his career he wrote widely on history of philosophy and history of religions and mythology. He was a disciple of Eduard von Hartmann who claimed that reality is the Unconscious World Spirit also expressed in history through religions and coming to consciousness in the minds of philosophers. Drews often provoked controversy, in part because of his unorthodox ideas on religion, and in part because of his repeated attacks on the philosophy of Nietzsche and passionate support of Wagner.
He rose to international prominence with his book The Christ Myth (1909), by amplifying and publicizing the Christ Myth thesis initially advanced by Bruno Bauer, which denies the historicity of Jesus.

The international controversy provoked by the Christ Myth was an early part of Drews's lifelong advocacy of the abandonment of Judaism and Christianity, both of which he regarded as based on ancient beliefs from Antiquity, and shaped by religious dualism — and his urging a renewal of faith based on Monism and German Idealism. He asserted that true religion could not be reduced to a cult of personality, even if based on the worship of the Unique and Great Personality of a Historical Jesus, as claimed by Protestant liberal theologians, which he argued was nothing more than the adaptation of the Great Man Theory of history promoted by the Romanticism of the 19th century.>

Drews was considered a dissenter in his time. Many German academics didn't accept his "dilettantism" (Abweichungen von der communis opinio, that is "straying from the common opinions").

Drews was a reformer, and stayed involved in religious activism all his life. He was, in his last few years, to witness and participate in an attempt by the Free Religion Movement to inspire a more liberal form of worship, and left the German Faith Movement, a venture trying to promote without success an awakening for a German Faith, an unusual form of a nationalistic and racist faith with Hinduism overtones — far removed from the elitist German Idealism Drews expounded in his last book, The German Religion (Deutsche Religion, 1935) and that he had been hoping to see replace in the future what he considered an obsolete Christianity and its primitive superstitions.

Later, Drews came back to the same subject, in The Denial of the Historicity of Jesus in Past and Present (1926), which is a historical review of some 35 major deniers of Jesus historicity (radicals, mythicists) covering the period 1780 - 1926.