Eugenius Warming - Warming, Religion and Politics

Warming, Religion and Politics

Warming was raised in a Christian Protestant home and he continued to be religious throughout his life. He accepted the evolution by descent of living beings, but believed that laws governing planets’ orbits and other laws governing organic evolution were God-given. In his popular book Nedstamningslæren (translated title: Evolution by descent), he concludes the section on hypotheses about the origin of life writing that, no matter what hypothesis is considered, it just “defers the grand question: how did life first come into existence, »in the beginning«? … as if we human beings thereby obtained understanding and explanation for anything at all, or circumvented the almighty power that, incomprehensibly to our mind, must have created matter, force, time and infinite space. Science has not disproven the Bible that says: »In the beginning God created …«!”. Warming shared this view with many prominent contemporary naturalists, e.g. Alfred Russel Wallace.

Politically, Warming was national-conservative, Scandinavist and anti-Prussian. Warming was able to visit his birthplace only a few times in his life because Schleswig was conquered by Prussia and Austria in 1864 and (Northern Schleswig) returned to Denmark in 1920. Warming expressed support, in letters, for France in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. He made financial contributions to a secret fund that should support Danish-minded Schleswigian farmers in buying farms and prevent Germanization of Northern Schleswig. In a letter of 1898 to his son Jens, he regrets that the Højre – the conservative party – would lose an upcoming election and expresses concern that anarchy and socialism will eventually rule.