Critical Edition of František Príhonskýs manuscript on D.F. Strauß

For many decades an undated 770-page manuscript with the somewhat bulky and mysterious German title D. D. F. Strauß in seiner christlichen Glaubenslehre widerlegt, ehe er geboren ward durch die Ansichten des D. Bernard Bolzano (Dr. David Friedrich Strauß in his Of Christian Doctrine refuted before he was born by the views of Dr. Bernard Bolzano) has been kept in the Bautzen Cathedral Archives unedited and scarcely heard of. This situation, however, will now be ameliorated with a 36-month research project: Prof. Winfried Löffler and his collaborator, the experienced editor Peter M. Schenkel, are planning an annotated critical edition of the entire text with an accompanying commentary. The manuscript is of great interest, since it reflects a controversy between two intellectual giants who were as different as can be: One was the Protestant David Friedrich Strauß (1808-1874), perhaps the best-known theologian of the whole 19th century, whose reinterpretation of Christian doctrine in his The life of Jesus made him a kind of enfant terrible for orthodoxy. The other was the Catholic Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848), whose pioneering achievements in logic, mathematics, and philosophy of science, and as a grandfather of analytic philosophy, stand uncontested today, but whose theology and philosophy of religion still await broader attention. The relative obscurity of these aspects of Bolzanos thought has to do with Bolzanos being removed from his Prague theology chair under peculiar circumstances in 1819. Bolzano developed a somewhat revised form of Catholic theology (for which he wound up on the Index of Prohibited Books), but on the whole he defended the historical reliability and rationality of the Catholic faith. The manuscript in question was probably authored between 1841 and 1846 by Bernard Bolzanos most gifted disciple, František Prhonsk (1788-1859). It is a comprehensive critique of Straußs second and less known, but voluminous, book Die christliche Glaubenslehre (1840/41). From the Bolzano-Prhonsk correspondence it is clear that Prhonsk did not author a fully original work, but writes as his masters voice with reference to Bolzanos lectures from 1805ff. The manuscript even contains numerous marginalia in Bolzanos own hand, written in his private stenography. The manuscript is thus an important secondary (and to some degree also primary) source for Bolzano scholarship. Another novel aspect of the project arises from the fact that the manuscript tackles Straußs Glaubenslehre as a whole unlike the other contemporary reactions, which only focused on its introductory chapters. One of the projects many research questions will concern Prhonsks criteria for selecting which passages to comment on. One challenge which the project will face is to decipher the countless additions, deletions, and marginalia; incorporating them into an easily accessible text; and reconstructing the precise connections which the text bears to Strauß. Löffler and Schenkel expect the project to yield significant contributions to scholarship not only on Bolzano, but also on Strauß and on the latters reception as well as some novel general insights into a turbulent era of theology.

Due to his materialist critique of the Gospel "The Life of Jesus", David Friedrich Strauss was perhaps the theologian who received most public attention across all the 19th century. Much less known is his second book "Christliche Glaubenslehre", a naturalist- secularist analysis of Christian theology. The only complete commentary on that book, written by František Prhonsk, the most gifted disciple of the Prague philosopher, mathematician and theologian Bernard Bolzano, has been lying for about 180 years as an unedited and hard-to-decipher 770 pages manuscript (with the somewhat enigmatic title "D. D. F. Strauß in seiner christlichen Glaubenslehre widerlegt, ehe er geboren ward durch die Ansichten des D. Bernard Bolzano") in the Cathedral Archive of Bautzen / Germany. In an FWF research project, Peter M. Schenkel deciphered, transcribed and edited this text under the guidance of Winfried Löffler, philosopher of religion at the University of Innsbruck. Among other reasons, the manuscript is valuable due to Bernard Bolzano's pencil marginal remarks, but it also opens new perspectives into the structures of collaboration in Bolzano's intellectual circles. Contrary to the manuscript title and to remarks in the letter correspondence, Prhonsk, the author of a high-level critique of Kant ("Neuer Anti-Kant"), appears not merely as a propagator of Bolzano's ideas ("his master's voice"), but surprisingly often as an independent thinker. The easy-to-read edition allows an accessible path into the scarcely studied reception of Strauss's works in the Habsburg Empire. The current open access text (https://www.uibk.ac.at/philtheol/forschung/arbeitstext_prihonsky_strauss.pdf) will later be supplemented by a printed edition and a commentary.