Luca Pellarin

Franz C. Overbeck. Beyond Theology, Within Limits

This thesis stems from a few impressions and ensuing considerations triggered by reading the pages of the œuvre of Franz C. Overbeck (1837-1905). The pages are above all those of his Kirchenlexicon, an extensive collection of reflections gathered for the purpose of carrying out the never accomplished project of writing a secular, or profane, history of the church; Overbeck is above all “the late Overbeck” (1897-1905), the sick and tired Basel-based professor of New Testament and Early Church History who resolved to enter early retirement to take care of his writings and of his health. The (albeit on the whole scant) often extra-theological reception Overbeck “enjoyed” and the breadth of themes covered by the entries of his Kirchenlexicon, whose vast majority date from the very last decade of his life, are only some of the reasons behind the attempt to understand if and to what extent one can speak of an “Overbeck ‘beyond theology’ ”, of an Overbeck who might be thus deemed as a “theorist of culture”. A lengthy introduction outlining his profile and the (non-)pervasiveness of his thought and setting out the working hypotheses is followed by four chapters, each articulated through the implementation of a different methodology. In the first of them, more strictly historical-philosophical and resulting from archival research, I analyse the catalogue of Overbeck’s “philosophical library”, which is singled out as a paradigm of the theologian’s “other” interests, and dwell on his (meticulous) work habits. The second chapter is instead dedicated to the study of the extra-theological implications and repercussions (if any) of his battle against the prominent Baltic Lutheran theologian Adolf von Harnack; while in the first of its two broad sections I proceed by resorting to a newly-designed retrospective approach, in the second I advance by closely observing a set of selected excerpts from the Kirchenlexicon where Overbeck pauses on six non-theologians or non-primarily-theologians with the exact intention of castigating Harnack. As for the third chapter, organised as a word-by-word scrutiny of a sort of aphorism drafted by Overbeck, its pages convey a comprehensive perspective on what, according to him, “modernity” means, on how, when, and to what extent the words “modernity” and “modern” can or should be used, and on how modern his modernity is. Finally, in the fourth and last chapter, “born and bred” out of the desire to test and possibly refine the theory of resonance, in the reference frame of whose “research program” (“Resonant Self-World Relations in Ancient and Modern Socio-Religious Practices”) this thesis was conceived and developed, and gradually progressed around a working hypothesis and by enforcing imagination, I explore the transformation that was undergone by Christian eschatology and its (supposedly) initial apocalyptic afflatus. From the very beginning to the very end of this study, the preferential tool for gaining access to Overbeck’s writing production and personality – the latter being always highly (critically) regarded – is the concept of the “limit”. The limit is that of Overbeck’s extensive and yet not all-encompassing philosophical and, more at large, extra-theological knowledge and of the ways he mobilises it. The limit is the discretion he espouses in venturing into disciplinary fields other than his own, without ever arrogating a voice or standing as a judge in “foreign” matters. The limit is the sense with which Overbeck would like to see his contemporaries and fellow theologians clothed: only those endowed with it are worthy of being called “modern”. The limit is the horizon of meaning of the lives of the first believers in Christ and, in many respects, of ours too.