GÖRRES, Johann Joseph von. — Born in Coblenz on 25 Jan. 1776, died in Munich on 29 Jan. 1848. Initially he came under the influence of Kant’s “philosophical revolution” and sought to graft it onto the political revolution that reached the Rhineland with French arms. Disillusioned, he returned from a mission to Paris (1799). From 1801 he taught natural sciences at Coblenz, but also published a Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt (1810), dedicated to Creuzer, the great scholar of ancient myths.
Like Herder before him and like Creuzer, G. brought a lively religious interest to the study of the “primitive” and of myth. Between 1806 and 1808 he taught at the University of Heidelberg and, in contact with the Romantics Arnim, Brentano and others, rediscovered the old German popular literature and poetry; he reassessed the Middle Ages and the Church. With the newspaper Rheinischer Merkur (Jan. 1814–Jan. 1816) he led anti-Napoleonic patriotism, then patriotic-liberal opinion. Persecuted, especially after the publication of Deutschland und die Revolution (1819), in which he defended the freedom of the Church, he took refuge in Strasbourg and there became a Catholic. Among other works he wrote Europa und die Revolution (1821) and collaborated on the Katholik. In 1827 he was called to a chair of history in Munich and, with Döllinger and Möhler, made that university a European center of Catholic culture. In defense of the archbishop of Cologne, Droste, imprisoned in 1837, he wrote the Athanasius. Between 1836 and 1842 the Christliche Mystik appeared in 4 vols., in which he affirmed the Romantic-fideistic reaction to rationalism. In these years G. also collaborated on the Historisch-politische Blätter, founded by his son Guido and by Philips in 1838.
Like other great minds of the Romantic age, G. had encyclopedic ambitions, but tended above all to rise to those grand constructions of the philosophy of history in which, despite a rich and novel sense of historical individuality, a certain debased intuitionism is nonetheless evident. Having rediscovered the religious substratum of individuality, G. fought against the opposing “Jacobinisms” of the Revolution and bureaucratic prolixity; he defended “the liberties of peoples,” even against the “Holy Alliance” (Gesammelte Schriften, XIII, p. 415); he placed the Church above the State, yet demanded equality of confessions before the law (Athanasius).
Thus the Christian State to which G. aspired reconciled the Romantic and Catholic demand for religious unity with respect for diverse faiths within a nation divided along confessional lines; yet G. did not construct a proper “doctrine,” as did the jurists Stahl and Phillips. In his historical-religious studies he showed a keen sense for primitive and intuitive forms of spiritual life, and in psychology he was still indebted to Schelling, whom he had studied and admired; he did not, however, proceed from adequate critical premises, nor did he establish himself as an ecclesiastical historian or theologian comparable to a Döllinger or a Scheeben.
The first collected edition of his political writings and letters appeared in 9 vols. (Munich 1854–74); the Gesammelte Schriften were later edited by W. Schellberg for the Görres-Gesellschaft (Cologne 1926 ff.). There exists a brief Italian anthology from the Mystik (trans. S. Lupo, Turin 1929; in the series Pagine cristiane).