GÖRRES, JOHANN JOSEPH VON. - Born in Koblenz on 25 January 1776, died in Munich on 29 January 1848. He initially came under the influence of the Kantian "philosophical revolution," and wished to graft it onto the political revolution, which reached the Rhineland with French arms. He returned disillusioned, however, from a mission to Paris (1799). From 1801 he taught natural sciences in Koblenz, but he also published a Mythengeschichte der asiatischen Welt (1810), which he 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 rediscovered, through contact with the romantics von Arnim, Brentano, etc., the ancient literature and popular poetry of Germany; he reassessed the Middle Ages and the Church. With the newspaper Rheinischer Merkur (Jan. 1814-Jan. 1816) he led the anti-Napoleonic patriotism, and later patriotic-liberal opinion. Persecuted, especially after the publication of Deutschland und die Revolution (1819), in which he also defended the freedom of the Church, he took refuge in Strasbourg, and there found himself a Catholic again. He wrote, among other things, Europa und die Revolution (1821) and contributed to the Katholik. In 1827 he was called to fill a chair of history in Munich and made that University, together with Döllinger and Möhler, 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 the romantic-fideistic reaction against rationalism is asserted. In these years G. also contributed to the Historisch-politische Blätter, founded by his son Guido and by Phillips in 1838.
Like other great spirits of the romantic age, G. had encyclopedic demands, but he tended above all to rise to those great constructions of the philosophy of history, in which there finally stands out, albeit with a rich and new sense of historical individuality, a certain inferior intuitionism. Having rediscovered the religious substratum of individuality, G. fought against the opposing "Jacobinisms" of the Revolution and of bureaucratic Prussianism; he defended "the freedoms of peoples," even against the "holy alliance" (Gesammelte Schriften, XIII, p. 415); he placed the Church higher than the State, but wanted equality of confessions before the law (Athanasius).
Thus the Christian State to which G. aspired reconciles the romantic and Catholic demand for religious unity with that of respect for the various faiths, in a nation divided in the confessional respect: but G. does not properly construct a "doctrine," as do the jurists Stahl and Phillips. In historical-religious studies he has a lively sense for the primitive and intuitive forms of spiritual life, and is still indebted, in psychology, to Schelling, whom he had studied and admired a great deal: he does not, however, start from adequate critical premises, nor does he establish himself as an ecclesiastical historiographer or as a theologian to be compared with a Döllinger or a Schechen.
The first edition of his political writings and his letters, in 9 vols. (Munich 1854-74), was followed by the Gesammelte Schriften, edited by W. Schellberg for the Görres-Gesellschaft (Cologne 1926 and suppl.). There exists a brief Italian anthology from the Mystik (trans. by S. Lupo, Turin 1929: in the series Pagine cristiane).
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Ettore Passerin