GÖRRES, JOHANN JOSEPH VON. – Born in Coblenz 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 the French armies. He returned disillusioned, however, from a mission to Paris (1799). From 1801 he taught natural sciences in Coblenz, but 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 vivid religious interest to the study of the “primitive” and of myth. Between 1806 and 1808 he taught at the University of Heidelberg and, through contact with the romantics von Arnim, Brentano, and others, rediscovered ancient German literature and folk poetry; he reassessed the Middle Ages and the Church. Through the newspaper Rheinischer Merkur (January 1814–January 1816) he led anti-Napoleonic patriotism, and subsequently 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, where he found his way back to Catholicism. Among other works, he wrote Europa und die Revolution (1821) and contributed to the Katholik. In 1827 he was called to occupy a chair of history in Munich and, together with Döllinger and Möhler, made that University a European center of Catholic culture. In defense of the archbishop of Cologne, Droste, who was imprisoned in 1837, he wrote the Athanasius. Between 1836 and 1842 the four-volume Christliche Mystik appeared, in which the romantic-fideistic reaction to rationalism found expression. During 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 interests, but tended above all to rise toward those grand constructions of the philosophy of history in which, despite a rich and novel sense of historical individuality, a certain inferior intuitionism ultimately becomes apparent. Having rediscovered the religious substratum of individuality, G. fought against the opposing “Jacobinisms” of the Revolution and of bureaucratic Prussianism; he defended “the liberties of peoples,” even against the “Holy Alliance” (Gesammelte Schriften, XIII, p. 415); he placed the Church above the State, but desired equality among confessions before the law (Athanasius).
Thus the Christian State to which G. aspired reconciles the Romantic and Catholic demand for religious unity with respect for the various faiths, in a nation divided confessionally; but G. did not properly construct a “doctrine,” as did the jurists Stahl and Phillips. In his historical-religious studies he had a keen sense of the primitive and intuitive forms of spiritual life, and, in psychology, remained indebted to Schelling, whom he had studied and admired greatly; he did not, however, proceed from adequate critical premises, nor did he establish himself as an ecclesiastical historian or as a theologian comparable to Döllinger or Schechen.
The first edition of his political writings and letters, in 9 volumes (Munich 1854–74), was followed by the Gesammelte Schriften, edited by W. Schellberg for the Görres-Gesellschaft (Cologne 1926 and following years). A brief Italian anthology from the Mystik exists (translated by S. Lupo, Turin 1929, in the series Pagine cristiane).