Wilhelm Benecke

Wilhelm Benecke (1776-1837) was a German manufacturer living in London, whose theological and philosophical opinions would challenge many of Crabb Robinson's accepted notions of 'rational' Christianity, creating a crisis of faith between 1826 and 1836 similar to what he experienced in his youth when confronted by the forces of materialism, necessarianism, scepticism, and German Idealism between 1790 and 1805. In the late 1790s, while living in Hamburg, Benecke studied maritime insurance, eventually establishing his own insurance company and publishing the first scientific work in that field in Hamburg in 1807 (an English edition appeared in 1824). A succession of French invasions destroyed his company, forcing Benecke to remove to England in 1813. With the help of some friends, he opened a chemical manufactory in Deptford that quickly restored his lost wealth, enabling him to bring his family to England. By 1828 Benecke had earned enough to retire comfortably in Heidelberg, where he died in 1837. Though a successful businessman, Benecke's real passion was the study of religion and philosophy. The key to his system was the ancient doctrine of the pre-existence of the soul, a belief his son would later describe in his Introduction to his edition of his father’s treatise on Romans as the master plan of an “all-loving God, who by an immeasurable sacrifice of His own blissful existence, guides the spirits fallen through their own transgressions, through a series of different existences to perfection and happiness” (Benecke, Exposition xii-xiii). Benecke died early in 1837; Robinson received the news on 14 March, remarking in his Reminiscences for 1837 that Benecke was a “thinker, rather than a writer – a speculative Theologian who made Pre-Existence the foundation of his religious Scheme” (Reminiscences 1837, 4: f. 150). See Friedrich Wilhelm Benecke, ed., Wilhelm Benecke's Lebensskizze und Brief. Als Manu- skript gedruckt, 2 vols (Dresden: Druck der Teubnerschen Offizin, 1850); also Wilhelm Benecke, An Exposition of St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm Benecke (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854).