Христиан Карл Йосиас фон Бунзен: Дипломат и ученый

German diplomat and scholar (1791–1860)

Christian Charles Josias, Baron von Bunsen (Christian Karl Josias Freiherr von Bunsen; 25 August 1791 – 28 November 1860), was a German diplomat and scholar. He worked in the Papal States and England for a large part of his career.

Bunsen was born at Korbach, an old town in the German principality of Waldeck. His father was a farmer driven by poverty to become a soldier. Having studied at the Korbach gymnasium (a type of superior state grammar school) and Marburg University, Bunsen went in his nineteenth year to Göttingen, where he studied philosophy under Christian Gottlob Heyne, and supported himself by teaching and later by acting as tutor to William Backhouse Astor, John Jacob's son. Bunsen had been recommended to Astor by Heyne. He won the university prize essay of the year 1812 with his treatise, De Iure Atheniensium Hœreditario (“Athenian Law of Inheritance”), and a few months later the University of Jena granted him the honorary degree of doctor of philosophy. During 1813 he traveled extensively with Astor in Germany and Italy. He became himself a zealous auditor of Champollion, and also encouraged Lepsius in the study of hieroglyphics. The Archaeological Institute, established in 1829, found in Bunsen its most active supporter. Bunsen founded the Protestant hospital on the Tarpeian Rock in 1835. The special mission of Bunsen to England, from June to November 1841, was completely successful, in spite of the opposition of English Tractarians and Lutheran extremists. The Jerusalem bishopric, with the consent of the British government and the active encouragement of the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, was duly established, endowed with Prussian and English money, and remained for some forty years an isolated symbol of Protestant unity and a rock of stumbling to Anglican Catholics.

Bunsen's life as a public man was now practically at an end. He retired first to a villa on the Neckar near Heidelberg and later to Bonn. He refused to stand for a seat, in the Liberal interest, in the Lower House of the Prussian diet, but continued to take an active interest in politics, and in 1855 published in two volumes a work, Die Zeichen der Zeit: Briefe, etc., which exercised an immense influence in reviving the Liberal movement which the failure of the revolution had crushed. In September 1857 Bunsen attended, as the king's guest, a meeting of the Evangelical Alliance at Berlin; and one of the last papers signed by Frederick William, before his mind gave way in October, was that which conferred upon him the title of baron and a peerage for life. In 1858, at the special request of the regent (afterwards the emperor) William, he took his seat in the Prussian House of Lords, and, though remaining silent, supported the new ministry, of which his political and personal friends were members. Literary work was, however, his main preoccupation during all this period. Two discoveries of ancient manuscripts made during his stay in London, the one containing a shorter text of the Epistles of St Ignatius, and the other an unknown work On All the Heresies, by Bishop Hippolytus, had already led him to write his Hippolytus and his Age: Doctrine and Practice of Rome under Commodus and Severus (1852). He now concentrated all his efforts upon a translation of the Bible with commentaries, the Bibelwerk. While this was in preparation he published his God in History, in which he contends that the progress of mankind marches parallel to the conception of God formed within each nation by the highest exponents of its thought. At the same time he carried through the press, assisted by Samuel Birch, the concluding volumes of his work (published in English as well as in German) Egypt's Place in Universal History. This work contained a reconstruction of Egyptian chronology, together with an attempt to determine the relation in which the language and the religion of that country stand to the development of each among the more ancient non Aryan and Aryan races. His ideas on this subject were most fully developed in two volumes published in London before he left England. His greatest work, Bibelwerk für die Gemeinde, the first part of which was published in 1858, was intended to be completed in 1862. It had occupied his attention for nearly 30 years, as the grand center point to which all his literary and intellectual energies were to be devoted, but he died before he could finish it. Three volumes of the Bibelwerk were published at his death. The work was completed in the same spirit with the aid of manuscripts under the editorship of Hollzmann and Kamphausen.

In 1858 Bunsen's health began to fail; visits to Cannes in 1858 and 1859 brought no improvement, and he died on 28 November 1860, in Bonn. One of his last requests having been that his wife would write down recollections of their common life, she published his Memoirs in 1868, which contain much of his private correspondence. The German translation of these Memoirs has added extracts from unpublished documents, throwing a new light upon the political events in which he played a part. Baron Humboldt's letters to Bunsen were printed in 1869.

Bunsen's English connection, both through his wife (d. 1876) and through his own long residence in London, was further increased in his family. He had ten children, including five sons,
Henry (1818–1855) became a clergyman and a naturalised Englishman. Ernest (1819–1903), in 1845 married an Englishwoman, Miss Gurney, subsequently resided and died in London. He was a scholarly writer, who published various works both in German and in English, notably on Aryan origins, Biblical chronology, and other questions of comparative religion. Ernest's son, Sir Maurice de Bunsen (b. 1852), entered the English diplomatic service in 1877; and after a varied experience became minister at Lisbon in 1905. His youngest grand daughter through Maurice was Mary de Bunsen, World War Two Air Transport Auxiliary pilot and author. Karl (Charles; 1821–1887) had a career in the German diplomatic service. Georg (1824–1896) was for some time was an active politician in Germany, eventually retired to live in London. He wrote his father's biography for the ninth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica. He was married to Emma Birkbeck and their grandson Ernest Henderson founded the Sheraton Hotels chain. Theodor (1832–1892) had a career in the German diplomatic service. Emilie (1827 1911).