GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
1. When two generations of Protestant strife had turned to naught the
intellectual promise of the Reformation, and much of the ground first
won by it had lapsed to Catholicism, the general forward movement of
European thought availed to set up in Germany as elsewhere a measure of
critical unbelief. There is abundant evidence that the Lutheran clergy
not only failed to hold the best intelligence of the country with them,
but in large part fell into personal disrepute. [1208] "The scenes of
clerical immorality," says an eminently orthodox historian, "are enough
to chill one's blood even at the distance of two centuries." [1209]
A Church Ordinance of 1600 acknowledges information to the effect
that a number of clergymen and schoolmasters are guilty of "whoredom
and fornication," and commands that "if they are notoriously guilty
they shall be suspended." Details are preserved of cases of clerical
drunkenness and ruffianism; and the women of the priests' families do
not escape the pillory. [1210] Nearly a century later, Arnold resigned
his professorship at Giessen "from despair of producing any amendment
in the dissolute habits of the students." [1211] It is noted that
"the great moral decline of the clergy was confined chiefly to the
Lutheran Church. The Reformed [Calvinistic] was earnest, pious,
and aggressive" [1212]--the usual result of official hostility.
In such circumstances, the active freethought existing in France at the
beginning of the seventeenth century could not fail to affect Germany;
and even before the date of the polemic of Garasse and Mersenne there
appeared (1615) a counterblast to the new thought in the Theologia
Naturalis of J. H. Alsted, of Frankfort, directed adversus atheos,
Epicureos, et sophistas hujus temporis. The preface to this solid
quarto (a remarkable sample of good printing for the period) declares
that "there are men in this diseased (exulcerato) age who dare to
oppose science to revelation, reason to faith, nature to grace,
the creator to the redeemer, and truth to truth"; and the writer
undertakes to rise argumentatively from nature to the Christian God,
without, however, transcending the logical plane of De Mornay. The
trouble of the time, unhappily for the faith, was not rationalism,
but the inextinguishable hatreds of Protestant and Catholic, and the
strife of economic interests dating from the appropriations of the
first reformers. At length, after a generation of gloomy suspense,
came the explosion of the hostile ecclesiastical interests, and
the long-drawn horror of the Thirty Years' War, which left Germany
mangled, devastated, drained of blood and treasure, decivilized, and
well-nigh destitute of the machinery of culture. No such printing
as that of Alsted's book was to be done in the German world for
many generations. But as in France, so in Germany, the exhausting
experience of the moral and physical evil of religious war wrought
something of an antidote, in the shape of a new spirit of rationalism.
Not only was the Peace of Westphalia an essentially secular
arrangement, subordinating all religious claims to a political
settlement, [1213] but the drift of opinion was markedly
freethinking. Already in 1630 one writer describes "three classes
of skeptics among the nobility of Hamburg: first, those who believe
that religion is nothing but a mere fiction, invented to keep the
masses in restraint; second, those who give preference to no faith,
but think that all religions have a germ of truth; and third, those
who, confessing that there must be one true religion, are unable to
decide whether it is papal, Calvinist, or Lutheran, and consequently
believe nothing at all." No less explicit is the written testimony
of Walther, the court chaplain of Ulrich II of East Friesland, 1637:
"These infernal courtiers, among whom I am compelled to live against
my will, doubt those truths which even the heathen have learned
to believe." [1214] In Germany as in France the freethinking which
thus grew up during the religious war expanded after the peace. As
usual, this is to be gathered from the orthodox propaganda against it,
setting out in 1662 with a Preservative against the Pest of Present-day
Atheists, [1215] by one Theophilus Gegenbauer. So far was this from
attaining its end that there ensued ere long a more positive and
aggressive development of freethinking than any other country had yet
seen. A wandering scholar, Matthias Knutzen of Holstein (b. 1645),
who had studied philosophy at Königsberg, went about in 1674 teaching
a hardy Religion of Humanity, rejecting alike immortality, God and
Devil, churches and priests, and insisting that conscience could
perfectly well take the place of the Bible as a guide to conduct. His
doctrines are to be gathered chiefly from a curious Latin letter,
[1216] written by him for circulation, headed Amicus Amicis Amica;
and in this the profession of atheism is explicit: "Insuper Deum
negamus." In two dialogues in German he set forth the same ideas. His
followers, as holding by conscience, were called Gewissener; and
he or another of his group asserted that in Jena alone there were
seven hundred of them. [1217] The figures were fantastic, and the
whole movement passed rapidly out of sight--hardly by reason of the
orthodox refutations, however. Germany was in no state to sustain
such a party; and what happened was a necessarily slow gestation of
the seed of new thought thus cast abroad.
Knutzen's Latin letter is given in full by a Welsh scholar settled
in Germany, Jenkinus Thomasius (Jenkin Thomas), in his Historia
Atheismi (Altdorf, 1692), ed. Basel, 1709, pp. 97-101; also
by La Croze in his (anon.) Entretiens sur divers sujets, 1711,
p. 402 sq. Thomasius thus codifies its doctrine:--"1. There is
neither God nor Devil. 2. The magistrate is nothing to be esteemed;
temples are to be condemned, priests to be rejected. 3. In place
of the magistrate and the priest are to be put knowledge and
reason, joined with conscience, which teaches to live honestly,
to injure none, and to give each his own. 4. Marriage and free
union do not differ. 5. This is the only life: after it, there
is neither reward nor punishment. 6. The Scripture contradicts
itself." Knutzen admittedly wrote like a scholar (Thomasius,
p. 97); but his treatment of Scripture contradictions belongs
to the infancy of criticism; though La Croze, replying thirty
years later, could only meet it with charges of impiety and
stupidity. As to the numbers of the movement see Trinius,
Freydenker Lexicon, 1759, s. v. Knutzen. Kurtz (Hist. of the
Christian Church, Eng. tr. 1864, i, 213) states that a careful
academic investigation proved the claim to a membership of 700
to be an empty boast (citing H. Rossel, Studien und Kritiken,
1844, iv). This doubtless refers to the treatise of Musæus, Jena,
1675, cited by La Croze, p. 401. Some converts Knutzen certainly
made; and as only the hardiest would dare to avow themselves, his
influence may have been considerable. "Examples of total unbelief
come only singly to knowledge," says Tholuck; "but total unbelief
had still to the end of the century to bear penal treatment." He
gives the instances (1) of the Swedish Baron Skytte, reported in
1669 by Spener to the Frankfort authorities for having said at
table, before the court preacher, that the Scriptures were not
holy, and not from God but from men; and (2) "a certain minister"
who at the end of the century was prosecuted for blasphemy. (Das
kirchliche Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts, 2 Abth. pp. 56-57.) Even
Anabaptists were still liable to banishment in the middle of
the century. Id. 1 Abth. 1861, p. 36. As to clerical intolerance
see pp. 40-44. On the merits of the Knutzen movement cp. Pünjer,
Hist, of the Christian Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 437-8.
2. While, however, clerical action could drive such a movement under
the surface, it could not prevent the spread of rationalism in all
directions; and there was now germinating a philosophic unbelief
[1218] under the influence of Spinoza. Nowhere were there more
prompt and numerous answers to Spinoza than in Germany, [1219]
whence it may be inferred that within the educated class he soon
had a good many adherents. In point of fact the Elector Palatine
offered him a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg in 1673,
promising him "the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching,"
and merely stipulating that he should not use it "to disturb the
religion publicly established." [1220] On the other hand, Professor
Rappolt, of Leipzig, attacked him as an atheist, in an Oratio contra
naturalistas in 1670; Professor Musæus, of Jena, assailed him in 1674;
[1221] and the Chancellor Kortholt, of Kiel, grouped him, Herbert,
and Hobbes as The Three Great Impostors in 1680. [1222] After the
appearance of the Ethica the replies multiplied. On the other hand,
Cuffelaer vindicated Spinoza in 1684; and in 1691 F. W. Stosch, a
court official, and son of the court preacher, published a stringent
attack on revelationism, entitled Concordia rationis et fidei, partly
on Spinozistic lines, which created much commotion, and was forcibly
suppressed and condemned to be burnt by the hangman at Berlin, [1223]
as it denied not only the immateriality but the immortality of the
soul and the historical truth of the Scriptural narratives. This
seems to have been the first work of modern freethought published
by a German, [1224] apart from Knutzen's letter; but a partial list
of the apologetic works of the period, from Gegenbauer onwards,
may suffice to suggest the real vogue of heterodox opinions:--
1662. Th. Gegenbauer. Preservatio wider die Pest der heutigen
Atheisten. Erfurt.
1668. J. Musæus. Examen Cherburianismi. Contra E. Herbertum de
Cherbury.
1668. Anton Reiser. De origine, progressu, et incremento Antitheismi
seu Atheismi. [1225] Augsburg.
1670. Rappolt. Oratio contra Naturalistas. Leipzig.
1672. J. Müller. Atheismus devictus (in German). Hamburg.
1672. J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-Atheistica (in German).
1673. ---- Besiegte Atheisterey.
1673. Chr. Pfaff. Disputatio contra Atheistas.
1674. J. Musæus. Spinozismus. Jena.
1677. Val. Greissing. Corona Transylvani; Exerc. 2, de Atheismo,
contra Cartesium et Math. Knutzen. Wittemberg.
1677. Tobias Wagner. Examen ... atheismi speculativi. Tübingen.
1677. K. Rudrauff, Giessen. Dissertatio de Atheismo.
1680. Chr. Kortholt. De tribus impostoribus magnis liber. Kiloni.
1689. Th. Undereyck. Der Närrische Atheist in seiner Thorheit
ueberzeugt. Bremen.
1692. Jenkinus Thomasius. Historia Atheismi. Altdorf.
1696. J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-Atheistica. Reprint.
1697. A. H. Grosse. An Atheismus necessario ducat ad corruptionem
morum. Rostock.
1697. Em. Weber. Beurtheilung der Atheisterei.
1700. Tribbechov. Historia Naturalismi. Jena.
1708. Loescher. Prænotiones Theologicæ contra Naturalistarum et
Fanaticorum omne genus, Atheos, Deistas, Indifferentistas, etc.
Wittemberg.
1708. Schwartz. Demonstrationes Dei. Leipzig.
1708. Rechenberg. Fundamenta veræ religionis Prudentum, adversus
Atheos, etc.
1710. J. C. Wolfius. Dissertatio de Atheismi falso suspectis.
Wittemberg.
1713. J. N. Fromman. Atheus Stultus. Tübingen.
1713. Anon. Widerlegung der Atheisten, Deisten, und neuen Zweifeler.
Frankfort.
[Later came the works of Buddeus (1716) and Reimmann and Fabricius,
noted above, vol. i, ch. i, § 2.]
3. For a community in which the reading class was mainly clerical and
scholastic, the seeds of rationalism were thus in part sown in the
seventeenth century; but the ground was not yet propitious. Leibnitz
(1646-1716), the chief thinker produced by Germany before Kant,
lived in a state of singular intellectual isolation; [1226] and
showed his sense of it by writing his philosophic treatises chiefly
in French. One of the most widely learned men of his age, he was wont
from his boyhood to grapple critically with every system of thought
that came in his way; and, while claiming to be always eager to learn,
[1227] he was as a rule strongly concerned to affirm his own powerful
bias. Early in life he writes that it horrifies him to think how
many men he has met who were at once intelligent and atheistic;
[1228] and his propaganda is always dominated by the desire rather
to confute unbelief than to find out the truth. As early as 1668
(aet. 22) he wrote an essay to that end, which was published as
a Confessio naturæ contra Atheistas. Against Spinoza he reacted
instantly and violently, pronouncing the Tractatus on its first
(anonymous) appearance an "unbearably bold (licentiosum) book,"
and resenting the Hobbesian criticism which it "dared to apply to
sacred Scripture." [1229] Yet in the next year we find him writing
to Arnauld in earnest protest against the hidebound orthodoxy of the
Church. "A philosophic age," he declares, "is about to begin, in which
the concern for truth, flourishing outside the schools, will spread
even among politicians. Nothing is more likely to strengthen atheism
and to upset faith, already so shaken by the attacks of great but bad
men [a pleasing allusion to Spinoza], than to see on the one side the
mysteries of the faith preached upon as the creed of all, and on the
other hand become matter of derision to all, convicted of absurdity
by the most certain rules of common reason. The worst enemies of the
Church are in the Church. Let us take care lest the latest heresy--I
will not say atheism, but--naturalism, be publicly professed." [1230]
For a time he seemed thus disposed to liberalize. He wrote to Spinoza
on points of optics before he discovered the authorship; and he is
represented later as speaking of the Tractatus with respect. He even
visited Spinoza in 1676, and obtained a perusal of the manuscript
of the Ethica; but he remained hostile to him in theology and
philosophy. To the last he called Spinoza a mere developer of
Descartes, [1231] whom he also habitually resisted.
This was not hopeful; and Leibnitz, with all his power and originality,
really wrought little for the direct rationalization of religious
thought. [1232] His philosophy, with all its ingenuity, has the common
stamp of the determination of the theist to find reasons for the God
in whom he believed beforehand; and his principle that all is for
the best is the fatal rounding of his argumentative circle. Thus his
doctrine that that is true which is clear was turned to the account
of an empiricism of which the "clearness" was really predetermined
by the conviction of truth. His Theodicée, [1233] written in reply
to Bayle, is by the admission even of admirers [1234] a process of
begging the question. Deity, a mere "infinition" of finite qualities,
is proved à priori, though it is expressly argued that a finite mind
cannot grasp infinity; and the necessary goodness of necessary deity
is posited in the same fashion. It is very significant that such a
philosopher, himself much given to denying the religiousness of other
men's theories, was nevertheless accused among both the educated
and the populace of being essentially non-religious. Nominally he
adhered to the entire Christian system, including miracles, though he
declared that his belief in dogma rested on the agreement of reason
with faith, and claimed to keep his thought free on unassailed
truths; [1235] and he always discussed the Bible as a believer;
yet he rarely went to church; [1236] and the Low German nickname
Lövenix (= Glaubet nichts, "believes nothing") expressed his local
reputation. No clergyman attended his funeral; but indeed no one
else went, save his secretary. [1237] It is on the whole difficult to
doubt that his indirect influence not only in Germany but elsewhere
had been and has been for deism and atheism. [1238] He and Newton
were the most distinguished mathematicians and theists of the age;
and Leibnitz, as we saw, busied himself to show that the philosophy
of Newton [1239] tended to atheism, and that that of their theistic
predecessor Descartes would not stand criticism. [1240] Spinoza being,
according to him, in still worse case, and Locke hardly any sounder,
[1241] there remained for theists only his cosmology of monads and
his ethic of optimism--all for the best in the best of all possible
worlds--which seems at least as well fitted as any other theism to
make thoughtful men give up the principle.
4. Other culture-conditions concurred to set up a spirit of rationalism
in Germany. After the Thirty Years' War there arose a religious
movement, called Pietism by its theological opponents, which aimed at
an emotional inwardness of religious life as against what its adherents
held to be an irreligious orthodoxy around them. [1242] Contending
against rigid articles of credence, they inevitably prepared the way
for less credent forms of thought. [1243] Though the first leaders
of Pietism grew embittered with their unsuccess and the attacks of
their religious enemies, [1244] their impulse went far, and greatly
influenced the clergy through the university of Halle, which in the
first part of the eighteenth century turned out 6,000 clergymen in
one generation. [1245] Against the Pietists were furiously arrayed
the Lutherans of the old order, who even contrived in many places to
suppress their schools. [1246] Virtues generated under persecution,
however, underwent the law of degeneration which dogs all intellectual
subjection; and the inner life of Pietism, lacking mental freedom
and intellectual play, grew as cramped in its emotionalism as that
of orthodoxy in its dogmatism. Religion was thus represented by a
species of extremely unattractive and frequently absurd formalists on
the one hand, and on the other by a school which at its best unsettled
religious usage, and otherwise tended alternately to fanaticism and
cant. [1247] Thus "the rationalist tendencies of the age were promoted
by this treble exhibition of the aberrations of belief." [1248]
"How sorely," says Tholuck, "the hold not only of ecclesiastical
but of Biblical belief on men of all grades had been shaken at the
beginning of the eighteenth century is seen in many instances." [1249]
Orthodoxy selects that of a Holstein student who hanged himself at
Wittemberg in 1688, leaving written in his New Testament, in Latin,
the declaration that "Our soul is mortal; religion is a popular
delusion, invented to gull the ignorant, and so govern the world the
better." [1250] But again there is the testimony of the mint-master
at Hanover that at court there all lived as "free atheists." And
though the name "freethinker" was not yet much used in discussion,
it had become current in the form of Freigeist--the German equivalent
still used. This, as we have noted, [1251] was probably a survival
from the name of the old sect of the "Free Spirit," rather than an
adaptation from the French esprit fort or the English "freethinker."
5. After the collapse of the popular movement of Matthias Knutzen,
the thin end of the new wedge may be seen in the manifold work of
Christian Thomasius (1655-1728), who in 1687 published a treatise
on "Divine Jurisprudence," in which the principles of Pufendorf
on natural law, already offensive to the theologians, were carried
so far as to give new offence. Reading Pufendorf in his nonage as a
student of jurisprudence, he was so conscious of the conflict between
the utilitarian and the Scriptural view of moral law that, taught
by a master who had denounced Pufendorf, he recoiled in a state of
theological fear. [1252] Some years later, gaining self-possession, he
recognized the rationality of Pufendorf's system, and both expounded
and defended him, thus earning his share in the hostility which the
great jurist encountered at clerical hands. Between that hostility
and the naturalist bias which he had acquired from Pufendorf,
there grew up in him an aversion to the methods and pretensions
of theologians which made him their lifelong antagonist. [1253]
Pufendorf had but guardedly introduced some of the fundamental
principles of Hobbes, relating morals to the social state, and thus
preparing the way for utilitarianism. [1254] This sufficed to make
the theologians his enemies; and it is significant that Thomasius,
heterodox at the outset only thus far forth, becomes from that point
onwards an important pioneer of freethought, toleration, and humane
reform. Innovating in all things, he began, while still a Privatdocent
at Leipzig University, a campaign on behalf of the German language;
and, not content with arousing much pedantic enmity by delivering
lectures for the first time in his mother tongue, and deriding
at the same time the bad scholastic Latin of his compatriots,
he set on foot the first vernacular German periodical, [1255]
which ran for two years (1688-90), and caused so much anger that
he was twice prosecuted before the ecclesiastical court of Dresden,
the second time on a charge of contempt of religion. The periodical
was in effect a crusade against all the pedantries, the theologians
coming in for the hardest blows. [1256] Other satirical writings,
and a defence of intermarriage between Calvinists and Lutherans,
[1257] at length put him in such danger that, to escape imprisonment,
he sought the protection of the Elector of Brandenburg at Halle, where
he ultimately became professor of jurisprudence in the new university,
founded by his advice. There for a time he leant towards the Pietists,
finding in that body a concern for natural liberty of feeling and
thinking which was absent from the mental life of orthodoxy; but he
was "of another spirit" than they, and took his own way.
In philosophy an unsystematic pantheist, he taught, after Plutarch,
Bayle, and Bacon, that "superstition is worse than atheism"; but
his great practical service to German civilization, over and above
his furthering of the native speech, was his vigorous polemic against
prosecutions for heresy, trials for witchcraft, and the use of torture,
all of which he did more than any other German to discredit, though
judicial torture subsisted for another half-century. [1258] It was by
his propaganda that the princes of Germany were moved to abolish all
trials for sorcery. [1259] In such a battle he of course had the clergy
against him all along the line; and it is as an anti-clerical that
he figures in clerical history. The clerical hostility to his ethics
he repaid with interest, setting himself to develop to the utmost,
in the interest of lay freedom, the Lutheran admission of the divine
right of princes. [1260] This he turned not against freedom of opinion
but against ecclesiastical claims, very much in the spirit of Hobbes,
who may have influenced him.
The perturbed Mosheim, while candidly confessing that Thomasius
is the founder of academic freedom in Germany, pronounces that the
"famous jurists" who were led by Thomasius "set up a new fundamental
principle of church polity--namely, the supreme authority and power
of the civil magistrate," so tending to create the opinion "that the
ministers of religion are not to be accounted ambassadors of God,
but vicegerents of the chief magistrates. They also weakened not a
little the few remaining prerogatives and advantages which were left
of the vast number formerly possessed by the clergy; and maintained
that many of the maxims and regulations of our churches which had
come down from our fathers were relics of popish superstition. This
afforded matter for long and pernicious feuds and contests between
our theologians and our jurists.... It will be sufficient for us to
observe, what is abundantly attested, that they diminished much in
various places the respect for the clergy, the reverence for religion,
and the security and prosperity of the Lutheran Church." [1261]
Pusey, in turn, grudgingly allows that "the study of history was
revived and transformed through the views of Thomasius." [1262]
6. A personality of a very different kind emerges in the same period
in Johann Conrad Dippel (1673-1734), who developed a system of
rationalistic mysticism, and as to whom, says an orthodox historian,
"one is doubtful whether to place him in the class of pietists or
of rationalists, of enthusiasts or of scoffers, of mystics or of
freethinkers." [1263] The son of a preacher, he yet "exhibited in his
ninth year strong doubts as to the catechism." After a tolerably free
life as a student he turned Pietist at Strasburg, lectured on astrology
and palmistry, preached, and got into trouble with the police. In
1698 he published under the pen-name of "Christianus Democritus"
his book, Gestäuptes Papstthum der Protestirenden ("The Popery of
the Protestantizers Whipped"), in which he so attacked the current
Christian ethic of salvation as to exasperate both Churches. [1264] The
stress of his criticism fell firstly on the unthinking Scripturalism of
the average Protestant, who, he said, while reproaching the Catholic
with setting up in the crucifix a God of wood, was apt to make for
himself a God of paper. [1265] In his repudiation of the "bargain" or
"redemption" doctrine of the historic Church he took up positions which
were as old as Abailard, and which were one day to become respectable;
but in his own life he was much of an Ishmaelite, with wild notions
of alchemy and gold-making; and after predicting that he should live
till 1808, he died suddenly in 1734, leaving a doctrine which appealed
only to those constitutionally inclined, on the lines of the earlier
English Quakers, to set the inner light above Scripture. [1266]
7. Among the pupils of Thomasius at Halle was Theodore Louis Lau,
who, born of an aristocratic family, became Minister of Finances to
the Duke of Courland, and after leaving that post held a high place
in the service of the Elector Palatine. While holding that office
Lau published a small Latin volume of pensées entitled Meditationes
Theologicæ-Physicæ, notably deistic in tone. This gave rise to such an
outcry among the clergy that he had to leave Frankfort, only, however,
to be summoned before the consistory of Königsberg, his native town,
and charged with atheism (1719). He thereupon retired to Altona,
where he had freedom enough to publish a reply to his clerical
persecutors. [1267]
8. While Thomasius was still at work, a new force arose of a more
distinctly academic cast. This was the adaptation of Leibnitz's
system by Christian Wolff, who, after building up a large influence
among students by his method of teaching, [1268] came into public
prominence by a rectorial address [1269] at Halle (1721) in which
he warmly praised the ethics of Confucius. Such praise was naturally
held to imply disparagement of Christianity; and as a result of the
pietist outcry Wolff was condemned by the king to exile from Prussia,
under penalty of the gallows, [1270] all "atheistical" writings being
at the same time forbidden. Wolff's system, however, prevailed so
completely, in virtue of its lucidity and the rationalizing tendency
of the age, that in the year 1738 there were said to be already 107
authors of his cast of thinking. Nevertheless, he refused to return
to Halle on any invitation till the accession (1740) of Frederick
the Great, one of his warmest admirers, whereafter he figured as
the German thinker of his age. His teaching, which for the first
time popularized philosophy in the German language, in turn helped
greatly, by its ratiocinative cast, to promote the rationalistic
temper, though orthodox enough from the modern point of view. Under
the new reign, however, pietism and Wolffism alike lost prestige,
[1271] and the age of anti-Christian and Christian rationalism
began. Thus the period of freethinking in Germany follows close upon
one of religious revival. The 6,000 theologians trained at Halle in the
first generation of the century had "worked like a leaven through all
Germany." [1272] "Not since the time of the Reformation had Germany
such a large number of truly pious preachers and laymen as towards
the end of the first half of the eighteenth century." [1273] There,
as elsewhere, religion intellectually collapsed.
As to Wolff's rationalistic influence see Cairns, Unbelief in
the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 173; Pusey, pp. 115-19; Pünjer,
p. 529; Lechler, pp. 448-49. "It cannot be questioned that, in
his philosophy, the main stress rests upon the rational" (Kahnis,
as cited, p. 28). "Francke and Lange (pietists) ... saw atheism
and corruption of manners springing up from Wolff's school"
(before his exile). Id. p. 113. Wolff's chief offence lay in
stressing natural religion, and in indicating, as Tholuck observes,
that that could be demonstrated, whereas revealed religion could
only be believed (Abriss, p. 18). He greatly pleased Voltaire
by the dictum that men ought to be just even though they had
the misfortune to be atheists. It is noted by Tholuck, however
(Abriss, as cited, p. 11, note), that the decree for Wolff's
expulsion was inspired not by his theological colleagues but
by two military advisers of the king. Tholuck's own criticism
resolves itself into a protest against Wolff's predilection for
logical connection in his exposition. The fatal thing was that
Wolff accustomed German Christians to reason.
9. Even before the generation of active pressure from English and
French deism there were clear signs that rationalism had taken root in
German life. On the impulse set up by the establishment of the Grand
Lodge at London in 1717, Freemasonic lodges began to spring up in
Germany, the first being founded at Hamburg in 1733. [1274] The deism
which in the English lodges was later toned down by orthodox reaction
was from the first pronounced in the German societies, which ultimately
passed on the tradition to the other parts of the Continent. But
the new spirit was not confined to secret societies. Wolffianism
worked widely. In the so-called Wertheim Bible (1735) Johann
Lorenz Schmid, in the spirit of the Leibnitz-Wolffian theology,
"undertook to translate the Bible, and to explain it according to the
principle that in revelation only that can be accepted as true which
does not contradict the reason." [1275] This of course involved no
thorough-going criticism; but the spirit of innovation was strong
enough in Schmid to make him undermine tradition at many points,
and later carried him so far as to translate Tindal's Christianity as
old as Creation. So far was he in advance of his time that when his
Wertheim Bible was officially condemned throughout Germany he found no
defenders. [1276] The Wolffians were in comparison generally orthodox;
and another writer of the same school, Martin Knutzen, professor at
Königsberg (1715-1751), undertook in a youthful thesis De æternitate
mundi impossibili (1735) to rebut the old Averroïst doctrine, revived
by modern science, of the indestructibility of the universe. A few
years later (1739) he published a treatise entitled The Truth of
Christianity Demonstrated by Mathematics, which succeeded as might
have been expected.
10. To the same period belong the first activities of Johann Christian
Edelmann (1698-1767), one of the most energetic freethinkers of his
age. Trained philosophically at Jena under the theologian Budde,
a bitter opponent of Wolff, and theologically in the school of the
Pietists, he was strongly influenced against official orthodoxy
through reading the Impartial History of the Church and of Heretics,
by Gottfried Arnold, an eminently anti-clerical work, which nearly
always takes the side of the heretics. [1277] In the same heterodox
direction he was swayed by the works of Dippel. At this stage Edelmann
produced his Unschuldige Wahrheiten ("Innocent Truths"), in which
he takes up a pronouncedly rationalist and latitudinarian position,
but without rejecting "revelation"; and in 1736 he went to Berleburg,
where he worked on the Berleburg translation of the Bible, a Pietist
undertaking, somewhat on the lines of Dippel's mystical doctrine,
in which a variety of incredible Scriptural narratives, from the six
days' creation onwards, are turned to mystical purpose. [1278] In
this occupation Edelmann seems to have passed some years. Gradually,
however, he came more and more under the influence of the English
deists; and he at length withdrew from the Pietist camp, attacking
his former associates for the fanaticism into which their thought
was degenerating. It was under the influence of Spinoza, however,
that he took his most important steps. A few months after meeting
with the Tractatus he began (1740) the first part of his treatise
Moses mit aufgedecktem Angesichte ("Moses with unveiled face"),
an attack at once on the doctrine of inspiration and on that of
the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. The book was intended to
consist of twelve parts; but after the appearance of three it was
prohibited by the imperial fisc, and the published parts burned by the
hangman at Hamburg and elsewhere. Nonetheless, Edelmann continued his
propaganda, publishing in 1741 or 1742 The Divinity of Reason, [1279]
and in 1741 Christ and Belial. In 1749 or 1750 his works were again
publicly burned at Frankfurt by order of the imperial authorities;
and he had much ado to find anywhere in Germany safe harbourage, till
he found protection under Frederick at Berlin, where he died in 1767.
Edelmann's teaching was essentially Spinozist and pantheistic, [1280]
with a leaning to the doctrine of metempsychosis. As a pantheist he of
course entirely rejected the divinity of Jesus, pronouncing inspiration
the appanage of all; and the gospels were by him dismissed as late
fabrications, from which the true teachings of the founder could not
be learned; though, like nearly all the freethinkers of that age,
he estimated Jesus highly. [1281] A German theologian complains,
nevertheless, that he was "more just toward heathenism than toward
Judaism; and more just toward Judaism than toward Christianity";
adding: "What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said in
France and England; but from a German theologian, and that with such
eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating in blasphemy,
such things were unheard of." [1282] The force of Edelmann's attack
may be gathered from the same writer's account of him as a "bird of
prey" who rose to a "wicked height of opposition, not only against
the Lutheran Church, but against Christianity in general."
11. Even from decorous and official exponents of religion, however,
there came "naturalistic" and semi-rationalistic teaching, as in
the Reflections on the most important truths of religion [1283]
(1768-1769) of J. F. W. Jerusalem, Abbot of Marienthal in Brunswick,
and later of Riddagshausen (1709-1789). Jerusalem had travelled
in Europe, and had spent two years in Holland and one in England,
where he studied the deists and their opponents. "In England alone,"
he declared, "is mankind original." [1284] Though really written by
way of defending Christianity against the freethinkers, in particular
against Bolingbroke and Voltaire, [1285] the very title of his book
is suggestive of a process of disintegration; and in it certain
unedifying Scriptural miracles are actually rejected. [1286] It was
probably this measure of adaptation to new needs that gave it its
great popularity in Germany and secured its translation into several
other languages. Goethe called him a "freely and gently thinking
theologian"; and a modern orthodox historian of the Church groups him
with those who "contributed to the spread of Rationalism by sermons
and by popular doctrinal and devotional works." [1287] Jerusalem was,
however, at most a semi-rationalist, taking a view of the fundamental
Christian dogmas which approached closely to that of Locke. [1288]
It was, as Goethe said later, the epoch of common sense; and the very
theologians tended to a "religion of nature." [1289]
12. Alongside of home-made heresy there had come into play a new
initiative force in the literature of English deism, which began to
be translated after 1740, [1290] and was widely circulated till, in
the last third of the century, it was superseded by the French. The
English answers to the deists were frequently translated likewise,
and notoriously helped to promote deism [1291]--another proof that
it was not their influence that had changed the balance of activity
in England. Under a freethinking king, even clergymen began guardedly
to accept the deistic methods; and the optimism of Shaftesbury began
to overlay the optimism of Leibnitz; [1292] while a French scientific
influence began with La Mettrie, [1293] Maupertuis, and Robinet. Even
the Leibnitzian school, proceeding on the principle of immortal
monads, developed a doctrine of the immortality of the souls of animals
[1294]--a position not helpful to orthodoxy. There was thus a general
stirring of doubt among educated people, [1295] and we find mention
in Goethe's Autobiography of an old gentleman of Frankfort who avowed,
as against the optimists, "Even in God I find defects (Fehler)." [1296]
On the other hand, there were instances in Germany of the phenomenon,
already seen in England in Newton and Boyle, of men of science
devoting themselves to the defence of the faith. The most notable
cases were those of the mathematician Euler and the biologist von
Haller. The latter wrote Letters (to his Daughter) On the most
important Truths of Revelation (1772) [1297] and other apologetic
works. Euler in 1747 published at Berlin, where he was professor,
his Defence of Revelation against the Reproaches of Freethinkers;
[1298] and in 1769 his Letters to a German Princess, of which the
argument notably coincides with part of that of Berkeley against
the freethinking mathematicians. Haller's position comes to the same
thing. All three men, in fact, grasped at the argument of despair--the
inadequacy of the human faculties to sound the mystery of things;
and all alike were entirely unable to see that it logically cancelled
their own judgments. Even a theologian, contemplating Haller's theorem
of an incomprehensible omnipotence countered in its merciful plan
of salvation by the set of worms it sought to save, comments on the
childishness of the philosophy which confidently described the plans
of deity in terms of what it declared to be the blank ignorance of
the worms in question. [1299] Euler and Haller, like some later men of
science, kept their scientific method for the mechanical or physical
problems of their scientific work, and brought to the deepest problems
of all the self-will, the emotionalism, and the irresponsibility of
the ignorant average man. Each did but express in his own way the
resentment of the undisciplined mind at attacks upon its prejudices;
and Haller's resort to poetry as a vehicle for his religion gives the
measure of his powers on that side. Thus in Germany as in England the
"answer" to the freethinkers was a failure. Men of science playing
at theology and theologians playing at science alike failed to turn
the tide of opinion, now socially favoured by the known deism of the
king. German orthodoxy, says a recent Christian apologist, fell "with
a rapidity reminding one of the capture of Jericho." [1300] Goethe,
writing of the general attitude to Christianity about 1768, sums up
that "the Christian religion wavered between its own historic-positive
base and a pure deism, which, grounded on morality, was in turn to
re-establish ethics." [1301]
Frederick's attitude, said an early Kantian, had had "an almost
magical influence" on popular opinion (Willich, Elements of the
Critical Philosophy, 1798, p. 2). With this his French teachers
must have had much to do. Lord Morley pronounces (Voltaire,
4th ed. p. 123) that French deism "never made any impression on
Germany," and that "the teaching of Leibnitz and Wolff stood like a
fortified wall against the French invasion." This is contradicted
by much German testimony; in particular by Lange's (Gesch. des
Mater. i, 318), though he notes that French materialism could not
get the upper hand. Laukhard, who expressed the highest admiration
for Tindal, as having wholly delivered him from dogmatism, avowed
that Voltaire, whom everybody read, had perhaps done more harm
to priest religion than all the books of the English and German
deists together (Leben, 1792-1802, Th. i, p. 268).
Tholuck gravely affirms (Abriss, p. 33) that the acquaintance
with the French "deistery and frivolity" in Germany belongs to
a "somewhat later period than that of the English." Naturally
it did. The bulk of the English deistic literature was printed
before the printing of the French had begun! French MSS. would
reach German princes, but not German pastors. But Tholuck sadly
avows that the French deism (of the serious and pre-Voltairean
portions of which he seems to have known nothing) had a
"frightful" influence on the upper classes, though not on the
clergy (p. 34). Following him, Kahnis writes (Internal History,
p. 41) that "English and French Deism met with a very favourable
reception in Germany--the latter chiefly in the higher circles,
the former rather among the educated middle classes." (He
should have added, "the younger theologians.") Baur, even
in speaking disparagingly of the French as compared with the
English influence, admits (Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 2te
Aufl. p. 347) that the former told upon Germany. Cp. Tennemann,
Bohn. tr. pp. 385, 388. Hagenbach shows great ignorance of English
deism, but he must have known something of German; and he writes
(tr. p. 57) that "the imported deism," both English and French,
"soon swept through the rifts of the Church, and gained supreme
control of literature." Cp. pp. 67-68. See Croom Robertson's
Hobbes, pp. 225-26, as to the persistence of a succession of
Hobbes and Locke in Germany in the teeth of the Wolffian school,
which soon lost ground after 1740. It is further noteworthy that
Brucker's copious Historia Critica Philosophiæ (1742-44), which as
a mere learned record has great merit, and was long the standard
authority in Germany, gives great praise to Locke and little space
to Wolff. (See Enfield's abstract, pp. 614, 619 sq.) The Wolffian
philosophy, too, had been rejected and disparaged by both Herder
and Kant--who were alike deeply influenced by Rousseau--in the
third quarter of the century; and was generally discredited,
save in the schools, when Kant produced the Critique of Pure
Reason. See below, pp. 337, 345.
13. Frederick, though reputed a Voltairean freethinker par excellence,
may be claimed for Germany as partly a product of the rationalizing
philosophy of Wolff. In his first letter to Voltaire, written in 1736,
four years before his accession, he promises to send him a translation
he has had made of the "accusation and the justification" of Wolff,
"the most celebrated philosopher of our days, who, for having carried
light into the darkest places of metaphysics, and for having treated
the most difficult matters in a manner no less elevated than precise
and clear, is cruelly accused of irreligion and atheism"; and he
speaks of getting translated Wolff's Treatise of God, the Soul, and
the World. When he became a thoroughgoing freethinker is not clear,
for Voltaire at this time had produced no explicit anti-Christian
propaganda. At first the new king showed himself disposed to act
on the old maxim that freethought is bad for the common people. In
1743-44 he caused to be suppressed two German treatises by one
Gebhardi, a contributor to Gottsched's magazines, attacking the
Biblical miracles; and in 1748 he sent a young man named Rüdiger to
Spandau for six months' confinement for printing an anti-Christian
work by one Dr. Pott. [1302] But as he grew more confident in his own
methods he extended to men of his own way of thinking the toleration
he allowed to all religionists, save insofar as he vetoed the mutual
vituperation of the sects, and such proselytizing as tended to create
strife. With an even hand he protected Catholics, Greek Christians,
and Unitarians, letting them have churches where they would; [1303]
and when, after the battle of Striegau, a body of Protestant peasantry
asked his permission to slay all the Catholics they could find,
he answered with the gospel precept, "Love your enemies." [1304]
Beyond the toleration of all forms of religion, however, he never
went; though he himself added to the literature of deism. Apart from
his verses we have from him the posthumous treatise Pensées sur la
Religion, probably written early in his life, where the rational case
against the concepts of revelation and of miracles is put with a calm
and sustained force. Like the rest, he is uncritical in his deism;
but, that granted, his reasoning is unanswerable. In talk he was wont
to treat the clergy with small respect; [1305] and he wrote more
denunciatory things concerning them than almost any freethinker of
the century. [1306] Bayle, Voltaire, and Lucretius were his favourite
studies; and as the then crude German literature had no attraction for
him, he drew to his court many distinguished Frenchmen, including La
Mettrie, Maupertuis, D'Alembert, D'Argens, and above all Voltaire,
between whom and him there was an incurable incompatibility of
temper and character, and a persistent attraction of force of mind,
which left them admiring without respecting each other, and unable
to abstain from mutual vituperation. Under Frederick's vigorous rule
all speech was free save such as he considered personally offensive,
as Voltaire's attack on Maupertuis; and after a stormy reign he could
say, when asked by Prince William of Brunswick whether he did not
think religion one of the best supports of a king's authority, "I
find order and the laws sufficient.... Depend upon it, countries have
been admirably governed when your religion had no existence." [1307]
Religion certainly had no part in his personality in the ordinary
sense of the term. Voltaire was wont to impute to him atheism; when
La Mettrie died, the mocker, then at Frederick's court, remarked
that the post of his majesty's atheist was vacant, but happily the
Abbé de Prades was there to fill it. In effect, Frederick professed
Voltaire's own deism; but of all the deists of the time he had least
of the religious temperament and most of sheer cynicism.
The attempt of Carlyle to exhibit Frederick as a practical
believer is a flagrant instance of that writer's subjective
method. He tells (Hist. of Friedrich, bk. xviii, ch. x) that at
the beginning of the battle of Leuthen a column of troops near
the king sang a hymn of duty (which Carlyle calls "the sound of
Psalms"); that an officer asked whether the singing should be
stopped, and that the king said "By no means." His "hard heart
seems to have been touched by it. Indeed, there is in him, in
those grim days, a tone (!) as of trust in the Eternal, as of
real religious piety and faith, scarcely noticeable elsewhere
in his history. His religion--and he had in withered forms a
good deal of it, if we will look well--being almost always in
a strictly voiceless state, nay, ultra voiceless, or voiced the
wrong way, as is too well known." Then comes the assertion that
"a moment after" the king said "to someone, Ziethen probably,
'With men like these, don't you think I shall have victory this
day!'" Here, with the very spirit of unveracity at work before his
eyes, Carlyle plumps for the fable. Yet the story, even if true,
would give no proof whatever of religious belief.
In point of fact, Frederick was a much less "religious" deist
than Voltaire. He erected no temple to his unloved God. And a
perusal of his dialogue of Pompadour and the Virgin (Dialogues
des morts) may serve to dispose of the thesis that the German
mind dealt reverently and decently with matters which the French
mind handled frivolously. That performance outgoes in ribaldry
anything of the age in French.
As the first modern freethinking king, Frederick is something of a test
case. Son of a man of narrow mind and odious character, he was himself
no admirable type, being neither benevolent nor considerate, neither
truthful nor generous; and in international politics, after writing in
his youth a treatise in censure of Machiavelli, he played the old game
of unscrupulous aggression. Yet he was not only the most competent,
but, as regards home administration, the most conscientious king of his
time. To find him a rival we must go back to the pagan Antonines and
Julian, or at least to St. Louis of France, who, however, was rather
worsened than bettered by his creed. [1308] Henri IV of France, who
rivalled him in sagacity and greatly excelled him in human kindness,
was far his inferior in devotion to duty.
The effect of Frederick's training is seen in his final attitude to
the advanced criticism of the school of d'Holbach, which assailed
governments and creeds with the same unsparing severity of logic and
moral reprobation. Stung by the uncompromising attack, Frederick
retorts by censuring the rashness which would plunge nations into
civil strife because kings miscarry where no human wisdom could avoid
miscarriage. He who had wantonly plunged all Germany into a hell of
war for his sole ambition, bringing myriads to misery, thousands
to violent death, and hundreds of his own soldiers to suicide,
could be virtuously indignant at the irresponsible audacity of
writers who indicted the whole existing system for its imbecility and
injustice. But he did reason on the criticism; he did ponder it; he did
feel bound to meet argument with argument; and he left his arguments to
the world. The advance on previous regal practice is noteworthy: the
whole problem of politics is at once brought to the test of judgment
and persuasion. Beside the Christian Georges and the Louis's of his
century, and beside his Christian father, his superiority in judgment
and even in some essential points of character is signal. Such was
the great deist king of the deist age; a deist of the least religious
temper and of no very fine moral material to begin with.
The one contemporary monarch who in any way compares with him in
enlightenment, Joseph II of Austria, belonged to the same school. The
main charge against Frederick as a ruler is that he did not act up
to the ideals of the school of Voltaire. In reply to the demand of
the French deists for an abolition of all superstitious teaching,
he observed that among the 16,000,000 inhabitants of France
at most 200,000 were capable of philosophic views, and that the
remaining 15,800,000 were held to their opinions by "insurmountable
obstacles." [1309] This, however, had been said by the deists
themselves (e.g., d'Holbach, préf. to Christianisme dévoilé); and
such an answer meant that he had no idea of so spreading instruction
that all men should have a chance of reaching rational beliefs. This
attitude was his inheritance from the past. Yet it was under him that
Prussia began to figure as a first-rate culture force in Europe.
14. The social vogue of deistic thought could now be traced in much of
the German belles-lettres of the time. The young Jakob von Mauvillon
(1743-1794), secretary of the King of Poland and author of several
histories, in his youth translated from the Latin into French Holberg's
Voyage of Nicolas Klimius (1766), which made the tour of Europe, and
had a special vogue in Germany. Later in life, besides translating
and writing abundantly and intelligently on matters of economic and
military science--in the latter of which he had something like expert
status--Mauvillon became a pronounced heretic, though careful to keep
his propaganda anonymous.
The most systematic dissemination of the new ideas was that carried on
in the periodical published by Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733-1811)
under the title of The General German Library (founded 1765), which
began with fifty contributors, and at the height of its power had
a hundred and thirty, among them being Lessing, Eberhard, and Moses
Mendelssohn. In the period from its start to the year 1792 it ran to
106 volumes; and it has always been more or less bitterly spoken of
by later orthodoxy as the great library of that movement. Nicolai,
himself an industrious and scholarly writer, produced among many
other things a satirical romance famous in its day, the Life and
Opinions of Magister Sebaldus Nothanker, ridiculing the bigots and
persecutors the type of Klotz, the antagonist of Lessing, and some
of Nicolai's less unamiable antagonists, [1310] as well as various
aspects of the general social and literary life of the time. To
Nicolai is fully due the genial tribute paid to him by Heine, [1311]
were it only for the national service of his "Library." Its many
translations from the English and French freethinkers, older and
newer, concurred with native work to spread a deistic rationalism,
labelled Aufklärung, or enlightenment, through the whole middle class
of Germany. [1312] Native writers in independent works added to the
propaganda. Andreas Riem (1749-1807), a Berlin preacher, appointed
by Frederick a hospital chaplain, [1313] wrote anonymously against
priestcraft as no other priest had yet done. "No class of men," he
declared, in language perhaps echoed from his king, "has ever been
so pernicious to the world as the priesthood. There were laws at all
times against murderers and bandits, but not against the assassin in
the priestly garb. War was repelled by war, and it came to an end. The
war of the priesthood against reason has lasted for thousands of years,
and it still goes on without ceasing." [1314] Georg Schade (1712-1795),
who appears to have been one of the believers in the immortality of
animals, and who in 1770 was imprisoned for his opinions in the Danish
island of Christiansoe, was no less emphatic, declaring, in a work on
Natural Religion on the lines of Tindal (1760), that "all who assert a
supernatural religion are godless impostors." [1315] Constructive work
of great importance, again, was done by J. B. Basedow (1723-1790), who
early became an active deist, but distinguished himself chiefly as an
educational reformer, on the inspiration of Rousseau's Émile, [1316]
setting up a system which "tore education away from the Christian
basis," [1317] and becoming in virtue of that one of the most popular
writers of his day. It is latterly admitted even by orthodoxy that
school education in Germany had in the seventeenth century become a
matter of learning by rote, and that such reforms as had been set up
in some of the schools of the Pietists had in Basedow's day come to
nothing. [1318] As Basedow was the first to set up vigorous reforms,
it is not too much to call him an instaurator of rational education,
whose chief fault was to be too far ahead of his age. This, with the
personal flaw of an unamiable habit of wrangling in all companies,
caused the failure of his "Philanthropic Institute," established in
1771, on the invitation of the Prince of Dessau, to carry out his
educational ideals. Quite a number of other institutions, similarly
planned, after his lead, by men of the same way of thinking, as Canope
and Salzmann, in the same period, had no better success.
Goethe, who was clearly much impressed by Basedow, and travelled
with him, draws a somewhat antagonistic picture of him on
retrospect (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. xiv). He accuses him in
particular of always obtruding his anti-orthodox opinions; not
choosing to admit that religious opinions were being constantly
obtruded on Basedow. Praising Lavater for his more amiable
nature, Goethe reveals that Lavater was constantly propounding
his orthodoxy. Goethe, in fine, was always lenient to pietism,
in which he had been brought up, and to which he was wont to make
sentimental concessions. He could never forget his courtly duties
towards the established convention, and so far played the game of
bigotry. Hagenbach notes (i, 298, note), without any deprecation,
that after Basedow had published in 1763-1764 his Philalethie,
a perfectly serious treatise on natural as against revealed
religion, one of the many orthodox answers, that by Pastor Goeze,
so inflamed against him the people of his native town of Hamburg
that he could not show himself there without danger. And this
is the man accused of "obtruding his views." Baur is driven, by
way of disparagement of Basedow and his school, to censure their
self-confidence--precisely the quality which, in religious teachers
with whom he agreed, he as a theologian would treat as a mark
of superiority. Baur's attack on the moral utilitarianism of the
school is still less worthy of him. (Gesch. der christl. Kirche,
iv, 595-96). It reads like an echo of Kahnis (as cited, p. 46 sq.).
Yet another influential deist was Johann August Eberhard (1739-1809),
for a time a preacher at Charlottenburg, but driven out of the Church
for the heresy of his New Apology of Sokrates; or the Final Salvation
of the Heathen (1772). [1319] The work in effect placed Sokrates on
a level with Jesus, [1320] which was blasphemy. [1321] But the outcry
attracted the attention of Frederick, who made Eberhard a Professor of
Philosophy at Halle, where later he opposed the idealism of both Kant
and Fichte. Substantially of the same school was the less pronouncedly
deistic cleric Steinbart, [1322] author of a utilitarian System of
Pure Philosophy, or Christian doctrine of Happiness, now forgotten,
who had been variously influenced by Locke and Voltaire. [1323] Among
the less heterodox but still rationalizing clergy of the period were
J. J. Spalding, author of a work on The Utility of the Preacher's
Office, a man of the type labelled "Moderate" in the Scotland of the
same period, and as such antipathetic to emotional pietists; [1324]
and Zollikofer, of the same school--both inferribly influenced by the
deism of their day. Considerably more of a rationalist than these was
the clergyman W. A. Teller (1734-1804), author of a New Testament
Lexicon, who reached a position virtually deistic, and intimated
to the Jews of Berlin that he would receive them into his church on
their making a deistic profession of faith. [1325]
15. If it be true that even the rationalizing defenders of Christianity
led men on the whole towards deism, [1326] much more must this hold
true of the new school who applied rationalistic methods to religious
questions in their capacity as theologians. Of this school the founder
was Johann Salomo Semler (1725-1791), who, trained as a Pietist at
Halle, early thought himself into a more critical attitude, [1327]
albeit remaining a theological teacher. Son of a much-travelled army
chaplain, who in his many campaigns had learned much of the world,
and in particular seen something of religious frauds in the Catholic
countries, Semler started with a critical bias which was cultivated
by wide miscellaneous reading from his boyhood onwards. As early as
1750, in his doctoral dissertation defending certain texts against
the criticism of Whiston, he set forth the view, developed a century
later by Baur, that the early Christian Church contained a Pauline and
a Petrine party, mutually hostile. The merit of his research won him
a professorship at Halle; and this position he held till his death,
despite such heresy as his rejection from the canon of the books of
Ruth, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, the Song of Solomon, the two books of
Chronicles, and the Apocalypse, in his Freie Untersuchung des Canons
(1771-1774)--a work apparently inspired by the earlier performance of
Richard Simon. [1328] His intellectual life was for long a continuous
advance, always in the direction of a more rationalistic comprehension
of religious history; and he reached, for his day, a remarkably
critical view of the mythical element in the Old Testament. [1329]
Not only did he recognize that Genesis must have pre-Mosaic origins,
and that such books as the Proverbs and the Psalms were of later
date and other origin than those traditionally assigned: [1330] his
historical sense worked on the whole narrative. Thus he recognized
the mythical character of the story of Samson, and was at least on
the way towards a scientific handling of the New Testament. [1331]
But in his period and environment a systematic rationalism was
impossible; he was always a "revelation-believing Christian"; his
critical intelligence was always divided against itself; [1332]
and his powers were expended in an immense number of works, [1333]
which failed to yield any orderly system, while setting up a general
stimulus, in despite of their admitted unreadableness. [1334]
In his latter days he strongly opposed and condemned the more
radical rationalism of his pupil Bahrdt, and of the posthumous work
of Reimarus, here exemplifying the common danger of the intellectual
life, for critical as well as uncritical minds. After provoking many
orthodox men by his own challenges, he is roused to fury alike by the
genial rationalism of Bahrdt and by the cold analysis of Reimarus;
and his attack on the Wolfenbüttel Fragments published by Lessing
is loaded with a vocabulary of abuse such as he had never before
employed [1335]--a sure sign that he had no scientific hold of his own
historical conception. Like the similarly infuriated semi-rational
defenders of the historicity of Jesus in our own day, he merely
"followed the tactic of exposing the lack of scientific knowledge and
theological learning" of the innovating writer. Always temperamentally
religious, he died in the evangelical faith. But his own influence in
promoting rationalism is now obvious and unquestioned, [1336] and he is
rightly to be reckoned a main founder of "German rationalism"--that is,
academic rationalism on theologico-historical lines [1337]--although
he always professed to be merely rectifying orthodox conceptions. In
the opinion of Pusey "the revival of historical interpretation by
Semler became the most extensive instrument of the degradation of
Christianity."
Among the other theologians of the time who exercised a similar
influence to the Wolffian, Töllner attracts notice by the comparative
courage with which, in the words of an orthodox critic, he "raised, as
much as possible, natural religion to revelation," and, "on the other
hand, lowered Scripture to the level of natural light." [1338] First
he published (1764) True Reasons why God has not furnished Revelation
with evident proofs, [1339] arguing for the modern attenuation of
the idea of revelation; then a work on Divine Inspiration (1771) in
which he explicitly avowed that "God has in no way, either inwardly
or outwardly, dictated the sacred books. The writers were the real
authors" [1340]--a declaration not to be counterbalanced by further
generalities about actual divine influence. Later still he published a
Proof that God leads men to salvation even by his revelation in Nature
[1341] (1766)--a form of Christianity little removed from deism. Other
theologians, such as Ernesti, went far with the tide of illuminism;
and when the orthodox Chr. A. Crusius died at Leipzig in 1781, Jean
Paul Richter, then a student, wrote that people had become "too much
imbued with the spirit of illuminism" to be of his school. "Most,
almost all the students," adds Richter, incline to heterodoxy; and
of the professor Morus he tells that "wherever he can explain away a
miracle, the devil, etc., he does so." Of this order of accommodators,
a prominent example was Michaelis (1717-1791), whose reduction of
the Mosaic legislation to motives of every-day utility is still
entertaining.
16. Much more notorious than any other German deist of his time was
Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741-1792), a kind of raw Teutonic Voltaire,
and the most popularly influential German freethinker of his age. In
all he is said to have published a hundred and twenty-six books
and tracts, [1342] thus approximating to Voltaire in quantity if
not in quality. Theological hatred has so pursued him that it is
hard to form a fair opinion as to his character; but the record
runs that he led a somewhat Bohemian and disorderly life, though a
very industrious one. While a preacher in Leipzig in 1768 he first
got into trouble--"persecution" by his own account; "disgrace for
licentious conduct," by that of his enemies. In any case, he was
at this period quite orthodox in his beliefs. [1343] That there was
no serious disgrace is suggested by the fact that he was appointed
Professor of Biblical Antiquities at Erfurt; and soon afterwards, on
the recommendation of Semler and Ernesti, at Giessen (1771). While
holding that post he published his "modernized" translation of the
New Testament, done from the point of view of belief in revelation,
following it up by his New Revelations of God in Letters and Tales
(1773), which aroused Protestant hostility. After teaching for a time
in a new Swiss "Philanthropin"--an educational institution on Basedow's
lines--he obtained a post as a district ecclesiastical superintendent
in the principality of Türkheim on the Hardt; whereafter he was enabled
to set up a "Philanthropin" of his own in the castle of Heidesheim,
near Worms. The second edition of his translation of the New Testament,
however, aroused Catholic hostility in the district; the edition was
confiscated, and he found it prudent to make a tour in Holland and
England, only to receive, on his return, a missive from the imperial
consistory declaring him disabled for any spiritual office in the Holy
German Empire. Seeking refuge in Halle, he found Semler grown hostile;
but made the acquaintance of Eberhard, with the result of abandoning
the remains of his orthodox faith. Henceforth he regarded Jesus, albeit
with admiration, as simply a great teacher, "like Moses, Confucius,
Sokrates, Semler, Luther, and myself"; [1344] and to this view he gave
effect; in the third edition of his New Testament translation, which
was followed in 1782 by his Letters on the Bible in Popular Style
(Volkston), and in 1784 by his Completion (Ausführung) of the Plan
and Aim of Jesus in Letters (1784), and his System of Moral Religion
(1787). More and more fiercely antagonized, he duly retaliated on the
clergy in his Church and Heretic Almanack (1781); and after for a time
keeping a tavern, he got into fresh trouble by printing anonymous
satires on the religious edict of 1788, directed against all kinds
of heresy, [1345] and was sentenced to two years' imprisonment in a
fortress--a term reduced by the king to one year. Thereafter he ended
not very happily his troublous life in Halle in 1792.
The weakest part of Bahrdt's performance is now seen to be
his application of the empirical method of the early theological
rationalists, who were wont to take every Biblical prodigy as a merely
perverted account of an incident which certainly happened. That
method--which became identified with the so-called "rationalism"
of Germany in that age, and is not yet discarded by rationalizing
theologians--is reduced to open absurdity in his hands, as when
he makes Moses employ fireworks on Mount Sinai, and Jesus feed the
five thousand by stratagem, without miracle. But it was not by such
extravagances that he won and kept a hearing throughout his life. It
is easy to see on retrospect that the source of his influence as a
writer lay above all things in his healthy critical ethic, his own
mode of progression being by way of simple common sense and natural
feeling, not of critical research. His first step in rationalism
was to ask himself "how Three Persons could be One God"--this while
believing devoutly in revelation, miracles, the divinity of Jesus,
and the Atonement. Under the influence of a naturalist travelling
in his district, he gave up the orthodox doctrine of the Atonement,
feeling himself "as if new-born" in being freed of what he had learned
to see as a "pernicious and damnable error." [1346] It was for such
writing that he was hated and persecuted, despite his habitual eulogy
of Christ as "the greatest and most venerable of mortals." His offence
was not against morals, but against theology; and he heightened the
offence by his vanity.