opponents. "The wretched Bahrdt" is Dr. Pusey's Christian account
of him. Even F. C. Baur is abusive. The American translators
of Hagenbach, Messrs. Gage and Stuckenberg, have thought fit to
insert in their chapter-heading the phrase "Bahrdt, the Theodore
Parker of Germany." As Hagenbach has spoken of Bahrdt with special
contempt, the intention can be appreciated; but the intended
insult may now serve as a certificate of merit to Bahrdt. Bishop
Hurst solemnly affirms that "What Jeffreys is to the judicial
history of England, Bahrdt is to the religious history of German
Protestantism. Whatever he touched was disgraced by the vileness
of his heart and the Satanic daring of his mind" (History of
Rationalism, ed. 1867, p. 119; ed. 1901, p. 139). This concerning
doctrines of a nearly invariable moral soundness, which to-day
would be almost universally received with approbation. Pünjer,
who cannot at any point indict the doctrines, falls back on
the professional device of classing them with the "platitudes"
of the Aufklärung; and, finding this insufficient to convey
a disparaging impression to the general reader, intimates that
Bahrdt, connecting ethic with rational sanitation, "does not shrink
from the coarseness of laying down" a rule for bodily health,
which Pünjer does not shrink from quoting (pp. 549-50). Finally
Bahrdt is dismissed as "the theological public-house-keeper of
Halle." So hard is it for men clerically trained to attain to
a manly rectitude in their criticism of anti-clericals. Bahrdt
was a great admirer of the Gospel Jesus; so Cairns (p. 178)
takes a lenient view of his life. On that and his doctrine
cp. Hagenbach, pp. 107-10; Pünjer, i, 546-50; Noack, Th. iii,
Kap. 5. Goethe satirized him in a youthful Prolog, but speaks of
him not unkindly in the Wahrheit und Dichtung. As a writer he is
much above the German average.
17. Alongside of these propagators of popular rationalism stood
a group of companion deists usually considered together--Gotthold
Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768), and
Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786). The last-named, a Jew, "lived entirely
in the sphere of deism and of natural religion," [1347] and sought,
like the deists in general, to give religion an ethical structure;
but he was popular chiefly as a constructive theist and a defender
of the doctrine of immortality on non-Christian lines. His Phædon
(1767), setting forth that view, had a great vogue. [1348] One of
his more notable teachings was an earnest declaration against any
connection between Church and State; but like Locke and Rousseau he
so far sank below his own ideals as to agree in arguing for a State
enforcement of a profession of belief in a God [1349]--a negation of
his own plea. With much contemporary popularity, he had no permanent
influence; and he seems to have been completely broken-hearted over
Jacobi's disclosure of the final pantheism of Lessing, for whom he
had a great affection.
See the monograph of Rabbi Schreiber, of Bonn, Moses Mendelssohn's
Verdienste um die deutsche Nation (Zürich, 1880), pp. 41-42. The
strongest claim made for Mendelssohn by Rabbi Schreiber is that he,
a Jew, was much more of a German patriot than Goethe, Schiller,
or Lessing. Heine, however, pronounces that "As Luther against the
Papacy, so Mendelssohn rebelled against the Talmud" (Zur Gesch. der
Relig. und Philos. in Deutschland: Werke, ed. 1876, iii, 65).
Lessing, on the other hand, is one of the outstanding figures in
the history of Biblical criticism, as well as of German literature in
general. The son of a Lutheran pastor, Lessing became in a considerable
measure a rationalist, while constantly resenting, as did Goethe,
the treatment of religion in the fashion in which he himself treated
non-religious opinions with which he did not agree. [1350] It is
clear that already in his student days he had become substantially an
unbeliever, and that it was on this as well as other grounds that he
refused to become a clergyman. [1351] Nor was he unready to jeer at
the bigots when they chanced to hate where he was sympathetic. [1352]
On the side of religious problems, he was primarily and permanently
influenced by two such singularly different minds as Bayle [1353]
and Rousseau, the first appealing to and eliciting his keen critical
faculty, the second his warm emotional nature; and he never quite
unified the result. From first to last he was a freethinker in the
sense that he never admitted any principle of authority, and was
stedfastly loyal to the principle of freedom of utterance. He steadily
refused to break with his freethinking friend Mylius, and he never
sought to raise odium against any more advanced freethinker on the
score of his audacity. [1354] In his Hamburgische Dramaturgie, indeed,
dealing with a German play in which Mohammedanism in general, and one
Ismenor in particular, in the time of the Crusades are charged with
the sin of persecution, he remarks that "these very Crusades, which
in their origin were a political stratagem of the popes, developed
into the most inhuman persecutions of which Christian superstition
has ever made itself guilty: the true religion had then the most and
the bloodiest Ismenors." [1355] In his early Rettungen (Vindications),
again, he defends the dubious Cardan and impersonally argues the pros
and cons of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a fashion possible only
to a skeptical mind. [1356] And in his youth, as in his last years, he
maintained that "there have long been men who disregarded all revealed
religions and have yet been good men. [1357] In his youth, however,
he was more of a Rousseauist than of an intellectual philosopher,
setting up a principle of "the heart" against every species of analytic
thought, including even that of Leibnitz, which he early championed
against the Wolfian adaptation of it. [1358] The sound principle that
conduct is more important than opinion he was always apt, on the
religious side, to strain into the really contrary principle that
opinions which often went with good conduct were necessarily to be
esteemed. So when the rationalism of the day seriously or otherwise
(in Voltairean Berlin it was too apt to be otherwise) assailed the
creed of his parents, whom he loved and honoured, sympathy in his
case as in Goethe's always predetermined his attitude; [1359] and it
is not untruly said of him that he did prefer the orthodox to the
heterodox party, like Gibbon, "inasmuch as the balance of learning
which attracted his esteem was [then] on that side." [1360] We thus
find him, about the time when he announces to his father that he had
doubted concerning the Christian dogmas, [1361] rather nervously
proving his essential religiousness by dramatically defending the
clergy against the prejudices of popular freethought as represented
by his friend Mylius, who for a time ran in Leipzig a journal called
the Freigeist--not a very advanced organ. [1362]
Lessing was in fact, with his versatile genius and his vast reading,
a man of moods rather than a systematic thinker, despite his powerful
critical faculty; and alike his emotional and his critical side
determined his aversion to the attempts of the "rationalizing"
clergy to put religion on a common-sense footing. His personal
animosity to Voltaire and to Frederick would also influence him; but
he repugned even the decorous "rationalism" of the theologians of
his own country. When his brother wrote him to the effect that the
basis of the current religion was false, and the structure the work
of shallow bunglers, he replied that he admitted the falsity of the
basis, but not the incompetence of those who built up the system,
in which he saw much skill and address. Shallow bunglers, on the
other hand, he termed the schemers of the new system of compromise
and accommodation. [1363] In short, as he avowed in his fragment on
Bibliolatry, he was always "pulled this way and that" in his thought
on the problem of religion. [1364] For himself, he framed (or perhaps
adopted) [1365] a pseudo-theory of the Education of the Human Race
(1780), which has served the semi-rationalistic clergy of our own day
in good stead; and adapted Rousseau's catching doctrine that the true
test of religion lies in feeling and not in argument. [1366] Neither
doctrine, in short, has a whit more philosophical value than the other
"popular philosophy" of the time, and neither was fitted to have much
immediate influence; but both pointed a way to the more philosophic
apologists of religion, while baulking the orthodox. [1367] If all this
were more than a piece of defensive strategy, it was no more scientific
than the semi-rationalist theology which he contemned. The "education"
theorem, on its merits, is indeed a discreditable paralogism; and
only our knowledge of his affectional bias can withhold us from
counting it a mystification. On analysis it is found to have no
logical content whatever. "Christianity" Lessing made out to be a
"universal principle," independent of its pseudo-historical setting;
thus giving to the totality of the admittedly false tradition the
credit of an ethic which in the terms of the case is simply human, and
in all essentials demonstrably pre-Christian. His propaganda of this
kind squares ill with his paper on The Origin of Revealed Religion,
written about 1860. There he professes to hold by a naturalist view
of religion. All "positive" or dogmatic creeds he ascribes to the
arrangements that men from time to time found it necessary to make
as to the means of applying "natural" religion. "Hence all positive
and revealed religions are alike true and alike false; alike true,
inasmuch as it has everywhere been necessary to come to terms over
different things in order to secure agreement and unity in the public
religion; alike false, inasmuch as that over which men came to terms
does not so much stand close to the essential (nicht sowohl ... neben
dem Wesentlichen besteht), but rather weakens and oppresses it. The
best revealed or positive religion is that which contains the fewest
conventional additions to natural religion; that which least limits the
effects of natural religion." [1368] This is the position of Tindal
and the English deists in general; and it seems to have been in this
mood that Lessing wrote to Mendelssohn about being able to "help the
downfall of the most frightful structure of nonsense only under the
pretext of giving it a new foundation." [1369] On the historical
side, too, he had early convinced himself that Christianity was
established and propagated "by entirely natural means" [1370]--this
before Gibbon. But, fighter as he was, he was not prepared to lay
his cards on the table in the society in which he found himself. In
his strongest polemic there was always an element of mystification;
[1371] and his final pantheism was only privately avowed.
It was through a series of outside influences that he went so far,
in the open, as he did. Becoming the librarian of the great Bibliothek
of Wolfenbüttel, the possession of the hereditary Prince (afterwards
Duke) of Brunswick, he was led to publish the "Anonymous Fragments"
known as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments (1774-1778), wherein the methods
of the English and French deists are applied with a new severity to
both the Old and the New Testament narratives. It is now put beyond
doubt that they were the work of Reimarus, [1372] who had in 1755
produced a defence of "Natural Religion"--that is, of the theory of
a Providence--against La Mettrie, Maupertuis, and older materialists,
which had a great success in its day. [1373] At his death, accordingly,
Reimarus ranked as an admired defender of theism and of the belief
in immortality. [1374] He was the son-in-law of the esteemed scholar
Fabricius, and was for many years Professor of Oriental Languages in
the Hamburg Academy. The famous research which preserves his memory
was begun by him at the age of fifty, for his own satisfaction, and
was elaborated by him during twenty years, while he silently endured
the regimen of the intolerant Lutheranism of his day. [1375] As he
left the book it was a complete treatise entitled An Apology for the
Rational Worshipper of God; but his son feared to have it published,
though Lessing offered to take the whole risk; and it was only by the
help of the daughter, Elise Reimarus, [1376] Lessing's friend, that the
fragments came to light. As the Berlin censor would not give official
permission, [1377] Lessing took the course of issuing them piecemeal
in a periodical series of selections from the treasures of the
Wolfenbüttel Library, which had privilege of publication. The first,
On the Toleration of Deists, which attracted little notice, appeared
in 1774; four more, which made a stir, in 1777; and only in 1778 was
"the most audacious of all," On the Aim of Jesus and his Disciples,
[1378] published as a separate book. Collectively they constituted
the most serious attack yet made in Germany on the current creed,
though their theory of the true manner of the gospel history of course
smacks of the pre-scientific period. A generation later, however,
they were still "the radical book of the anti-supernaturalists"
in Germany. [1379]
As against miracles in general, the Resurrection in
particular, and Biblical ethics in general, the attack of
Reimarus was irresistible, but his historical construction is
pre-scientific. The method is, to accept as real occurrences
all the non-miraculous episodes, and to explain them by a
general theory. Thus the appointment of the seventy apostles--a
palpable myth--is taken as a fact, and explained as part of
a scheme by Jesus to obtain temporal power; and the scourging
of the money-changers from the Temple, improbable enough as it
stands, is made still more so by supposing it to be part of a
scheme of insurrection. The method further involves charges of
calculated fraud against the disciples or evangelists--a historical
misconception which Lessing repudiated, albeit not on the right
grounds. See the sketch in Cairns, p. 197 sq., which indicates the
portions of the treatise produced later by Strauss. Cp. Pünjer,
i, 550-57; Noack, Th. iii, Kap. 4. Schweitzer (Von Reimarus zu
Wrede), in his satisfaction at the agreement of Reimarus with his
own conception of an "eschatological" Jesus, occupied with "the
last things," gives Reimarus extravagant praise. Strauss rightly
notes the weakness of the indictment of Moses as a worker of fraud
(Voltaire, 2te Ausg. p. 407).
It is but fair to say that Reimarus's fallacy of method, which
was the prevailing one in his day, has not yet disappeared from
criticism. As we have seen, it was employed by Pomponazzi in
the Renaissance (vol. i, p. 377), and reintroduced in the modern
period by Connor and Toland. It is still employed by some professed
rationalists, as Dr. Conybeare. It has, however, in all likelihood
suggested itself spontaneously to many inquirers. In the Phædrus
Plato presents it as applied by empirical rationalizers to myths
at that time.
Though Lessing at many points oppugned the positions of the Fragments,
he was led into a fiery controversy over them, in which he was
unworthily attacked by, among others, Semler, from whom he had looked
for support; and the series was finally stopped by authority. There
can now be no doubt that Lessing at heart agreed with Reimarus on
most points of negative criticism, [1380] but reached a different
emotional estimate and attitude. All the greater is the merit of
his battle for freedom of thought. Thereafter, as a final check to
his opponents, he produced his famous drama Nathan the Wise, which
embodies Boccaccio's story of The Three Rings, and has ever since
served as a popular lesson of tolerance in Germany. [1381] In the end,
he seems to have become, to at least some extent, a pantheist; [1382]
but he never expounded any coherent and comprehensive set of opinions,
[1383] preferring, as he put it in an oft-quoted sentence, the state
of search for truth to any consciousness of possessing it. [1384]
He left behind him, however, an important fragment, which constituted
one of his most important services to national culture--his "New
Hypothesis concerning the evangelists as merely human writers." He
himself thought that he had done nothing "more important or ingenious"
[1385] of the kind; and though his results were in part unsound and
impermanent, he is justly to be credited with the first scientific
attempt to deduce the process of composition of the gospels [1386]
from primary writings by the first Christians. Holding as he did to
the authenticity and historicity of the fourth gospel, he cannot be
said to have gone very deep; but two generations were to pass before
the specialists got any further. Lessing had shown more science and
more courage than any other pro-Christian scholar of the time, and,
as the orthodox historian of rationalism has it, "Though he did not
array himself as a champion of rationalism, he proved himself one of
the strongest promoters of its reign." [1387]
18. Deism was now as prevalent in educated Germany as in France or
England; and, according to a contemporary preacher, "Berliner" was
about 1777 a synonym for "rationalist." [1388] Wieland, one of the
foremost German men of letters of his time, is known to have become
a deist of the school of Shaftesbury; [1389] and in the leading
journal of the day he wrote on the free use of reason in matters of
faith. [1390] Some acts of persecution by the Church show how far the
movement had gone. In 1774 we find a Catholic professor at Mayence,
Lorenzo Isenbiehl, deposed and sent back to the seminary for two
years on the score of "deficient theological knowledge," because he
argued (after Collins) that the text Isaiah vii, 14 applied not to
the mother of Jesus but to a contemporary of the prophet; and when,
four years later, he published a book on the same thesis, in Latin, he
was imprisoned. Three years later still, a young Jesuit of Salzburg,
named Steinbuhler, was actually condemned to death for writing some
satires on Roman Catholic ceremonies, and, though afterwards pardoned,
died of the ill-usage he had undergone in prison. [1391] It may have
been the sense of danger aroused by such persecution that led to the
founding, in 1780, of a curious society which combined an element
of freethinking Jesuitism with freemasonry, and which included a
number of statesmen, noblemen, and professors--Goethe, Herder, and
the Duke of Weimar being among its adherents. But it is difficult to
take seriously the accounts given of the order. [1392]
The spirit of rationalism, in any case, was now so prevalent that
it began to dominate the work of the more intelligent theologians,
to whose consequent illogical attempts to strain out by the most
dubious means the supernatural elements from the Bible narratives
[1393] the name of "rationalism" came to be specially applied, [1394]
that being the kind of criticism naturally most discussed among the
clergy. Taking rise broadly in the work of Semler, reinforced by that
of the English and French deists and that of Reimarus, the method led
stage by stage to the scientific performance of Strauss and Baur, and
the recent "higher criticism" of the Old and New Testaments. Noteworthy
at its outset as exhibiting the tendency of official believers to
make men, in the words of Lessing, irrational philosophers by way of
making them rational Christians, [1395] this order of "rationalism"
in its intermediate stages belongs rather to the history of Biblical
scholarship than to that of freethought, since more radical work was
being done by unprofessional writers outside, and deeper problems were
raised by the new systems of philosophy. Within the Lutheran pale,
however, there were some hardy thinkers. A striking figure of the time,
in respect of his courage and thoroughness, is the Lutheran pastor
J. H. Schulz, [1396] who so strongly combatted the compromises of the
Semler school in regard to the Pentateuch, and argued so plainly for a
severance of morals from religion as to bring about his own dismissal
(1792). [1397] Schulz's Philosophical Meditation on Theology and
Religion [1398] (1784) is indeed one of the most pronounced attacks on
orthodox religion produced in that age. But it is in itself a purely
speculative construction. Following the current historical method,
he makes Moses the child of the Egyptian princess, and represents him
as imposing on the ignorant Israelites a religion invented by himself,
and expressive only of his own passions. Jesus in turn is extolled in
the terms common to the freethinkers of the age; but his conception
of God is dismissed as chimerical; and Schulz finally rests in the
position of Edelmann, that the only rational conception of deity is
that of the "sufficient ground of the world," and that on this view
no man is an atheist. [1399]
Schulz's dismissal appears to have been one of the fruits of the
orthodox edict (1788) of the new king, Frederick William II, the
brother of Frederick, who succeeded in 1786. It announced him--in
reality a "strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden
superstition" [1400]--as the champion of religion and the enemy of
freethinking; forbade all proselytizing, and menaced with penalties
all forms of heresy, [1401] while professing to maintain freedom of
conscience. The edict seems to have been specially provoked by fresh
literature of a pronouncedly freethinking stamp, though it lays stress
on the fact that "so many clergymen have the boldness to disseminate
the doctrines of the Socinians, Deists, and Naturalists under the name
of Aufklärung." The work of Schulz would be one of the provocatives,
and there were others. In 1785 had appeared the anonymous Moroccan
Letters, [1402] wherein, after the model of the Persian Letters
and others, the life and creeds of Germany are handled in a quite
Voltairean fashion. The writer is evidently familiar with French
and English deistic literature, and draws freely on both, making
no pretence of systematic treatment. Such writing, quietly turning
a disenchanting light of common sense on Scriptural incredibilities
and Christian historical scandals, without a trace of polemical zeal,
illustrated at once the futility of Kant's claim, in the second edition
of his Critique of Pure Reason, to counteract "freethinking unbelief"
by transcendental philosophy. And though the writer is careful to point
to the frequent association of Christian fanaticism with regicide,
his very explicit appeal for a unification of Germany, [1403] his
account of the German Protestant peasant and labourer as the most
dismal figure in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland, [1404] and his
charge against Germans of degrading their women, [1405] would not
enlist the favour of the authorities for his work. Within two years
(1787) appeared, unsigned, an even more strongly anti-Christian and
anti-clerical work, The In Part Only True System of the Christian
Religion, [1406] ascribed to Jakob von Mauvillon, [1407] whom we have
seen twenty-one years before translating the freethinking romance of
Holberg. Beginning his career as a serious publicist by translating
Raynal's explosive history of the Indies (7 vols. 1774-78), he had done
solid work as a historian and as an economist, and also as an officer
in the service of the Duke of Brunswick and a writer on military
science. The True System is hostile alike to priesthoods and to the
accommodating theologians, whose attempt to rationalize Christianity on
historical lines it flouts in Lessing's vein as futile. Mauvillon finds
unthinkable the idea of a revelation which could not be universal;
rejects miracles and prophecies as vain bases for a creed; sums up the
New Testament as planless; and pronounces the ethic of Christianity,
commonly regarded as its strongest side, the weakest side of all. He
sums up, in fact, in a logical whole, the work of the English and
French deists. [1408] To such propaganda the edict of repression was
the official answer. It naturally roused a strong opposition; [1409]
but though it ultimately failed, through the general breakdown of
European despotisms, it was not without injurious effect. The first
edict was followed in a few months by one which placed the press and
all literature, native and foreign, under censorship. This policy,
which was chiefly inspired by the new king's Minister of Religion,
Woellner, was followed up in 1791 by the appointment of a committee
of three reactionaries--Hermes, Hilmer, and Woltersdorf--who not
only saw to the execution of the edicts, but supervised the schools
and churches. Such a regimen, aided by the reaction against the
Revolution, for a time prevented any open propaganda on the part of
men officially placed; and we shall see it hampering and humiliating
Kant; but it left the leaven of anti-supernaturalism to work all the
more effectively among the increasing crowd of university students.
Many minds of the period, doubtless, are typified by Herder,
who, though a practising clergyman, was clearly a Spinozistic
theist, accommodating himself to popular Christianity in a genially
latitudinarian spirit. [1410] When in his youth he published an essay
discussing Genesis as a piece of oriental poetry, not to be treated as
science or theology, he evoked an amount of hostility which startled
him. [1411] Learning his lesson, he was for the future guarded enough
to escape persecution. He was led by his own temperamental bias,
however, to a transcendental position in philosophy. Originally in
agreement with Kant, [1412] as against the current metaphysic, in the
period before the issue of the latter's Critique of Pure Reason, he
nourished his religious instincts by a discursive reading of history,
which he handled in a comparatively scientific yet above all poetic
or theosophic spirit, while Kant, who had little or no interest in
history, developed his thought on the side of physical science. [1413]
The philosophic methods of the two men thus became opposed; and when
Herder found Kant's philosophy producing a strongly rationalistic
cast of thought among the divinity students who came before him
for examination, he directly and sharply antagonized it [1414] in
a theistic sense. Yet his own influence on his age was on the whole
latitudinarian and anti-theological; he opposed to the apriorism of
Kant the view that the concepts of space and time are the results of
experience and an abstraction of its contents; his historic studies
had developed in him a conception of the process of evolution alike
in life, opinion, and faculty; and orthodoxy and philosophy alike
incline to rank him as a pantheist. [1415]
19. Meanwhile, the drift of the age of Aufklärung was apparent in
the practically freethinking attitude of the two foremost men of
letters in the new Germany--Goethe and Schiller. Of the former,
despite the bluster of Carlyle, and despite the æsthetic favour
shown to Christianity in Wilhelm Meister, no religious ingenuity
can make more than a pantheist, [1416] who, insofar as he touched
on Biblical questions, copied the half-grown rationalism of the
school of Semler. [1417] "The great Pagan" was the common label
among his orthodox or conformist contemporaries. [1418] As a boy,
learning a little Hebrew, he was already at the critical point of
view in regard to Biblical marvels, [1419] though he never became a
scientific critic. He has told how, in his youth, when Lavater insisted
that he must choose between orthodox Christianity and atheism, he
answered that, if he were not free to be a Christian in his own way
(wie ich es bisher gehegt hätte), he would as soon turn atheist as
Christian, the more so as he saw that nobody knew very well what
either signified. [1420] As he puts it, he had made a Christ and
a Christianity of his own. [1421] His admired friend Fräulein von
Klettenberg, the "Beautiful Soul" of one of his pieces, told him
that he never satisfied her when he used the Christian terminology,
which he never seemed to get right; and he tells how he gradually
turned away from her religion, which he had for a time approached,
in its Moravian aspect, with a too passionate zeal. [1422] In his
letters to Lavater, he wrote quite explicitly that a voice from heaven
would not make him believe in a virgin birth and a resurrection,
such tales being for him rather blasphemies against the great God
and his revelation in Nature. Thousands of pages of earlier and later
writings, he declared, were for him as beautiful as the gospel. [1423]
Nor did he ever yield to the Christian Church more than a Platonic
amity; so that much of the peculiar hostility that was long felt
for his poetry and was long shown to his memory in Germany is to be
explained as an expression of the normal malice of pietism against
unbelievers. [1424] Such utterances as the avowal that he revered
Jesus as he revered the Sun, [1425] and the other to the effect that
Christianity has nothing to do with philosophy, where Hegel sought
to bring it--that it is simply a beneficent influence, and is not to
be looked to for proof of immortality [1426]--are clearly not those
of a believer. To-day belief is glad to claim Goethe as a friend in
respect of his many concessions to it, as well as of his occasional
flings at more consistent freethinkers. But a "great pagan" he remains
for the student. In the opinion of later orthodoxy his "influence on
religion was very pernicious." [1427] He indeed showed small concern
for religious susceptibilities when he humorously wrote that from
his youth up he believed himself to stand so well with his God as to
fancy that he might even "have something to forgive Him." [1428]
One passage in Goethe's essay on the Pentateuch, appended to the
West-Oestlicher Divan, is worth noting here as illustrating the
ability of genius to cherish and propagate historical fallacies. It
runs: "The peculiar, unique, and deepest theme of the history
of the world and man, to which all others are subordinate,
is always the conflict of belief and unbelief. All epochs
in which belief rules, under whatever form, are illustrious,
inspiriting, and fruitful for that time and the future. All
epochs, on the other hand, in which unbelief, in whatever form,
secures a miserable victory, even though for a moment they
may flaunt it proudly, disappear for posterity, because no man
willingly troubles himself with knowledge of the unfruitful"
(first ed. pp. 424-25). Goethe goes on to speak of the four
latter books of Moses as occupied with the theme of unbelief,
and of the first as occupied with belief. Thus his formula was
based, to begin with, on purely fabulous history, into the nature
of which his poetic faculty gave him no true insight. (See his
idyllic recast of the patriarchal history in Th. I, B. iv of the
Wahrheit und Dichtung.) Applied to real history, his formula has
no validity save on a definition which implies either an equivoque
or an argument in a circle. If it refer, in the natural sense, to
epochs in which any given religion is widely rejected and assailed,
it is palpably false. The Renaissance and Goethe's own century were
ages of such unbelief; and they remain much more deeply interesting
than the Ages of Faith. St. Peter's at Rome is the work of a
reputedly unbelieving pope. If on the other hand his formula be
meant to apply to belief in the sense of energy and enthusiasm, it
is still fallacious. The crusades were manifestations of energy and
enthusiasm; but they were profoundly "unfruitful," and they are not
deeply interesting. The only sense in which Goethe's formula could
stand would be one in which it is recognized that all vigorous
intellectual life stands for "belief"--that is to say, that
Lucretius and Voltaire, Paine and d'Holbach, stand for "belief"
when confidently attacking beliefs. The formula is thus true only
in a strained and non-natural sense; whereas it is sure to be
read and to be believed, by thoughtless admirers, in its natural
and false sense, though the whole history of Byzantium and modern
Islam is a history of stagnant and unfruitful belief, and that of
modern Europe a history of fruitful doubt, disbelief, and denial,
involving new affirmations. Goethe's own mind on the subject was in
a state of verbalizing confusion, the result or expression of his
temperamental aversion to clear analytical thought ("Above all," he
boasts, "I never thought about thinking") and his habit of poetic
allegory and apriorism. "Logic was invincibly repugnant to him"
(Lewes, Life of Goethe, 3rd ed. p. 38). The mosaic of his thinking
is sufficiently indicated in Lewes's sympathetically confused
account (id. pp. 523-27). Where he himself doubted and denied
current creeds, as in his work in natural science, he was most
fruitful [1429] (though he was not always right--e.g., his polemic
against Newton's theory of colour); and the permanently interesting
teaching of his Faust is precisely that which artistically utters
the doubt through which he passed to a pantheistic Naturalism.
20. No less certain is the unbelief of Schiller (1759-1805), whom
Hagenbach even takes as "the representative of the rationalism of his
age." In his juvenile Robbers, indeed, he makes his worst villains
freethinkers; and in the preface he stoutly champions religion
against all assailants; but hardly ever after that piece does he give
a favourable portrait of a priest. [1430] He himself soon joined the
Aufklärung; and all his æsthetic appreciation of Christianity never
carried him beyond the position that it virtually had the tendency
(Anlage) to the highest and noblest, though that was in general
tastelessly and repulsively represented by Christians. He added that
in a certain sense it is the only æsthetic religion, whence it is
that it gives such pleasure to the feminine nature, and that only
among women is it to be met with in a tolerable form. [1431] Like
Goethe, he sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane
of possibility, [1432] in the manner of the liberal theologians of
the period; and like him he often writes as a deist, [1433] though
professedly for a time a Kantist. On the other hand, he does not
hesitate to say that a healthy nature (which Goethe had said needed
no morality, no Natur-recht, [1434] and no political metaphysic)
required neither deity nor immortality to sustain it. [1435]
21. The critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) may be said
to represent most comprehensively the outcome in German intelligence
of the higher freethought of the age, insofar as its results could
be at all widely assimilated. In its most truly critical part, the
analytic treatment of previous theistic systems in the Critique of
Pure Reason (1781), he is fundamentally anti-theological; the effect
of the argument being to negate all previously current proofs of the
existence and cognizableness of a "supreme power" or deity. Already
the metaphysics of the Leibnitz-Wolff school were discredited;
[1436] and so far Kant could count on a fair hearing for a system
which rejected that of the schools. Certainly he meant his book to
be an antidote to the prevailing religious credulity. "Henceforth
there were to be no more dreams of ghost-seers, metaphysicians, and
enthusiasts." [1437] On his own part, however, no doubt in sympathy
with the attitude of many of his readers, there followed a species of
intuitional reaction. In his short essay What is Freethinking? [1438]
(1784) he defines Aufklärung or freethinking as "the advance of men
from their self-imputed minority"; and "minority" as the inability to
use one's own understanding without another's guidance. "Sapere aude;
dare to use thine own understanding," he declares to be the motto of
freethought: and he dwells on the laziness of spirit which keeps men
in the state of minority, letting others do their thinking for them
as the doctor prescribes their medicine. In this spirit he justifies
the movement of rational criticism while insisting, justly enough,
that men have still far to go ere they can reason soundly in all
things. If, he observes, "we ask whether we live in an enlightened
(aufgeklärt) age the answer is, No, but in an age of enlightening
(aufklärung)." There is still great lack of capacity among men in
general to think for themselves, free of leading-strings. "Only slowly
can a community (Publikum) attain to freethinking." But he repeats
that "the age is the age of aufklärung, the age of Frederick the
Great": and he pays a high tribute to the king who repudiated even
the arrogant pretence of "toleration," and alone among monarchs said
to his subjects, "Reason as you will; only obey!"
But the element of apprehension gained ground in the aging
freethinker. In 1787 appeared the second edition of the Critique,
with a preface avowing sympathy with religious as against freethinking
tendencies; and in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) he makes
an almost avowedly unscientific attempt to restore the reign of
theism on a basis of a mere emotional and ethical necessity assumed
to exist in human nature--a necessity which he never even attempts to
demonstrate. With the magic wand of the Practical Reason, as Heine has
it, he reanimated the corpse of theism, which the Theoretic Reason had
slain. [1439] In this adjustment he was perhaps consciously copying
Rousseau, who had greatly influenced him, [1440] and whose theism is
an avowedly subjectivist predication. But the same attitude to the
problem had been substantially adopted by Lessing; [1441] and indeed
the process is at bottom identical with that of the quasi-skeptics,
Pascal, Huet, Berkeley, and the rest, who at once impugn and employ
the rational process, reasoning that reason is not reasonable. Kant
did but set up the "practical" against the "pure" reason, as other
theists before him had set up faith against science, or the "heart"
against the "head," and as theists to-day exalt the "will" against
"knowledge," the emotional nature against the logical. It is tolerably
clear that Kant's motive at this stage was an unphilosophic fear that
Naturalism would work moral harm [1442]--a fear shared by him with
the mass of the average minds of his age.
The same motive and purpose are clearly at work in his treatise on
Religion within the bounds of Pure [i.e. Mere] Reason (1792-1794),
where, while insisting on the purely ethical and rational character
of true religion, he painfully elaborates reasons for continuing
to use the Bible (concerning which he contends that, in view of
its practically "godly" contents, no one can deny the possibility
of its being held as a revelation) as "the basis of ecclesiastical
instruction" no less than a means of swaying the populace. [1443]
Miracles, he in effect avows, are not true; still, there must be no
carping criticism of the miracle stories, which serve a good end. There
is to be no persecution; but there is to be no such open disputation as
would provoke it. [1444] Again and again, with a visible uneasiness,
the writer returns to the thesis that even "revealed" religion
cannot do without sacred books which are partly untrue. [1445]
The doctrine of the Trinity he laboriously metamorphosed, as so
many had done before him, and as Coleridge and Hegel did after him,
into a formula of three modes or aspects of the moral deity [1446]
which his ethical purpose required. And all this divagation from the
plain path of Truth is justified in the interest of Goodness.
All the while the book is from beginning to end profoundly
divided against itself. It indicates disbelief in every one of the
standing Christian dogmas--Creation, Fall, Salvation, Miracles,
and the supernatural basis of morals. The first paragraph of the
preface insists that morality is founded on the free reason, and
that it needs no religion to aid it. Again and again this note is
sounded. "The pure religious faith is that alone which can serve as
basis for a universal Church; because it is a pure reason-faith, in
which everyone can participate." [1447] But without the slightest
attempt at justification there is thrown in the formula that "no
religion is thinkable without belief in a future life." [1448] Thus
heaven and hell [1449] and Bible and church are arbitrarily imposed
on the "pure religion" for the comfort of unbelieving clergymen and
the moralizing of life. Error is to cast out error, and evil, evil.
The process of Kant's adjustment of his philosophy to social needs
as he regarded them is to be understood by following the chronology
and the vogue of his writings. The first edition of the Critique of
Pure Reason "excited little attention" (Stuckenberg, Life of Kant,
p. 368); but in 1787 appeared the second and modified edition,
with a new preface, clearly written with a propitiatory eye to
the orthodox reaction. "All at once the work now became popular,
and the praise was as loud and as fulsome as at first the silence
had been profound. The literature of the day began to teem with
Kantian ideas, with discussions of the new philosophy, and with
the praises of its author.... High officials in Berlin would
lay aside the weighty affairs of State to consider the Kritik,
and among them were found warm admirers of the work and its
author." Id. p. 369. Cp. Heine, Rel. und Phil. in Deutschland,
B. iii--Werke, iii, 75, 82.
This popularity becomes intelligible in the light of the new
edition and its preface. To say nothing of the alterations in the
text, pronounced by Schopenhauer to be cowardly accommodations
(as to which question see Adamson, as cited, and Stuckenberg,
p. 461, note 94), Kant writes in the preface that he had been
"obliged to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith";
and, again, that "only through criticism can the roots be
cut of materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking unbelief
(freigeisterischen Unglauben), fanaticism and superstition, which
may become universally injurious; also of idealism and skepticism,
which are dangerous rather to the Schools, and can hardly reach the
general public." (Meiklejohn mistranslates: "which are universally
injurious"--Bohn ed. p. xxxvii.) This passage virtually puts the
popular religion and all philosophies save Kant's own on one level
of moral dubiety. It is, however, distinctly uncandid as regards
the "freethinking unbelief," for Kant himself was certainly an
unbeliever in Christian miracles and dogmas.
His readiness to make an appeal to prejudice appears again
in the second edition of the Critique when he asks: "Whence
does the freethinker derive his knowledge that there is, for
instance, no Supreme Being?" (Kritik der reinen Vernunft,
Transc. Methodenlehre, 1 H. 2 Absch. ed. Kirchmann, 1879,
p. 587; Bohn tr. p. 458.) He had just before professed to be
dealing with denial of the "existence of God"--a proposition of
no significance whatever unless "God" be defined. He now without
warning substitutes the still more undefined expression "Supreme
Being" for "God," thus imputing a proposition probably never
sustained with clear verbal purpose by any human being. Either,
then, Kant's own proposition was the entirely vacuous one that
nobody can demonstrate the impossibility of an alleged undefined
existence, or he was virtually asserting that no one can disprove
any alleged supernatural existence--spirit, demon, Moloch, Krishna,
Bel, Siva, Aphrodite, or Isis and Osiris. In the latter case he
would be absolutely stultifying his own claim to cut the roots of
"superstition" and "fanaticism" as well as of freethinking and
materialism; for, if the freethinker cannot disprove Jehovah,
neither can the Kantist disprove Allah and Satan; and Kant had
no basis for denying, as he did with Spinoza, the existence of
ghosts or spirits. From this dilemma Kant's argument cannot be
delivered. And as he finally introduces deity as a psychologically
and morally necessary regulative idea, howbeit indemonstrable,
he leaves every species of superstition exactly where it stood
before--every superstition being practically held, as against
"freethinking unbelief," on just such a tenure.
If he could thus react against freethinking before 1789, he
must needs carry the reaction further after the outbreak of the
French Revolution; and his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der
blossen Vernunft (1792-1794) is a systematic effort to draw the
teeth of the Aufklärung, modified only by his resentment of the
tyranny of the political authority towards himself. Concerning the
age-long opposition between rationalism (Verstandesaufklärung)
and intuitionism or emotionalism (Gefühlsphilosophie), it is
claimed by modern transcendentalists that Kant, or Herder,
or another, has effected a solution on a plane higher than
either. (E.g. Kronenberg, Herder's Philosophie, 1889, p. 6.) The
true solution certainly must account for both points of view--no
very difficult matter; but no solution is really attained by
either of these writers. Kant alternately stood at the two
positions; and his unhistorical mind did not seek to unify them
in a study of human evolution. For popular purposes he let pass
the assumption that a cosmic emotion is a clue to the nature of
the cosmos, as the water-finder's hazel-twig is said to point
to the whereabouts of water. Herder, recognisant of evolution,
would not follow out any rational analysis.
All the while, however, Kant's theism was radically irreconcilable with
the prevailing religion. As appears from his cordial hostility to the
belief in ghosts, he really lacked the religious temperament. "He
himself," says a recent biographer, "was too suspicious of the
emotions to desire to inspire any enthusiasm with reference to his own
heart." [1450] This misstates the fact that his "Practical Reason"
was but an abstraction of his own emotional predilection; but it
remains true that that predilection was nearly free from the commoner
forms of pious psychosis; and typical Christians have never found him
satisfactory. "From my heart," writes one of his first biographers,
"I wish that Kant had not regarded the Christian religion merely as
a necessity for the State, or as an institution to be tolerated for
the sake of the weak (which now so many, following his example, do
even in the pulpit), but had known that which is positive, improving,
and blessed in Christianity." [1451] He had in fact never kept up any
theological study; [1452] and his plan of compromise had thus, like
those of Spencer and Mill in a later day, a fatal unreality for all
men who have discarded theology with a full knowledge of its structure,
though it appeals very conveniently to those disposed to retain it as
a means of popular influence. All his adaptations, therefore, failed
to conciliate the mass of the orthodox; and even after the issue of
the second Critique (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft) he had been
the subject of discussion among the reactionists. [1453] But that
Critique, and the preface to the second edition of the first, were
at bottom only pleas for a revised ethic, Kant's concern with current
religion being solely ethical; [1454] and the force of that concern led
him at length, in what was schemed as a series of magazine articles,
[1455] to expound his notion of religion in relation to morals. When
he did so he aroused a resentment much more energetic than that
felt by the older academics against his philosophy. The title of his
complete treatise, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, is
obviously framed to parry criticism; yet so drastic is its treatment
of its problems that the College of Censors at Berlin under the new
theological régime vetoed the second part. By the terms of the law
as to the censorship, the publisher was entitled to know the reason
for the decision; but on his asking for it he was informed that
"another instruction was on hand, which the censor followed as his
law, but whose contents he refused to make known." [1456] Greatly
incensed, Kant submitted the rejected article with the rest of his
book to the theological faculty of his own university of Königsberg,
asking them to decide in which faculty the censorship was properly
vested. They referred the decision to the philosophical faculty, which
duly proceeded to license the book (1793). As completed, it contained
passages markedly hostile to the Church. His opponents in turn were
now so enraged that they procured a royal cabinet order (October,
1794) charging him with "distorting and degrading many of the chief
and fundamental doctrines of the Holy Scriptures and of Christianity,"
and ordering all the instructors at the university not to lecture on
the book. [1457] Such was the reward for a capitulation of philosophy
to the philosophic ideals of the police.
Kant, called upon to render an account of his conduct to the
Government, formally defended it, but in conclusion decorously said:
"I think it safest, in order to obviate the least suspicion in this
respect, as your Royal Majesty's most faithful subject, to declare
solemnly that henceforth I will refrain altogether from all public
discussion of religion, whether natural or revealed, both in lectures
and in writings." After the death of Frederick William II (1797) and
the accession of Frederick William III, who suspended the edict of
1788, Kant held himself free to speak out again, and published (1798)
an essay on "The Strife of the [University] Faculties," wherein he
argued that philosophers should be free to discuss all questions of
religion so long as they did not handle Biblical theology as such. The
belated protest, however, led to nothing. By this time the philosopher
was incapable of further efficient work; and when he died in 1804 the
chief manuscript he left, planned as a synthesis of his philosophic
teaching, was found to be hopelessly confused. [1458]
The attitude, then, in which Kant stood to the reigning religion in his
latter years remained fundamentally hostile, from the point of view
of believing Christians as distinguished from that of ecclesiastical
opportunists. What were for temporizers arguments in defence of
didactic deceit, were for sincerer spirits fresh grounds for recoiling
from the whole ecclesiastical field. Kant must have made more rebels
than compliers by his very doctrine of compliance. Religion was
for him essentially ethic; and there is no reconciling the process
of propitiation of deity, in the Christian or any other cult, with
his express declaration that all attempts to win God's favour save
by simple right-living are sheer fetichism. [1459] He thus ends
practically at the point of view of the deists, whose influence on
him in early life is seen in his work on cosmogony. [1460] He had,
moreover, long ceased to go to church or follow any religious usage,
even refusing to attend the services on the installation of a new
university rector, save when he himself held the office. At the close
of his treatise on religion, after all his anxious accommodations,
he becomes almost violent in his repudiations of sacerdotalism and
sectarian self-esteem. "He did not like the singing in the churches,
and pronounced it mere bawling. In prayer, whether public or private,
he had not the least faith; and in his conversation as well as his
writings he treated it as a superstition, holding that to address
anything unseen would open the way for fanaticism. Not only did
he argue against prayer; he also ridiculed it, and declared that
a man would be ashamed to be caught by another in the attitude of
prayer." One of his maxims was that "To kneel or prostrate himself on
the earth, even for the purpose of symbolizing to himself reverence
for a heavenly object, is unworthy of man." [1461] So too he held
that the doctrine of the Trinity had no practical value, and he had a
"low opinion" of the Old Testament.
Yet his effort at compromise had carried him to positions which are
the negation of some of his own most emphatic ethical teachings. Like
Plato, he is finally occupied in discussing the "right fictions"
for didactic purposes. Swerving from thoroughgoing freethought for
fear of moral harm, he ends by sacrificing intellectual morality
to what seems to him social security. His doctrine, borrowed from
Lessing, of a "conceivable" revelation which told man only what he
could find out for himself, is a mere flout to reason. While he
carries his "categorical imperative," or à priori conception of
duty, so extravagantly far as to argue that it is wrong even to
tell a falsehood to a would-be murderer in order to mislead him,
he approves of the systematic employment of the pulpit function by
men who do not believe in the creed they there expound. The priest,
with Kant's encouragement, is to "draw all the practical lessons for
his congregation from dogmas which he himself cannot subscribe with
a full conviction of their truth, but which he can teach, since it
is not altogether impossible that truth may be concealed therein,"
while he remains free as a scholar to write in a contrary sense in
his own name. And this doctrine, set forth in the censured work of
1793, is repeated in the moralist's last treatise (1798), wherein
he explains that the preacher, when speaking doctrinally, "can put
into the passage under consideration his own rational views, whether
found there or not." Kant thus ended by reviving for the convenience
of churchmen, in a worse form, the medieval principle of a "twofold
truth." So little efficacy is there in a transcendental ethic for
any of the actual emergencies of life.
On this question compare Kant's Religion innerhalb der Grenzen
der blossen Vernunft, Stück iii, Abth. i, § 6; Stück iv,
Th. ii, preamble and §§ i, 3, and 4; with the essay Ueber ein
vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (1797), in reply
to Constant--rep. in Kant's Vorzügliche kleine Schriften, 1833,
Bd. ii, and in App. to Rosenkranz's ed. of Werke, vii, 295--given
by T. K. Abbott in his tr. of the Critique of Judgment. See
also Stuckenberg, pp. 341-45, and the general comment of Baur,
Kirchengeschichte des 19ten Jahrhunderts, 1862, p. 65. "Kant's
recognition of Scripture is purely a matter of expedience. The
State needs the Bible to control the people; the masses need it in
order that they, having weak consciences, may recognize their duty;
and the philosopher finds it a convenient vehicle for conveying
to the people the faith of reason. Were it rejected it might
be difficult, if not impossible, to put in its place another
book which would inspire as much confidence." All the while
"Kant's principles of course led him to deny that the Bible is
authoritative in matters of religion, or that it is of itself
a safe guide in morals.... Its value consists in the fact that,
owing to the confidence of the people in it, reason can use it to
interpret into Scripture its own doctrines, and can thus make it
the means of popularizing rational faith. If anyone imagines that
the aim of the interpretation is to obtain the real meaning of
Scripture, he is no Kantian on this point" (Stuckenberg, p. 341).
22. The total performance of Kant thus left Germany with a powerful
lead on the one hand towards that unbelief in religion which in the
last reign had been fashionable, and on the other hand a series of
prescriptions for compromise; the monarchy all the while throwing
its weight against all innovation in doctrine and practice. In 1799
Fichte is found expressing the utmost alarm at the combination of the
European despotisms to "rout out freethought"; [1462] and so strong
did the official reaction become that in the opinion of Heine all
the German philosophers and their ideas would have been suppressed
by wheel and gallows but for Napoleon, [1463] who intervened in the
year 1805. The Prussian despotism being thus weakened, what actually
happened was an adaptation of Kant's teaching to the needs alike of
religion and of rationalism. The religious world was assured by it
that, though all previous arguments for theism were philosophically
worthless, theism was now safe on the fluid basis of feeling. On the
other hand, rationalism alike in ethics and in historical criticism
was visibly reinforced on all sides. Herder, as before noted, found
divinity students grounding their unbelief on Kant's teaching. Staüdlin
begins the preface to his History and Spirit of Skepticism (1794) with
the remark that "Skepticism begins to be a disease of the age"; and
Kant is the last in his list of skeptics. At the close of the century
"the number of Kantian theologians was legion," and it was through
the Kantian influence that "the various anti-orthodox tendencies
which flourished during the period of Illumination were concentrated
in Rationalism" [1464]--in the tendency, that is, to bring rational
criticism to bear alike on history, dogma, and philosophy. Borowski
in 1804 complains that "beardless youths and idle babblers" devoid of
knowledge "appeal to Kant's views respecting Christianity." [1465]
These views, as we have seen, were partly accommodating, partly
subversive in the extreme. Kant regards Jesus as an edifying ideal
of perfect manhood, "belief" in whom as such makes a man acceptable
to God, because of following a good model. "While he thus treats
the historical account of Jesus as of no significance, except as a
shell into which the practical reason puts the kernel, his whole
argument tends to destroy faith in the historic person of Jesus
as given in the gospel, treating the account itself as something
whose truthfulness it is not worth while to investigate." [1466]
In point of fact we find his devoted disciple Erhard declaring:
"I regard Christian morality as something which has been falsely
imputed to Christianity; and the existence of Christ does not at all
seem to me to be a probable historical fact"--this while declaring
that Kant had given him "the indescribable comfort of being able to
call himself openly, and with a good conscience, a Christian." [1467]
While therefore a multitude of preachers availed themselves of
Kant's philosophic licence to rationalize in the pulpit and out
of it as occasion offered, and yet others opposed them only on
the score that all divergence from orthodoxy should be avowed,
the dissolution of orthodoxy in Germany was rapid and general; and
the anti-supernaturalist handling of Scripture, prepared for as we
have seen, went on continuously. Even the positive disparagement
of Christianity was carried on by Kantian students; and Hamann,
dubbed "the Magician of the North" for his alluring exposition
of emotional theism, caused one of them, a tutor, to be brought
before a clerical consistory for having taught his pupil to throw all
specifically Christian doctrines aside. The tutor admitted the charge,
and with four others signed a declaration "that neither morality
nor sound reason nor public welfare could exist in connection with
Christianity." [1468] Hamann's own influence was too much a matter
of literary talent and caprice to be durable; and recent attempts to
re-establish his reputation have evoked the deliberate judgment that
he has no permanent importance. [1469]
Against the intellectual influence thus set up by Kant there was none
in contemporary Germany capable of resistance. Philosophy for the most
part went in Kant's direction, having indeed been so tending before
his day. Rationalism of a kind had already had a representative in
Chr. A. Crusius (1712-1775), who in treatises on logic and metaphysics
opposed alike Leibnitz and Wolff, and taught for his own part a kind
of Epicureanism, nominally Christianized. To his school belonged
Platner (much admired by Jean Paul Richter, his pupil) and Tetens,
"the German Locke," who attempted a common-sense answer to Hume. His
ideal was a philosophy "at once intelligible and religious, agreeable
to God and accessible to the people." [1470] Platner on the other hand,
leaning strongly towards a psychological and anthropological view of
human problems, [1471] opposed first to atheism [1472] and later to
Kantian theism [1473] a moderate Pyrrhonic skepticism; here following a
remarkable lead from the younger Beausobre, who in 1755 had published
in French, at Berlin, a treatise entitled Le Pyrrhonisme Raisonnable,
taking up the position, among others, that while it is hard to prove
the existence of God by reason it is impossible to disprove it. This
was virtually the position of Kant a generation later; and it is
clear that thus early the dogmatic position was discredited.
23. Some philosophic opposition there was to Kant, alike on
intuitionist grounds, as in the cases of Hamann and Herder, and
on grounds of academic prejudice, as in the case of Kraus; but the
more important thinkers who followed him were all as heterodox as
he. In particular, Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who began in
authorship by being a Kantian zealot, gave even greater scandal than
the Master had done. Fichte's whole career is a kind of "abstract
and brief chronicle" of the movements of thought in Germany during
his life. In his boyhood, at the public school of Pforta, we find
him and his comrades already influenced by the new currents. "Books
imbued with all the spirit of free inquiry were secretly obtained,
and, in spite of the strictest prohibitions, great part of the
night was spent in their perusal. The works of Wieland, Lessing,
and Goethe were positively forbidden; yet they found their way
within the walls, and were eagerly studied." [1474] In particular,
Fichte followed closely the controversy of Lessing with Goeze;
and Lessing's lead gave him at once the spirit of freethought,
as distinct from any specific opinion. Never a consistent thinker,
Fichte in his student and tutorial days is found professing at once
determinism and a belief in "Providence," accepting Spinoza and
contemplating a village pastorate. [1475] But while ready to frame a
plea for Christianity on the score of its psychic adaptation to "the
sinner," he swerved from the pastorate when it came within sight,
declaring that "no purely Christian community now exists." [1476]
About the age of twenty-eight he became an enthusiastic convert to the
Kantian philosophy, especially to the Critique of Practical Reason,
and threw over determinism on what appear to be grounds of empirical
utilitarianism, failing to face the philosophical issue. Within
a year of his visit to Kant, however, he was writing to a friend
that "Kant has only indicated the truth, but neither unfolded nor
proved it," and that he himself has "discovered a new principle,
from which all philosophy can easily be deduced.... In a couple of
years we shall have a philosophy with all the clearness of geometrical
demonstration." [1477] He had in fact passed, perhaps under Spinoza's
influence, to pantheism, from which standpoint he rejected Kant's
anti-rational ground for affirming a God not immanent in things, and
claimed, as did his contemporaries Schelling and Hegel, to establish
theism on rational grounds. Rejecting, further, Kant's reiterated
doctrine that religion is ethic, Fichte ultimately insisted that, on
the contrary, religion is knowledge, and that "it is only a corrupt
society that has to use religion as an impulse to moral action."
But alike in his Kantian youth and later he was definitely
anti-revelationist, however much he conformed to clerical prejudice
by attacks upon the movement of freethought. In his "wander-years"
he writes with vehemence of the "worse than Spanish inquisition"
under which the German clergy are compelled to "cringe and dissemble,"
partly because of lack of ability, partly through economic need. [1478]
In his Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung ("Essay towards a
Critique of all Revelation"), published with some difficulty, Kant
helping (1792), he in effect negates the orthodox assumption, and,
in the spirit of Kant and Lessing, but with more directness than they
had shown, concludes that belief in revelation "is an element, and an
important element, in the moral education of humanity, but it is not
a final stage for human thought." [1479] In Kant's bi-frontal fashion,
he had professed [1480] to "silence the opponents of positive religion
not less than its dogmatical defenders"; but that result did not follow
on either side, and ere long, as a professor at Jena, he was being
represented as one of the most aggressive of the opponents. Soon
after producing his Critique of all Revelation he had published
anonymously two pamphlets vindicating the spirit as distinguished
from the conduct of the French Revolution; and upon a young writer
known to harbour such ideas enmity was bound to fall. Soon it took
the form of charges of atheism. It does not appear to be true that
he ever told his students at Jena: "In five years there will be
no more Christian religion: reason is our religion"; [1481] and it
would seem that the first charges of atheism brought against him were
purely malicious. [1482] But his career henceforth was one of strife
and friction, first with the student-blackguardism which had been
rife in the German universities ever since the Thirty Years' War,
and which he partly subdued; then with the academic authorities and
the traditionalists, who, when he began lecturing on Sunday mornings,
accused him of attempting to throw over Christianity and set up the
worship of reason. He was arraigned before the High Consistory of
Weimar and acquitted; but his wife was insulted in the streets of
Jena; his house was riotously attacked in the night; and he ceased to
reside there. Then, in his Wissenschaftslehre ("Doctrine of Knowledge,"
1794-95) he came into conflict with the Kantians, with whom his rupture
steadily deepened on ethical grounds. Again he was accused of atheism
in print; and after a defence in which he retorted the charge on the
utilitarian theists he resigned.
In Berlin, where the new king held the old view that the wrongs of
the Gods were the Gods' affair, he found harbourage; and sought to
put himself right with the religious world by his book Die Bestimmung
des Menschen ("The Vocation of Man," 1800), wherein he speaks of the
Eternal Infinite Will as regulating human reason so far as human reason
is right--the old counter-sense and the old evasion. By this book
he repelled his rationalistic friends Schelling and the Schlegels;
while his religious ally Schleiermacher, who chose another tactic,
wrote on it a bitter and contemptuous review, and "could hardly find
words strong enough to express his detestation of it." [1483] A few
years later Fichte was writing no less contemptuously of Schelling;
and in his remaining years, though the Napoleonic wars partly brought
him into sympathy with his countrymen, from whom he had turned away
in angry alienation, he remained a philosophic Ishmael, warring and
warred upon all round. He was thus left to figure for posterity as a
religionist "for his own hand," who rejected all current religion while
angrily dismissing current unbelief as "freethinking chatter." [1484]
If his philosophy be estimated by its logical content as distinguished
from its conflicting verbalisms, it is fundamentally as atheistic as
that of Spinoza. [1485] That he was conscious of a vital sunderance
between his thought and that of the past is made clear by his answer,
in 1805, to the complaint that the people had lost their "religious
feeling" (Religiosität). His retort is that a new religious feeling
has taken the place of the old; [1486] and that was the position
taken up by the generation which swore by him, in the German manner,
as the last had sworn by Kant.
But the successive philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel,
all rising out of the "Illumination" of the eighteenth century, have
been alike impermanent. Nothing is more remarkable in the history
of thought than the internecine strife of the systems which insisted
on "putting something in the place" of the untenable systems of the
past. They have been but so many "toppling spires of cloud." Fichte,
like Herder, broke away from the doctrine of Kant; and later became
bitterly opposed to that of his former friend Schelling, as did Hegel
in his turn. Schleiermacher, hostile to Kant, was still more hostile
to Fichte; and Hegel, detesting Schleiermacher [1487] and developing
Fichte, give rise to schools arrayed against each other, of which the
anti-Christian was by far the stronger. All that is permanent in the
product of the age of German Rationalism is the fundamental principle
upon which it proceeded, the confutation of the dogmas and legends
of the past, and the concrete results of the historical, critical,
and physical research to which the principle and the confutation led.
24. It is true that the progressive work was not all done by the
Rationalists so-called. As always, incoherences in the pioneers led
to retorts which made for rectification. One of the errors of bias
of the early naturalists, as we have noted, was their tendency to
take every religious document as genuine and at bottom trustworthy,
provided only that its allegations of miracles were explained away
as misinterpretations of natural phenomena. So satisfied were many
of them with this inexpensive method that they positively resisted
the attempts of supernaturalists, seeking a way out of their special
dilemma, to rectify the false ascriptions of the documents. Bent solely
on one solution, they were oddly blind to evidential considerations
which pointed to interpolation, forgery, variety of source, and error
of literary tradition; while scholars bent on saving "inspiration"
were often ready in some measure for such recognitions. These arrests
of insight took place alternately on both sides, in the normal way of
intellectual progress by alternate movements. All the while, it is the
same primary force of reason that sets up the alternate pressures,
and the secondary pressures are generated by, and are impossible
without, the first.
25. The emancipation, too, was limited in area in the German-speaking
world. In Austria, despite a certain amount of French culture, the
rule of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century was too effective to
permit of any intellectual developments. Maria Theresa, who knew
too well that the boundless sexual licence against which she fought
had nothing to do with innovating ideas, had to issue a special
order to permit the importation of Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois;
and works of more subversive doctrine could not openly pass the
frontiers at all. An attempt to bring Lessing to Vienna in 1774,
with a view to founding a new literary Academy, collapsed before the
opposition; and when Prof. Jahn, of the Vienna University--described
as "freethinking, latitudinarian, anti-supernaturalistic"--developed
somewhat anti-clerical tendencies in his teaching and writing, he
was forced to resign, and died a simple Canon. [1488] The Emperor
Joseph II in his day passed for an unbeliever; [1489] but there was
no general movement. "Austria, in a time of universal effervescence,
produced only musicians, and showed zest only for pleasure." [1490]
Yet among the music-makers was the German-born Beethoven, the greatest
master of his age. Kindred in spirit to Goethe, and much more of a
revolutionist than he in all things, Beethoven spent the creative part
of his life at Vienna without ceasing to be a freethinker. [1491]
"Formal religion he apparently had none." He copied out a kind of
theistic creed consisting of three ancient formulas: "I am that which
is": "I am all that is, that was, that shall be": "He is alone by
Himself; and to Him alone do all things owe their being." Beyond this
his beliefs did not go. When his friend Moscheles at the end of his
arrangement of Fidelio wrote: "Fine, with God's help," Beethoven added,
"O man, help thyself." [1492] His reception of the Catholic sacraments
in extremis was not his act. He had left to mankind a purer and a more
lasting gift than either the creeds or the philosophies of his age.