A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume...

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,135 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.136 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”;137 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,138 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.”139 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.

Bahrdt’s real power may be inferred from the fury of some of his 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,”140 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.141 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 God142—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.143 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.144 Nor was he unready to jeer at the bigots when they chanced to hate where he was sympathetic.145 On the side of religious problems, he was primarily and permanently influenced by two such singularly different minds as Bayle146 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.147 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.”148 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.149 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.150 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.151 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;152 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.”153 We thus find him, about the time when he announces to his father that he had doubted concerning the Christian dogmas,154 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.155

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.156 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.157 For himself, he framed (or perhaps adopted)158 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.159 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.160 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.”161 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.”162 On the historical side, too, he had early convinced himself that Christianity was established and propagated “by entirely natural means”163—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;164 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,165 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.166 At his death, accordingly, Reimarus ranked as an admired defender of theism and of the belief in immortality.167 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.168 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,169 Lessing’s friend, that the fragments came to light.

As the Berlin censor would not give official permission,170 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,171 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.172

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,173 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.174 In the end, he seems to have become, to at least some extent, a pantheist;175 but he never expounded any coherent and comprehensive set of opinions,176 preferring, as he put it in an oft-quoted sentence, the state of search for truth to any consciousness of possessing it.177

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”178 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 gospels179 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.”180

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.”181 Wieland, one of the foremost German men of letters of his time, is known to have become a deist of the school of Shaftesbury;182 and in the leading journal of the day he wrote on the free use of reason in matters of faith.183 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.184 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.185

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 narratives186 the name of “rationalism” came to be specially applied,187 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,188 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,189 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).190 Schulz’s Philosophical Meditation on Theology and Religion191 (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.192

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”193—as the champion of religion and the enemy of freethinking; forbade all proselytizing, and menaced with penalties all forms of heresy,194 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,195 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,196 his account of the German Protestant peasant and labourer as the most dismal figure in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland,197 and his charge against Germans of degrading their women,198 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,199 ascribed to Jakob von Mauvillon,200 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.201 To such propaganda the edict of repression was the official answer. It naturally roused a strong opposition;202 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.203 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.204 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,205 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.206 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 it207 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.208

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,209 who, insofar as he touched on Biblical questions, copied the half-grown rationalism of the school of Semler.210 “The great Pagan” was the common label among his orthodox or conformist contemporaries.211 As a boy, learning a little Hebrew, he was already at the critical point of view in regard to Biblical marvels,212 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.213 As he puts it, he had made a Christ and a Christianity of his own.214 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.215 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.216 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.217 Such utterances as the avowal that he revered Jesus as he revered the Sun,218 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 immortality219—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.”220 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.”221

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 fruitful222 (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.223 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.224 Like Goethe, he sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane of possibility,225 in the manner of the liberal theologians of the period; and like him he often writes as a deist,226 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,227 and no political metaphysic) required neither deity nor immortality to sustain it.228

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;229 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.”230 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?231 (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.232 In this adjustment he was perhaps consciously copying Rousseau, who had greatly influenced him,233 and whose theism is an avowedly subjectivist predication. But the same attitude to the problem had been substantially adopted by Lessing;234 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 harm235—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.236 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.237 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.238 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 deity239 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.”240 But without the slightest attempt at justification there is thrown in the formula that “no religion is thinkable without belief in a future life.”241 Thus heaven and hell242 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.