Frederick’s attitude, said an early Kantian, had had “an almost magical influence” on popular opinion (Willich, Elements of the Critical Philosophy, 1798, p. 2). With this his French teachers must have had much to do. Lord Morley pronounces (Voltaire, 4th ed. p. 123) that French deism “never made any impression on Germany,” and that “the teaching of Leibnitz and Wolff stood like a fortified wall against the French invasion.” This is contradicted by much German testimony; in particular by Lange’s (Gesch. des Mater. i, 318), though he notes that French materialism could not get the upper hand. Laukhard, who expressed the highest admiration for Tindal, as having wholly delivered him from dogmatism, avowed that Voltaire, whom everybody read, had perhaps done more harm to priest religion than all the books of the English and German deists together (Leben, 1792–1802, Th. i, p. 268).
Tholuck gravely affirms (Abriss, p. 33) that the acquaintance with the French “deistery and frivolity” in Germany belongs to a “somewhat later period than that of the English.” Naturally it did. The bulk of the English deistic literature was printed before the printing of the French had begun! French MSS. would reach German princes, but not German pastors. But Tholuck sadly avows that the French deism (of the serious and pre-Voltairean portions of which he seems to have known nothing) had a “frightful” influence on the upper classes, though not on the clergy (p. 34). Following him, Kahnis writes (Internal History, p. 41) that “English and French Deism met with a very favourable reception in Germany—the latter chiefly in the higher circles, the former rather among the educated middle classes.” (He should have added, “the younger theologians.”) Baur, even in speaking disparagingly of the French as compared with the English influence, admits (Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, 2te Aufl. p. 347) that the former told upon Germany. Cp. Tennemann, Bohn. tr. pp. 385, 388. Hagenbach shows great ignorance of English deism, but he must have known something of German; and he writes (tr. p. 57) that “the imported deism,” both English and French, “soon swept through the rifts of the Church, and gained supreme control of literature.” Cp. pp. 67–68. See Croom Robertson’s Hobbes, pp. 225–26, as to the persistence of a succession of Hobbes and Locke in Germany in the teeth of the Wolffian school, which soon lost ground after 1740. It is further noteworthy that Brucker’s copious Historia Critica Philosophiæ (1742–44), which as a mere learned record has great merit, and was long the standard authority in Germany, gives great praise to Locke and little space to Wolff. (See Enfield’s abstract, pp. 614, 619 sq.) The Wolffian philosophy, too, had been rejected and disparaged by both Herder and Kant—who were alike deeply influenced by Rousseau—in the third quarter of the century; and was generally discredited, save in the schools, when Kant produced the Critique of Pure Reason. See below, pp. 337, 345.
13. Frederick, though reputed a Voltairean freethinker par excellence, may be claimed for Germany as partly a product of the rationalizing philosophy of Wolff. In his first letter to Voltaire, written in 1736, four years before his accession, he promises to send him a translation he has had made of the “accusation and the justification” of Wolff, “the most celebrated philosopher of our days, who, for having carried light into the darkest places of metaphysics, and for having treated the most difficult matters in a manner no less elevated than precise and clear, is cruelly accused of irreligion and atheism”; and he speaks of getting translated Wolff’s Treatise of God, the Soul, and the World. When he became a thoroughgoing freethinker is not clear, for Voltaire at this time had produced no explicit anti-Christian propaganda. At first the new king showed himself disposed to act on the old maxim that freethought is bad for the common people. In 1743–44 he caused to be suppressed two German treatises by one Gebhardi, a contributor to Gottsched’s magazines, attacking the Biblical miracles; and in 1748 he sent a young man named Rüdiger to Spandau for six months’ confinement for printing an anti-Christian work by one Dr. Pott.95 But as he grew more confident in his own methods he extended to men of his own way of thinking the toleration he allowed to all religionists, save insofar as he vetoed the mutual vituperation of the sects, and such proselytizing as tended to create strife. With an even hand he protected Catholics, Greek Christians, and Unitarians, letting them have churches where they would;96 and when, after the battle of Striegau, a body of Protestant peasantry asked his permission to slay all the Catholics they could find, he answered with the gospel precept, “Love your enemies.”97
Beyond the toleration of all forms of religion, however, he never went; though he himself added to the literature of deism. Apart from his verses we have from him the posthumous treatise Pensées sur la Religion, probably written early in his life, where the rational case against the concepts of revelation and of miracles is put with a calm and sustained force. Like the rest, he is uncritical in his deism; but, that granted, his reasoning is unanswerable. In talk he was wont to treat the clergy with small respect;98 and he wrote more denunciatory things concerning them than almost any freethinker of the century.99 Bayle, Voltaire, and Lucretius were his favourite studies; and as the then crude German literature had no attraction for him, he drew to his court many distinguished Frenchmen, including La Mettrie, Maupertuis, D’Alembert, D’Argens, and above all Voltaire, between whom and him there was an incurable incompatibility of temper and character, and a persistent attraction of force of mind, which left them admiring without respecting each other, and unable to abstain from mutual vituperation. Under Frederick’s vigorous rule all speech was free save such as he considered personally offensive, as Voltaire’s attack on Maupertuis; and after a stormy reign he could say, when asked by Prince William of Brunswick whether he did not think religion one of the best supports of a king’s authority, “I find order and the laws sufficient.... Depend upon it, countries have been admirably governed when your religion had no existence.”100 Religion certainly had no part in his personality in the ordinary sense of the term. Voltaire was wont to impute to him atheism; when La Mettrie died, the mocker, then at Frederick’s court, remarked that the post of his majesty’s atheist was vacant, but happily the Abbé de Prades was there to fill it. In effect, Frederick professed Voltaire’s own deism; but of all the deists of the time he had least of the religious temperament and most of sheer cynicism.
The attempt of Carlyle to exhibit Frederick as a practical believer is a flagrant instance of that writer’s subjective method. He tells (Hist. of Friedrich, bk. xviii, ch. x) that at the beginning of the battle of Leuthen a column of troops near the king sang a hymn of duty (which Carlyle calls “the sound of Psalms”); that an officer asked whether the singing should be stopped, and that the king said “By no means.” His “hard heart seems to have been touched by it. Indeed, there is in him, in those grim days, a tone (!) as of trust in the Eternal, as of real religious piety and faith, scarcely noticeable elsewhere in his history. His religion—and he had in withered forms a good deal of it, if we will look well—being almost always in a strictly voiceless state, nay, ultra voiceless, or voiced the wrong way, as is too well known.” Then comes the assertion that “a moment after” the king said “to someone, Ziethen probably, ‘With men like these, don’t you think I shall have victory this day!’” Here, with the very spirit of unveracity at work before his eyes, Carlyle plumps for the fable. Yet the story, even if true, would give no proof whatever of religious belief.
In point of fact, Frederick was a much less “religious” deist than Voltaire. He erected no temple to his unloved God. And a perusal of his dialogue of Pompadour and the Virgin (Dialogues des morts) may serve to dispose of the thesis that the German mind dealt reverently and decently with matters which the French mind handled frivolously. That performance outgoes in ribaldry anything of the age in French.
As the first modern freethinking king, Frederick is something of a test case. Son of a man of narrow mind and odious character, he was himself no admirable type, being neither benevolent nor considerate, neither truthful nor generous; and in international politics, after writing in his youth a treatise in censure of Machiavelli, he played the old game of unscrupulous aggression. Yet he was not only the most competent, but, as regards home administration, the most conscientious king of his time. To find him a rival we must go back to the pagan Antonines and Julian, or at least to St. Louis of France, who, however, was rather worsened than bettered by his creed.101 Henri IV of France, who rivalled him in sagacity and greatly excelled him in human kindness, was far his inferior in devotion to duty.
The effect of Frederick’s training is seen in his final attitude to the advanced criticism of the school of d’Holbach, which assailed governments and creeds with the same unsparing severity of logic and moral reprobation. Stung by the uncompromising attack, Frederick retorts by censuring the rashness which would plunge nations into civil strife because kings miscarry where no human wisdom could avoid miscarriage. He who had wantonly plunged all Germany into a hell of war for his sole ambition, bringing myriads to misery, thousands to violent death, and hundreds of his own soldiers to suicide, could be virtuously indignant at the irresponsible audacity of writers who indicted the whole existing system for its imbecility and injustice. But he did reason on the criticism; he did ponder it; he did feel bound to meet argument with argument; and he left his arguments to the world. The advance on previous regal practice is noteworthy: the whole problem of politics is at once brought to the test of judgment and persuasion. Beside the Christian Georges and the Louis’s of his century, and beside his Christian father, his superiority in judgment and even in some essential points of character is signal. Such was the great deist king of the deist age; a deist of the least religious temper and of no very fine moral material to begin with.
The one contemporary monarch who in any way compares with him in enlightenment, Joseph II of Austria, belonged to the same school. The main charge against Frederick as a ruler is that he did not act up to the ideals of the school of Voltaire. In reply to the demand of the French deists for an abolition of all superstitious teaching, he observed that among the 16,000,000 inhabitants of France at most 200,000 were capable of philosophic views, and that the remaining 15,800,000 were held to their opinions by “insurmountable obstacles.”102 This, however, had been said by the deists themselves (e.g., d’Holbach, préf. to Christianisme dévoilé); and such an answer meant that he had no idea of so spreading instruction that all men should have a chance of reaching rational beliefs. This attitude was his inheritance from the past. Yet it was under him that Prussia began to figure as a first-rate culture force in Europe.
14. The social vogue of deistic thought could now be traced in much of the German belles-lettres of the time. The young Jakob von Mauvillon (1743–1794), secretary of the King of Poland and author of several histories, in his youth translated from the Latin into French Holberg’s Voyage of Nicolas Klimius (1766), which made the tour of Europe, and had a special vogue in Germany. Later in life, besides translating and writing abundantly and intelligently on matters of economic and military science—in the latter of which he had something like expert status—Mauvillon became a pronounced heretic, though careful to keep his propaganda anonymous.
The most systematic dissemination of the new ideas was that carried on in the periodical published by Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811) under the title of The General German Library (founded 1765), which began with fifty contributors, and at the height of its power had a hundred and thirty, among them being Lessing, Eberhard, and Moses Mendelssohn. In the period from its start to the year 1792 it ran to 106 volumes; and it has always been more or less bitterly spoken of by later orthodoxy as the great library of that movement. Nicolai, himself an industrious and scholarly writer, produced among many other things a satirical romance famous in its day, the Life and Opinions of Magister Sebaldus Nothanker, ridiculing the bigots and persecutors the type of Klotz, the antagonist of Lessing, and some of Nicolai’s less unamiable antagonists,103 as well as various aspects of the general social and literary life of the time. To Nicolai is fully due the genial tribute paid to him by Heine,104 were it only for the national service of his “Library.” Its many translations from the English and French freethinkers, older and newer, concurred with native work to spread a deistic rationalism, labelled Aufklärung, or enlightenment, through the whole middle class of Germany.105 Native writers in independent works added to the propaganda. Andreas Riem (1749–1807), a Berlin preacher, appointed by Frederick a hospital chaplain,106 wrote anonymously against priestcraft as no other priest had yet done. “No class of men,” he declared, in language perhaps echoed from his king, “has ever been so pernicious to the world as the priesthood. There were laws at all times against murderers and bandits, but not against the assassin in the priestly garb. War was repelled by war, and it came to an end. The war of the priesthood against reason has lasted for thousands of years, and it still goes on without ceasing.”107 Georg Schade (1712–1795), who appears to have been one of the believers in the immortality of animals, and who in 1770 was imprisoned for his opinions in the Danish island of Christiansœ, was no less emphatic, declaring, in a work on Natural Religion on the lines of Tindal (1760), that “all who assert a supernatural religion are godless impostors.”108 Constructive work of great importance, again, was done by J. B. Basedow (1723–1790), who early became an active deist, but distinguished himself chiefly as an educational reformer, on the inspiration of Rousseau’s Émile,109 setting up a system which “tore education away from the Christian basis,”110 and becoming in virtue of that one of the most popular writers of his day. It is latterly admitted even by orthodoxy that school education in Germany had in the seventeenth century become a matter of learning by rote, and that such reforms as had been set up in some of the schools of the Pietists had in Basedow’s day come to nothing.111 As Basedow was the first to set up vigorous reforms, it is not too much to call him an instaurator of rational education, whose chief fault was to be too far ahead of his age. This, with the personal flaw of an unamiable habit of wrangling in all companies, caused the failure of his “Philanthropic Institute,” established in 1771, on the invitation of the Prince of Dessau, to carry out his educational ideals. Quite a number of other institutions, similarly planned, after his lead, by men of the same way of thinking, as Canope and Salzmann, in the same period, had no better success.
Goethe, who was clearly much impressed by Basedow, and travelled with him, draws a somewhat antagonistic picture of him on retrospect (Wahrheit und Dichtung, B. xiv). He accuses him in particular of always obtruding his anti-orthodox opinions; not choosing to admit that religious opinions were being constantly obtruded on Basedow. Praising Lavater for his more amiable nature, Goethe reveals that Lavater was constantly propounding his orthodoxy. Goethe, in fine, was always lenient to pietism, in which he had been brought up, and to which he was wont to make sentimental concessions. He could never forget his courtly duties towards the established convention, and so far played the game of bigotry. Hagenbach notes (i, 298, note), without any deprecation, that after Basedow had published in 1763–1764 his Philalethie, a perfectly serious treatise on natural as against revealed religion, one of the many orthodox answers, that by Pastor Goeze, so inflamed against him the people of his native town of Hamburg that he could not show himself there without danger. And this is the man accused of “obtruding his views.” Baur is driven, by way of disparagement of Basedow and his school, to censure their self-confidence—precisely the quality which, in religious teachers with whom he agreed, he as a theologian would treat as a mark of superiority. Baur’s attack on the moral utilitarianism of the school is still less worthy of him. (Gesch. der christl. Kirche, iv, 595–96). It reads like an echo of Kahnis (as cited, p. 46 sq.).
Yet another influential deist was Johann August Eberhard (1739–1809), for a time a preacher at Charlottenburg, but driven out of the Church for the heresy of his New Apology of Sokrates; or the Final Salvation of the Heathen (1772).112 The work in effect placed Sokrates on a level with Jesus,113 which was blasphemy.114 But the outcry attracted the attention of Frederick, who made Eberhard a Professor of Philosophy at Halle, where later he opposed the idealism of both Kant and Fichte. Substantially of the same school was the less pronouncedly deistic cleric Steinbart,115 author of a utilitarian System of Pure Philosophy, or Christian doctrine of Happiness, now forgotten, who had been variously influenced by Locke and Voltaire.116 Among the less heterodox but still rationalizing clergy of the period were J. J. Spalding, author of a work on The Utility of the Preacher’s Office, a man of the type labelled “Moderate” in the Scotland of the same period, and as such antipathetic to emotional pietists;117 and Zollikofer, of the same school—both inferribly influenced by the deism of their day. Considerably more of a rationalist than these was the clergyman W. A. Teller (1734–1804), author of a New Testament Lexicon, who reached a position virtually deistic, and intimated to the Jews of Berlin that he would receive them into his church on their making a deistic profession of faith.118
15. If it be true that even the rationalizing defenders of Christianity led men on the whole towards deism,119 much more must this hold true of the new school who applied rationalistic methods to religious questions in their capacity as theologians. Of this school the founder was Johann Salomo Semler (1725–1791), who, trained as a Pietist at Halle, early thought himself into a more critical attitude,120 albeit remaining a theological teacher. Son of a much-travelled army chaplain, who in his many campaigns had learned much of the world, and in particular seen something of religious frauds in the Catholic countries, Semler started with a critical bias which was cultivated by wide miscellaneous reading from his boyhood onwards. As early as 1750, in his doctoral dissertation defending certain texts against the criticism of Whiston, he set forth the view, developed a century later by Baur, that the early Christian Church contained a Pauline and a Petrine party, mutually hostile. The merit of his research won him a professorship at Halle; and this position he held till his death, despite such heresy as his rejection from the canon of the books of Ruth, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, the Song of Solomon, the two books of Chronicles, and the Apocalypse, in his Freie Untersuchung des Canons (1771–1774)—a work apparently inspired by the earlier performance of Richard Simon.121 His intellectual life was for long a continuous advance, always in the direction of a more rationalistic comprehension of religious history; and he reached, for his day, a remarkably critical view of the mythical element in the Old Testament.122 Not only did he recognize that Genesis must have pre-Mosaic origins, and that such books as the Proverbs and the Psalms were of later date and other origin than those traditionally assigned:123 his historical sense worked on the whole narrative. Thus he recognized the mythical character of the story of Samson, and was at least on the way towards a scientific handling of the New Testament.124 But in his period and environment a systematic rationalism was impossible; he was always a “revelation-believing Christian”; his critical intelligence was always divided against itself;125 and his powers were expended in an immense number of works,126 which failed to yield any orderly system, while setting up a general stimulus, in despite of their admitted unreadableness.127
In his latter days he strongly opposed and condemned the more radical rationalism of his pupil Bahrdt, and of the posthumous work of Reimarus, here exemplifying the common danger of the intellectual life, for critical as well as uncritical minds. After provoking many orthodox men by his own challenges, he is roused to fury alike by the genial rationalism of Bahrdt and by the cold analysis of Reimarus; and his attack on the Wolfenbüttel Fragments published by Lessing is loaded with a vocabulary of abuse such as he had never before employed128—a sure sign that he had no scientific hold of his own historical conception. Like the similarly infuriated semi-rational defenders of the historicity of Jesus in our own day, he merely “followed the tactic of exposing the lack of scientific knowledge and theological learning” of the innovating writer. Always temperamentally religious, he died in the evangelical faith. But his own influence in promoting rationalism is now obvious and unquestioned,129 and he is rightly to be reckoned a main founder of “German rationalism”—that is, academic rationalism on theologico-historical lines130—although he always professed to be merely rectifying orthodox conceptions. In the opinion of Pusey “the revival of historical interpretation by Semler became the most extensive instrument of the degradation of Christianity.”
Among the other theologians of the time who exercised a similar influence to the Wolffian, Töllner attracts notice by the comparative courage with which, in the words of an orthodox critic, he “raised, as much as possible, natural religion to revelation,” and, “on the other hand, lowered Scripture to the level of natural light.”131 First he published (1764) True Reasons why God has not furnished Revelation with evident proofs,132 arguing for the modern attenuation of the idea of revelation; then a work on Divine Inspiration (1771) in which he explicitly avowed that “God has in no way, either inwardly or outwardly, dictated the sacred books. The writers were the real authors”133—a declaration not to be counterbalanced by further generalities about actual divine influence. Later still he published a Proof that God leads men to salvation even by his revelation in Nature134 (1766)—a form of Christianity little removed from deism. Other theologians, such as Ernesti, went far with the tide of illuminism; and when the orthodox Chr. A. Crusius died at Leipzig in 1781, Jean Paul Richter, then a student, wrote that people had become “too much imbued with the spirit of illuminism” to be of his school. “Most, almost all the students,” adds Richter, incline to heterodoxy; and of the professor Morus he tells that “wherever he can explain away a miracle, the devil, etc., he does so.” Of this order of accommodators, a prominent example was Michaelis (1717–1791), whose reduction of the Mosaic legislation to motives of every-day utility is still entertaining.
16. Much more notorious than any other German deist of his time was Carl Friedrich Bahrdt (1741–1792), a kind of raw Teutonic Voltaire, and the most popularly influential German freethinker of his age. In all he is said to have published a hundred and twenty-six books and tracts,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