may be claimed for Germany as partly a product of the rationalizing
philosophy of Wolff. In his first letter to Voltaire, written in 1736,
four years before his accession, he promises to send him a translation
he has had made of the "accusation and the justification" of Wolff,
"the most celebrated philosopher of our days, who, for having carried
light into the darkest places of metaphysics, and for having treated
the most difficult matters in a manner no less elevated than precise
and clear, is cruelly accused of irreligion and atheism"; and he
speaks of getting translated Wolff's Treatise of God, the Soul, and
the World. When he became a thoroughgoing freethinker is not clear,
for Voltaire at this time had produced no explicit anti-Christian
propaganda. At first the new king showed himself disposed to act
on the old maxim that freethought is bad for the common people. In
1743-44 he caused to be suppressed two German treatises by one
Gebhardi, a contributor to Gottsched's magazines, attacking the
Biblical miracles; and in 1748 he sent a young man named Rüdiger to
Spandau for six months' confinement for printing an anti-Christian
work by one Dr. Pott. [1302] But as he grew more confident in his own
methods he extended to men of his own way of thinking the toleration
he allowed to all religionists, save insofar as he vetoed the mutual
vituperation of the sects, and such proselytizing as tended to create
strife. With an even hand he protected Catholics, Greek Christians,
and Unitarians, letting them have churches where they would; [1303]
and when, after the battle of Striegau, a body of Protestant peasantry
asked his permission to slay all the Catholics they could find,
he answered with the gospel precept, "Love your enemies." [1304]
Beyond the toleration of all forms of religion, however, he never
went; though he himself added to the literature of deism. Apart from
his verses we have from him the posthumous treatise Pensées sur la
Religion, probably written early in his life, where the rational case
against the concepts of revelation and of miracles is put with a calm
and sustained force. Like the rest, he is uncritical in his deism;
but, that granted, his reasoning is unanswerable. In talk he was wont
to treat the clergy with small respect; [1305] and he wrote more
denunciatory things concerning them than almost any freethinker of
the century. [1306] Bayle, Voltaire, and Lucretius were his favourite
studies; and as the then crude German literature had no attraction for
him, he drew to his court many distinguished Frenchmen, including La
Mettrie, Maupertuis, D'Alembert, D'Argens, and above all Voltaire,
between whom and him there was an incurable incompatibility of
temper and character, and a persistent attraction of force of mind,
which left them admiring without respecting each other, and unable
to abstain from mutual vituperation. Under Frederick's vigorous rule
all speech was free save such as he considered personally offensive,
as Voltaire's attack on Maupertuis; and after a stormy reign he could
say, when asked by Prince William of Brunswick whether he did not
think religion one of the best supports of a king's authority, "I
find order and the laws sufficient.... Depend upon it, countries have
been admirably governed when your religion had no existence." [1307]
Religion certainly had no part in his personality in the ordinary
sense of the term. Voltaire was wont to impute to him atheism; when
La Mettrie died, the mocker, then at Frederick's court, remarked
that the post of his majesty's atheist was vacant, but happily the
Abbé de Prades was there to fill it. In effect, Frederick professed
Voltaire's own deism; but of all the deists of the time he had least
of the religious temperament and most of sheer cynicism.
The attempt of Carlyle to exhibit Frederick as a practical
believer is a flagrant instance of that writer's subjective
method. He tells (Hist. of Friedrich, bk. xviii, ch. x) that at
the beginning of the battle of Leuthen a column of troops near
the king sang a hymn of duty (which Carlyle calls "the sound of
Psalms"); that an officer asked whether the singing should be
stopped, and that the king said "By no means." His "hard heart
seems to have been touched by it. Indeed, there is in him, in
those grim days, a tone (!) as of trust in the Eternal, as of
real religious piety and faith, scarcely noticeable elsewhere
in his history. His religion--and he had in withered forms a
good deal of it, if we will look well--being almost always in
a strictly voiceless state, nay, ultra voiceless, or voiced the
wrong way, as is too well known." Then comes the assertion that
"a moment after" the king said "to someone, Ziethen probably,
'With men like these, don't you think I shall have victory this
day!'" Here, with the very spirit of unveracity at work before his
eyes, Carlyle plumps for the fable. Yet the story, even if true,
would give no proof whatever of religious belief.
In point of fact, Frederick was a much less "religious" deist
than Voltaire. He erected no temple to his unloved God. And a
perusal of his dialogue of Pompadour and the Virgin (Dialogues
des morts) may serve to dispose of the thesis that the German
mind dealt reverently and decently with matters which the French
mind handled frivolously. That performance outgoes in ribaldry
anything of the age in French.
As the first modern freethinking king, Frederick is something of a test
case. Son of a man of narrow mind and odious character, he was himself
no admirable type, being neither benevolent nor considerate, neither
truthful nor generous; and in international politics, after writing in
his youth a treatise in censure of Machiavelli, he played the old game
of unscrupulous aggression. Yet he was not only the most competent,
but, as regards home administration, the most conscientious king of his
time. To find him a rival we must go back to the pagan Antonines and
Julian, or at least to St. Louis of France, who, however, was rather
worsened than bettered by his creed. [1308] Henri IV of France, who
rivalled him in sagacity and greatly excelled him in human kindness,
was far his inferior in devotion to duty.
The effect of Frederick's training is seen in his final attitude to
the advanced criticism of the school of d'Holbach, which assailed
governments and creeds with the same unsparing severity of logic and
moral reprobation. Stung by the uncompromising attack, Frederick
retorts by censuring the rashness which would plunge nations into
civil strife because kings miscarry where no human wisdom could avoid
miscarriage. He who had wantonly plunged all Germany into a hell of
war for his sole ambition, bringing myriads to misery, thousands
to violent death, and hundreds of his own soldiers to suicide,
could be virtuously indignant at the irresponsible audacity of
writers who indicted the whole existing system for its imbecility and
injustice. But he did reason on the criticism; he did ponder it; he did
feel bound to meet argument with argument; and he left his arguments to
the world. The advance on previous regal practice is noteworthy: the
whole problem of politics is at once brought to the test of judgment
and persuasion. Beside the Christian Georges and the Louis's of his
century, and beside his Christian father, his superiority in judgment
and even in some essential points of character is signal. Such was
the great deist king of the deist age; a deist of the least religious
temper and of no very fine moral material to begin with.
The one contemporary monarch who in any way compares with him in
enlightenment, Joseph II of Austria, belonged to the same school. The
main charge against Frederick as a ruler is that he did not act up
to the ideals of the school of Voltaire. In reply to the demand of
the French deists for an abolition of all superstitious teaching,
he observed that among the 16,000,000 inhabitants of France
at most 200,000 were capable of philosophic views, and that the
remaining 15,800,000 were held to their opinions by "insurmountable
obstacles." [1309] This, however, had been said by the deists
themselves (e.g., d'Holbach, préf. to Christianisme dévoilé); and
such an answer meant that he had no idea of so spreading instruction
that all men should have a chance of reaching rational beliefs. This
attitude was his inheritance from the past. Yet it was under him that
Prussia began to figure as a first-rate culture force in Europe.