England; and, according to a contemporary preacher, "Berliner" was
about 1777 a synonym for "rationalist." [1388] Wieland, one of the
foremost German men of letters of his time, is known to have become
a deist of the school of Shaftesbury; [1389] and in the leading
journal of the day he wrote on the free use of reason in matters of
faith. [1390] Some acts of persecution by the Church show how far the
movement had gone. In 1774 we find a Catholic professor at Mayence,
Lorenzo Isenbiehl, deposed and sent back to the seminary for two
years on the score of "deficient theological knowledge," because he
argued (after Collins) that the text Isaiah vii, 14 applied not to
the mother of Jesus but to a contemporary of the prophet; and when,
four years later, he published a book on the same thesis, in Latin, he
was imprisoned. Three years later still, a young Jesuit of Salzburg,
named Steinbuhler, was actually condemned to death for writing some
satires on Roman Catholic ceremonies, and, though afterwards pardoned,
died of the ill-usage he had undergone in prison. [1391] It may have
been the sense of danger aroused by such persecution that led to the
founding, in 1780, of a curious society which combined an element
of freethinking Jesuitism with freemasonry, and which included a
number of statesmen, noblemen, and professors--Goethe, Herder, and
the Duke of Weimar being among its adherents. But it is difficult to
take seriously the accounts given of the order. [1392]
The spirit of rationalism, in any case, was now so prevalent that
it began to dominate the work of the more intelligent theologians,
to whose consequent illogical attempts to strain out by the most
dubious means the supernatural elements from the Bible narratives
[1393] the name of "rationalism" came to be specially applied, [1394]
that being the kind of criticism naturally most discussed among the
clergy. Taking rise broadly in the work of Semler, reinforced by that
of the English and French deists and that of Reimarus, the method led
stage by stage to the scientific performance of Strauss and Baur, and
the recent "higher criticism" of the Old and New Testaments. Noteworthy
at its outset as exhibiting the tendency of official believers to
make men, in the words of Lessing, irrational philosophers by way of
making them rational Christians, [1395] this order of "rationalism"
in its intermediate stages belongs rather to the history of Biblical
scholarship than to that of freethought, since more radical work was
being done by unprofessional writers outside, and deeper problems were
raised by the new systems of philosophy. Within the Lutheran pale,
however, there were some hardy thinkers. A striking figure of the time,
in respect of his courage and thoroughness, is the Lutheran pastor
J. H. Schulz, [1396] who so strongly combatted the compromises of the
Semler school in regard to the Pentateuch, and argued so plainly for a
severance of morals from religion as to bring about his own dismissal
(1792). [1397] Schulz's Philosophical Meditation on Theology and
Religion [1398] (1784) is indeed one of the most pronounced attacks on
orthodox religion produced in that age. But it is in itself a purely
speculative construction. Following the current historical method,
he makes Moses the child of the Egyptian princess, and represents him
as imposing on the ignorant Israelites a religion invented by himself,
and expressive only of his own passions. Jesus in turn is extolled in
the terms common to the freethinkers of the age; but his conception
of God is dismissed as chimerical; and Schulz finally rests in the
position of Edelmann, that the only rational conception of deity is
that of the "sufficient ground of the world," and that on this view
no man is an atheist. [1399]
Schulz's dismissal appears to have been one of the fruits of the
orthodox edict (1788) of the new king, Frederick William II, the
brother of Frederick, who succeeded in 1786. It announced him--in
reality a "strange compound of lawless debauchery and priest-ridden
superstition" [1400]--as the champion of religion and the enemy of
freethinking; forbade all proselytizing, and menaced with penalties
all forms of heresy, [1401] while professing to maintain freedom of
conscience. The edict seems to have been specially provoked by fresh
literature of a pronouncedly freethinking stamp, though it lays stress
on the fact that "so many clergymen have the boldness to disseminate
the doctrines of the Socinians, Deists, and Naturalists under the name
of Aufklärung." The work of Schulz would be one of the provocatives,
and there were others. In 1785 had appeared the anonymous Moroccan
Letters, [1402] wherein, after the model of the Persian Letters
and others, the life and creeds of Germany are handled in a quite
Voltairean fashion. The writer is evidently familiar with French
and English deistic literature, and draws freely on both, making
no pretence of systematic treatment. Such writing, quietly turning
a disenchanting light of common sense on Scriptural incredibilities
and Christian historical scandals, without a trace of polemical zeal,
illustrated at once the futility of Kant's claim, in the second edition
of his Critique of Pure Reason, to counteract "freethinking unbelief"
by transcendental philosophy. And though the writer is careful to point
to the frequent association of Christian fanaticism with regicide,
his very explicit appeal for a unification of Germany, [1403] his
account of the German Protestant peasant and labourer as the most
dismal figure in Germany, Holland, and Switzerland, [1404] and his
charge against Germans of degrading their women, [1405] would not
enlist the favour of the authorities for his work. Within two years
(1787) appeared, unsigned, an even more strongly anti-Christian and
anti-clerical work, The In Part Only True System of the Christian
Religion, [1406] ascribed to Jakob von Mauvillon, [1407] whom we have
seen twenty-one years before translating the freethinking romance of
Holberg. Beginning his career as a serious publicist by translating
Raynal's explosive history of the Indies (7 vols. 1774-78), he had done
solid work as a historian and as an economist, and also as an officer
in the service of the Duke of Brunswick and a writer on military
science. The True System is hostile alike to priesthoods and to the
accommodating theologians, whose attempt to rationalize Christianity on
historical lines it flouts in Lessing's vein as futile. Mauvillon finds
unthinkable the idea of a revelation which could not be universal;
rejects miracles and prophecies as vain bases for a creed; sums up the
New Testament as planless; and pronounces the ethic of Christianity,
commonly regarded as its strongest side, the weakest side of all. He
sums up, in fact, in a logical whole, the work of the English and
French deists. [1408] To such propaganda the edict of repression was
the official answer. It naturally roused a strong opposition; [1409]
but though it ultimately failed, through the general breakdown of
European despotisms, it was not without injurious effect. The first
edict was followed in a few months by one which placed the press and
all literature, native and foreign, under censorship. This policy,
which was chiefly inspired by the new king's Minister of Religion,
Woellner, was followed up in 1791 by the appointment of a committee
of three reactionaries--Hermes, Hilmer, and Woltersdorf--who not
only saw to the execution of the edicts, but supervised the schools
and churches. Such a regimen, aided by the reaction against the
Revolution, for a time prevented any open propaganda on the part of
men officially placed; and we shall see it hampering and humiliating
Kant; but it left the leaven of anti-supernaturalism to work all the
more effectively among the increasing crowd of university students.
Many minds of the period, doubtless, are typified by Herder,
who, though a practising clergyman, was clearly a Spinozistic
theist, accommodating himself to popular Christianity in a genially
latitudinarian spirit. [1410] When in his youth he published an essay
discussing Genesis as a piece of oriental poetry, not to be treated as
science or theology, he evoked an amount of hostility which startled
him. [1411] Learning his lesson, he was for the future guarded enough
to escape persecution. He was led by his own temperamental bias,
however, to a transcendental position in philosophy. Originally in
agreement with Kant, [1412] as against the current metaphysic, in the
period before the issue of the latter's Critique of Pure Reason, he
nourished his religious instincts by a discursive reading of history,
which he handled in a comparatively scientific yet above all poetic
or theosophic spirit, while Kant, who had little or no interest in
history, developed his thought on the side of physical science. [1413]
The philosophic methods of the two men thus became opposed; and when
Herder found Kant's philosophy producing a strongly rationalistic
cast of thought among the divinity students who came before him
for examination, he directly and sharply antagonized it [1414] in
a theistic sense. Yet his own influence on his age was on the whole
latitudinarian and anti-theological; he opposed to the apriorism of
Kant the view that the concepts of space and time are the results of
experience and an abstraction of its contents; his historic studies
had developed in him a conception of the process of evolution alike
in life, opinion, and faculty; and orthodoxy and philosophy alike
incline to rank him as a pantheist. [1415]