Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

In such circumstances, the active freethought existing in France at the beginning of the seventeenth century could not fail to affect Germany; and even before the date of the polemic of Garasse and Mersenne there appeared (1615) a counterblast to the new thought in the Theologia Naturalis of J. H. Alsted, of Frankfort, directed adversus atheos, Epicureos, et sophistas hujus temporis. The preface to this solid quarto (a remarkable sample of good printing for the period) declares that “there are men in this diseased (exulcerato) age who dare to oppose science to revelation, reason to faith, nature to grace, the creator to the redeemer, and truth to truth”; and the writer undertakes to rise argumentatively from nature to the Christian God, without, however, transcending the logical plane of De Mornay. The trouble of the time, unhappily for the faith, was not rationalism, but the inextinguishable hatreds of Protestant and Catholic, and the strife of economic interests dating from the appropriations of the first reformers. At length, after a generation of gloomy suspense, came the explosion of the hostile ecclesiastical interests, and the long-drawn horror of the Thirty Years’ War, which left Germany mangled, devastated, drained of blood and treasure, decivilized, and well-nigh destitute of the machinery of culture. No such printing as that of Alsted’s book was to be done in the German world for many generations. But as in France, so in Germany, the exhausting experience of the moral and physical evil of religious war wrought something of an antidote, in the shape of a new spirit of rationalism.

Knutzen’s Latin letter is given in full by a Welsh scholar settled in Germany, Jenkinus Thomasius (Jenkin Thomas), in his Historia Atheismi (Altdorf, 1692), ed. Basel, 1709, pp. 97–101; also by La Croze in his (anon.) Entretiens sur divers sujets, 1711, p. 402 sq. Thomasius thus codifies its doctrine:—“1. There is neither God nor Devil. 2. The magistrate is nothing to be esteemed; temples are to be condemned, priests to be rejected. 3. In place of the magistrate and the priest are to be put knowledge and reason, joined with conscience, which teaches to live honestly, to injure none, and to give each his own. 4. Marriage and free union do not differ. 5. This is the only life: after it, there is neither reward nor punishment. 6. The Scripture contradicts itself.” Knutzen admittedly wrote like a scholar (Thomasius, p. 97); but his treatment of Scripture contradictions belongs to the infancy of criticism; though La Croze, replying thirty years later, could only meet it with charges of impiety and stupidity. As to the numbers of the movement see Trinius, Freydenker Lexicon, 1759, s. v. Knutzen. Kurtz (Hist. of the Christian Church, Eng. tr. 1864, i, 213) states that a careful academic investigation proved the claim to a membership of 700 to be an empty boast (citing H. Rossel, Studien und Kritiken, 1844, iv). This doubtless refers to the treatise of Musæus, Jena, 1675, cited by La Croze, p. 401. Some converts Knutzen certainly made; and as only the hardiest would dare to avow themselves, his influence may have been considerable. “Examples of total unbelief come only singly to knowledge,” says Tholuck; “but total unbelief had still to the end of the century to bear penal treatment.” He gives the instances (1) of the Swedish Baron Skytte, reported in 1669 by Spener to the Frankfort authorities for having said at table, before the court preacher, that the Scriptures were not holy, and not from God but from men; and (2) “a certain minister” who at the end of the century was prosecuted for blasphemy. (Das kirchliche Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts, 2 Abth. pp. 56–57.) Even Anabaptists were still liable to banishment in the middle of the century. Id. 1 Abth. 1861, p. 36. As to clerical intolerance see pp. 40–44. On the merits of the Knutzen movement cp. Pünjer, Hist, of the Christian Philos. of Religion, Eng. tr. i, 437–8.

As to Wolff’s rationalistic influence see Cairns, Unbelief in the Eighteenth Century, 1881, p. 173; Pusey, pp. 115–19; Pünjer, p. 529; Lechler, pp. 448–49. “It cannot be questioned that, in his philosophy, the main stress rests upon the rational” (Kahnis, as cited, p. 28). “Francke and Lange (pietists) ... saw atheism and corruption of manners springing up from Wolff’s school” (before his exile). Id. p. 113. Wolff’s chief offence lay in stressing natural religion, and in indicating, as Tholuck observes, that that could be demonstrated, whereas revealed religion could only be believed (Abriss, p. 18). He greatly pleased Voltaire by the dictum that men ought to be just even though they had the misfortune to be atheists. It is noted by Tholuck, however (Abriss, as cited, p. 11, note), that the decree for Wolff’s expulsion was inspired not by his theological colleagues but by two military advisers of the king. Tholuck’s own criticism resolves itself into a protest against Wolff’s predilection for logical connection in his exposition. The fatal thing was that Wolff accustomed German Christians to reason.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.).

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.

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).

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.

The process of Kant’s adjustment of his philosophy to social needs as he regarded them is to be understood by following the chronology and the vogue of his writings. The first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason “excited little attention” (Stuckenberg, Life of Kant, p. 368); but in 1787 appeared the second and modified edition, with a new preface, clearly written with a propitiatory eye to the orthodox reaction. “All at once the work now became popular, and the praise was as loud and as fulsome as at first the silence had been profound. The literature of the day began to teem with Kantian ideas, with discussions of the new philosophy, and with the praises of its author.... High officials in Berlin would lay aside the weighty affairs of State to consider the Kritik, and among them were found warm admirers of the work and its author.” Id. p. 369. Cp. Heine, Rel. und Phil. in Deutschland, B. iii—Werke, iii, 75, 82.

This popularity becomes intelligible in the light of the new edition and its preface. To say nothing of the alterations in the text, pronounced by Schopenhauer to be cowardly accommodations (as to which question see Adamson, as cited, and Stuckenberg, p. 461, note 94), Kant writes in the preface that he had been “obliged to destroy knowledge in order to make room for faith”; and, again, that “only through criticism can the roots be cut of materialism, fatalism, atheism, freethinking unbelief (freigeisterischen Unglauben), fanaticism and superstition, which may become universally injurious; also of idealism and skepticism, which are dangerous rather to the Schools, and can hardly reach the general public.” (Meiklejohn mistranslates: “which are universally injurious”—Bohn ed. p. xxxvii.) This passage virtually puts the popular religion and all philosophies save Kant’s own on one level of moral dubiety. It is, however, distinctly uncandid as regards the “freethinking unbelief,” for Kant himself was certainly an unbeliever in Christian miracles and dogmas.

His readiness to make an appeal to prejudice appears again in the second edition of the Critique when he asks: “Whence does the freethinker derive his knowledge that there is, for instance, no Supreme Being?” (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Transc. Methodenlehre, 1 H. 2 Absch. ed. Kirchmann, 1879, p. 587; Bohn tr. p. 458.) He had just before professed to be dealing with denial of the “existence of God”—a proposition of no significance whatever unless “God” be defined. He now without warning substitutes the still more undefined expression “Supreme Being” for “God,” thus imputing a proposition probably never sustained with clear verbal purpose by any human being. Either, then, Kant’s own proposition was the entirely vacuous one that nobody can demonstrate the impossibility of an alleged undefined existence, or he was virtually asserting that no one can disprove any alleged supernatural existence—spirit, demon, Moloch, Krishna, Bel, Siva, Aphrodite, or Isis and Osiris. In the latter case he would be absolutely stultifying his own claim to cut the roots of “superstition” and “fanaticism” as well as of freethinking and materialism; for, if the freethinker cannot disprove Jehovah, neither can the Kantist disprove Allah and Satan; and Kant had no basis for denying, as he did with Spinoza, the existence of ghosts or spirits. From this dilemma Kant’s argument cannot be delivered. And as he finally introduces deity as a psychologically and morally necessary regulative idea, howbeit indemonstrable, he leaves every species of superstition exactly where it stood before—every superstition being practically held, as against “freethinking unbelief,” on just such a tenure.

If he could thus react against freethinking before 1789, he must needs carry the reaction further after the outbreak of the French Revolution; and his Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1792–1794) is a systematic effort to draw the teeth of the Aufklärung, modified only by his resentment of the tyranny of the political authority towards himself. Concerning the age-long opposition between rationalism (Verstandesaufklärung) and intuitionism or emotionalism (Gefühlsphilosophie), it is claimed by modern transcendentalists that Kant, or Herder, or another, has effected a solution on a plane higher than either. (E.g. Kronenberg, Herder’s Philosophie, 1889, p. 6.) The true solution certainly must account for both points of view—no very difficult matter; but no solution is really attained by either of these writers. Kant alternately stood at the two positions; and his unhistorical mind did not seek to unify them in a study of human evolution. For popular purposes he let pass the assumption that a cosmic emotion is a clue to the nature of the cosmos, as the water-finder’s hazel-twig is said to point to the whereabouts of water. Herder, recognisant of evolution, would not follow out any rational analysis.

Yet his effort at compromise had carried him to positions which are the negation of some of his own most emphatic ethical teachings. Like Plato, he is finally occupied in discussing the “right fictions” for didactic purposes. Swerving from thoroughgoing freethought for fear of moral harm, he ends by sacrificing intellectual morality to what seems to him social security. His doctrine, borrowed from Lessing, of a “conceivable” revelation which told man only what he could find out for himself, is a mere flout to reason. While he carries his “categorical imperative,” or à priori conception of duty, so extravagantly far as to argue that it is wrong even to tell a falsehood to a would-be murderer in order to mislead him, he approves of the systematic employment of the pulpit function by men who do not believe in the creed they there expound. The priest, with Kant’s encouragement, is to “draw all the practical lessons for his congregation from dogmas which he himself cannot subscribe with a full conviction of their truth, but which he can teach, since it is not altogether impossible that truth may be concealed therein,” while he remains free as a scholar to write in a contrary sense in his own name. And this doctrine, set forth in the censured work of 1793, is repeated in the moralist’s last treatise (1798), wherein he explains that the preacher, when speaking doctrinally, “can put into the passage under consideration his own rational views, whether found there or not.” Kant thus ended by reviving for the convenience of churchmen, in a worse form, the medieval principle of a “twofold truth.” So little efficacy is there in a transcendental ethic for any of the actual emergencies of life.

On this question compare Kant’s Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, Stück iii, Abth. i, § 6; Stück iv, Th. ii, preamble and §§ i, 3, and 4; with the essay Ueber ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen (1797), in reply to Constant—rep. in Kant’s Vorzügliche kleine Schriften, 1833, Bd. ii, and in App. to Rosenkranz’s ed. of Werke, vii, 295—given by T. K. Abbott in his tr. of the Critique of Judgment. See also Stuckenberg, pp. 341–45, and the general comment of Baur, Kirchengeschichte des 19ten Jahrhunderts, 1862, p. 65. “Kant’s recognition of Scripture is purely a matter of expedience. The State needs the Bible to control the people; the masses need it in order that they, having weak consciences, may recognize their duty; and the philosopher finds it a convenient vehicle for conveying to the people the faith of reason. Were it rejected it might be difficult, if not impossible, to put in its place another book which would inspire as much confidence.” All the while “Kant’s principles of course led him to deny that the Bible is authoritative in matters of religion, or that it is of itself a safe guide in morals.... Its value consists in the fact that, owing to the confidence of the people in it, reason can use it to interpret into Scripture its own doctrines, and can thus make it the means of popularizing rational faith. If anyone imagines that the aim of the interpretation is to obtain the real meaning of Scripture, he is no Kantian on this point” (Stuckenberg, p. 341).

24. It is true that the progressive work was not all done by the Rationalists so-called. As always, incoherences in the pioneers led to retorts which made for rectification. One of the errors of bias of the early naturalists, as we have noted, was their tendency to take every religious document as genuine and at bottom trustworthy, provided only that its allegations of miracles were explained away as misinterpretations of natural phenomena. So satisfied were many of them with this inexpensive method that they positively resisted the attempts of supernaturalists, seeking a way out of their special dilemma, to rectify the false ascriptions of the documents. Bent solely on one solution, they were oddly blind to evidential considerations which pointed to interpolation, forgery, variety of source, and error of literary tradition; while scholars bent on saving “inspiration” were often ready in some measure for such recognitions. These arrests of insight took place alternately on both sides, in the normal way of intellectual progress by alternate movements. All the while, it is the same primary force of reason that sets up the alternate pressures, and the secondary pressures are generated by, and are impossible without, the first.