Note 223 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

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