[282] Mignet, Hist. de la révolution française, 4e édit. ii, 340. [↑]
Chapter XVIII
GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
1. When two generations of Protestant strife had turned to naught the intellectual promise of the Reformation, and much of the ground first won by it had lapsed to Catholicism, the general forward movement of European thought availed to set up in Germany as elsewhere a measure of critical unbelief. There is abundant evidence that the Lutheran clergy not only failed to hold the best intelligence of the country with them, but in large part fell into personal disrepute.[1] “The scenes of clerical immorality,” says an eminently orthodox historian, “are enough to chill one’s blood even at the distance of two centuries.”[2] A Church Ordinance of 1600 acknowledges information to the effect that a number of clergymen and schoolmasters are guilty of “whoredom and fornication,” and commands that “if they are notoriously guilty they shall be suspended.” Details are preserved of cases of clerical drunkenness and ruffianism; and the women of the priests’ families do not escape the pillory.[3] Nearly a century later, Arnold resigned his professorship at Giessen “from despair of producing any amendment in the dissolute habits of the students.”[4] It is noted that “the great moral decline of the clergy was confined chiefly to the Lutheran Church. The Reformed [Calvinistic] was earnest, pious, and aggressive”[5]—the usual result of official hostility.
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.
Not only was the Peace of Westphalia an essentially secular arrangement, subordinating all religious claims to a political settlement,[6] but the drift of opinion was markedly freethinking. Already in 1630 one writer describes “three classes of skeptics among the nobility of Hamburg: first, those who believe that religion is nothing but a mere fiction, invented to keep the masses in restraint; second, those who give preference to no faith, but think that all religions have a germ of truth; and third, those who, confessing that there must be one true religion, are unable to decide whether it is papal, Calvinist, or Lutheran, and consequently believe nothing at all.” No less explicit is the written testimony of Walther, the court chaplain of Ulrich II of East Friesland, 1637: “These infernal courtiers, among whom I am compelled to live against my will, doubt those truths which even the heathen have learned to believe.”[7] In Germany as in France the freethinking which thus grew up during the religious war expanded after the peace. As usual, this is to be gathered from the orthodox propaganda against it, setting out in 1662 with a Preservative against the Pest of Present-day Atheists,[8] by one Theophilus Gegenbauer. So far was this from attaining its end that there ensued ere long a more positive and aggressive development of freethinking than any other country had yet seen. A wandering scholar, Matthias Knutzen of Holstein (b. 1645), who had studied philosophy at Königsberg, went about in 1674 teaching a hardy Religion of Humanity, rejecting alike immortality, God and Devil, churches and priests, and insisting that conscience could perfectly well take the place of the Bible as a guide to conduct. His doctrines are to be gathered chiefly from a curious Latin letter,[9] written by him for circulation, headed Amicus Amicis Amica; and in this the profession of atheism is explicit: “Insuper Deum negamus.” In two dialogues in German he set forth the same ideas. His followers, as holding by conscience, were called Gewissener; and he or another of his group asserted that in Jena alone there were seven hundred of them.[10] The figures were fantastic, and the whole movement passed rapidly out of sight—hardly by reason of the orthodox refutations, however. Germany was in no state to sustain such a party; and what happened was a necessarily slow gestation of the seed of new thought thus cast abroad.
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.
2. While, however, clerical action could drive such a movement under the surface, it could not prevent the spread of rationalism in all directions; and there was now germinating a philosophic unbelief[11] under the influence of Spinoza. Nowhere were there more prompt and numerous answers to Spinoza than in Germany,[12] whence it may be inferred that within the educated class he soon had a good many adherents. In point of fact the Elector Palatine offered him a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg in 1673, promising him “the most ample freedom in philosophical teaching,” and merely stipulating that he should not use it “to disturb the religion publicly established.”[13] On the other hand, Professor Rappolt, of Leipzig, attacked him as an atheist, in an Oratio contra naturalistas in 1670; Professor Musæus, of Jena, assailed him in 1674;[14] and the Chancellor Kortholt, of Kiel, grouped him, Herbert, and Hobbes as The Three Great Impostors in 1680.[15] After the appearance of the Ethica the replies multiplied. On the other hand, Cuffelaer vindicated Spinoza in 1684; and in 1691 F. W. Stosch, a court official, and son of the court preacher, published a stringent attack on revelationism, entitled Concordia rationis et fidei, partly on Spinozistic lines, which created much commotion, and was forcibly suppressed and condemned to be burnt by the hangman at Berlin,[16] as it denied not only the immateriality but the immortality of the soul and the historical truth of the Scriptural narratives. This seems to have been the first work of modern freethought published by a German,[17] apart from Knutzen’s letter; but a partial list of the apologetic works of the period, from Gegenbauer onwards, may suffice to suggest the real vogue of heterodox opinions:—
| 1662. | Th. Gegenbauer. Preservatiowider die Pest der heutigen Atheisten. Erfurt. |
| 1668. | J. Musæus. ExamenCherburianismi. Contra E. Herbertum de Cherbury. |
| Anton Reiser. De origine, progressu,et incremento Antitheismi seu Atheismi.[18]Augsburg. |
| 1670. | Rappolt. Oratio contraNaturalistas. Leipzig. |
| 1672. | J. Müller. Atheismusdevictus (in German). Hamburg. |
| J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-Atheistica (in German). |
| 1673. | —— BesiegteAtheisterey. |
| Chr. Pfaff. Disputatio contraAtheistas. |
| 1674. | J. Musæus. Spinozismus.Jena. |
| 1677. | Val. Greissing. Corona Transylvani;Exerc. 2, de Atheismo, contra Cartesium et Math. Knutzen.Wittemberg. |
| Tobias Wagner. Examen ... atheismispeculativi. Tübingen. |
| K. Rudrauff, Giessen. Dissertatio deAtheismo. |
| 1680. | Chr. Kortholt. De tribusimpostoribus magnis liber. Kiloni. |
| 1689. | Th. Undereyck. Der NärrischeAtheist in seiner Thorheit ueberzeugt. Bremen. |
| 1692. | Jenkinus Thomasius. HistoriaAtheismi. Altdorf. |
| 1696. | J. Lassen. Arcana-Politica-Atheistica. Reprint. |
| 1697. | A. H. Grosse. An Atheismusnecessario ducat ad corruptionem morum. Rostock. |
| Em. Weber. Beurtheilung derAtheisterei. |
| 1700. | Tribbechov. HistoriaNaturalismi. Jena. |
| 1708. | Loescher. PrænotionesTheologicæ contra Naturalistarum et Fanaticorum omne genus,Atheos, Deistas, Indifferentistas, etc. Wittemberg. |
| Schwartz. Demonstrationes Dei.Leipzig. |
| Rechenberg. Fundamenta veræreligionis Prudentum, adversus Atheos, etc. |
| 1710. | J. C. Wolfius. Dissertatio deAtheismi falso suspectis. Wittemberg. |
| 1713. | J. N. Fromman. Atheus Stultus.Tübingen. |
| Anon. Widerlegung derAtheisten, Deisten, und neuen Zweifeler. Frankfort. |