[Later came the works of Buddeus (1716) and Reimmann and Fabricius, noted above, vol. i, ch. i, § 2.]
3. For a community in which the reading class was mainly clerical and scholastic, the seeds of rationalism were thus in part sown in the seventeenth century; but the ground was not yet propitious. Leibnitz (1646–1716), the chief thinker produced by Germany before Kant, lived in a state of singular intellectual isolation;[19] and showed his sense of it by writing his philosophic treatises chiefly in French. One of the most widely learned men of his age, he was wont from his boyhood to grapple critically with every system of thought that came in his way; and, while claiming to be always eager to learn,[20] he was as a rule strongly concerned to affirm his own powerful bias. Early in life he writes that it horrifies him to think how many men he has met who were at once intelligent and atheistic;[21] and his propaganda is always dominated by the desire rather to confute unbelief than to find out the truth. As early as 1668 (aet. 22) he wrote an essay to that end, which was published as a Confessio naturæ contra Atheistas. Against Spinoza he reacted instantly and violently, pronouncing the Tractatus on its first (anonymous) appearance an “unbearably bold (licentiosum) book,” and resenting the Hobbesian criticism which it “dared to apply to sacred Scripture.”[22] Yet in the next year we find him writing to Arnauld in earnest protest against the hidebound orthodoxy of the Church. “A philosophic age,” he declares, “is about to begin, in which the concern for truth, flourishing outside the schools, will spread even among politicians. Nothing is more likely to strengthen atheism and to upset faith, already so shaken by the attacks of great but bad men [23] For a time he seemed thus disposed to liberalize. He wrote to Spinoza on points of optics before he discovered the authorship; and he is represented later as speaking of the Tractatus with respect. He even visited Spinoza in 1676, and obtained a perusal of the manuscript of the Ethica; but he remained hostile to him in theology and philosophy. To the last he called Spinoza a mere developer of Descartes,[24] whom he also habitually resisted.
This was not hopeful; and Leibnitz, with all his power and originality, really wrought little for the direct rationalization of religious thought.[25] His philosophy, with all its ingenuity, has the common stamp of the determination of the theist to find reasons for the God in whom he believed beforehand; and his principle that all is for the best is the fatal rounding of his argumentative circle. Thus his doctrine that that is true which is clear was turned to the account of an empiricism of which the “clearness” was really predetermined by the conviction of truth. His Theodicée,[26] written in reply to Bayle, is by the admission even of admirers[27] a process of begging the question. Deity, a mere “infinition” of finite qualities, is proved à priori, though it is expressly argued that a finite mind cannot grasp infinity; and the necessary goodness of necessary deity is posited in the same fashion. It is very significant that such a philosopher, himself much given to denying the religiousness of other men’s theories, was nevertheless accused among both the educated and the populace of being essentially non-religious. Nominally he adhered to the entire Christian system, including miracles, though he declared that his belief in dogma rested on the agreement of reason with faith, and claimed to keep his thought free on unassailed truths;[28] and he always discussed the Bible as a believer; yet he rarely went to church;[29] and the Low German nickname Lövenix (= Glaubet nichts, “believes nothing”) expressed his local reputation. No clergyman attended his funeral; but indeed no one else went, save his secretary.[30] It is on the whole difficult to doubt that his indirect influence not only in Germany but elsewhere had been and has been for deism and atheism.[31] He and Newton were the most distinguished mathematicians and theists of the age; and Leibnitz, as we saw, busied himself to show that the philosophy of Newton[32] tended to atheism, and that that of their theistic predecessor Descartes would not stand criticism.[33] Spinoza being, according to him, in still worse case, and Locke hardly any sounder,[34] there remained for theists only his cosmology of monads and his ethic of optimism—all for the best in the best of all possible worlds—which seems at least as well fitted as any other theism to make thoughtful men give up the principle.
4. Other culture-conditions concurred to set up a spirit of rationalism in Germany. After the Thirty Years’ War there arose a religious movement, called Pietism by its theological opponents, which aimed at an emotional inwardness of religious life as against what its adherents held to be an irreligious orthodoxy around them.[35] Contending against rigid articles of credence, they inevitably prepared the way for less credent forms of thought.[36] Though the first leaders of Pietism grew embittered with their unsuccess and the attacks of their religious enemies,[37] their impulse went far, and greatly influenced the clergy through the university of Halle, which in the first part of the eighteenth century turned out 6,000 clergymen in one generation.[38] Against the Pietists were furiously arrayed the Lutherans of the old order, who even contrived in many places to suppress their schools.[39] Virtues generated under persecution, however, underwent the law of degeneration which dogs all intellectual subjection; and the inner life of Pietism, lacking mental freedom and intellectual play, grew as cramped in its emotionalism as that of orthodoxy in its dogmatism. Religion was thus represented by a species of extremely unattractive and frequently absurd formalists on the one hand, and on the other by a school which at its best unsettled religious usage, and otherwise tended alternately to fanaticism and cant.[40] Thus “the rationalist tendencies of the age were promoted by this treble exhibition of the aberrations of belief.”[41] “How sorely,” says Tholuck, “the hold not only of ecclesiastical but of Biblical belief on men of all grades had been shaken at the beginning of the eighteenth century is seen in many instances.”[42] Orthodoxy selects that of a Holstein student who hanged himself at Wittemberg in 1688, leaving written in his New Testament, in Latin, the declaration that “Our soul is mortal; religion is a popular delusion, invented to gull the ignorant, and so govern the world the better.”[43] But again there is the testimony of the mint-master at Hanover that at court there all lived as “free atheists.” And though the name “freethinker” was not yet much used in discussion, it had become current in the form of Freigeist—the German equivalent still used. This, as we have noted,[44] was probably a survival from the name of the old sect of the “Free Spirit,” rather than an adaptation from the French esprit fort or the English “freethinker.”
5. After the collapse of the popular movement of Matthias Knutzen, the thin end of the new wedge may be seen in the manifold work of Christian Thomasius (1655–1728), who in 1687 published a treatise on “Divine Jurisprudence,” in which the principles of Pufendorf on natural law, already offensive to the theologians, were carried so far as to give new offence. Reading Pufendorf in his nonage as a student of jurisprudence, he was so conscious of the conflict between the utilitarian and the Scriptural view of moral law that, taught by a master who had denounced Pufendorf, he recoiled in a state of theological fear.[45] Some years later, gaining self-possession, he recognized the rationality of Pufendorf’s system, and both expounded and defended him, thus earning his share in the hostility which the great jurist encountered at clerical hands. Between that hostility and the naturalist bias which he had acquired from Pufendorf, there grew up in him an aversion to the methods and pretensions of theologians which made him their lifelong antagonist.[46] Pufendorf had but guardedly introduced some of the fundamental principles of Hobbes, relating morals to the social state, and thus preparing the way for utilitarianism.[47] This sufficed to make the theologians his enemies; and it is significant that Thomasius, heterodox at the outset only thus far forth, becomes from that point onwards an important pioneer of freethought, toleration, and humane reform. Innovating in all things, he began, while still a Privatdocent at Leipzig University, a campaign on behalf of the German language; and, not content with arousing much pedantic enmity by delivering lectures for the first time in his mother tongue, and deriding at the same time the bad scholastic Latin of his compatriots, he set on foot the first vernacular German periodical,[48] which ran for two years (1688–90), and caused so much anger that he was twice prosecuted before the ecclesiastical court of Dresden, the second time on a charge of contempt of religion. The periodical was in effect a crusade against all the pedantries, the theologians coming in for the hardest blows.[49] Other satirical writings, and a defence of intermarriage between Calvinists and Lutherans,[50] at length put him in such danger that, to escape imprisonment, he sought the protection of the Elector of Brandenburg at Halle, where he ultimately became professor of jurisprudence in the new university, founded by his advice. There for a time he leant towards the Pietists, finding in that body a concern for natural liberty of feeling and thinking which was absent from the mental life of orthodoxy; but he was “of another spirit” than they, and took his own way.
In philosophy an unsystematic pantheist, he taught, after Plutarch, Bayle, and Bacon, that “superstition is worse than atheism”; but his great practical service to German civilization, over and above his furthering of the native speech, was his vigorous polemic against prosecutions for heresy, trials for witchcraft, and the use of torture, all of which he did more than any other German to discredit, though judicial torture subsisted for another half-century.[51] It was by his propaganda that the princes of Germany were moved to abolish all trials for sorcery.[52] In such a battle he of course had the clergy against him all along the line; and it is as an anti-clerical that he figures in clerical history. The clerical hostility to his ethics he repaid with interest, setting himself to develop to the utmost, in the interest of lay freedom, the Lutheran admission of the divine right of princes.[53] This he turned not against freedom of opinion but against ecclesiastical claims, very much in the spirit of Hobbes, who may have influenced him.
The perturbed Mosheim, while candidly confessing that Thomasius is the founder of academic freedom in Germany, pronounces that the “famous jurists” who were led by Thomasius “set up a new fundamental principle of church polity—namely, the supreme authority and power of the civil magistrate,” so tending to create the opinion “that the ministers of religion are not to be accounted ambassadors of God, but vicegerents of the chief magistrates. They also weakened not a little the few remaining prerogatives and advantages which were left of the vast number formerly possessed by the clergy; and maintained that many of the maxims and regulations of our churches which had come down from our fathers were relics of popish superstition. This afforded matter for long and pernicious feuds and contests between our theologians and our jurists.... It will be sufficient for us to observe, what is abundantly attested, that they diminished much in various places the respect for the clergy, the reverence for religion, and the security and prosperity of the Lutheran Church.”[54] Pusey, in turn, grudgingly allows that “the study of history was revived and transformed through the views of Thomasius.”[55]
6. A personality of a very different kind emerges in the same period in Johann Conrad Dippel (1673–1734), who developed a system of rationalistic mysticism, and as to whom, says an orthodox historian, “one is doubtful whether to place him in the class of pietists or of rationalists, of enthusiasts or of scoffers, of mystics or of freethinkers.”[56] The son of a preacher, he yet “exhibited in his ninth year strong doubts as to the catechism.” After a tolerably free life as a student he turned Pietist at Strasburg, lectured on astrology and palmistry, preached, and got into trouble with the police. In 1698 he published under the pen-name of “Christianus Democritus” his book, Gestäuptes Papstthum der Protestirenden (“The Popery of the Protestantizers Whipped”), in which he so attacked the current Christian ethic of salvation as to exasperate both Churches.[57] The stress of his criticism fell firstly on the unthinking Scripturalism of the average Protestant, who, he said, while reproaching the Catholic with setting up in the crucifix a God of wood, was apt to make for himself a God of paper.[58] In his repudiation of the “bargain” or “redemption” doctrine of the historic Church he took up positions which were as old as Abailard, and which were one day to become respectable; but in his own life he was much of an Ishmaelite, with wild notions of alchemy and gold-making; and after predicting that he should live till 1808, he died suddenly in 1734, leaving a doctrine which appealed only to those constitutionally inclined, on the lines of the earlier English Quakers, to set the inner light above Scripture.[59]
7. Among the pupils of Thomasius at Halle was Theodore Louis Lau, who, born of an aristocratic family, became Minister of Finances to the Duke of Courland, and after leaving that post held a high place in the service of the Elector Palatine. While holding that office Lau published a small Latin volume of pensées entitled Meditationes Theologicæ-Physicæ, notably deistic in tone. This gave rise to such an outcry among the clergy that he had to leave Frankfort, only, however, to be summoned before the consistory of Königsberg, his native town, and charged with atheism (1719). He thereupon retired to Altona, where he had freedom enough to publish a reply to his clerical persecutors.[60]
8. While Thomasius was still at work, a new force arose of a more distinctly academic cast. This was the adaptation of Leibnitz’s system by Christian Wolff, who, after building up a large influence among students by his method of teaching,[61] came into public prominence by a rectorial address[62] at Halle (1721) in which he warmly praised the ethics of Confucius. Such praise was naturally held to imply disparagement of Christianity; and as a result of the pietist outcry Wolff was condemned by the king to exile from Prussia, under penalty of the gallows,[63] all “atheistical” writings being at the same time forbidden. Wolff’s system, however, prevailed so completely, in virtue of its lucidity and the rationalizing tendency of the age, that in the year 1738 there were said to be already 107 authors of his cast of thinking. Nevertheless, he refused to return to Halle on any invitation till the accession (1740) of Frederick the Great, one of his warmest admirers, whereafter he figured as the German thinker of his age. His teaching, which for the first time popularized philosophy in the German language, in turn helped greatly, by its ratiocinative cast, to promote the rationalistic temper, though orthodox enough from the modern point of view. Under the new reign, however, pietism and Wolffism alike lost prestige,[64] and the age of anti-Christian and Christian rationalism began. Thus the period of freethinking in Germany follows close upon one of religious revival. The 6,000 theologians trained at Halle in the first generation of the century had “worked like a leaven through all Germany.”[65] “Not since the time of the Reformation had Germany such a large number of truly pious preachers and laymen as towards the end of the first half of the eighteenth century.”[66] There, as elsewhere, religion intellectually collapsed.