Oldal 107 [107]
THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY...
the Olympian Gods." The heroine of his drama Iphigenie auf Tauris represents
the process of human self-assertion against the unreasonable demands of the
Gods: a fine and developed sense of any threat to freedom and self-determina¬
tion and the demand for autonomy. Goethe was depicting a refusal to submit
to the Gods, not a struggle against them.” The protagonists of the Enlighten¬
ment discerned the orthodox interrelationship between the conventional idea
of God and that of sin.
Supporters of the Enlightenment rejected the dogma of original sin, because
it declared that human moral powers were ultimately ineffective and made
man totally dependent on divine grace. Enlightened theologians thought that
burdening all humans with guilt for Adam’s disobedience was contrary to God’s
absolute goodness.
With Leibniz a fundamental reinterpretation of original sin began. The no¬
tion gradually gave way to the idea of metaphysical evil. Evil itself was no longer
recognized as an efficient cause in the world or in man. Human corruption
became mere human imperfection.”’ While humanity after the fall was the
starting point of Martin Luther’s thinking, natural men provided the point of
departure for Leibniz’s reflections on theology. Ultimately, the image of the
sinner was replaced by that of a free human being created by God.
Christian notions ofa sinful corruption of humanity had already been swept
away by the moral weeklies of the mid-eighteenth century.” The journal Der
Mensch, for example, suggested, that, although “the corrupt character with
which we are born [has] permeated [us]”, it is nevertheless “something alien,
which goes against our nature.” While humans were conceived in sin, he wrote,
corruption was “not naturally part of human nature ... but had been added to
it.”’3 In other words, sinfulness was accidental, not an essential part of human
nature, while the basic features of virtue, he argued, were integral to human
nature. The reality of innate sin and the indispensability of divine grace were
denied. Evil was now seen as something purely human. The power to over¬
come it also lay exclusively with men, and it was of course a part of this new
69 Cf. Rascu, Iphigenie auf Tauris (note 48), 27ff.
7 Tbid.
71 Cf. LEIBNIZ, Theodizee (note 54), I, § 20, $29, $31; cf. WOLFF, Christian, Vernünfftige Gedancken
von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, 4" ed. with occasional additions, Frankfurt/M. ¬
Leipzig, 1738, § 1056; cf. for the theological tradition ScHUBART, Anselm, Das Ende der Siinde.
Anthropologie und Erbsünde zwischen Reformation und Aufklärung, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 2002.
72 Cf. MARTENS, Wolfgang, Die Botschaft der Tugend. Die Aufklärung im Spiegel der deutschen
Moralischen Wochenschriften, Stuttgart, Metzler, 1971, esp. 231ff.
73 Quoted from MARTENS, Wochenschriften (note 72), 233.
- 105 +