Oldal 113 [113]
OCR
THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY... Goethe’s Zahmes Xenion: “The more you feel that you are human, the more like the Gods you are", sums up the critical, Promethean and humanitarian mentality for which humans were never merely means, but always also an end. It elevated man to his destiny by assimilating him into the sphere of the Gods. For Goethe, man was the most perfect and the highest being. Made in God’s image, mankind possessed divine features.’ Goethe’s religious philosophy climaxes in the notion of man’s reverence for his own divinity. “The feeling of human dignity, objectified, equals God”, was Goethe’s brief comment on Kant." In his reading of Kant, Schiller interpreted the phrase “God in us” to mean “moral independence” and “Godlikeness” as the “destiny” and “the goal toward which man aspires.”!!! For Schiller, the idea of man as the image of God did not merely constitute protest against theological orthodoxy, but was also a measure of humanity pursuing its earthly destiny. “Man bears within his personality ... a predisposition for divinity ... the path towards divinity, if one can call something that never leads to its goal a path [has been] revealed to man in his senses.”!!? Man was to become God - Schiller’s goal never changed. Later, however, he no longer found “divinity” in the purely moral will. In Ästhetischen Briefe’? a new way opened through beauty. Godlikeness could be created in harmonious mediation between “wisdom” and “love”, “thinking” and “feeling”, “grace” and “dignity” — these were the poles around which Schiller’s thinking revolved, especially in his later theoretical writings, mainly on aesthetics.'“ Nevertheless, Schiller’s belief in man’s perfectibility in and through beauty had nothing to do with aestheticism. Ultimately, this doctrine of the deification of man by beauty was less a philosophy than a belief. Schiller not merely proclaimed it in his Asthetischen Briefe; for him, the most appropriate medium for portraying this concept was always the work of art itself. Nevertheless, Schiller’s belief in man’s perfectibility in and through beauty had nothing to do with aestheticism. In his view the difference between divine humanity and the 108 Goethe, cited in BOLLACHER, Vernunft und Geschichte (note 7),. 269. 10° Goethe, Sprüche, 903, quoted from FRANZ, Erich, Goethe als religiöser Denker, Tübingen, Mohr, 1932, 14f. 110 Goethe, Randbemerkung zu Kants Kritik der Urteilskraft, $ 86, note, quoted from FRANZ, Goethe als religiöser Denker, (note 109), 120. SCHILLER, Friedrich, Philosophie der Physiologie, in G. Fricke - H. G. Göpfert (eds.), Sämtliche Werke, (hereafter cited as SCHILLER, Werke),, 5th revised edition, vol. 5, München, Hanser, 1976, 250. SCHILLER, Philosophie der Physiologie, Schiller Werke, vol. 5, 251. SCHILLER, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reihe von Briefen, Schiller Werke, vol. 5, 570-669. 114 Cf. SCHILLER, Über Anmut und Würde, Schiller Werke, vol. 5, 433-488, 483 ff. © 11 BE 11. DS 11. u * 111 +
