Seite 117 [117]
THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY...
Religion als Wissenschaft, which was anonymously published in 1795. In his
view the “veils” or coverings are still necessary as a temporary expedient, but
they would be gradually dispensed with, “clearly an expression of the progress
of knowledge.” Niethammer expected that one day, “when the human spirit has
gone through the whole course of development ..., positive religion, gradually
purified of the accretions which it has acquired in response to the needs of the
time, will be elevated into pure Vernunftreligion”. This will happen, he sug¬
gested, as soon as humankind has reached the stage “at which unveiled truth
will no longer dazzle it.”"°*
For contemporaries, intellectual involvement remained an indispensable
condition for any religious certainty, but it was not the only one. Few sup¬
porters of the Enlightenment claimed that the rational dimension of religion
accounted fully for its truth. Rather, they combined belief in a specific canon
of fundamental ethical and religious truths with the warmth and sincerity of
a sensitive heart. It was the Enlightened theology and not the young Friedrich
Schleiermacher that defined emotion as the core of religion. The heart as the
seat of feeling could be elevated into something “sacred”, so that feeling and
religion came to represent two sides of the same coin: “A person with no re¬
ligion has no sensibility ... a person with the wrong religion has the wrong
sensibility.”!*° Feeling could hardly be rated more highly. Ultimately, sensibility,
virtue and religion were so closely intertwined that an insensitive person was
almost considered to be Godless and immoral.
The Enlightened theologians could not ignore this mode of religion, espe¬
cially because of their critical distance from Pietism. Johann Joachim Spalding
excluded from his deliberation both Wolff’s pure reasoning and the unfree type
of emotionality which submitted to the prescribed standards of a penitential
struggle. But for him both motives continued to be effective in a lively, ac¬
tive moral feeling which was “heartfelt” and “reasonable” in equal measure."
He transformed the apparent autonomy of both reason and emotion into the
concept “the integral human being” (ganzer Mensch), integrated “head and
134 NIETHAMMER, Friedrich Immanuel, Über Religion als Wissenschaft. Zur Bestimmung des Inhalts
der Religionen und der Behandlungsart ihrer Urkunden, Neustrelitz, Hofbuchhandlung, 1795,
preface; cf. LINDNER, Gerhard, Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer als Christ und Theologe. Seine
Entwicklung vom deutschen Idealismus zum konfessionellen Luthertum. PhD thesis, University
of Erlangen, Nürnberg, 1971.
135 BEST, Renate, Juden und Judenbilder in der gesellschaftlichen Konstruktion einer deutschen Na¬
tion (1781-1804), in H.-G. Haupt — D. Langenwiesche (eds.), Nation und Religion in der deutschen
Geschichte, Frankfurt — New York, Campus, 2001, 200.
136 Cf, SPALDING, Johann Joachim, Die Bestimmung des Menschen, 5th edition, Leipzig, Weidmann
und Reich, 1768, 5.