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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 suggested, 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 supporters 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 religion 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, especially 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, active 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 Nation (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.
