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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY... one", he insisted during the atheism dispute;'** “both are interventions by the transcendental, the former through action, the latter through faith.”!** This, however, remains tied to the “moral revelations of the spirit, which gain reality in action.”!?5 According to Kant, morality was merely the “most important part of the highest good”, and “moral principles teach us not so much how to be happy as how to be worthy of happiness." Fichte, by contrast, considered morality as self-sufficient enough to translate the “Kingdom of God” into reality, even if only by an endless process. This systematization, which led to a totally ethicized Christianity, did not mean that religion had been sacrificed to morality and absorbed by it, but only that religious truths were rigorously related to an ethical view of self and could only be perceived as such. Neither the Enlightened theologians nor Fichte, despite this ambivalence, ever suggested that its ethical foundation accounted fully for the truth of religion. Under the influence of the Enlightenment the religious impulse slowly gave way to a moralizing that promoted independence. This new development appears as a process of gradual transformation of the religious awareness of sin and repentance into moral self-discipline.'*” V In order to circumscribe Enlightened religion, the supporters of the Enlightenment coined, among others ideas, the notion of “private religion”. It served as a shorthand term for the self-determination of religious belief, for the individualization of religion and for the distancing from the protestant church. The claim to autonomy led to an individualistic undogmatic religion as a result of the criticism of traditional religion. Enlightened reasoning became the test for religion’s humanity. The subjective religion manifested the claim to be entitled, distinctly, to give voice against the Church’s pretension. This individualization of religion exhibited a crucial feature of the Enlightenment religiosity. The Enlightened Christians no longer assumed the Church to be the sole bearer of 183 FICHTE, Appellation an das Publikum (note 179), 193 — 238, 209. 184 Tbid. 185 STRACK, Friedrich, Im Schatten der Neugier. Christliche Tradition und kritische Philosophie im Werk Friedrich von Hardenbergs, Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1982, 206. 186 KANT, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (note 131), 143, 169. 17 Onthis cf. the fruitful approach in KITTSTEINER, Heinz-Dieter,From grace to virtue: concerning a change in the presentation ofthe parable ofthe prodigal son inthe 18th and early 19'* centuries, Social Science Information 23 (1986), 955-975. e 123"
