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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY...
instructions should be left to a positive religion that relied on authority, while
the more highly educated could obey their own reason.’”
This view, held by all members of the educated classes, was expressed most
clearly of all by Goethe. “Anyone who possesses science and art has religion
as well; anyone who possesses neither of these had better have religion.”'?*
The close reciprocal relationship between education and religion, based on
the Enlightened anthropologization of religion, appeared early in Goethe, who
repeatedly and persistently explained and defended his “private Christianity”.
To him, the “true believers” were people of culture and education, of discrimi¬
nation and taste in things of the world, in the arts, in science and scholarship.
Goethe’s statement is emblematic for the transition from the foundational
interrelationship between education and private religion to the reciprocity be¬
tween Bildung and religion. The fading of orthodox Protestant piety in the
second half of the eighteenth century brought about the reevaluation of Bil¬
dung. The concept of Bildung had religious roots, and contemporaries were
still aware of its religious moments.’” The reciprocal relationship between Bil¬
dung and religion which was characteristic of the Protestant German educated
classes no longer had any connection with the orthodox concept of religion.
For Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), religion, understood as an awareness of
contingency, was the expression of man’s submission to a law that was not his
own. From this point of view man was not, in essence, free. Therefore, this
religion could not educate him, and for Schlegel, as for many of his contem¬
poraries, orthodox theology was merely “a supplement” to Bildung, or even a
surrogate education.’
The religion of the educated classes, by contrast, was to all intents and pur¬
poses identical with Bildung. In 1798, writing in the journal Athendum, Schlegel
conceptualised the Bildung character of religion: “... and nothing is religious in
the strict sense unless it is a product of freedom. We could say: the greater the
freedom the more religious; and the more we have of Bildung, the less inclined
we are to rely on religion.”’”’ The Gebildeten believed that they could dispense
19:
LESSING, Schriften, LM, vol. 14, 445.
14 GOETHE, Gedichte und Epen, Werke HA, vol. 1, 36f.
15 Cf. TiMM, Hermann, Bildungsreligion im deutschsprachigem Protestantismus — eine grund¬
begriffliche Perspektivierung, in R. Koselleck (ed.), Bildungsbiirgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, Teil
II: Bildungsgüter und Bildungswissen, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1990, 57-79.
Cf. RICHTER, Wilhelm, Der Wandel des Bildungsgedankens, Die Brüder Humboldt, Das Zeitalter
der Bildung und die Gegenwart, Berlin, Colloquium, 1971.
SCHLEGEL, Friedrich, Athenäumsfragment Nr. 233, in J. Minor (ed.), Prosaische Jugendschriften,
2nd edition, vol. 2, Wien, Konogen, 1906, 241.; on the context of Bildungsreligion cf. also MÜL¬
LER, Ernst, Ästhetische Religiosität und Kunstreligion. Philosophien von der Aufklärung bis zum
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