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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 discrimination 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 between Bildung and religion. The fading of orthodox Protestant piety in the second half of the eighteenth century brought about the reevaluation of Bildung. The concept of Bildung had religious roots, and contemporaries were still aware of its religious moments.’” The reciprocal relationship between Bildung 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 contemporaries, 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 purposes 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 grundbegriffliche 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 MÜLLER, Ernst, Ästhetische Religiosität und Kunstreligion. Philosophien von der Aufklärung bis zum “© a 19 a 19 Ss
