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HANS ERICH BÖDEKER
altogether with any form of Church-based Christianity. Ihis was also the line
taken by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) in his early study Über Religion
in 1789, incidentally his only work devoted to religion. For him, religion had
been entirely absorbed into the context of ideas and feeling. Humboldt, who
was interested in the autonomy of Bildung as a direct counterpart to Kant’s
autonomy of knowledge and morality, saw religion as a part of high education.
“However much religious ideas contribute to moral affectability on the one
hand, they are not inseparably linked with it on the other. The mere idea of
intellectual perfection is fulfilling and edifying enough, and is no longer set
to require a different manifestation or form.”'** For Humboldt religion was a
significant but not necessary element in education. Religion could assist man
in his Bildung, but it was no longer an absolute requirement. Thus Humboldt
had subordinated religion to the general term of Bildung. In his own way, he
represented the further development of a tradition which had started with
Lessing and to a certain extent also with Wieland, Friedrich Nicolai and others:
that of the Gebildeten seeing themselves as spokesmen and prophets of human
dignity, truth, humanity and religion, and thus offering a humanistic message
and culture in addition to that proclaimed by the Church.
The young Friedrich Schleiermacher, too, was part of this context, although
he very soon broke with the aesthetic enthusiasm for religion displayed by the
Romantics. Friedrich Schlegel was certainly right when, in his review, he inter¬
preted the Reden as an attempt to harmonize the previously antagonistically
opposed forces of “Christianity” and “education of the age”.’”? One of Schleier¬
macher’s main aims was indeed to convince his educated audience that as “true”
representatives of science, scholarship and art, they were ex professo, as it were,
religious. When he spoke “of Bildung towards religion”, he was referring to a
comprehensive educational experience in the course of which a man gradually
“raised himself above the common standpoint” and achieved an independent,
more profound worldview. Bildung towards religion meant “an endless forming
and shaping of the personality” by transferring ones capacity for enthusiasm,
mainly for art, science and scholarship, to the person being educated.” Schlei¬
ermacher’s descriptions of Bildung show clearly that in essence, it meant the
deutschen Idealismus, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2004, and see also BRAUNGART, Wolfgang — FUNKE,
Gotthard — KocH, Manfred (eds.), Astetische und religiöse Erfahrung der Jahrhundertwenden
um 1800, vol. 1,Paderborn et al, Schöningh, 1997.
18 HUMBOLDT, Wilhelm von, Über Religion, in A. Leitzmann (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften (Akade¬
mieausgabe), vol. 1, Berlin, Behr, 1903, 52.
199 Cf. Friedrich Schlegel’s review of Schleirmacher’s Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten
unter ihren Verächtern, Athenäum 2 (1799), 285-300.
200 SCHLEIERMACHER, Reden (note 41), 51, cf. also 37, 62.
* 126 +