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THE RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OF THE EDUCATED CLASSES IN PROTESTANT GERMANY...
same as religiosity. “The phenomenal affinity between Bildung and religion
proves to be a phenomenal identity. Religion describes the state of the human
being who is in the course of perpetual Bildung.” At the same time, he regarded
clergymen as a significant driving force of the educational process.””
Within Schleiermacher’s science of man, all his statements about the “en¬
hancement of life” in fact described nothing but Bildung as such. Bildung
towards religion ultimately proved to be Bildung pure and simple. In his Gel¬
egentliche Gedanken über Universitäten im deutschen Sinn, which was published
nine years after the Reden, Schleiermacher not surprisingly used the expression
in his account of academic Bildung that he had earlier used to describe religious
Bildung. The parallels between scholarly and religious life are obvious.?°®
Hegel, too, never failed to emphasize the purpose of religion as the means
of humanistic Bildung and education. “Our palladium” he wrote for example
to a friend, “is neither the totality of the regulation of councils, nor the clergy
charged with maintaining them, but only the general education ofthecommon
people. Our more immediate palladium therefore consists of the universities
and the general educational institutions." Or again: “Protestantism consists
less of a particular confession than of the spirit of reflection and of higher,
rational Bildung."?95
VI
The members of the educated classes saw themselves as spokesmen and proph¬
ets of human dignity, truth, humanity and religion, and thus as offering a
humanistic message and culture in addition to that proclaimed by the Prot¬
estant Church. The “true believers” were people of culture and education, of
discrimination and taste in things of the world, in feeling, science and scholar¬
ship. Goethe was one of the first to take the word “church” out of the context
of revelation and apply it to the world and to the art. As early as 1771 he wrote:
201 WINTZSCH, Hans Ulrich, Religiosität und Bildung. Der anthropologische und bildungsphiloso¬
phische Ansatz in Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion, Zürich, Juris Druck, 1967, 121.
202 Cf. Srroup, John, The Struggle for Identity in the Clerical Estate. Northwest German Protestant
Opposition to Absolutist Policy in the Eighteenth Century, Leiden, Brill, 1984, passim.
203 Cf, SCHLEIERMACHER, Friedrich, Gelegentliche Gedanken über Universitäten im deutschen Sinn.
Mit einem Anhang iiber eine neu zu errichtende, Berlin, Realschule, 1808, 108ff.
204 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel an Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, 10.10.1816, in J. Hoffmeister
(ed.), Briefe von und an Hegel, 4 vols, Hamburg, Felix Meiner, 1952-1960, vol. 2, 141.
205 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel an Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer, 3.11.1810, ibid., vol.
1, 337.
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