Oldal 130 [130]
OCR
HANS ERICH BÖDEKER “.. in all countries thinking people, the true believers, will always remain an invisible church.” He located it in the area of education and taste. Elsewhere he had stated: “Ihose who really want to live the true Leben Menschen, want to advance more quickly ... those who are serious must therefore adhere to a quiet, almost compressed Church, because to set themselves against the broad tide of the day would be to no avail.” Members of the largely bourgeois educated classes — lawyers, officials, professors, teachers and clergy — were, in the main, both carriers and targets of this Enlightened religious feeling.*” With their growing self-confidence, they voiced a claim to power in all areas of life, reason, critical thinking, Enlightened humanity, and purified feeling. A fundamental feature of their theological discourse was a separation between Christians with and without a formal education. In theoretical terms, the differentiation of these two classes went back to the systematic separation of theology and religion. Religious Enlightenment referred to the educated classes, the gebildeten Stdnde. Private religion was thus the religion of the Gebildeten and, above all, of theologians, who gained insight into their own conduct, both academic and pastoral. A large proportion of the clergy (but not all) participated in this transformation of religious feeling. This period, however, also witnessed the beginning of a serious decline in theology as a discipline and as a profession, a development of great significance for German cultural history. While it was rare for an established theologian to leave the profession — except for cases such as those of Joachim Heinrich Campe and Christian Gotthelf Salzmann, who switched from theology to teaching, an area in which the boundaries were fluid anyway - it was much more common for people to change direction, either during their theological studies or immediately after having completed them. Gottfried August Biirger (1747-1794), Johann Heinrich Voß (1751-1826), Thomas Abbt (1738-1766), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Christian Friedrich Schubart (1739-1791), Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz (1751-1792), Ludwig Timotheus Spittler (1752-1810), Johannes von Müller (1752-1809), Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel are among those who took this course. Many of them, and even more others who did not embark upon theological studies at all but who became scholars, officials, or writers, came from the 2% Johann Wolfgang Goethe quoted from the article Kirche in Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (eds.), Deutsches Wörterbuch, Vol. 5, Leipzig, Hirzel, 1873, 790-796. 207 CF. BÖDEKER, Hans Erich, Die “gebildeten Stände“ im späten 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert: Zugehörigkeit und Abgrenzungen. Mentalitäten und Handlungspotentiale, in J. Kocka (ed.), Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert. Politischer Einfluß und gesellschaftliche Formation. Teil 4, Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1989, 21-52. * 128 +
