The Enlightenment took enormous interest in a wide variety of religious topics: the existence of God, the problem of evil, the meaning of revelation, ecclesiastical authority, the status of scripture, religious tolerance, and immortality. This last issue is particularly important as one of the essential components, along with the existence of a moral God, of a “natural” theology that could be fully derived or endorsed by reason. Furthermore, reflection on immortality plays directly into the urgent discussions in the eighteenth century about autonomy, freedom, and progress; the way one envisions a hereafter profoundly reflects and legitimates the way one envisions life in the present. This fluidity between an understanding of the here and the hereafter is perfectly captured in Johann Joachim Spalding's extremely influential Bestimmung des Menschen (1748; The Vocation of Man), which envisions immortality as a process of ever increasing rational pleasure and self-perfection—goals not at all unfamiliar to the mortals of the Enlightenment.

Johann Gottfried Herder is a central and in some ways transitional voice in this public discussion of man's immortal Bestimmung. In the early 1769 letters to Mendelssohn he espoused a model of nonprogressive palingenesis, in which the soul is endlessly reborn within the same class of being without undergoing any overarching development. There is, in short, no personal, angelic afterlife. Compared to the essentially Christian afterlife of the rationalist Popularphilosophen of Herder's day, this position was quite austere.

“Classicism” and “secular humanism” seems an obvious combination: Goethe, the great pagan, substituted a generalized ethic of humanity (taken in its broadest possible religio-ethical and aesthetic sense) as the social glue that replaced the function of sectarian religion in post-Enlightenment secularized Europe. He offered a heightened version of Enlightenment culture and reason that obviated the need for religion. Through World War I his name alone evoked an entire system of ethics, aesthetics, and even epistemology among writers as disparate as Adalbert Stifter, Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane, Hugo von Hofmannsthal; and scholars such as the psychoanalytic generation, Hannah Arendt, Norbert Elias, Oswald Spengler; and philosophers such as Benedetto Croce and José Ortega y Gasset. My subtitle reveals the underlying schism— “sanctification” is a religious term; Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute), a hangover of the particularly secular and disrespectful Enlightenment associated with the French Revolution; and the “Novelle,” a charming, respectable, Biedermeier idyll. The Goethe cult that substituted German classicism for religion was, for better or worse, not interested in the Goethe of the 1820s, except for his conversations with Eckermann; “the late Goethe,” or, as I would have it, “the Biedermeier Goethe,” offers, however, a more mature, richer classicism, indeed a sanctified classicism.

The Revolutionary Rhizome

All eyes, it would seem, are on Spinoza at the moment. Much of the credit for this remarkable renaissance is due to Gilles Deleuze, who wrote two books on Spinoza, and then went even further in his best-selling manifesto What Is Philosophy?, anointing Spinoza both the “prince” and the “Christ” of philosophy. And Deleuze is hardly alone in his attentions. Spinoza now looms large in our understanding of the entire Age of Goethe. The controversy over Spinoza still figures as a minor flap in Lewis White Beck's classic history, Early German Philosophy; but it has become the defining intellectual controversy of the whole age since the publication of Frederick Beiser's influential study The Fate of Reason in 1987. Further, over the past decade, the intellectual historian Jonathan Israel has published three massive tomes asserting that, basically, every significant thinker of the Enlightenment was a closet Spinozist. Skepticism may be in order: on Wall Street, this latest development would be read as a “contrary indicator,” signaling a market top. But the centrality of the Spinozastreit (Spinoza controversy) clearly means that we have to understand both the extent and the import of Spinoza's influence on the Age of Goethe. And the centrality of Spinoza to contemporary discourse is beyond doubt; somehow, he figures in everyone's equations.

When it comes to religion, Goethe's reputation is anything but spotless. Heinrich Heine famously referred to Goethe as “der große Heide” (the great heathen). August Wilhelm Schlegel took this one step further when he called Goethe “einen zum Islam bekehrten Heiden” (a heathen who converted to Islam). Wolfgang Frühwald points out that in an altar painting by Konrad Eberhard for the St. Clara Hospital in Basel, Goethe is grouped with the heathens who cannot be converted by St. Paul. Similarly, Prince Metternich opposed the creation of a Goethe monument because of Goethe's spotty record on religion, declaring that we should not “dem Andenken eines Mannes zu große Ehre … erweisen, der ersichtlich seines religiösen Bekenntnisses nicht ohne Anstoß gewesen sei” (pay too much tribute to the memory of a man whose religious creed was not inoffensive). Finally, Romano Guardini, in a letter to Ernst Beutler, summed it up when he declared that Goethe had done more harm to Christianity than even Nietzsche (Perels 28).

Though these claims are surely inflated, they are not wholly unfounded. In the following, I will provide a brief overview over Goethe's stance on religion. I then contrast Goethe's views with those introduced in Kant's “Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft” (1793; Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone). Here, I pay particular attention to the role both thinkers assign to the concepts of sensuality and the body.

By 1788, Friedrich schiller (1759-1805) could look back on nearly a decade of blasphemous production regarding prophets, priests, and organized religion. In 1789, after several years of assaulting the negative social and political functions of Jesus Christ and Christianity, Schiller, then a professor of history, turned his attention to the Hebrew prophet Moses in the lecture “Die Sendung Moses” (The Mission of Moses or The Legation of Moses), delivered at the University of Jena in the summer of 1789 and published in Schiller's journal Thalia in 1790. In light of recent charges of blasphemy (and—in an insightless or disingenuous smear attempt—polytheism) inspired by his poem “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (The Gods of Ancient Greece) in 1788, Schiller's Moses essay comprises both a response to the charges and an articulation of his earlier criticisms of religion. In the Moses essay, Schiller moves beyond the concerns of the political misuses of and intellectual detours posed by Christianity in contemporary European states to an explanation of the original paradigmatic political purposes of religion and the initial civilizing effect of monotheism as a step toward a constitution based on reason for all humankind.

In chapter 10 of The Romantic Imperative, “Religion and Politics in Frühromantik,” Frederick Beiser argues for the significance of Herder in the crucial process of reinterpreting Spinoza at the end of the eighteenth century in Germany. Specifically, Herder's 1787 Gott: Einige Gespräche (God: Some Dialogues) introduced a “vitalistic” reading of Spinoza and “self-consciously fuse[d] him with his great metaphysical contemporary: Leibniz.” However, besides another brief mention of Herder's belief in “combining Spinoza's monism and naturalism with Leibniz's vitalism” (182), Leibniz falls out of Beiser's story. In Beiser's earlier Fate of Reason Leibniz suffers the same fate, disappearing in the excellent and gripping tale of the so-called Pantheism controversy around Spinoza. Given the weight of Beiser's account, this essay undertakes what many a novel has done with, say, Jane Austen or Gone with the Wind, namely, a shift in focus onto a minor or at least somewhat neglected character in order to let Leibniz emerge from the immense shadow cast by Spinoza.

Throughout his long and productive career as a publicist, novelist, essayist, philosopher, and educator, Christoph Martin Wieland grappled with the meaning of religion for individuals and human societies. Wieland's work is of particular interest to the study of religion and secularization in German Classicism because he demonstrates how secular interests can shape serious intellectual engagement with religious concerns. Wieland's approach to religious questions is multivalent, but it is decidedly this-worldly rather than theological. Wieland's writings on religion are distinguished by his rationalist critique, his political and social pragmatism, and his anthropological focus on how religious experience provides insight into human nature. These three approaches to questions of religion each serve the Enlightenment project, of which Wieland is a representative figure, and which is often equated with modernity and secularization in the West. Yet Wieland presents a distinctive voice in late eighteenth-century deliberations on the role of religion in human experience and its relationship to reason. This voice is defined by his self-conscious method of inquiry, his interest in the relation between the secular and the religious, and by his attention to authorial tone. Both method and tone reflect important anthropological and philosophical convictions he holds about human nature and the limits and possibilities of human knowledge.

Shortly after the attacks on the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001, Jürgen Habermas was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Booksellers. In his acceptance speech, he chose to address the role of religion in secular society. Unlike many others, Habermas does not simply cast the tenets of the enlightenment, the age of reason, as antidotes to religiously motivated violence. rather, Habermas declared that the process of secularization remained incomplete, and he characterized contemporary Western society as postsecular. In his conversation with Pope Benedict XVI, Habermas further explored this topic. He is curious about the prepolitical sources that feed democratic orders and about the “contributions in a religious language to public debates.” In other words, Habermas wonders about the relation between reason and religion in general and religion and politics in particular. Although he acknowledges the roots of these discourses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, neither his acceptance speech nor the conversations explore these roots in detail. This volume seeks to address this gap from a cultural and historical perspective. It is the goal of this edited collection to offer new perspectives on the relation between religion and reason as it evolved in the era of the German enlightenment.

The Age of Goethe hosts a sustained and multifaceted debate about the place of religion and religious difference in late eighteenth-century politics, philosophy, and culture. Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and their respective institutions center the debate at a time when Goethe, Schiller, and the proponents of both Weimar Classicism and writing German into a Weltliteratur (world literature) encroach on religious territories with a commitment to a more culturally encompassing concept of the sacred and the divine, one that included but was not limited to elements of pantheism, polytheism, and mythology. Yet in dominant cultural discourse and practice, a belief in the monotheistic, Trinitarian, and Christian incarnation of the divine prevails. At the same time, competing models of divinities persisted in a kind of cultural polytheism that exerted significant influence on the production of poetry and art. Increasingly, any association between secularism and modernity reopened wounds caused by theological and sectarian differences.

To understand the depth of the rift between elite and dominant discourses of the sacred, it is perhaps instructive to recall the contentiousness of the debate about atheism, or Atheismusstreit (1798–99), ensuing from a narrow definition of enlightened reason, presumed to exclude faith. Spinoza's name became associated with atheism because of heterodox arguments, and, as Louis Dupré notes: “The stigma adhered to his name throughout the eighteenth century.” When the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) lost his university post in Jena owing to accusations of atheism, it was a prominent public matter.

Stories of conversions from Protestantism to Catholicism received a great deal of attention in Germany during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Johann Heinrich Voß's pamphlet Wie ward Fritz Stolberg ein Unfreier? (How Did Fritz Stolberg Become Unliberated?, 1819) analyzes his friend Friedrich Leopold Stolberg's conversion to Catholicism and mourns the loss of their friendship. Stolberg's conversion, from his assault on Schiller's “Die Götter Griechenlandes” (The Gods of Greece, 1788) to his marriage to a Catholic woman in 1790, occurred during a public struggle over the ethics of conversion. Enlightenment thinkers such as Voß, Klopstock, and Goethe saw membership in the Catholic Church as a relinquishment of freedom and agency: Catholics allowed their religious institution to make their decisions for them, so they were seen as voluntary slaves to higher authorities and as refusing to take on the responsibility of thinking for themselves—victims of what Werner Schneiders calls a “Fremdaufklärung” or enlightenment by others. Protestants, on the other hand, saw themselves as exercising their Kantian right to use their own understanding, and were thus practicing self-liberation (“Selbstbefreiung,” Schneiders 176) and self-enlightenment (“Selbstaufklärung,” Schneiders 177). True enlightenment demands that the individual assume responsibility for his own thinking, rejecting knowledge that is simply transmitted by those in power.

Enlightenment Rationalism and Catholicism

The influence of religious traditions on German thought of the Classical period cannot be appreciated enough. Beginning in the early Enlightenment and spanning literary movements from Sentimentality and Storm and Stress through Weimar Classicism and Romanticism, German literature grappled with this powerful, largely Lutheran and Pietist legacy, which it transposed into its own secular worldview. Literary fiction, aesthetic experience itself, had become the central medium of secularization. This is also reflected in the biographies of many writers of the time; we are reminded of the notoriously high number of pastor's sons—most prominently perhaps Lessing—many of whom broke away from the intended clerical path, and of the many more who were shaped by a Pietist upbringing, from Klopstock and Herder to Karl Philipp Moritz, Novalis, and the early Romantics.

Little is known about Kleist's biography, even less about his religious upbringing and outlook. His familial background in Prussia's military aristocracy—quite unusual for intellectuals of his time—as well as the social milieu of his hometown Frankfurt an der Oder and later the Potsdam Cadet School were Protestant, of course, with some Pietist influences. The letters he wrote his fiancée serve as the main source for determining Kleist's intellectual and spiritual development after leaving the army in 1799.