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the archiepiscopal rule rested lightly on an orthodox population which, assured of eternal certainties, devoted itself to epidermal contacts and other worldly joys.
Grimm idolized Voltaire, Mozart despised him, and was shocked at the assumption of his hosts and their friends that Christianity was a myth useful in social control.
Mozart took inspiration rather from Italy than from Germany; he preferred melody and simple harmony to complex and erudite polyphony. Only in his final decade did he feel strong influences from Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach.
Mozart’s music is the voice of an aristocratic age that had not heard the Bastille fall, and of a Catholic culture undisturbed in its faith, free to enjoy the charms of life without the restless search to find new content for an emptied dream.
Religion was more powerful and pervasive in Islam than in Christendom; the Koran was the law as well as the gospel, and the theologians were the official interpreters of the law.
The Wahabites were the Puritans of Islam: they condemned the worship of saints, destroyed the tombs and shrines of saints and martyrs, denounced the wearing of silk and the use of tobacco, and defended the right of each individual to interpret the Koran for himself.
Education was dominated by the clergy, who held that good citizens or loyal tribesthen could be more surely made by disciplining character than by liberating intellect. The clergy had won the battle against the scientists, philosophers, and historians who had prospered in medieval Islam; astronomy had relapsed into astrology, chemistry into alchemy, medicine into magic, history into myth.
Islamic theology, like the Christian, considered woman a main source of evil, which could be controlled only by her strict subordination.
In 1722, 97.7 per cent of the Russian population was rural; in 1790, still 96.4 per cent; so slow was industrialization. In 1762 all but ten per cent of the people were peasants, and 52.4 per cent of these were serfs.
A landlord’s wealth was reckoned by the number of his serfs; so Count Peter Cheremetyev was 140,000 serfs rich.4 The 992,000 serfs of the Church were a main part of her wealth, and 2,800,000 serfs tilled the lands of the Crown in 1762.5
Religion was especially strong in Russia, for poverty was bitter, and merchants of hope found many purchasers. Skepticism was confined to an upper class that could read French, and Freemasonry had many converts there.
Russian civilization was a mixture of unavoidable discipline and callous exploitation, of piety and violence, of prayer and profanity, of music and vulgarity, of fidelity and cruelty, of servile obsequiousness and indomitable bravery. These people could not develop the virtues of peace because they had to fight, through long winters and long winter nights, a bitter war against the arctic winds that crossed unhindered over their frozen plains.
They had never known the Renaissance or the Reformation, and so—except in their artificial capital—they were still imprisoned in medieval swaddling clothes. They comforted themselves with pride of race and surety of faith: not yet a territorial nationalism, but a fierce conviction that while the West was damning itself with science, wealth, paganism, and unbelief, “Holy Russia” remained loyal to the Christianity of the patriarchs, was more endeared to Christ, and would someday rule and redeem the world.
The nobles demanded such limitless power over legislation because each wished to be completely free in ruling his lands and his serfs. But limitation is the essence of liberty, for as soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy. The history of Poland after Jan Sobieski was a chronicle of anarchy.
Polish morals resembled the German at table and the French in bed.
the Western powers resigned themselves to the partitioning of Poland as the fated result of her political chaos, her religious animosities, and her military impotence; u the catastrophe was recognized as inevitable by every Continental statesman.”
He agreed with Voltaire in believing that the “masses” bred too fast, and worked too hard, to allow time for real education. Disillusionment with their theology would only incline them to political violence. “The Enlightenment,” said Frederick, “is a light from heaven for those who stand on the heights, and a destructive firebrand for the masses”;
it seems to me that if this universe had been made by a benevolent being, he should have made us happier than we are. … The human mind is weak; more than three fourths of mankind are made for subjection to the most absurd fanaticism. Fear of the Devil and of hell fascinates their eyes, and they detest the wise man who tries to enlighten them....
Frederick concluded that to allow governments to be dominated by the majority would be disastrous. A democracy, to survive, must be, like other governments, a minority persuading a majority to let itself be led by a minority.
He believed that an hereditary aristocracy would develop a sense of honor and loyalty, and a willingness to serve the state at great personal cost, which could not be expected of bourgeois geniuses formed in the race for wealth.
Frederick liked to picture himself as the servant of the state and the people. This may have been a rationalization of his will to power, but he lived up to the claim. The state became for him the Supreme Being, to which he would sacrifice himself and others; and the demands of that service overrode, in his view, the code of individual morality; the Ten Commandments stop at the royal doors.
he did not share the philosophes’ trust in the enlightenment of mankind. In the race between reason and superstition he predicted the victory of superstition.
Having accepted religion as a human need, Frederick made his peace with it, and protected all its peaceful forms with full toleration.
He hoped that obedience through fear of force would grow into obedience through habituation to law—which was force reduced to rules and hiding its claws.
when, after Frederick’s death, the despotism remained without the enlightenment, the national structure was weakened and collapsed at Jena before a will as strong as Frederick’s own.
in the eighteenth century Germany was not a nation but a loose federation of nearly independent states, which formally accepted the “Holy Roman” emperor at Vienna as their head,
The states had a common language, literature, and art, but differed in manners, dress, coinage, and creed. There were some advantages in this political fragmentation: the multiplicity of princely courts favored a stimulating diversity of cultures; the armies were small, instead of being united for the terror of Europe;
Class distinctions, however, were emphasized in most of the German states, as part of the technique of social control. Nobles, clergy, army officers, professional men, merchants, and peasants constituted separate classes; and within every category there were grades each of which stiffened itself with scorn of the next beneath.
during the American Revolution, German princes sold—or, as they put it, “lent”—thirty thousand troops to England for some £500,000; 12,500 of these men never returned.
Religion in Germany was more subordinate to the state than in Catholic lands. Divided into sects, it had no awesome pontiff to co-ordinate its doctrine, strategy and defense;
because the philosophy of Wolff had provided the universities with a compromise between rationalism and religion, the German Enlightenment did not take an extreme form. It sought not to destroy religion, but to free it from the myths, absurdities, and sacerdotalism that in France made Catholicism so pleasing to the people and so irritating to the philosophers.
German rationalists recognized the profound appeal that religion makes to the emotional elements in man; and the German nobility, less openly skeptical than the French, supported religion as an aid to morals and government.
Just as the average individual recapitulates in his growth the intellectual and moral development of the race, so the race slowly passes through the intellectual and moral development of the superior individual. To put it Pythagoreanly, each of us is reborn and reborn until his education—his adjustment to reason—is complete.
he hoped for a time when all theology would have disappeared from Christianity, and only the sublime ethic of patient kindness and universal orotherhood would remain.
In the draft of a letter to Mendelssohn he declared his adherence to Spinoza’s view that body and mind are the outside and inside of one reality, two attributes of one substance identical with God.
Friedrich Jacobi agreed with Hamann and Rousseau. Spinoza’s philosophy, he said, is perfectly logical if you accept logic, but it is false because logic never reaches the heart of reality, which is revealed only to feeling and faith.
They listened to Rousseau’s cry for naturalness and freedom, but took no stock in his apotheosis of the “general will.” They agreed with him in rejecting materialism, rationalism, and determinism, and with Lessing in preferring the lusty irregularity of Shakespeare to the cramping classicism of Corneille and Racine.
In the confused whirlwind of Sturm und Drang some dominating ideas gave the movement character and influence. Most of its leaders came from the middle class, and began their revolt as a protest against the privileges of birth, the insolence of office, and the luxury of prelates feasting on peasants’ tithes.
He concluded that history is an excellent teacher, with few pupils. “It is in the nature of man that no one learns from experience. The follies of the fathers are lost on their children; each generation has to commit its own.”116 “Whoever reads history with application will perceive that the same scenes are often repeated, and that one need only change the names of the actors.”
to write history is to compile the follies of men and the strokes of fortune. Everything turns on these two articles.”
he inherited the subtle psychology of Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, and used it in an attempt to save science from Hume and religion from Voltaire.
Kant already laid down his basic theses: that space and time are not objective or sensible objects, but are forms of perception inherent in the nature and structure of the mind; and that the mind is no passive recipient and product of sensations, but is an active agent—with inherent modes and laws of operation—for transforming sensations into ideas.
At almost every step Kant had to invent a German translation of a Latin term, and in many cases even Latin lacked terms for the distinctions and subtleties he wished to express. He confused his readers by giving new meanings to old words, and sometimes forgetting his redefinitions. The first hundred pages are tolerably clear; the rest is a philosophical conflagration in which the untutored reader will see nothing but smoke.
All attempts to demonstrate the truth or falsity of religion by pure reason were, to Kant, forms of dogmatism; and he condemned as “the dogmatism of metaphysics” any system of science or philosophy or theology that had not first submitted to a critical examination of reason itself.
he set himself to overcome both the dogmatism of Wolff and the skepticism of Hume by a criticism—a critical examination—that would at once describe, delimit, and restore the authority of reason. These three stages—dogmatism, skepticism, criticism—were, in Kant’s view, the three ascending phases in the evolution of modern philosophy.
Kant divided all knowledge into empirical (dependent upon experience) and transcendental (independent of, and therefore transcending, experience). He agreed that all knowledge begins with experience, in the sense that some sensation must precede and arouse the operations of thought; but he believed that the moment experience begins it is molded by the structure of the mind through its inherent forms of “intuition” (perception) or conception. The inherent forms of “intuition” are the universal forms that experience takes in our outward sensation as space, and in our inward sensibility as time.
Perception is sensation interpreted by the inherent forms of space and time; knowledge is perception transformed by the categories into a judgment or an idea. Experience is not a passive acceptance of objective impressions upon our senses; it is the product of the mind actively working upon the raw material of sensation.
We cannot prove by pure or theoretical reason (as Wolff tried to do) that the individual soul is immortal, or that the will is free, or that God exists; but neither can we by pure reason disprove these beliefs (as some skeptics thought to do). Reason and the categories are equipped to deal only with phenomena or appearances, external or internal; we cannot apply them to the thing-in-itself—the reality behind sensations or the soul behind ideas.
how can we rest content with so baffling a conclusion—that free will, immortality, and God can be neither proved nor disproved by pure reason? There is (Kant urges) something in us deeper than reason, and that is our irrefutable consciousness that consciousness, mind, and soul are not material, and that the will is in some measure, however mysteriously and illogically, free;
The skeptics could argue that Kant had justified agnosticism, and could scorn his reinstatement of God as a supplement to the police. The buffeted theologians reproached him for admitting so much to the infidels, and rejoiced that religion had apparently survived its perilous passage through Kant’s labyrinthine mind.
