Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)
Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) is an informative and entertaining description of recent trends in German philosophy and theology in the early 19th century. Yes, entertaining. Originally written as a series of articles in a French newspaper, it's purpose was to explain its topic to a contemporary French audience. He compiled it into book form in 1834.
He focuses on figures like the following, some of them the "usual suspects" today, other not: Martin Luther (1483-1546), who not only kicked off the Protestant Reformation but whose vernacular translation of the Bible "created the German language", as Heine puts it; Philippus Aureolus Paracelsus, given name Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493-1541); Jakob Böhme (1575-1624); Réne Descartes (1596–1650) of the cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am); John Locke (1632-1704); Baruch (Benedictus) de Spinoza (1632-1677); Philipp Jacob Spener (German link) (1635-1705); Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von Leibnitz (1646-1716); August Hermann Francke (1663-1727); Christian Freiherr von Wolff, aka, Christian von Wolfius (1679-1754), whose "spiritual rule" lasted "more than half a century" in Germany; Voltaire (1694-1778), who Heine calls "the bookseller Nikolai" (?!); Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); Immanuel Kant (1724–1804); Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786); Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781); Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), of whom Heine doesn't seem to be terribly fond; Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760-1825); Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814); Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling(1775-1854); and, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who Heine says "closed the great circle" of German philosophy.
I was surprised to find no mention of the Protestant theologian Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834), who the ecumenical Christian theologian Hans Küng considers to be among the greatest of all Christian theologians.
Heine elaborates a theory of questionable historical provenance but perhaps some conceptual value that argues that German concepts of religion are more heavily influenced by a pre-Christian concept of a spiritual world populated by various forces that act on the material world in observable ways. And he argues that German philosophical-religious thinking is dominated by a kind of spiritual dogmatism that assumes that doesn't take adequate account of the limitations of the material world. He describes this in terms of a spiritual concept in contrast to a sensual one.
Heine gets entertaining mileage out of the young Fichte's efforts to pal around with Kant. And he tells a funny anecdote about Hegel on his deathbed saying, "Nur einer hat mich verstanden. Und der hat mich auch nicht verstanden." (Only one person has understood me. And he also didn't understand me.")
Tags: heinrich heine, hegel
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