Sachwissen Religion. Texte. Book

Heine is one of the great modern Germans in every sense, anchored deeply in its traditions, while also preserving an intellecutally-healthy and honest distance from the culture to which he devoted his life and energies. We see this in some of his fascinating poems, like Die Nacht am Strande, which begins in a stunning high Romantic mode, only to step back at the conclusion in a surprising surge of self-conscious irony, with a sea-spirit complaining of the chilly cold that may cause "divine sniffles." It was as though he loved the grandeur of that particular idiom while also recognizing that there is something here we probably shouldn't take too seriously.

So Heine was in his Zeitgeist but not of it, so to speak. He moved with its energies, but saw it for what it was. And it was in this spirit that he composed this essay on religion and philosophy in Germany, which he wrote in France for an audience had had become newly interested in German belles lettres, in part under the influence of Mme. de Staël's enormously popular books on German culture.

Heine's central thesis is that the German character is fundamentally pantheistic, which he understands as holding it as an absolute principle that the energies of God or the divine move in and through nature, and are not apart from it. He identifies this view with the old German religions of Wotan and Thor, and interprets the arrival of Christianity, with its core doctrine of the transcendence of God, as an alien influence that has softened the German character, but never really won it over to its own way of thinking.

In one illuminating discussion, Heine reflects on how easy it was for Martin Luther to jettison the entire Catholic edifice of saints and miracles - but he never abandoned the belief in witchcraft and demons. Why? In a manner reminiscent of the Grimms and similar scholars of German religion, Heine believes that the traditions of bogeymen and spirits are to some significant degree survivals of the pre-Christian religion that lives on in the tales told in nurseries and by the fireside. The survival of this impulse, and the continual return of German philosophy and religion to some form of pantheism, is a Leitmotif of the culture.

Philosophically speaking, Heine sees Spinoza, who argued that the substance which composes all things is identical with God, as the epitome of this doctrine of pantheism. He reviews various intellectual controversies regarding Spinoza in Germany, and situates his Ethics as the prototype for all of German idealism.

There is very much more in this book, and it is a delightful and endlessly-insightful work told in the most artful manner. His discussions of Luther, Lessing, Kant, Fichte, and Schilling are all magisterial, and I very much wish that Hegel had gotten more from him than a brief mention. I found Heine's interpretive instinct unerring, and found myself in strong agreement with him much of the time.

I was prepared to give this book five stars even before the end, which reached a startling and unexpected crescendo that was nearly overpowering. With uncanny foresight, Heine warns the French in emphatic terms about the dangers of a German nation united under the signs of its old pre-Christian consciousness, warning that if such a day should come, there will be a thunder such as the world has never heard, which will set lions in Africa cowering in their dens.