Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe ed. by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson (review)

Reviewed by: Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe ed. by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson Daniel DiMassa Religion, Reason, and Culture in the Age of Goethe. Edited by Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013. Pp. 288 Cloth. $90.00. ISBN 978-1571135612. On October 14, 2001, barely a month after the 9/11 attacks, Jürgen Habermas raised the specter of religion and secularization in his acceptance speech for the Friedenspreis des deutschen Buchhandels. Whereas a critic like Christopher Hitch-ens would all but call for endless war in the Middle East, deeming the eradication of religion the only solution to religious violence, Habermas warned of the possible transmogrification of secularization into its own ugly crusade. He called instead for a mode of secularization that could accommodate religion via processes of transformation and translation, much like religion had once accommodated myth. In 2004, he engaged Pope Benedict XVI, then Joseph Ratzinger, in a landmark dialogue in which both men explored the prepolitical foundations of the state and inquired after what religion and reason might stand to learn from one another. In 2007, with the publication of A Secular Age, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor dispensed with the notion of secularization as a unilateral “subtraction story,” challenging the readers of his 874-page tome to witness the transformed but by no means diminished presence of religion in the age of God’s alleged death. Elisabeth Krimmer and Patricia Anne Simpson introduce the present volume with these reevaluations of secularization in mind, aiming with its publication to “offer new perspectives on the relation between religion and reason as it evolved in the era of the German Enlightenment” and to “elaborate on the personal, political, and aesthetic constructions of religious agency during the Age of Goethe” (1). They set out to show “the importance of religious belief systems to Enlightenment culture” (2). While they are careful to acknowledge that the essays “are by no means intended to be comprehensive” (16), this admission ought not belie the admirable scope of the volume, which includes sections on (I) Wieland and Herder; (II) Schiller and Goethe; (III) Kleist and Hölderlin; and (IV) Leibniz, Spinoza, and their legacy. To be sure, the two central sections account for six of the volume’s ten essays, which, as one might guess, results in a primarily—though not exclusively—literaturwissenschaftliche approach to their subject. While this circumstance will likely (and regrettably) limit the impact of so valuable an endeavor (it seems doubtful that historians of religion or philosophy will concern themselves, for example, with interpretations of Kleist’s novellas), Germanists can now enjoy an eminently useful compendium for approaching the vexed topic of religion in the literature of the Goethezeit. This is no small accomplishment. Given the feverish rhetoric of Aufklärung as well as the important transformations in religious thought and praxis at the end of the eighteenth century, there always exists the danger of overstating the case of a [End Page 166] uniform secularization—a danger which the contributors to this volume, through one nuanced reading after another, have uniformly avoided. Noteworthy in this regard is an essay in which Claire Baldwin shows how Wieland balances a commitment to freethinking reason with a healthy respect for the foundations of religious faith; or, to cite another example, an essay in which Elisabeth Krimmer, while acknowledging Goethe’s reputation as “der große Heide,” settles on eclecticism as the defining characteristic of his religious sensibility. Eclectic is, in fact, an apt descriptor for the essays in this volume, which, despite their semi-chronological arrangement by author, could just as easily have been ordered by any number of rubrics. Readers will note, for example, that the section on Hölderlin and Kleist might just as well be regarded as an extended reflection on Roman Catholicism in the Age of Goethe: Lisa Beesley has written a cogent essay on the pathological discourses surrounding eighteenth-century conversions to Catholicism; Helmut Schneider and Patricia Anne Simpson, meanwhile, explore the aesthetic significance of a Marian Catholicism for Kleist and Hölderlin. In their essays on Schiller and Goethe, on the other hand, Jeffrey High and...

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