The Philosophical Context of Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ Radical Bible Criticism

THE PHILOSOPHICAL CONTEXT OF HERMANN SAMUEL REIMARUS’ RADICAL BIBLE CRITICISM

Jonathan Israel

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), philologist, Bible critic, and phi- losopher, was in no doubt himself as to the severity of his philologico- philosophical assault on the Christian religion. At one point he suggests that Celsus and Porphyry themselves could scarcely have sharpened it any further;1 and even more acerbic was his attack on the Jewish legacy to humanity. While it is true that in the early sections of his Apologie Reimarus recounts his estrangement from Christianity, and Christianity’s inheritance from the Jews, as a gradual process of doubt and questioning, driven principally by textual and philological concerns, it is equally true that in the later stages of his intellectual evolution he built his general outlook around what he saw as an all-encompassing and surpassing prin- ciple of ‘reason’. ‘Reason’ he holds aloft and extols, but also very closely entwines with what he sees as the general progress of philosophy in the history of the world. In a remarkable passage in which he asserts that philosophy bequeathed more to the development of the Christian religion than the latter ever gave to philosophy, he contends that the history of religion proves beyond all doubt the indispensability of philosophy to the progress of morality and indeed religion itself. ‘Die Lehre von der Einheit Gottes’, he points out, by way of example, ‘und dessen Anbetung ohne Bilder, welche Moses aus der geheimen Weissheit der Egyptischen Priester mitgebracht hatte, aber ohne vernünftige Gründe bloss als ein Gebot vortrug, hatte bey den Israel- iten nicht eher Eingang, als bis sie in der Gefangenschaft mit vernünftigen Heyden umgegangen waren.’2 But what kind of philosophy did Reimarus embrace? Philosophically, he was undoubtedly something of a hybrid fĳigure, with one foot, or part of a foot, in the Radical Enlightenment, and the other, or one and a half feet, in the moderate Enlightenment. In this present paper I shall focus

1 Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Apologie oder Schutzschrift für die vernünftigen Verehrer Gottes (ed.) G. Alexander (2 vols. Frankfurt, 1972), i, p. 61. 2 Ibid., i, 112–13. 184 jonathan israel on three main dimensions of Reimarus’ philosophical activity and conclu- sions. Firstly, I argue that despite some obvious diffferences between his public position and his clandestine outlook, the general standpoint to be found in both the published works and the secret Apologie of this unusu- ally widely read and erudite professor, forms a philosophically coherent whole, which in the main can be deemed a single and in some ways rather original system. Secondly, I argue that the oft-repeated claim that Rei- marus’ critique of revealed religion, as it is put in Alan Kors’ Oxford Ency- clopedia of the Enlightenment, arose chiefly ‘under the influence of English deism’, or as a recent Dutch scholar expresses it ‘following the English deists, among them John Toland, Anthony Collins, Thomas Chubb and Thomas Woolston’,3 is not at all a satisfactory designation of his orienta- tion; indeed I think this thesis, frequently repeated though it is, is basically untrue and seriously misleading. Thirdly, while agreeing that Reimarus is a key exemplum of the phe- nomenon, highlighted in particular by Martin Mulsow, of a split intellectual personality who can be said to be radical in some respects but moderate in others, and moreover that it was precisely his being moderate in some ways which enabled him to be subversive in others, I neverthe- less contend that Reimarus’ intellectual radicalism was not very extensive in scope, indeed was almost entirely confĳined to his attack on revealed religion and ecclesiastical authority (both of which he kept strictly pri- vate) plus his likewise largely silent plea for a broader toleration. Beyond these three points, there is very little that is even mildly radical in Rei- marus’ thought. On the contrary, his core ideas would seem to share many characteristics with the kind of conservative providential Deism repre- sented also by Challe, Wollaston and Voltaire. Finally, I shall claim that his underlying aversion to Spinozism and disinclination to invoke Spinoza’s (or Bayle’s) name,4 despite the fact that he was clearly thoroughly famil-

3 John Stroup, ‘Hermann Samuel Reimarus’ in Alan Kors (ed.) Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment (4 vols. Oxford, 2003), iii, p. 417; M. H. De Lang, “Literary and historical Criticism as Apologetics”, Nederlands Archief voor Kerkgeschiedenis lxxii (1992), pp. 149–65, here, p. 151; the source of this misleading idée fĳixe seems to be especially the writings of Henning Graf Reventlow, see, for instance, Henning Graf Reventlow, ‘Das Arsenal der Bibelkritik des Reimarus’ in Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) ein “bekannter Unbekannter” der Aufklärung in Hamburg (Göttingen, 1973), pp. 44–65, particularly pp. 44, 57–8; see also Günter Gawlick, ‘Der Deismus als Grundzug der Religionsphilosophie der Aufklärung’, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) ein “bekannter Unbekannter”, pp. 18–19. 4 Jürgen von Kempski, ‘Spinoza, Reimarus, Bruno Bauer – drei Paradigmen radikaler Bibelkritik’, in Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) ein “bekannter Unbekannter”, pp. 96–112, here, p. 97.