Judex! Blasphemy! and Posthumous Conversion: Schiller and (No) Religion

Summary

InGeschichte des Abfalls der vereinigten Niederlande von der Spanischen Regierung (1788), Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805) wrote: “Das gemeinschaftliche Ziel des Despotismus und des Priestertums ist Einförmigkeit, und Einförmigkeit ist ein notwendiges Hülfsmittel der menschlichen Armut und Beschränkung.” Like Schiller, many of the foremost canonical thinkers and doers of the Late Enlightenment rose to prominence as political, philosophical, and literary enemies of coerced uniformity—despotism and priestcraft— be it in the form of feudal tyranny, foreign occupation, violation of freedom of political thought and expression; or church-state violation of freedom of, to, and from religion. Revolutions in deed are preceded and accompanied by revolutions in thought, and just as every revolution in thought needs a Locke, a Jefferson, a Rousseau; every revolution in deed needs a William of Orange, a Washington, a Danton. As an enemy of tyranny, the German dramatist, theorist, historian, and poet Schiller belongs in a political-rhetorical class with these thinkers, and, by association, in a class with his own dramatic creations—the doers Karl Moor, Marquis Posa, Joan of Arc, and William Tell. Such liberation heroes, the legendary and the fictional as well as the historical, are fairly destined to become mythologized objects of tribal fetish worship. But what is a tribal-law-abiding idol-worshipper to make of such complicated requisite liberal rebels, once the reformed—and subsequently static-conservative—tribal state has been established, only (hopefully) to plod along through the anti-constitutional trials of relentlessly retarded constitutional progress?