His sublime perfection; it is up to us to understand ourselves and rule ourselves. âKnow then thyself, presume not God to scan,â wrote Alexander Pope. âThe proper study of Mankind is Man.â
This rationalistic, antidogmatic, searching, secular humanist sense of the divine came to be called âdeism.â The term helps describe the convictions of Voltaire and Rousseau, Jefferson and Franklinâand, to a degree, Beethoven. He was no churchgoer; in his maturity, he studied Eastern religion and scripture. âOnly art and science,â he wrote, âcan raise men to the level of gods.â 23 He never claimed that God imbued him with his gifts. He believed his talent came from natureâGodâs nature, to be sure. At the same time, Beethoven would be no more a conventional deist than he was a conventional anything else, and his ideas of God evolved along with his life and art. The older he got, the more he turned toward faith in a God who was present and all-seeing, who listened to prayers (though none of this was anathema to deists).
All eras pass, and in the end, the Enlightenmentâs dream of an earthly Elysium did not endure. It was overturned in Europe by forces including the limitations of science, the limitations of reason, the fear of social chaos, the resistance of religions to giving up their monopoly on truth. The Enlightenmentâs shibboleth of reason toppled at last. The founding Romantic poet and philosopher Novalis condemned the âharsh, chilly light of the Enlightenmentâ and exalted the mythical and mystical. 24 Beethoven, for his part, did not share that spirit; he never really absorbed the Romantic age. At the same time the Enlightenment birthed ideas whose reverberations would not disappear in the world, or in Beethovenâs mind and music.
So many excesses of the Enlightenment, in all its forms great and terrible, rose from excesses of hope.
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If the methods of reason and science that were applied (and often misapplied) to all things united the whole of the Enlightenmentâand among progressives everywhere there was a sense of boundless human potential about to be unleashedâthere were still essential differences between the way the Enlightenment was translated and transposed in France, England, and America, and how it took form in German lands: Aufklärung.
In most regions, philosophical and ethical ideals quickly became political. In an age that prided itself on rationality, it was natural to conclude that the institutions and extravagances of the ancient courts had little reason behind them. Enlightenment criticism of church and aristocracy, the unchallenged privilege once granted to Electors and petty princes, and the power wielded and abused by the clergy would, in France, lead to revolution, then to an avalanche of murder and an attempt to wipe away the aristocracy and the church. But, like most of Germany, Bonn never challenged the system of princes and courts. In stark contrast to the French, German Aufklärers wanted strong governments, efficient bureaucracies, strong armies, powerful and enlightened princes. The German ideal of enlightened reform was top-down, achieved by edict.
Thus the celebration of what came to be called âbenevolent despots,â most famous among them Frederick the Great in Berlin (for whom Voltaire was house philosopher) and Joseph II in Vienna. In a letter, Frederick wrote a virtual definition of enlightened despotism: âPhilosophers should be the teachers of the world and the teachers of princes. They must think logically and we must act logically. They must teach the world by their powers of judgment; we must teach the world by our example.â 25
While Aufklärers often tended to the anticlerical, they were not against religion. By the time Beethoven left Bonn, he had experienced little but cultured and enlightened aristocrats and clerics, many of them his admirers and patrons. Partly
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