A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

may be claimed for Germany as partly a product of the rationalizing philosophy of Wolff. In his first letter to Voltaire, written in 1736, four years before his accession, he promises to send him a translation he has had made of the "accusation and the justification" of Wolff, "the most celebrated philosopher of our days, who, for having carried light into the darkest places of metaphysics, and for having treated the most difficult matters in a manner no less elevated than precise and clear, is cruelly accused of irreligion and atheism"; and he speaks of getting translated Wolff's Treatise of God, the Soul, and the World. When he became a thoroughgoing freethinker is not clear, for Voltaire at this time had produced no explicit anti-Christian propaganda. At first the new king showed himself disposed to act on the old maxim that freethought is bad for the common people. In 1743-44 he caused to be suppressed two German treatises by one Gebhardi, a contributor to Gottsched's magazines, attacking the Biblical miracles; and in 1748 he sent a young man named Rüdiger to Spandau for six months' confinement for printing an anti-Christian work by one Dr. Pott. [1302] But as he grew more confident in his own methods he extended to men of his own way of thinking the toleration he allowed to all religionists, save insofar as he vetoed the mutual vituperation of the sects, and such proselytizing as tended to create strife. With an even hand he protected Catholics, Greek Christians, and Unitarians, letting them have churches where they would; [1303] and when, after the battle of Striegau, a body of Protestant peasantry asked his permission to slay all the Catholics they could find, he answered with the gospel precept, "Love your enemies." [1304] Beyond the toleration of all forms of religion, however, he never went; though he himself added to the literature of deism. Apart from his verses we have from him the posthumous treatise Pensées sur la Religion, probably written early in his life, where the rational case against the concepts of revelation and of miracles is put with a calm and sustained force. Like the rest, he is uncritical in his deism; but, that granted, his reasoning is unanswerable. In talk he was wont to treat the clergy with small respect; [1305] and he wrote more denunciatory things concerning them than almost any freethinker of the century. [1306] Bayle, Voltaire, and Lucretius were his favourite studies; and as the then crude German literature had no attraction for him, he drew to his court many distinguished Frenchmen, including La Mettrie, Maupertuis, D'Alembert, D'Argens, and above all Voltaire, between whom and him there was an incurable incompatibility of temper and character, and a persistent attraction of force of mind, which left them admiring without respecting each other, and unable to abstain from mutual vituperation. Under Frederick's vigorous rule all speech was free save such as he considered personally offensive, as Voltaire's attack on Maupertuis; and after a stormy reign he could say, when asked by Prince William of Brunswick whether he did not think religion one of the best supports of a king's authority, "I find order and the laws sufficient.... Depend upon it, countries have been admirably governed when your religion had no existence." [1307] Religion certainly had no part in his personality in the ordinary sense of the term. Voltaire was wont to impute to him atheism; when La Mettrie died, the mocker, then at Frederick's court, remarked that the post of his majesty's atheist was vacant, but happily the Abbé de Prades was there to fill it. In effect, Frederick professed Voltaire's own deism; but of all the deists of the time he had least of the religious temperament and most of sheer cynicism. The attempt of Carlyle to exhibit Frederick as a practical believer is a flagrant instance of that writer's subjective method. He tells (Hist. of Friedrich, bk. xviii, ch. x) that at the beginning of the battle of Leuthen a column of troops near the king sang a hymn of duty (which Carlyle calls "the sound of Psalms"); that an officer asked whether the singing should be stopped, and that the king said "By no means." His "hard heart seems to have been touched by it. Indeed, there is in him, in those grim days, a tone (!) as of trust in the Eternal, as of real religious piety and faith, scarcely noticeable elsewhere in his history. His religion--and he had in withered forms a good deal of it, if we will look well--being almost always in a strictly voiceless state, nay, ultra voiceless, or voiced the wrong way, as is too well known." Then comes the assertion that "a moment after" the king said "to someone, Ziethen probably, 'With men like these, don't you think I shall have victory this day!'" Here, with the very spirit of unveracity at work before his eyes, Carlyle plumps for the fable. Yet the story, even if true, would give no proof whatever of religious belief. In point of fact, Frederick was a much less "religious" deist than Voltaire. He erected no temple to his unloved God. And a perusal of his dialogue of Pompadour and the Virgin (Dialogues des morts) may serve to dispose of the thesis that the German mind dealt reverently and decently with matters which the French mind handled frivolously. That performance outgoes in ribaldry anything of the age in French. As the first modern freethinking king, Frederick is something of a test case. Son of a man of narrow mind and odious character, he was himself no admirable type, being neither benevolent nor considerate, neither truthful nor generous; and in international politics, after writing in his youth a treatise in censure of Machiavelli, he played the old game of unscrupulous aggression. Yet he was not only the most competent, but, as regards home administration, the most conscientious king of his time. To find him a rival we must go back to the pagan Antonines and Julian, or at least to St. Louis of France, who, however, was rather worsened than bettered by his creed. [1308] Henri IV of France, who rivalled him in sagacity and greatly excelled him in human kindness, was far his inferior in devotion to duty. The effect of Frederick's training is seen in his final attitude to the advanced criticism of the school of d'Holbach, which assailed governments and creeds with the same unsparing severity of logic and moral reprobation. Stung by the uncompromising attack, Frederick retorts by censuring the rashness which would plunge nations into civil strife because kings miscarry where no human wisdom could avoid miscarriage. He who had wantonly plunged all Germany into a hell of war for his sole ambition, bringing myriads to misery, thousands to violent death, and hundreds of his own soldiers to suicide, could be virtuously indignant at the irresponsible audacity of writers who indicted the whole existing system for its imbecility and injustice. But he did reason on the criticism; he did ponder it; he did feel bound to meet argument with argument; and he left his arguments to the world. The advance on previous regal practice is noteworthy: the whole problem of politics is at once brought to the test of judgment and persuasion. Beside the Christian Georges and the Louis's of his century, and beside his Christian father, his superiority in judgment and even in some essential points of character is signal. Such was the great deist king of the deist age; a deist of the least religious temper and of no very fine moral material to begin with. The one contemporary monarch who in any way compares with him in enlightenment, Joseph II of Austria, belonged to the same school. The main charge against Frederick as a ruler is that he did not act up to the ideals of the school of Voltaire. In reply to the demand of the French deists for an abolition of all superstitious teaching, he observed that among the 16,000,000 inhabitants of France at most 200,000 were capable of philosophic views, and that the remaining 15,800,000 were held to their opinions by "insurmountable obstacles." [1309] This, however, had been said by the deists themselves (e.g., d'Holbach, préf. to Christianisme dévoilé); and such an answer meant that he had no idea of so spreading instruction that all men should have a chance of reaching rational beliefs. This attitude was his inheritance from the past. Yet it was under him that Prussia began to figure as a first-rate culture force in Europe.