The narrative of secularism and the religion of German Enlightenment

It is a wide spectrum of the interrelations between philosophy and religion in Germany during the Enlightenment as disclosed in the newest book by Ludmila Kryshtop Morality and Religion in the Philosophy of German Enlightenment — from Thomasius to Kant regarded in the lenses of German studies whrerefrom those of Konrad Feiereis and Albrecht Beutel could be selected, that makes up the subject-matter of this article. The author highly estimates both Kryshtop’s successful endeavour to uproot the clich? of the enlightenment secularism (based on the pattern of French Enlightenment) and introducing of numerous philosophers to the Russian reader hardly familiar to him. In many details the author of the paper concerns himself with exposition of Christian August Crusius’ and Moses Mendelssohn’s philosophical ideas and approves Kryshtop’s exposition of deepening the movement to the left in German religious thought of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the author of the paper comes also to disagreement with the author of the book because of her underrating of the spread and influence of deism in “the age of reason” and refers to several signifi cant avenues whereby deism came from England to Germany. As to how to identify deism itself the author refers to a typological approach of Christoph Gestrich, which he considers as highly productive. The question is about 13 essences of deism whereby any thinker can be judged as one capable of being enlisted into the deists, the fi rst of them being negation of any religion’s claim at absoluteness, the last one infi delity to the doctrines of the Holy Trinity and Incarnation.