Martin Mulsow

Henry Stubbe, Robert Boyle and the Idolatry of Nature

This chapter expands and develop upon the themes raised in recent writing. It shows the connection between unorthodox views of the power of the stars, idolatry and even atheism becomes plausible once we turn our attention to the interchange of religion and philosophy and to the close relationship between religion and science during the early modern period. Henry Stubbe wrote his Miraculous Conformist in the format of a letter to Robert Boyle, who had been a patron of his during these years. Boyle supported Stubbe because he viewed him as a formerly radical mind, which could be re-educated in the spirit of the Royal Society and won over to the alliance of experimental philosophy and latitudinarian Anglicanism which Boyle hoped to promote. The hermeneutics of idolatry becomes therefore a double-edged sword. Keywords:Henry Stubbe; idolatry; Miraculous Conformist ; Robert Boyle

You Only Live Twice: Charlatanism, Alchemy, and Critique of Religion, Hamburg, 1747–1761

Rudolph Johann Friedrich Schmidt, personal physician and counsellor to the court of Darmstadt, was the author of a book on a life elixir. When he ‘died’ in 1761, the coffin in which Schmidt was interred turned out to be empty. Was he a charlatan? This case study shows that things are much more complicated than that. Schmidt, so the thesis goes, was a member of a secret society and had to fake his death in order to escape after the society was uncovered. He was acquainted with Johann Christian Edelmann, the famous German radical Pietist and freethinker, and probably also with Georg Schade, the deist and founder of the secret society. These individuals, who through their heterodox belief were ready to take many risks, were willing to execute extreme tactics including complex schemes of deception. To view this only as charlatanism in a pejorative sense would miss the point. Instead we can talk of a complex ‘charlatanized culture’ which includes bizarre tactics among alchemy, journalism, critique, and persecution.

Körper, Geist, Empfindung

Abstract As a member of the Illuminati Order, Karl Leonhard Reinhold wrote an – hitherto unknown – expert report about an internal manuscript on “The development of the forces of our mind” in January 1785. The manuscript had outlined a materialist theory of sensations and a conception of the interplay of the drives of pleasure and self-preservation. Reinhold, being in his early Kantian phase, criticized the materialism of this theory. In his own development, however, Reinhold returned soon to the topic of the drive of pleasure (in his Über die Natur des Vergnügens, 1788/89), where he does not totally exclude the materialism of Helvetius, but includes his conception in a synthetic Kantian approach.

The Libertine’s Two Bodies: Moral Persona and Free Thought in Early Modern Europe

In the fourteenth century, there was a bishop in France who claimed that he strictly obeyed celibacy in his capacity as bishop, while being happily married, in his capacity as baron.1 This may seem a somewhat frivolous example to illustrate a venerable phenomenon, namely, that one and the same person can take on several different institutional roles. In his classic The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz wrote the juridico-sacral history of this phenomenon. In the very beginning of the book he refers to the so-called Anonymus Normannus who speaks of the King, around the year 1100, as a ‘gemina persona’, a double person: ‘Thus we have to recognize [in the king] a twin person, one descending from nature, the other from grace’.2 The King never dies, it would be said later, because when the individual who holds the dignity perishes, his function, as a one-man corporation, immediately passes to his successor. When Kantorowicz wrote his book, in Princeton, in the years before 1957, he strove to explicate the medieval origins of the modern nation state.3 The book’s provocative thesis was that the roots of the state are a juridical and theological fiction. The fictitious split described by Kantorowicz was still operative in the seventeenth century, which had not forgotten the construction of the King’s two bodies or corporations. However, the perspective of the theory of state is not the only possible one from which to tell this story. The idea of the ‘gemina persona’ might also raise the question of whether this model of a person doubled by nature and grace attracted intellectuals who were driven by the desire to split their own selves. This question leads away from the sources studied in The King’s Two Bodies, but it cannot be dismissed. Was it possible, in an age of dissimulation and Nicodemism4 – the concealment of one’s own religious beliefs – that the politico-theological model of the royal person provided a pattern for the self-fashioning of a ‘gemina persona’ for the early modern intellectual? One example is François La Mothe Le Vayer, one of the so-called Libertins érudits, in Richelieu’s France. La Mothe adapted the models of ancient Stoicism and Pyrrhonist scepticism, and in the

Views of the Berlin Refuge: Scholarly Projects, Literary Interests, Marginal Fields

The intellectual Huguenot Refuge is one of the most important movements in Early modern Europe. This volume provides new information about one of its centres: about Berlin, and on the extremely important role Huguenot scholars played disseminating Enlightened thought.