Faith and Reason: Schiller's “Die Sendung Moses”

The literary dimension of Friedrich Schiller's portrayal of Moses in his lecture entitled "Die Sendung Moses" (1789; NA17:377-97) has not received much scholarly attention.1 This seemingly ancillary text is nonetheless key to central aspects of its author's philosophical and aesthetic positions because it encapsulates his views on both the relationship between religion and aesthetics, and-perhaps even more pertinent-on human nature in general. In fact, Schiller's text is less about the historical figure of Moses than about what it means to be human. Schiller presents Moses as a philosopher, politician, and poet (NA 17: 391-96) who united his people under monotheism, which, according to Schiller, helped further the enlightenment of Western civilization (NA 17: 377).2 Most of the scholarship on the lecture examines it either in the context of eighteenth-century historiography or of Schiller 's use of literary sources (Wufaben 125-26).3 Schiller's reference to Karl Leonhard Reinhold's Die hebraischen Mysterien-initially published in 1787 under the Masonic pseudonym "Br[uder] Decius"-contributed to the preoccupation with the complex history of Schiller's sources (NA 17:397).4 The somewhat narrow research focus has resulted in the assumption that Schiller paraphrases Reinhold's essay (Hartwich 30) and simply emphasizes those aspects of Reinhold's treatise that appear particularly important to him without adding any new arguments (Assmann, "Nachwort" 184).5 While my analysis builds on this research to provide necessary background information about the intellectual climate in which Schiller's "Die Sendung Moses" was written, I will read the text in light of the author's anthropological and poetological principles. One can assume that Schiller is not interested in simply summarizing his sources but in recreating history according to his own point of view, in line with his own premises laid out in his famous lecture on universal history, "Was heisst und zu welchem Ende studiert man Universalgeschichte? " ( 1789) (NA 17:359-76, see pages 362-63 and 372-75 in particular). In this lecture-which he delivered only a few weeks before he spoke on "Die Sendung Moses"-Schiller expects philosophically minded historians, like himself, to give meaning to an otherwise meaningless accumulation of facts (NA 17: 370, 373). From his argument it follows that he is not satisfied with the critical examination of historical sources. Instead he proposes that poetic illusion restore a truth that has been distorted by the limited perspective of each particular era (NA 17: 373-74). Schiller justifies his belief in a so-called "rational totality" of history with the continuous and unchangeable unity of human nature, which forms the basis for the similarities between ancient and modern-day events (NA 17: 371). In other words, understanding human nature is crucial to understanding human history. And history is relevant to Schiller only as long as it sheds light on the dark recesses of the human soul. My reading of Schiller's "Die Sendung Moses" intends to provide insights into the author's ambivalent stance toward humanism in the context of Enlightenment ideology. This article seeks to reveal the connections between Schiller's foundational assumptions about human nature, his dramatic oeuvre, his approach as a universal historian, and his use of biblical sources for his aesthetic pursuits. Of particular interest is the question of whether it is possible to preserve the rights of the individual in a society that is guided by abstract principles of truth. This question ties into the larger debate about the dialectic of the Enlightenment that-as some would argue-already began during Schiller's time and continues to this day: namely, whether the pursuit of Enlightenment ideas could lead to a tyranny of reason and the perversion of abstract, ethical principles, such as freedom, truth, and honor (Borchmeyer 130).6 Adherence to these universal ethical concepts often infringes on the fulfillment of individual human needs, which have generally been associated with the biological nature of the human species. …