We are familiar with the standard story about the origins of the Enlightenment in Germany. The Enlightenment supposedly began in the 1680s with Christian Thomasius and the University of Halle, founded in 1694, which became its first center. In Halle, Thomasius and his students developed a philosophy that was grounded in Samuel Pufendorf’s ideas of natural law and drew on the sensualism of John Locke.

“Godless physics” was not the only boogeyman to threaten Germany in the decades around 1700 because a fear of “godless” psychology developed as well. This was not just the sort of mortalism that we got to know with Bucher in Chapter 1 of this book. We also saw that in Halle a doctrine of the affects or passions arose that combined the common interests between the medical and the philosophical faculties. We need to devote more attention to this combined interest because some external observers thought it harbored a sort of implicit atheism.

The debates about idolatry in the seventeenth century exercised a powerful influence, and not just in theology and in religious controversies.1 Because these debates have fallen into oblivion, however, their influence on other disciplines has remained invisible and underestimated for too long. Even though their explicit focus was on ancient Israel and ancient Egypt it is obvious that they structured a nascent ethnology, the study of the religions of the New World and of exotic cultures.

In the previous chapter we watched Johann Christoph Becmann react to the immigration of Jews to Frankfurt on the Oder by supporting an edition of the Talmud. In 1695 he also published a new edition of Selden’s De jure naturali, which must have been of interest to Jewish scholars as well. In these years, however, he had to grapple with a controversial case that was triggered by a book that had been secretly published in 1692 by the printer Runge in Berlin and was being sold by the book dealer Jeremias Schrey from Frankfurt on the Oder.1

This book, along with its companion volume Enlightenment Underground and some of my other earlier works, draws a new picture of the origins of the German Enlightenment. It has mainly highlighted moments of radical Enlightenment, but it has also illuminated the conditions under which such moments took shape and shows that long-acknowledged scholarly discussions were deeply entangled with clandestine dissenters, and that the moderate Enlightenment, like that of Halle, was bound up with the Enlightened underground. The big picture that emerges is multifaceted and no longer focuses on Halle alone as the center and no longer emphasizes Pufendorf and Thomasius as the only protagonists but discovers a multitude of less well-known thinkers from various and unexpected locations in Germany.

When the Italian Aristotelian Cesare Cremonini died in 1631, he had these words engraved on his tombstone: Totus Cremonius hic iacet (“Here lies all of Cremonini”). At least that is what was reported by libertine traditions, which had a penchant for inventing epitaphs.1 The claim that “all of Cremonini” was lying in his grave – that is, that not only his body but also his soul – might well have been a consequence of his Aristotelianism, which sometimes argued that Alexander of Aphrodisias was right in considering the soul to be mortal.

The bedroom of King James II of England had a staircase that led down to a laboratory that housed the royal alchemist Edmund Dickinson.1 When he was not experimenting, Dickinson worked on a large book that he wanted to call Physica vetus et vera (“The Old and True Physics”). There he planned to describe the philosophy of Moses in such a way that it could finally be rightly understood and scientifically explained. When the king could not sleep, he went downstairs to Dickinson, where they discussed alchemy, philosophy, and politics, but probably also Moses.

Samuel Pufendorf’s version of natural law formed one of the foundations for the early Enlightenment in Germany, something we have noted in several of the chapters of this book, but the actual problems of law have not yet received their own chapter. Here I do not intend to summarize or comment on the many excellent contributions to this topic.1 To do so would not make much sense and, besides, the task could not be completed in the tight space of one chapter. Instead I would like to treat a few neglected authors, currents, and connections and pay special attention to radicalizing impulses.