Religion in Beethoven’s Library

AbstractThis chapter focuses primarily on two religious books in Beethoven’s library, which he likely read in the 1810s: Christoph Christian Sturm’s Betrachtungen über die Werke Gottes im Reiche der Natur und der Vorsehung, and Ignaz Aurelius Feßler’s Ansichten von Religion und Kirchenthum. Though the authors of both texts were Protestant, their lives and writings intersected with the German Catholic Enlightenment, a situation typical of the movement’s ecumenical outlook. Moreover, the concerns of these two books overlap with those of the Catholic Enlightenment: the presence of God in nature, in the case of Sturm’s Betrachtungen; and ecumenism, in the case of Feßler’s Ansichten. An additional section of the chapter discusses the non-Christian quotations in Beethoven’s Tagebuch, a commonplace book Beethoven maintained, also during the 1810s. Contrary to previous assumptions, within the framework of the Catholic Enlightenment, this openness to other religious traditions was not considered antithetical to traditional Christian belief.