Johann Christoph von Wöllner

Prussian pastor and politician

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Johann Christoph von Wöllner" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2014) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (August 2011) Click for important translation instructions.

View a machine-translated version of the French article.
Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Misplaced Pages.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Misplaced Pages article at ]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Johann Christoph von Wöllner}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Misplaced Pages:Translation.

(Learn how and when to remove this message)

Johann Christoph von Wöllner (19 May 1732 in Döberitz, Margraviate of Brandenburg – 10 September 1800 in Grossriez near Beeskow) was a Prussian pastor and politician under King Frederick William II. He was inclined to mysticism and joined the Freemasons and the Order of the Golden and Rosy Cross.

Wöllner was born in 1732 in Döberitz. His father was a pastor.

Wöllner, whom Frederick the Great had described as a "treacherous and intriguing priest," had started life as a poor tutor in the family of General August Frederick von Itzenplitz, a noble of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. After the general's death and to the scandal of king and nobility, he married the general's daughter, and with his mother-in-law's assistance settled down on a small estate. By his practical experiments and writings he gained a considerable reputation as an economist; but his ambition was not content with this, and he sought to extend his influence by joining first the Freemasons and afterwards the Rosicrucians. Wöllner, with his impressive personality and easy if superficial eloquence, was just the man to lead a movement of this kind. Under his influence the order spread rapidly, and he soon found himself the supreme director (Oberhauptdirektor) of several circles, which included in their membership princes, officers and high officials. As a Rosicrucian Wöllner dabbled in alchemy and other mystic arts, but he was also zealous for Christian orthodoxy as well as the Enlightenment concept of religion as an important factor in maintaining public order. A few months before Frederick II's death, Wöllner wrote to his friend the Rosicrucian Johann Rudolph von Bischoffswerder (1741–1803) that his highest ambition was to be placed at the head of the religious department of the state as an unworthy instrument in the hand of Ormesus (the prince of Prussia's Rosicrucian name) "for the purpose of saving millions of souls from perdition and bringing back the whole country to the faith of Jesus Christ."

Despite this statement, king Frederick William II of Prussia, with Christoph von Wöllner as Minister of Justice and head of the Office for the Worship, instituted the Königliche Examinations-Commission in geistlichen Sachen with the declared public purpose of managing and controlling any religious or spiritual activity in all the nation, and of applying the relative decree of 9 July 1788. The commission had also the legal power of confiscation on money and properties.

Among the most famous victims of this censorship, Immanuel Kant, with his 1793 first published script, titled Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason. The theologian Karl Friedrich Bahrdt saw himself forced to lay down his magisterium because of the new regulations.

Bibliography

Uta Wiggermann: Woellner und das Religionsedikt, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010.
Dirk Kemper: Obskurantismus als Mittel der Politik. Johann Christoph von Wöllners Politik der Gegenaufklärung am Vorabend der Französischen Revolution, in: Von „Obscuranten“ und „Eudämonisten“. Gegenaufklärerische, konservative und antirevolutionäre Publizisten im späten 18. Jahrhundert, ed. by Christoph Weiß, St. Ingbert 1997, pp. 193–220.
Reinhard Markner: Woellner, Johann Christoph (1732–1800), in: Le Monde maçonnique au XVIIIe siècle, ed. by Charles Porset (†) and Cécile Révauger, Paris 2013, vol. 3, pp. 2820–2824. (German version)

References

Ford, Guy Stanton (1910). "Wollner and the Prussian Religious Edict of 1788, II". The American Historical Review. 15 (3): 509–525. doi:10.2307/1835188. ISSN 0002-8762.
^ Ford, Guy Stanton (1910). "Wöllner and the Prussian Religious Edict of 1788, I". The American Historical Review. 15 (2): 264–280. doi:10.2307/1838334. ISSN 0002-8762.
Clark, Christopher (2006). Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600 to 1947. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. pp. 270. ISBN 9780674023857.

Categories: