| This dissertation examines how catechisms, short works in question-and-answer form, negotiate the relationship of faith and knowledge. Focusing on non-religious catechisms of the period 1760--90 when these texts first proliferated in Germany, I address their specificity and the larger pedagogical, religious, and scientific debates in which they took part. The notion of the "conversion of knowledge" explains how and why practitioners of Enlightenment, for all their alleged anti-dogmatism and stress on the autonomy of the individual, turned to the most dogmatic of textual forms to propagate a program of liberation from "self-incurred immaturity" (Kant). In readings of Paul, Augustine, and Luther, the first part of the thesis traces the claim that a minimum of knowledge of Church teachings is necessary to orient us toward God and render us receptive for insight into our spiritual calling. An examination of conversion narratives shows how the conversion experience constitutes a transition from knowledge to insight. I then examine how the question-and-answer format of the catechism takes the relay of the conversion narrative. In the second part, I show how, in the eighteenth-century, the vocation of the human being is rearticulated, on the one hand, in non-religious terms---the goal is no longer Seligkeit (beatitude) but Gluckseligkeit (happiness)---yet, on the other, in a traditionally religious format, the catechism. The claim of Enlightenment thinkers that our natural faculties are sufficient guides to and means of action leaves the necessity of insight (instead of merely abstract or, worse, scattered factual knowledge) intact. Insight might no longer come from God, we might be able to produce it ourselves, but it is still the precondition of all meaningful action. The third part's analysis of a set of non-religious catechisms examines under what conditions the catechism's traditional claim to providing knowledge and facilitating insight can attract the attention of some of the most innovative, even anti-traditional practitioners of enlightenment. |
