8 - Religion after the Seven Years War

Summary

Confessional Armageddon forgotten?

In 1782 the Baron von Schrautenbach handed over to the Moravian archive a sympathetic life of Zinzendorf written from the standpoint of the Enlightenment, a book which did not appear in cold print till 1851. Zinzendorf had died only in 1760, but already the glory days of his youth appeared to his biographer to belong to a remote heroic past.

In the times in which we now live such a community institution would develop with difficulty, and entail much joyless toil upon its creators and promoters. How astonishingly different from today were those times which have scarcely passed from us. Education, light, generally diffused knowledge, were much less than they are now. There was less international friendship among men across the globe … Habits were rough, always a step nearer nature, Werceness too, irritability, energy … A general longing among all men for fellowship, with a whole caboodle of opinions and very uncertain foundations.

This testimony clearly owed much to the conviction of men of the Enlightenment that their own happy generation had broken decisively with an obscurantist past, but it can be paralleled from various standpoints, and it is in some respects clearly true. When the Seven Years War began, the long-expected Armageddon between Catholic and Protestant seemed to have arrived.