Eleonore Schulz gives a working paper on ' "... that everyone is free to perform his duties" - Freedom concepts of theologians in Southern Germany between 1780 and 1792'

The paper presents texts from the period 1780-1792, in which theologians from Southern Germany draft concepts of freedom. The presented theologians are the rabbi Isaak Alexander, the Catholic theologians Eulogius Schneider, Benedikt Maria Werkmeister and Joseph Rendler, and the Protestant theologians Johannes Kern and Gebhard Ulrich Brastberger. They are geographically mobile - important cities are: Augsburg, Heidelberg, Regensburg, Salzburg, Strasbourg, Stuttgart, Vienna, Würzburg - and are connected to different social spaces, the court, universities and schools, monasteries and parishes. Because of their social background, their education and often far-reaching interests that are not limited to theology and philosophy, they are very articulate representatives of the
emerging modern bourgeoisie. None of them has been examined in detail so far in his theological reference to the political and philosophical discussions and changes of his time and against the background of social and regional history. This paper focuses on an interpretation of the sources based on the critique of the Enlightenment and the interests of its social carriers. The concepts of freedom and the perception of social relationships and changes they illustrate are thus classified in their social function. By this means an argumentation common to all of them becomes clear, in which central elements of the emerging modern bourgeois consciousness are articulated: The judicial office of God is relocated into nature and the conscience of man. The fact that man makes God available in
his special function as a judge relates to a new conception of time. Apocalypticism is reinterpreted into a worldly, dynamic eternity. This corresponds to the growing experience of an accumulation of knowledge, world domination and property. The alleged universalism which the new, predictable, logically acting and omnigracious judge and planner God represents, masks the particularity of this accumulation. This judge God supposedly serving the common good is in reality biased. Via nature, history and conscience he ultimately dissolves in the civil law and state. Thus, all of the five theologians speak in principle of liberties, not of freedom.

Cornel Zwierlein presents a working paper on 'Oriens contra Asiam: a spatio-temporal distinction emerging around 1700 (a study on Eusèbe Renaudot)'

Around 1700, several major political and religious controversies were troubling the courts of Europe as well as the Republic of Letters. A new vision of the Orient was emerging with the help of empiricist study of the religion of the Eastern Churches. This was linked to the West’s own disputes between Huguenots, royal Catholics and the less royal and less Catholic Jansenists in France, between episcopalists, Presbyterians, jurors and non-jurors in England before and after the Glorious Revolution. At the same time, starting in the mid-1680s, for the first time, the Far East became a major political affair across Europe during the so-called debate about the Chinese ceremonies and the choices to be taken regarding the Jesuit Mission to China. Also at the same time, on the level of historico-philosophical debates, the Querelle des Anciens et des modernes took off, and in historical chronology and geological sciences, debates about the synchronization of the different civilizations of the world as well as disputes about the shape and age of the earth took place. This all seems to belong to very different histories, but many intellectuals, like Eusèbe Renaudot, were actors in all those fields. He can thus serve like a prismatic reflector to make understand the links between those epistemic fields and intersections. We can understand, how the mental maps of the early enlightenment were reconfigured, how even something like a ´Middle East´ emerged as an actor eventually opposed to ´(Chinese) Asia´, how the discovery of the medieval Nestorian mission of China could serve ideological purposes around 1700 and how the Querelle des Anciens et des modernes was transformed into a comparison between civilizations across time and global space.