Bildung: Liberal Education and its Devout Origins

This research will investigate the blending of secular and spiritual components in the German Enlightenment concept of Bildung. It aims to reexamine the intimate relations between the secular, rational Enlightenment ideals of education, which played a seminal role in the formation of the concept of Bildung at the turn of the eighteenth century, and the religious and mystical foundations of these very ideals.