What was the nature of Beethoven’s religious confession? The nature of his sentiments is clear, attested by the quotations [copied by Beethoven from books] in the Aufzeichnungen (Notes): humility, and that sense of a private, one‑to‑one relationship which we find both in his writings and in his music, suggest faith in an omnipotent and personal God; transcendent and yet accessible (effusions on nature); a Father in whom all men are brothers (diary and Ninth Symphony), and yet infinitely remote from them, mysterious and never fully knowable (Oriental quotations, the Sanctus of the Missa Solemnis and the Heiliger Dankgesang of Op. 132). If Beethoven during his life was clearly not a practising Catholic, his assent to the last sacraments on his deathbed confirms the impression that he had never, unconsciously, detached himself from the community of the Church. To call him, as Schmitz does, a katholischer Aufklärer (“Catholic Enlightener”), mostly rationalist but inclined to fideism in the Masses, would be misleading. — M. Cooper

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Beethoven was a religious man who, formally raised as a Catholic Christian, had never abdicated his role as a member of the Church [even though he had never been a practising Catholic], but only at the end of his life, through misfortune and infirmity, came to understand the close relationship between the religious feelings and the often unformulated religious convictions in which he had lived, and the fundamental teachings of the Church, toward which he had been mostly indifferent or hostile. — M. Cooper

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Religion was not a subject he discussed much with others. Raised in the tolerant Catholicism of the late eighteenth century, the formal side of religion held little interest for him. The divinity to which his faith was directed was a personal God, a universal Father to whom he continually turned for consolation and forgiveness. He felt the presence of God in the beauty of nature and sought in the countryside the possibility of worshipping Him. — Kerman and Tyson

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Many have investigated Beethoven’s religious belief, about which — especially in the early years — little information survives. All have reached the same conclusion: that Beethoven believed in a Divinity, in a superior being, omnipotent and omniscient, a God to whom one could turn for forgiveness and consolation, but outside any dogmatic conception. This problem has been deeply analysed by Solomon in “The Search for Faith” (Su Beethoven, Einaudi, 1998, pp. 253–268), of which a very concise summary is given here.

Beethoven was born into a Catholic family, was baptised, and attended a Catholic elementary school. But there is no proof — apart from some generic testimony about his mother’s religiosity — that his parents or he himself were practising Catholics. Beethoven became an adult in an environment in which Enlightenment ideas were widespread and took, for many and for Beethoven himself, the place of dogmatic faith. The intellectuals of the Lesegesellschaft of Bonn, into whose circle Beethoven was welcomed, were Freemasons and anticlerical; but although, as enlightened rationalists, they rejected religious dogma, they did not exclude faith — in other words, they were not atheists. Yet there is no hint, in his early correspondence or in the recollections of his youthful friends, of any religious convictions of his.

In his writings the first references to religion appear in the famous letter to Hoffmeister of 8 May 1802 [K.59], written after the Concordat between Napoleon and the Church, in which at the end appears the phrase: “… but good God, such a sonata in these Christian times that are beginning — …”, a phrase not difficult to interpret as impatience toward the dogmas of Roman Catholicism, and which Solomon considers even “contemptuous.”

Other references appear in the letters of 1801 to his friends Amenda and Wegeler [A.51 and A.53], in which he communicates the onset of deafness: “Your Beethoven has a very unhappy life, in struggle with nature and the Creator. More than once I cursed the latter because he has arranged his creatures in such a way that often even the most beautiful flower can be destroyed and broken.” From his writings we also know of his adherence to Roman Stoicism: “Plutarch has revealed to me the path of resignation.”

It is, however, in the Heiligenstadt Testament of October 1802 that Beethoven’s religious feeling emerges, at least temporarily: “Almighty God, Thou from on high lookest into my inmost soul, readest my heart and knowest that it is filled with love for humanity.” Invocations of this kind reappear several times, for example in his private notes — certainly sincere — the Aufzeichnungen, gathered in what is now called the Tagebuch: “O God, God, look down upon the unhappy Beethoven” (no. 10, 13 May 1813); “God help me! Thou seest me abandoned by all mankind, for I do not wish to do harm. Hear my prayer” (no. 129, 1817–1818); “Only Thou, Almighty, seest into my heart” (no. 171, 1818).

These invocations reveal one of the characteristics of Beethoven’s religious belief: faith in the existence of an omnipotent God, a superior being, a protective divinity to whom one appeals directly, personally, without intermediaries, yet at the same time transcendent, remote, and mysterious. The origin of this aspect of his belief is suggested by the numerous Oriental quotations found in the Aufzeichnungen: “God is immaterial, therefore He is beyond all comprehension; since He is invisible He can have no form” (no. 74). “But from His works we are aware that He is eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent” (no. 74). It is therefore a God who permeates nature.

Around 1815, on a sheet and on a sketch, he wrote: “Every tree in the countryside said to me ‘Holy! Holy!’ In the forest an enchantment! Who can express all this?”; “Almighty in the forest! Every tree speaks thanks to Thee, O God!” This tells us that for Beethoven the cult of nature also had a religious meaning.

There are many works from the early 1800s and later that have a religious significance: the oratorio Christus am Ölberge Op. 85, which, Solomon writes, “seems to embody his identification with a suffering saviour”; nos. 4 (Die Ehre Gottes aus der Natur, The Glory of God in Nature) and 5 (Gottes Macht und Vorsehung, God’s Power and Providence) from the Gellert Lieder Op. 48, hymns to God’s works in nature and in all creation. But a religious meaning — in the sense of a Father in whom all men are brothers — is also found in the Choral Finale of the Ninth Symphony, Op. 125, with the embrace of the “millionen” in the Father above the vault of heaven, and in the Song of Thanksgiving offered to the Divinity by a convalescent, in the Lydian mode (Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der lydischen Tonart, Op. 132), where the address is to “the Divinity” and not to the God of any Christian confession.

It is worth recalling that when Beethoven set a poetic text to music, he never did so on commission, but always on his own initiative — driven, therefore, almost certainly by the meaning the text held for him.

Beethoven repeatedly read and annotated a book by Christoph Christian Sturm (1740–1786), Betrachtungen über die Werke Gottes im Reiche der Natur und der Vorsehung auf alle Tage des Jahres (“Reflections on the Works of God in the Realm of Nature and Providence for Every Day of the Year”): Beethoven’s copy, of an edition printed in Reutlingen in 1811, with annotations in his own hand, is today preserved in Berlin. In this work Sturm sought to reconcile Christian ideals with human reason. Probably for this reason, and because God was depicted therein as the supreme regulator of the celestial spheres and of the life of nature, Beethoven, as Schindler reported, loved this book very much.

It is certain that Beethoven never observed the formal obligations of a religion, much less of any of the Christian doctrines, although on a couple of occasions he accompanied his nephew Karl to confession. It is said that he once defined Jesus as “nothing but a crucified Jew.” And a conversation with his nephew Karl suggests that “he admitted the divinity of Jesus Christ only as a symbol, or as a mystery, and not as an established fact” (Chantavoine). Certainly there is no testimony throughout his life that might lead us to believe that Beethoven accepted the divinity of Christ. On the contrary, there remain accounts that he sometimes uttered words of contempt toward the religious hierarchy and men of the Church.

Yet despite this, in his Notes there are sentences such as the following, which lead us to think that in his search he had found certainty of the existence of God: “Everything flows clear and pure from God. If afterwards I was darkened by the passion for evil, I returned, after repeated penances and purifications, to the first, sublime and pure source, to the Divinity — and to thy art” (Aufzeichnungen no. 75). But, as Solomon has written, “Beethoven’s religiosity is firmly situated within Enlightenment thought, which had set itself the task of seeking a religion free from recourse to dogma. … And Beethoven, who rejects the authority of the Church, demonstrates his independence from Catholic or Lutheran thought, which presuppose dogma as the nucleus of theology. … Beethoven’s acceptance of pagan and Oriental religions corresponds to the efforts of Leibniz, Voltaire, and Herder to broaden the concept of divinity so as to include the totality of its manifestations: … different forms of faith are fundamentally in harmony according to a humanistic conception of an all‑knowing, all‑powerful, all‑present, and benevolent Father‑God, whose teachings conform to the requirements of morality and reason.” Beethoven was a child of the Enlightenment who never entirely yielded to the allure of religion, though, as many of his writings show, he seems — like anyone else — to have felt the need for it.

The faith in a superior being who permeated all things, to whom it was possible to appeal for help directly, without intermediaries, and from whom comfort and salvation could be obtained, was one of the foundations of Beethoven’s religiosity. The letter to Archduke Rudolph of 18 July 1821 gives us unequivocal proof of this: “… God, who sees into my innermost being and knows that I, as a man, everywhere fulfil in the most scrupulous manner the duties that humanity, God, and Nature impose upon me, will tear me away in the end, once again, from these tribulations.” Humanity, God, Nature — this is the spiritual trinity that lies at the basis of Beethoven’s religiosity.

The long crisis [of the years 1815–1818] that inaugurated Beethoven’s late style, although it coincided with the fading of the ideals of the Age of Reason and was accompanied by the erosion of Beethoven’s rational faculties during the battle for the guardianship of his nephew, did not lead him to repudiate Enlightenment ideals in themselves. He never yielded to the allure of mysticism. He abjured the intrusion of the miraculous and the supernatural into art and literature because, he wrote, “it has a soporific effect on feeling and on reason.” … It was during this critical period that Beethoven freely expressed his desires for comfort and his feelings of dependence on a supernatural being; and undertook the search for a religious meaning in Oriental and Egyptian rituals, in classical mythology, and in Christian theology. — Solomon

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Reading the text of the recitative that opens the second version of An die Hoffnung, set to music by Beethoven in 1815, one may be seized by the doubt that Beethoven’s faith in a God, a superior and omnipotent being, was very faint. These words indeed are: “Is there a God? Will He one day fulfil the promise of satisfying our tearful desires? Man must hope! He cannot doubt!” But his uncertainty seems to vanish immediately if in his Notes we read: “Everything flows clear and pure from God. If afterwards I was darkened by the passion for evil, I returned, after repeated penances and purifications, to the first, sublime and pure source, to the Divinity — and to thy art” (Aufzeichnungen no. 75). And in 1818 he copies from his beloved book by Christoph Christian Sturm, Betrachtungen über die Werke Gottes im Reiche der Natur und der Vorsehung auf alle Tage des Jahres (“Reflections on the Works of God in the Realm of Nature and Providence for Every Day of the Year”): “I shall submit serenely to all changes and place all my trust in Thee, immutable Good, O God! In Thee, immutable, my soul shall rejoice. Be my rock, God, be my light, my eternal certainty.” (Aufzeichnungen no. 180)

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Beethoven dedicated to Archduke Rudolph, his august patron and pupil, “a most exalted musical soul,” whom he called his “companion in art,” some of his highest works, culminating in the Missa Solemnis, inspired and nourished by a profound religious feeling, a work that aims “to awaken in both performers and listeners religious sentiments.” “There is nothing higher,” he writes to the Archduke, “than to approach, more than other men, the Divinity and to spread the rays of the Divinity upon other men.” — Magnani

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None of the commentators has ever doubted that among Beethoven’s sources of inspiration there was also a religious feeling. But on the nature of this feeling the most diverse evaluations have been made, and this was possible because Beethoven never expressed his religious conceptions explicitly and coherently.

Schindler, in the Biographie von L. van Beethoven (Münster, 1840), says: “Nur zwei Gegenstände wurden bei wissenschaftlichen Discussionen niemals von ihm berührt und mit Beharrlichkeit vermieden. Diese waren: Generalbass und Religion. Er erklärte beide für in sich abgeschlossene Dinge, über die man nicht weiter disputieren solle.” (“Only two subjects were never touched by him in scholarly discussions and were consistently avoided. These were: harmony and religion. He considered both as things closed in themselves and about which one should not dispute further.”)

What Beethoven says about religion is scattered and expressed in fragmentary fashion in his letters, in his notes, and in the Conversation Books; it consists of statements gathered from people who were in contact with him and is illustrated in the anecdotes reported by his biographers.

At the base of Beethoven’s religious feeling lie the influences of Catholicism and the Aufklärung. Both acted upon him in his youth in Bonn: the former through his upbringing and his frequenting of Catholic families, among others the von Breuning family; the latter through the atmosphere of the Elector’s court, where philosophical ideas from France had spread. From this could arise a kind of Catholicism tinged with rationalism.

Such a conception was not incompatible with the doctrines of Freemasonry, to which Beethoven might have felt close because of his humanitarian and liberal ideas.

If a rationalist‑tinged Catholicism constituted the basis of Beethoven’s religious beliefs … there are, in the verbal expression of his sentiments, many variations.

In 1802 the Heiligenstadt Testament ends with an invocation to a “Providence” and a “Divinity” of vague and imprecise definition.

In 1814 Moscheles had reduced the score of Fidelio for piano and had written on the last page: “Ende mit Gottes Hilfe” (“End, with God’s help”). Beethoven wrote beneath it: “O Mensch, hilf dir selber” (“O man, help yourself”).

But in 1820 we find in the Conversation Books, in Beethoven’s own hand: “Socrates und Jesus were meine Muster” (“Socrates and Jesus were my models”).

In 1815, in the sketchbooks, one finds phrases whose sense is that of a religious pantheistic enthusiasm: “Ist es doch, als ob jeder Baum zu mir spräche auf der Lande: Heilig! Heilig! Im Walde Entzücken! Wer kann alles ausdrücken?” (“It is indeed as if every tree in the countryside spoke to me: Holy! Holy! Enchantment in the forest! Who can express it all?”) “Allmächtiger im Walde! Ich bin selig, glücklich im Walde; jeder Baum spricht durch dich. O Gott! welche Herrlichkeit! In einer solchen Waldgegend, in der Höhe ist Ruhe, Ruhe, ihm zu dienen” (“Almighty in the forest! I am blessed, happy in the forest; every tree speaks through thee. O God! what magnificence! In such a wooded region, on the heights there is peace, peace to serve thee.”) (The phrase is preceded by the indication “On the Kahlenberg 1815, end of September.”)

Beethoven’s interest was awakened by translations of Persian or Indian works in which the infinite power and eternity of God, His omniscience and omnipresence, were expressed. Schindler reports that toward the end of his life Beethoven had written in his own hand the following sentences, which he always kept on his work table: “Ich bin was das ist. Ich bin alles, was ist, was war und was sein wird. Kein sterblicher Mensch hat meinen Schleier aufgehoben. Er ist einzig von ihm selbst, und diesem Einzigen sind alle Dinge ihr Dasein schuldig.” (“I am what is. I am all that is, that was, and that shall be. No mortal man has lifted my veil. He is alone by himself, and to this One all things owe their existence.”) It was a text of Egyptian origin … of pantheistic significance.