The Enlightenment is commonly understood as a period during which freedom of thought, individual liberties, scientifically informed reason, and revolutionary change spread across Europe during the long eighteenth century. Yet the license to determine what, exactly, counted as “enlightened” ideas and art paradoxically entailed a multilayered form of censorship that belies tolerance. As evident in the case of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Bildung and artistic production, especially his 1790 funeral cantata mourning the death of Joseph II, the Enlightenment not only served to inculcate and nourish freedom of thought but also inadvertently justified the need for authoritative control over what comprised enlightened thinking. As a case in point serves, on the one hand, Immanuel Kant’s well-known essay “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” and, on the other, Eulogius Schneider, a monk who became a poet. Elector-archbishop Maximilian Franz, brother of Joseph II and a promoter of a belated enlightenment in Bonn, hired him as a professor of aesthetics until he could no longer tolerate his religious publications. Enlightened leaders like him thus often exercised the very sort of censorship many authors and artists sought to avoid, problematizing the notion of enlightened thinking and the relationship between freedom and Bildung.