7'7 S Thesns for the Degree ‘of Ph” D

 

 

   
  
  
 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF
l iSCHLEIERMACHER S PHILOSOPHY O
‘ T S RELIGION IN ITS CULTURAL CONTEXT}

MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
RONALD EDWARD BENSON
l 9 7 0

{HES-‘1‘

  
     

  

LIBRARY

Michigan State
University

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

The Development of Schleiennacher's
Philosophy of Religion in Its
Cultural Context

presented by

Ronald Edward Benson

has been accepted towards fulfillment

of the requirements for

Ph.D. degree in Arts and Letters,
Interdisciplinary

fi/WW

Major professor

 

Date Februagz 102 197 I

0-169

 

 

 

ABSTRACT

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHLEIERMACHER'S
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IN ITS
CULTURAL CONTEXT

BY

Ronald Edward Benson

Misunderstandings of the concept of religion
developed by Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-
1834) reflect a failure to appreciate its development as a
response to a particular cultural setting. A survey of the
important events in Schleiermacher's life illustrates his
relationship to certain philosophical, religious, and
literary movements representative of the Prussian tradition.
These formative experiences, combined with his sensitive
perception of that cultural milieu, decisively affected his
progress toward the explication of a constructive philosophy
of religion.

Schleiermacher's education, experiences and personal
associations brought him into contact with characteristic
philosophies of religion in eighteenth-century Germany.
Philosophy and theology were interrelated in rational ortho-
doxy. The ascendancy of reason without revelation in the

Enlightenment generated support for natural religion and

Ronald Edward Benson

Kant's ethical religion. A protest against the excessive
dependence on reason became manifested in Moravian pietism,
the "faith and feeling" philosophers, and the literary
circle of the Berlin Romantics. The emergence of Schleier—
macher's philosophy of religion reflects his intimate
acquaintance with these divergent cultural currents.

Critiques of Schleiermacher which judge his thought
primarily in terms of twentieth—century issues frequently
obscure both Schleiermacher's intention and contribution.
His attention to apologetics originated with his perception
of the need to define the essence of religion g3; generis
in the light of the alternatives he perceived in the context
of his culture. He attempted to transcend both the inade—
quacies of traditional Christian approaches and the mis—
conceptions about religion held by nonbelievers. The common
conceptions of religion, as either the knowledge of super—
natural truths or the enactment of ethical ideals, Schleier—
macher regarded as unviable options which compromised the
distinctiveness of religion. Defining religion as the
consciousness or feeling of being absolutely dependent on
God, Schleiermacher viewed the content of theology as
derived from particular states of God—consciousness wherein
the Infinite is experienced in the finite.

If Schleiermacher is correct, any successful
reconstruction of Christian dogmatics must depend on a

careful re—examination of basic presuppositions concerning

Ronald Edward Benson

the nature of religion. Schleiermacher's attempt to locate
a sense of religion EEE generis suggests a step which may
preclude some unnecessary complications in the philosophy
of religion which accompany unexamined preconceptions about

the essence of religion.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SCHLEIERMACHER'S
PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IN ITS

CULTURAL CONTEXT

BY

Ronald Edward Benson

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

College of Arts and Letters

1970

 

Q2 755‘

7’/. 70

;) Copyright by
RONALD EDWARD BENS ON

1970

ii

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Study at Drew University between 1958 and 1961 was
influential in the choice of the subject for this disser-
tation. Dr. John D. Godsey, Professor of Systematic
Theology, introduced the writings of Schleiermacher to me
for the first time. Dr. John Dillenberger, Professor of
Systematic and Historical Theology, stimulated my interest
in the significant combination of philosophical, religious
and historical dimensions of thought. Schleiermacher
appeared to be a promising choice in considering a subject
for interdisciplinary study.

I am deeply appreciative of the help provided by
members of the Michigan State University faculty who
directed my study. I wish to thank Dr. Robert T. Anderson,
Associate Professor of Religion, and Dr. Donald N. Baker,
Associate Professor of History, for their personal interest
and assistance. I am grateful for the opportunity to have
Dr. Paul M. Hurrell, Professor of Philosophy, and chairman
of my Guidance Committee, as my teacher again. While an
undergraduate at Michigan State University, Dr. Hurrell

guided my first academic study in the philosophy of

 

r
—'

religion. The wise and sympathetic counsel of my Guidance
Committee has contributed immeasurably to make this study

possible.

iv

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . .

Aim and Sc0pe
Critical Evaluations
Historical Context

II. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. . . . . . . .

Childhood and Youth 1768-1787

Young Scholar and Teacher 1787-1794
Cleric of the Reformed Church 1794-1804
Professor at Halle and Berlin 1804-1834

III. CHARACTERISTIC GERMAN PHILOSOPHIES OF
RELIGION O O O O O O O O 0 O O

Rationalism in Philosophy and Theology
Protestant Scholasticism
The Legacy of Leibniz
Enlightenment Religion

Natural Religion
Kant's Ethical Religion

Reaction and Protest

The "Faith and Feeling" Philosophers
Moravian Pietism

IV. SCHLEIERMACHER AND GERMAN ROMANTICISM. .
The Berlin Literary Circle
The German Tradition in Literature
The Friendships of the Romantic
School
The Middle-Class Orientation
The Ideals of Romanticism

The Writing of 93 Religion

19

46

88

Chapter
V. SCHLEIERMACHER'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION . . 113

Analysis of Alternative Approaches
The Distinctive Nature of Religion
The Religion of Supernatural Truth
Kant and the Religion of Morality

The Feeling of God-Consciousness
The Subjective Aspect of Religious
Feelings
The Objective Source of Religious
Feelings

Schleiermacher and the Spinoza
Controversy
The Principle of Individuality
VI 0 CONCLUSION O O O O O O O O O O O O 15 6

BIBLIOGRAPHY. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Vi

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

The early nineteenth century theologian, Friedrich
Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, has been the subject of exten-
sive study by several generations of scholars. Contro-
versies have centered around the views of this prolific
writer since the days of his distinguished career as uni-
versity professor and preacher. His unique background and
the diverse activities of his life combined to create in
him an unusually astute awareness of the intellectual
currents of his time. Schleiermacher was a man of the
world who had many significant experiences and associations.

Aside from some skepticism at certain times during
his youth, Schleiermacher considered himself unequivocally
a Christian. In his presentation of the Christian message
he was conscious of the need to express ancient truths in
relevant thought-forms capable of being communicated
effectively in the modern age. Schleiermacher is noted
for the creative manner in which he synthesized Christian
tradition with the modern mind. He claimed that theology

is developed from an empirical description of human states

of God-consciousness which exist in Christians at particular
times. This emphasized the subjective and experiential
aspects of religion in contrast to orthodoxy's claim for an
absolute, timeless truth supplied by divine revelation.
Subsequently liberal theologians further developed this
appreciation for spiritual values relative to the contempo—
rary culture.

It was Schleiermacher's preoccupation with apolo—
getics which drew the ire of orthodox thinkers. Schleier-
macher was concerned about the low regard in which religion
was held by the educated and cultured people he knew.

Since he was convinced that religion was an essential in—
gredient of human life, he labored to overcome the offenses
that prevented his friends from experiencing fully the
spiritual dimensions of human existence. Asga propaedeutic
to proclaiming the Christian gospel, Schleiermacher dis-
cussed the role of religion separately.

His endeavor to propound a revised concept of
religion involved transcending both the inadequacy of the
traditional Christian approach and the misconceptions of
religion held by disbelievers. Schleiermacher affirmed
that religion represented an indispensable dimension of
human experience distinct from that of any other disci-
pline which might appear in an enlightened era to be a
surrogate for religion. He defined religion as the
consciousness or feeling of being absolutely dependent on

God. Schleiermacher explained that specific modifications

of the feeling of absolute dependence determine particular
historical religions. Schleiermacher's treatment of
"religion" did not represent an abrogation of Christianity
inasmuch as he did not devote serious attention to other
world religions. Furthermore, he held very high regard
for the Church and the importance of affiliation by the

individual with corporate, religious fellowship.

Aim and Scope

 

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine
Schleiermacher's concept of religion as it was developed
within the framework of the particular cultural context of
Berlin around 1800. A survey of the important events in
Schleiermacher's life illustrates his relationship to cer—
tain contemporary literary, philosophical and religious
movements of his time and suggests an evolution of thought
influenced by his association with them. Greater detail
for the earlier years emphasizes the formative experiences
that affected his progress toward his mature explication of
a constructive philosophy of religion. Attention is de-
voted to his perception of the cultural context out of
which he developed a new definition of religion. Schleier-
macher's notable achievements in Christian dogmatics and
his life-long preoccupation with philology and philosophy
per se are excluded from direct and detailed examination.
His encounter with philosophy is discussed insofar as

philosophy relates to the general background and contributes

specifically to his philosophy of religion. Likewise,
extensive analysis of Schleiermacher's role as an ecclesi-
astical leader, zealous patriot and governmental adviser in
Prussia, and contributor to the philosophy of education and

pedagogy is not presented.

Critical Evaluations

 

Johann August Wilhelm Neander, Schleiermacher's
colleague on the theological faculty at the University of
Berlin, remarked to his students at the time of Schleier-
macher's death, "In days to come a new period in church

history will be dated from him."1

The title of an early
twentieth century essay acclaimed Schleiermacher as "the
church-father of the nineteenth century."2 These judgments
reflect a broad consensus among theologians in the century
following his death. The illustrious Swiss theologian Karl
Barth (1886-1968), whom many consider likely to be ranked

as the church-father of twentieth century Protestantism,

portrays Schleiermacher as a "hero"3 whose greatness

 

1Quoted in Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, Friedrich
Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher in Selbstzeugnissen und Bild-
dokumenten (Reinbek‘bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1967), p. 156.

 

 

 

 

2Christian Luelmann, "Schleiermacher, der Kirchen-
vater des 19. Jahrhunderts" in Sammlung gemeinverstaend-
licher Vortraege und Schriften, EE: fig (Tuebifigen,fil907).

3Karl Barth, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau
to Ritschl (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), p. 308.

 

 

transcends the accolades and imitation of any one particular
group of admiring followers.

It has often been pointed out that Schleiermacher did

not found any one school. . .fi. Schleiermacher's

significance lies beyond the beginnings of a school

in his name. What he said of Frederick the Great in

his Academy address entitled "What goes to make a

great man" applies also to himself: "He did not

found a school, but an era."1
"Church-father of the Nineteenth (and also of the Twenti—
ethl?) Century."2

Schleiermacher's eminence should be stated more

accurately and specifically, inasmuch as a host of modern
Christians would clearly repudiate Schleiermacher's leader-
ship. The honorific "father of modern theology" expressed
by several authors3 suggests a claim too inclusive to be
warranted and too ambiguous to be adequately descriptive.

Even the titles "father of modern Protestantism"4 and "the

founder of modern Protestant theology"5 require the further

 

lIbid., p. 306.

2Karl Barth, "Nachwort," in Heinz Bolli, ed.,
Schleiermacher—Auswahl (Munich: Siebenstern Taschenbuch
Verlag, 1968), p. 290.

 

3John Dillenberger and Claude Welch, Protestant
Christianity Interpreted Through Its Development (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), p. 189; William
Boothby Selbie, "Schleiermacher," Hastings Encyclopaedia
of Religion and Ethics, 1920, XI, 236.

 

4Richard R. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and
Religion (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1964), p. 7.

 

5Paul Tillich, Perspectives on 19th and 20th

Centur Protestant Theolo , edliby Carl E. Braaten (New
York: Harper & Row, I967), pp. 11, 91.

 

 

l and "the

qualifications "father of liberal Protestantism"
father of modern liberal theology."2 Schleiermacher's
unique formulation of theology elicited an eager response
among a group of modern thinkers who were under the con-
viction that a viable theology must originate with the
human situation rather than with a supernatural authority.

Schleiermacher's most greatly admired achievement
is his systematic theology, which was first issued at

3

Berlin in 1821 under the title The Christian Faith. This

 

carefully organized and superbly executed reconstruction

of Christian dogma evoked high praise. In his 1926 Muenster
lecture on the history of modern theology, for example,
Barth related Schleiermacher to the entire tradition of

Christian theology.

I should call attention to the unique character of
Schleiermacher's Systematics. . . . Schleiermacher

had accomplished what was not achieved before him even
by an Augustine or a Thomas Aquinas, a Melanchthon, a
Zwingli or a Calvin in their corresponding works with
their articulated Chapters, Articles or Loci. He has
presented a single, astonishingly coherent view of

the separate parts (disjecta membra) of the historical
Christian faith.4

 

 

1Kenneth Hamilton, "Schleiermacher and Relational
Theology," Journal of Religion, XLIV (January, 1964), 29.

2Dillenberger and Welch, Protestant Christianity,
p. 182.

3Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith,
English translation of the Second German Edition edited by
H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh: T & T
Clark, 1928).

4Karl Barth, Theology and Church, Shorter Writings

 

The effect of The Christian Faith on several generations of

 

scholars has especially evoked among them an inevitable

comparison of Schleiermacher with John Calvin (1509—1564).l

"Next to the Institutes of Calvin," in the words of one

 

scholar, "it is the most influential dogmatic work to which
evangelical Protestantism can point."2

In the opinion of competent thinkers the Christian

Faith of Schleiermacher is, with the exception of
CaIVin's Institutes, the most important work covering
the whole field of doctrine to which Protestant theology
can point. To say this is not necessarily to adOpt
either his fundamental principles or the detailed con-
clusions to which these principles have guided him.3

 

 

This comparison is illuminating in several respects. For
one thing, a natural similarity between their dogmatics is
manifest since both works exhibit an architectonic structure

by means of which each work is systematically organized.

 

1920-1928, trans. by Louise Pettibone Smith, with an
Introduction by T. F. Torrance (New York: Harper & Row,
1962), p. 181.

 

lMartin Redeker, "Einleitung des Herausgebers, III.
Die Wuerdigung und Kritik der Glaubenslehre im Neuprotes-
tantismus," in Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube, nach
den Grundsaetzen der evangelischen Kirche im_Zusammenhange
dargestellt (7th ed.; Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1960), I,
xxxiiilxxxiv.

 

 

 

 

2Hugh Ross Mackintosh, T es of Modern Theology,
Schleiermacher to Barth (New Yor : Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1937), p._60; cf. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher gn_Christ
and Reli ion, p. 6; Niebuhr, "Introduction to the Torchbook
Edition,fi Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (New York:
Harper & Row, Harper Torchbooks,fl963), I, xix-xx.

 

 

 

3Mackintosh and Stewart, "Editors' Preface" to
Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (T & T Clark), p. v.

 

For another, each utilized the classical Christian tradition
in'a creative way which makes it distinctive. Finally, as
Calvin stood at a crucial turning point in the sixteenth
century Reformation, so Schleiermacher inaugurated a radi—
cal reformulation of theology in the nineteenth century
which decisively affected the future of modern thought.

During the years immediately preceding World War I
the production of new Schleiermacher studies was extensive.
This revival of interest in Schleiermacher occurred at the
time when theological liberalism, with its optimistic
faith in the seemingly unlimited possibilities of man's
nature, predominated. This liberalism coincided with re—
newed respect for Schleiermacher and interest in his
analysis of the relations between religion and culture.
When the ashes had settled after World War I a more sober
estimate of man appeared more frequently than before,
especially in Europe. In less than a generation the domi-
nant voice of Christian liberal theology was muted by a
new force, that of crisis theology or Neo-orthodoxy.

In general, Schleiermacher's reputation among
theologians and churchmen had been protected by an attitude
of reverence and admiration at best, or ignorance at worst.
This situation was abruptly altered when spokesmen for
Neo-orthodoxy became self-consciously aware of the irrecon-
cilability of their presuppositions with those of Schleier-

macher. Thus, in our day, Schleiermacher has appeared at

the center of new controversies as a formidable foe who
must be directly faced.
One of the leading proponents of early Neo-orthodoxy

was Heinrich Emil Brunner, whose book Die Mystik und das

 

 

Wort} assigned the blame for the anemia and apostasy he

saw in twentieth-century Christianity to Schleiermacher's
concept of religion. For Brunner, Schleiermacher was the
father of both Neo-Protestantism and "mediating theology"

(Vermittlungstheologie),2 which meant the abrogation of the

 

essential foundations of the Reformed tradition in favor of
Christianity compromised by the relativities of a comtempo—
rary culture. Brunner further alleged that there are
certain fatal deficiencies inherent in "Schleiermacher's
deterministic speculative theology--certainly with panthe-
istic modifications."3 One recent Schleiermacher study
concisely evaluates the deficiencies inherent in Brunner's
position in these words:

For Brunner, Schleiermacher represented all that was
bad in the modern situation. . . . He intentionally

 

1Heinrich Emil Brunner, Die Mystik und das Wort:
Der Gegensatz zwischen moderner Religionsauffassung und
christlichen Glauben dargestellt §n_der Theologie Schleier-
. machers (Tuebingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1924).

 

 

 

 

2Heinrich Emil Brunner, The Divine Imperative,.A
Stud in_Christian Ethics, trans. 5y OIive Wyon (Phila—
de p ia: Westminster Press, 1947), pp. 102, 594.

 

 

3Heinrich Emil Brunner, Dogmatics, Vol. I: The
Christian Doctrine of God, trans. by OliVe Wyon (Phila-
delphia: ‘Westminster Press, 1950), p. 346; cf. p. 167.

 

 

10

left all biographical, historical questions aside in
order to draw out the one single, devastating im-
pression. . . . Brunner was attacking an historical
phantom, one which seemed in some respects real enough
when embodied in various of his contemporaries but
which had little to do with the Schleiermacher which
actually existed.

Few have done more to stimulate the study of
Schleiermacher's thought than Karl Barth. Barth represents
a curious mixture of praise and condemnation aimed at
Schleiermacher.

From early days, Barth has always seen his theological
task to be that of countering Schleiermacher's massive
influence. The respect--and even affection—-which the
father of liberal Protestantism inspires in him has
never made him doubt that a complete reversal of
liberalism was the prime need of twentieth—century
theology when he first intervened on the theological
scene.
Barth, as well as Brunner, frequently identified Schleier—
macher with Neo—Protestantism, which he envisioned as a
deviation from true Evangelical Christianity. In charac—
teristic Neo-orthodox fashion, he asserted that "Neo—

3 Contrary to what one

Protestantism means 'religionism.'"
might anticipate on the basis of his critical attitude,

Barth believed he must take account of Schleiermacher in

 

1Terrence Nelson Tice, "Schleiermacher's Theologi-
cal Method: With Special Attention to His Production of
Church Dogmatics" (unpublished Th.D. dissertation, Prince-
ton Theological Seminary, 1961), pp. 23, 24.

2Hamilton, p. 37.

3Karl Barth, Church Do matics, Vol. I: The Doctrine
of the Word of God, Pt. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner‘s
Sons, 1956), p. 291.

11

his own constructive development. Repeatedly he returned
to Schleiermacher in his personal study, in his university
teaching, and in his writing. In preparing his monumental
Church Dogmatics, Barth felt compelled to come to terms
with Schleiermacher's Christian Faith. Commenting on his
early German experience, he remarked, "We believed that
what we found in the teaching of Schleiermacher was the
theological kernel of a Christianity—of-the—present com—
patible neither with the Bible nor the real world. We were
convinced that we must oppose this."1
Barth charged that Schleiermacher represented a
theology established on the basis of human consciousness,
and, as such, is helplessly relative. Judged from Barth's
conviction that theology must begin with the objective
revelation of the sovereign and transcendent God, Schleier-
macher's heuristic principle amounts to a reduction of
theology to anthropology. Barth wrote, "There is no doubt
that Schleiermacher, whether we look backwards or forwards
in the history of theology, was the prince of all anthro-

2 Liberal

pocentric, and so of all liberal, theologians."
theology is criticized by Barth for its preoccupation with

contemporary thought forms. Barth believed that

 

lKarl Barth, Church Do matics, Vol. II: The
Doctrine of God, Pt. 1 (New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons, 1957T, p. 634.

2Karl Barth, "Liberal Theology: Some Alternatives,"
The Hibbert Journal, LIX (April, 1961), 216-17.

12

Schleiermacher's excessive concern for securing the
acceptance of religion among modern men of the world
through apologetics ultimately transformed the content of
the theological message,1 and he warned that "There can be
no thought of a general sanctifying of cultural achievement,
such as Schleiermacher accomplished with his idealism."2
In spite of his gratitude for Schleiermacher's work, Barth
pointed to Schleiermacher's conclusions as confirming evi-
dence of the inherent danger derived from an unacceptable
basis. "His result challenged the decisive premise of all
Christian theology in a way which had not been known, per—
haps since the days of the ancient Gnostics.“3 While
Barth was willing to grant Schleiermacher's sincerity, the
results produced by the "greatest theological saint"4 of
the liberals suffered a devastating evaluation and condem-
nation. "In his Christology he intended really to preach
Christ, however many considerations go to show he failed

to do so."5 The post—World War I theological era was

 

lBarth, Protestant Thogght, p. 345.

 

2Barth, Theology and Church, p. 344.

3Barth, Protestant Thought, p. 354.

 

4Barth, "Liberal Theology," p. 217.

5Barth, Theology and Church, p. 192; cf. pp. 208,

288.

l3

graphically portrayed by Barth as a situation near ship-
wreck, when "the moment was at hand to turn the rudder an
angle of exactly 180 degrees."1 The appropriate strategy
"might be to stand Schleiermacher on his head."2
Barth's analysis of intellectual history assumed
that Schleiermacher is the prototype of nineteenth century
liberalism or "the great ripe classic of Modernism."3 Typi—
cal references allude to "the developed Neo-Protestantism of

Schleiermacher and his school"4

or "the interpretation of
the Reformation on the line taken by Schleiermacher—-
Ritsch1-—Troeltsch."5 The use of such broad uncritical
generalizations is vividly illustrated in Barth's charac-
terization of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) as a logical

descendent of Schleiermacher's anthropocentric theology.6

In a recent autobiographical essay Barth disclaimed being

 

lKarl Barth, The Humanit of God (Richmond,
Virginia: John Knox Press, I960g, p. 41.

21bid., p. 43.

3Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, Vol. I: The
Doctrine of the Word of God, Pt. 1 (Edinburgh: T & T

 

4Barth, Church Dogmatics, II/l, 529.

 

5Barth, Theology and Church, p. 314.

6Karl Barth, "An Introductory Essay" to the Harper
Torchbook edition of Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of
Christianity_(New York: Harper & Row, I957), pp. xx-
xxviii. Cf. Barth, Church Dogmatics, I/2, 290.

 

 

 

14

in the Schleiermacher line against such an intimation by
Rudolf Karl Bultmann.l On the contrary, Barth placed
Bultmann directly in the Schleiermacher tradition along
with the others previously mentioned.2
Surveys of the history of modern Protestant thought

usually mention Schleiermacher.. A perusal of the indices
of contemporary theological books reveals numerous refer-
ences to him. Nearly every theological student has heard
the name Schleiermacher, but few have read first-hand what
he said. The frequent passing references commonly en-
countered tend to include an implicit value judgment with
a comment on some aspect of his thought or influence.

Schleiermacher has been made responsible for every

good thing which has taken place in the interpretation

of religion in the West in the last one hundred and

fifty years; he has also been blamed for every wrong-

turning and every dead end pursued in that period.3
Thus, the limitation of the popular conception many receive
of Schleiermacher from secondary sources is compounded by

the bias of the contemporary authors' own presuppositions

and polemical interests.

 

lBarth, "Nachwort" in Bolli, Schleiermacher—
Auswahl, pp. 298-302.

 

2Karl Barth,‘How I_Chan ed My_Mind, ed. by John D.
Godsey (Richmond, Virginia: Jo n Knox Press, 1966), p.
68. Cf. Niebuhr, Schleiermacher on_Christ and Religion,

p. 8.

 

 

3E. Graham Waring, "Introduction" in Friedrich
Schleiermacher, On Reli ion, S eeches to Its Cultured
Despisers, transT‘by Jogn Oman New York: Frederick Ungar
PubliShing Co., 1955), p. v.

 

 

15

Schleiermacher's theology really does not easily fit

into the stereotype of liberalism with which commen-

tators have been accustomed to dismiss the nineteenth

century, so that the epithets aimed at the latter fail

to cripple the power of his true thought.l

American theology, to a large extent, has been

influenced by the hegemony of EurOpean scholarship. For a
number of years this general esteem for European leadership
meant sympathetic attention to Neo-orthodox writers. It
was the encouragement of Karl Barth which did much to
stimulate American interest in Schleiermacher's contri-
bution to modern theology. This had the effect of making

Schleiermacher's significance more widely known and

appreciated.

Historical Context

 

The chief deficiency in understanding Schleier-
macher at the present time is the very limited attention
devoted to the original intellectual context of Schleier-
macher's development. "Even the most appreciative studies
of his thought have often been seriously damaged by the
author's assumption of his own theological programme into
Schleiermacher's."2 Too often Schleiermacher is read from
the perspective of certain twentieth-century schools of

thought, and the result is a distortion of the real

 

lNiebuhr, "Introduction to the Torchbook Edition,"
Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, I, x.

 

2Tice, dissertation, "Schleiermacher's Theological

16

significance of his formulations. His sensitive perception
of the cultural milieu further sets him apart even from
others of his generation who are well known. A century ago
Dilthey observed,
Kant's philosophy can be understood completely without
a more detailed consideration of his person and life.
Schleiermacher's significance requires a biographical
description for a well—founded understanding of his
world-view and his publications.
John Dillenberger, in his study of the interaction
between Christianity and the growth of the sciences, points
out the failure to notice the total cultural context of a
controversy inevitably results in misunderstanding of the
real issues at stake.
Schleiermacher stands to the Christian tradition as
Kant does to the philosophical. He recast and trans-
formed the currents of the immediate past in a synthesis
which marked a genuine new departure in Christian his-
tory. . . . He knew that the traditional theological
systems were no longer viable. . . . Schleiermacher has
been judged too much by the inadequacies of his own
positive theological statements, and not sufficiently
in terms of the problem of his own time.2

So long as general knowledge of Schleiermacher is gained by

hearing the final conclusions of partisan theologians in

another age with their own special problems and interests,

Schleiermacher will remain another name representing a

 

lWilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers 1 (Berlin:
Georg Reimer, 1870), p. i; cf. Mackintosh, Types o£_Modern

Theology, pp. 5, 31-32.

2John Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural
Science (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company,
1960), . 193. Cf. Niebuhr, "Introduction to the Torch-
book Edition," Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, I, ix.

 

 

 

17

dead-end search that the modern student can wisely avoid
investigating. A satisfactory introduction to Schleier-
macher's world of ideas properly includes an analysis of
that original context. While Richard B. Brandt emphasizes
the dependence of Schleiermacher's theology on philosophy,
he likewise recognizes the vital role of the historical
situation in the genesis of imaginative new solutions.
His views on religion are as a whole not intelligible
by themselves, and he has, I think, often been mis—
understood because his statements about religion were
read outside their general context. . . . This moti-
vating force of his thinking depended on his nature
and experiences and not on sheer analytical acuteness.
Thus, although knowing the causes of a man's accepting
certain theories is not essential to an understanding
of the logical structure of his system, it may be--
and it is the case in this instance-—that his system
becomes more intelligible in the broad sense in the
light of some insight into his character and experi-
ence.

Paul Tillich (1886-1965) is best recognized for
his philosophical approach and his insistence on the corre-
lation of theology with the existential relevance of cul—
ture. In addition, he possessed an uncanny ability to View
historical developments of intellectual history in per-
spective. In spite of the fact that Tillich wrote little
directly about Schleiermacher in comparison to Barth,

Tillich's appraisal of Schleiermacher's significance was

astute.

 

1Richard B. Brandt, The Philosophy of Schleier-
macher, The Development 9: His Theory of Scientific and
Religious—Knowledgg_(New York: Harper & Brothers, 1941),
pp. 3, 5; cf. p. 42.

 

 

 

 

 

18

No present-day theology shOuld avoid a discussion of
Schleiermacher's experiential method, whether in agree-
ment or disagreement. One of the causes for the dis-
quieting effect of neo-orthodox theology was that it
detached itself completely from Schleiermacher's method,
consequently denying the theological development of the
last two hundred years (one hundred years before and
one hundred years after Schleiermacher.)l

Past and present restoration movements try to recapture
what was once alive in the period of Orthodoxy. . . .
This means that you cannot even understand people like
Schleiermacher or Ritschl, American liberalism or the
Social Gospel theology, because you do not know that
against which they were directed or on what they were
dependent.2 A
Schleiermacher's philosophy of religion evolved as
a result of his intimate acquaintance with divergent
philoSOphical and theological currents in late eighteenth
century Germany. Attention to the historical and intel—
lectual context of Schleiermacher's work is indispensable
to an adequate understanding of his thought. Consideration
of that context is especially relevant due to the decisive
effect that those circumstances had on his conceptual
development and to the tendency of certain contemporary

writers, such as Barth and Brunner, to judge Schleiermacher

primarily in the light of twentieth century issues.

 

1Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1951), I, 41,

 

2Paul Tillich, A_History of Christian Thought, ed.
by Carl E. Braaten (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), p. 277.
Cf. Tillich, Perspectives, p. 91.

 

 

CHAPTER II

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

The story of Schleiermacher's life reveals a most
unusual combination of external circumstances. The events
of his life, together with his acute awareness and fertile
insight, placed him in a position to become keenly con-
scious of fermenting intellectual forces leading from the
eighteenth into the nineteenth century in northern Europe.
Familiarity with Schleiermacher's biography vividly i1-

1umines the development of his creative thought.

Childhood and Youth 1768-1787

 

 

Schleiermacher's father, Gottlieb Adolph Schleyer—
macher (May 5, 1727—September 2, 1794), was a chaplain of
the Reformed Church to a regiment of the Prussian army
stationed in Silesia. He served as a teacher at the
Magdeburg orphanage 1758-60, and thereafter as a military
chaplain beginning in 1760. Gottlieb was the eldest son
of Daniel Schleyermacher (b. 1695), a clergyman of a radical
and emotional faith. He had been associated with the

Ronsdorf sect of Elias Eller, which was well-known in the

19

20

Rhineland for its apocalyptic, messianic message. After
eight years as preacher of Eller's church, Daniel left the
sect in 1749, but suspicion and persecution of the radicals
at that time forced him to flee for hislife from Elberfeld
to Arnheim, Holland with his family in 1751. As a result
of this experience, Gottlieb carefully avoided the excessive
claims of supernatural religion that disregarded reason.
His attitude in religious matters was influenced by the
rationalism of the day. He later confessed to his son a
skepticism wherein he preached for twelve years without the
firm religious convictions a clergyman would ordinarily be
assumed to possess.1 The practical value of morality and
religious beliefs formed the basis of Gottlieb's religious
commitment.

At the conclusion of the Seven Years' War Gottlieb
Schleiermacher resided in Breslau,2 a city of around 50,000.
In 1764 at the age of thirty-seven he took twenty—eight-
year-old Katharina Maria Stubenrauch (July 27, 1737—
November 17, 1783) as his wife. Both her father and
grandfather had been court preachers at the cathedral
church in Berlin. The Sack, Spalding and Stubenrauch

families formed the inner circle of aristocratic clergy of

 

1The Life of Schleiermacher g3 Unfolded ig_His
Autobiograpfiy and Letters, trans. by Frederica Rowan
(London: SmitH, Elder and Co., 1860), I, 84-85; of. p. 47.

 

2Breslau is currently known as Wroclaw, Poland.

21

the Reformed Church in Berlin. Friedrich Schleiermacher

later came to know Friedrich Samuel Gottfried Sack (1738—
1817), son of August Friedrich Wilhelm Sack (1703-1786),

both as a helpful friend and hostile critic.

A daughter, Charlotte, was born to the Schleier-
machers in Breslau on March 31, 1765. Friedrich Daniel
Ernst was born on November 21, 1768, and a second son,

Karl, was born a year later. A younger daughter, Vieckchen,
died as a small child, apparently of small—pox. Katharina
Schleiermacher was a mother with great sensitivity and
concern regarding the personal development of her children's
lives. Conscientiously she cared for all their needs in the
face of the frequent and prolonged absences of her husband
occasioned by his duties as army chaplain. She directed

the children at home in their early learning such as reading
and writing.

At the age of five Friedrich was afforded the oppor-
tunity to attend Friedrich's School in Breslau. He was a
precocious child whose accomplishments quickly surpassed a
number of older students. For example, at an early age he
easily mastered Latin grammar. The family moved to Plessl
in Upper Silesia in 1778 at the time of the War of Bavarian
Succession, when Chaplain Schleiermacher took up his

station with the troops in anticipation of battle action.

 

lPless is situated in what is now south-central
Poland near the Czech border, and is currently named
Pszczyna.

22

A year later, when Friedrich was eleven, his father re-
turned and the family made their residence at the colony
of Anhalt in Upper Silesia, which was composed primarily
of Moravians. In his autobiography Friedrich summarized
this period of his life.
From my tenth to my twelfth year I was mostly in the
country. . . . From my twelfth to my fourteenth year,
during which period I was at a boarding-school in
Pless, I fell into the hands of a pupil of Ernesti.
. . . His enthusiasm for the classical languages,
together with my ambitious desire to surpass others,
stimulated the activity of my mind.2
During the spring of 1778, while the Prussian
troops were quartered in Gnadenfrei3 in Upper Silesia,
Chaplain Gottlieb Schleiermacher became acquainted with
Moravian pietism. Sermons by Brother Heinrich von Bruiningk
caused a decided change in the emphasis of the fifty-five-
year-old chaplain's religious convictions. This marked the
beginning of his warm respect and interest in the Moravian
faith. His enthusiastic comments to his wife about the
Moravians led to an extended trip in the fall of 1782, when
they visited the Moravian communities at Gnadenfrei,

Herrnhut and Niesky. Their concern for the welfare of

their children coupled with the favorable impression of the

 

lJohann August Ernesti was a prominent Leipzig
philologist.

2Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 4.

 

3This Prussian village was located in territory
which is now part of Poland.

23

Moravian communities culminated in a journey by the whole
family to Gnadenfrei.

Accompanied by their three children, the parents
arrived at Gnadenfrei on April 5, 1783. They remained about
eleven weeks, during which time they continued to observe
the community and made the necessary arrangements to have
their children accepted for enrollment. The children of
non—members of the Moravian community were accepted with
reluctance and caution. "At the recommendation of the local
officials the Unity Elders' Conference held its formal dis-
cussion and drew the Lot with relation to the admission of
the Schleiermacher boys on May 17, 1783, and the result was

affirmative."l

Charlotte, then eighteen, remained at
Gnadenfrei for many years, while her brothers, Friedrich
and Karl, were taken to Niesky in Upper Lusatia, a town of
about 600 population originally founded in 1742 by the
Moravian brethren, located in the fertile plains north of
Goerlitz.2 Friedrich entered the Paedogogium at Niesky on

June 14, 1783, where he lived and studied until September

17, 1785.

 

1James David Nelson, "Herrnhut: Friedrich
Schleiermacher's Homeland" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Chicago Divinity School, 1963). p. 490; cf.
Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 5—6.

 

2In modern terms this would be situated in East
Germany near the Polish border slightly north of Czecho-
Slovakia.

24

Friedrich's father reported his impressions of his
journey taken in the fall of 1782 to his brother-in-law.

We journeyed on to Niesky, where we found the edu-
cational establishment in every respect excellent
beyond expectation. The village is small but pleasant,
and the air very pure. The educational establishment
consists of the paedagogio and a child's school; in
the former, there are about forty young people, and in
the latter more than sixty children. I visited as many
of the classes as possible, and in all I found the in-
struction thorough-going. The supervision exercised
in this institution, as also the economical arrange-
ments, seem to me as perfect as any I have ever known.

His mother, as well as his father, had expressed concern
about the potentially harmful and corrupting effect of the
secular environment of that age upon impressionable youth.2
The carefully regulated atmosphere of the Moravian schools
appeared ideal in their estimation. In a letter to his
sister Charlotte the fifteen—year-old Schleiermacher
reminisced:
I often think of what she [mother] said in Gradenfrei:
"Now that all the children are going to the Brethren,
I shall be of little more use here, so I may as well
lay me down and go to sleep." And when I took leave
of her here, I felt as if I should never see her
again.3
His mother returned home with trusting confidence for her

children's future. Her subsequent letters reveal a deep

peace and joy.4 Five months after Friedrich and Karl

 

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I,
23-24 0

2 . 3 .

Ibid., pp. 5, 25. Ibid., p. 35.

4Ibid., pp. 26—28.

25

entered the Paedagogium, a school official told them word
had been received that their mother had died.

Schleiermacher's father remarried in 1785. His
second wife was a member of the Moravian congregation at
Pless. Three children were born to them within six years:
Anna Maria Louise (Nanny), Sophie Caroline, and Charlotte
Friederike Wilhelmine. After their father died in 1794
Friedrich showed an interest in the welfare of his half—
sisters.

Schleiermacher had fond memories of his days at
Niesky.l The experiential piety of the Moravian faith
deeply impressed him and influenced his concept of religion
throughout his life. He studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew,
in addition to German literature. One of his teachers,
Anton Benjamin Hilmer, encouraged his earlier interest in
classical studies. No examinations were required of the
students. The school allowed a generous amount of free
time for independent study, which Schleiermacher used
profitably. His closest friend during his student years
with the Moravians was Jean Baptist Albertini (1769-1831),
later a Moravian bishop and poet. Togther they pursued
advanced studies in addition to the regular curriculum.
Both were highly gifted students who were promoted together

2

to the Seminary at Barby an der Elbe at the age of sixteen

 

lIbid., p. 8.

2Barby was the site of a Moravian Brethren colony
in East Germany, 1749-1809.

26

after only two years at Niesky instead of the usual course
of six years.

Friedrich Schleiermacher arrived at the Seminary
on September 22, 1785. Barby, which was located about
thirty—seven miles north of Halle on the Elbe River, served
as the advanced training center for future clergy and
teachers for the Moravian communities. A select group of
the most promising students studied at Barby.

In examination of the curriculum it will be observed
that the inclination to gain a passable knowledge in
many fields which was noted in the Paedagogium was
carried still farther in the Seminary. In its ideal
of a general education it was in many ways more like

a liberal arts college than a German university or an
American theological seminary. This school avoided the
narrowness brought by professional specialization in
both of these latter institutions, and by the constant
tailoring of the curriculum to the particular needs of
its relatively small number of students this school
was able to turn out a very high quality of cultured
men.

 

Schleiermacher's searching mind continually pressed
beyond the narrow limits of school studies. In private
studies he and Albertini were joined in their personal
quest by Samuel Okely, a student from England. The Seminary
permitted only the reading of books whose usefulness was
well established in relation to its goals. An informal
"philosophy club" composed of Schleiermacher, Albertini and
Okely together with Johann Jacob Beyer and Emanuel Zaeslein
sought a wider field of investigation than the Seminary

allowed. They conspired "through means of forbidden

 

lNelson, dissertation, "Herrnhut," p. 529.

27

correspondence and by secret and circuitous routes"1 to

obtain books being discussed in Germany at the time. In
addition to Kant's new works, they eagerly read Goethe's
Werther andWieland's poems, and the Critical discussions

found in the Jenaer Literaturzeitung. Each member of the

 

 

club proudly considered himself a free thinker (Selbst-
denker).

The Moravian system showed a shrewd appreciation of
wordly commonsense, but the uncommon achievements of
worldly-minded genius, like natural science and
classical literature, it generally neglected. Its
deepest vein was other-worldly, and it found greater
value in spontaneous inner lights, in dreams and un-
expected revelations of the supernatural, than in
learning. . . . No attention was paid to the renais-
sance in letters, in scholarship, and in philosophy
that was even then raising the German mind to its
highest spiritual achievements. There was an index
of forbidden literature, both ancient and modern.

Before long Schleiermacher's complaints about the narrow-
ness of Moravian religion and education led to a confir-
mation of his teachers' fears that exposure to worldly
thought would lead to skepticism and heterodoxy. Schleier—
macher realized what was happening.
My convictions soon differed so widely from the system
adopted by the United Brethren, that I thought I could
no longer conscientiously remain a member of the congre-

gation, and the utterances of my ideas also became so
distinct, that the attention of the superiors was

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, ll.

 

2Horace Leland Friess, "Introduction" to Friedrich
Schleiermacher, Schleiermacher's Soliloquies, 3g En lish
Translation of The Monologen (Chicago: Open Court Pub-
lishing Compifiy, 1926), pp. xvi-xvii.

 

28

attracted to the trefoil (for a young Englishman of

remarkable talent had by this time joined my friend

and myself). In vain was every means of conversion

employed. . . .1
The Seminary administration would not tolerate doubts and
criticism akin to the Enlightenment since they feared these
might spread like a disease among the students.

His theological teachers in Barby had little under-

standing for the circle of a few open doubters; all

doubt was considered the manifestation of a sinful

will. That led to a tightening of educational pre-

cautions. In 1786 the philosophical studies were

specifically forbidden to that circle of friends.

His English friend Okely was expelled from the

congregation.2

This course of events made it clear to Schleier-

macher that he must restrain his doubts or be subject to
dismissal. A dissenter would certainly not be granted a
position as teacher or clergyman among the Moravians. Even
if he did obtain such an office someday, he would be forced
to deny his ambition to pursue critical scholarship. Thus
it became painfully obvious that unless he intended to con—
form and seriously prepare for Moravian leadership, he
should seek an honorable way to depart from Barby. After
an extended period of self-examination he mustered the
courage to confide in his father. This was done in a letter

on January 21, 1787. The resolute but frightened youth

hesitantly revealed the change that had occurred in his

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 12.

2Martin Redeker, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Leben
und Werk (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., I968), pp. 22—23.

29

heart. At that time he felt the necessity of resolving
this personal struggle which he thought might eventually
lead to his return to the Moravians, although Schleier-
macher was no longer able to grant his unqualified assent
to the rigidly orthodox supernaturalistic Christology so
essential to the Moravian faith.

Several of Schleiermacher's friends from Barby

were studying at Halle, and his mother's brother was a
professor there.1 He pleaded with his father for per-
mission to transfer to the University of Halle. Unfortu-
nately,this father who had himself experienced years of
theological uncertainty before his transformation among the
Moravians less than ten years earlier became incensed at
the son's request. A series of letters between father and
son ensued, marked by disappointment, bitterness and mis-
understandings. The confused Friedrich was wounded by the
unjustified accusations of delusion, pride and wickedness
vehemently advanced by his father in emotion-laden rhetoric.
His father emphatically declared his position.

I shall not as yet write to Halle, because I hope
that the blessing of the Lord may attend my words and
my prayers.

Should you write to your uncle--to do which I give
you my permission in case your thoughts are not changed
--then regard yourself as having taken leave of me and

of the congregation; but longer than a year and a half,
reckoning from Easter next, I cannot let you study;

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I,

 

48-49 0

30

in that time you must make yourself efficient for some
tutorship or other.1

Young Scholar and Teacher 1787-1794

 

 

At Easter in 1787 Schleiermacher matriculated at
the University of Halle. His uncle, Samuel Ernst Timotheus
Stubenrauch, Professor of Theology at the university, pro-
vided Schleiermacher with a room in his own home. This
arrangement was economical for the student, and made wise
and sympathetic counsel readily available. Schleiermacher
never regretted the decision to come to Halle. Commenting
in retrospect, he spoke of that break: "While enjoying the
beautiful freedom of youth I succeeded in the crucial act
of casting off the mummery in which long and tedious hours
of educational sacrilege had clothed me."2

Schleiermacher had developed the habit of intensive
personal study with little dependence on the usual regi—
mentation of an academic program. Moreover, his inner
struggle to resolve certain intellectual issues of urgent
concern to him made it likely that Schleiermacher would
resist a conventional course of study. He was a diligent
student, but he attended only a few courses with regularity.
Schleiermacher's previous interest in ancient Greek philoso—

phy was further developed under the guidance of the Halle

philologist and classicist, Friedrich August Wolf (1759-

 

lIbid., p. 53.

2Schleiermacher, Soliloquies, p. 74.

 

31

1824). The best known Halle philosopher at that time was
Johann August Eberhard (1738-1809). Although Eberhard had
begun his career as a theologian, he became professor of
philosophy at Halle in 1778. In his teaching Eberhard
stressed the continuity between modern philosophy and the
ancient Greeks. Responding to Eberhard's suggestion,
Schleiermacher embarked upon a translation of Aristotle's

Nicomachean Ethics with annotations.

 

A revival of classical studies made its appearance in
the eighteenth century, which brought Schleiermacher
and many of his contemporaries under its spell. In
the same years that he was translating Aristotle at
Halle, Friedrich Schlegel was studying Greek poetry
at Leipzig and Dresden, Schelling Greek mythology at
Tuebingen, and Hegel Greek religion at Tuebingen and
Basel.

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) occu-
pied the attention of Schleiermacher during his student
years at Halle. Before coming to Halle he had read Kant's

Prolegomena pg any Future Metaphysics.2 His teacher Eber—

 

hard was an articulate critic of Kant. Schleiermacher read
Kantian writings on his own initiative without assistance.
Some of his early essays included evaluations of Kant's
ideas.

When his Uncle Stubenrauch left Halle and assumed

an appointment as pastor at Drossen3 on May 26, 1789,

 

lFriess, "Introduction" to Schleiermacher, Solilo-
guies, p. xxi.
2Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 68.

3The Brandenburg city of Drossen was located

32

Schleiermacher accompanied him. He spent the ensuing year
preparing for the theological examinations required of all
candidates for the Reformed ministry. In the spring he
traveled to Berlin and passed his first theological exami-
nations in May, 1790.

In October, 1790 at the age of twenty-two Schleier—
macher accepted a position in a new environment, wherein
he became responsible for his own livelihood for the first
time. Through the kindness of court preacher F. S. G. Sack
he had been recommended as a tutor to a certain Count Dohna
who had twelve children. Count Dohna was an enlightened
Junker with an estate at Schlobitten1 in distant eastern
Prussia. Schleiermacher's experiences at the home of this
noble family develOped his social graces and conversational
ability. The charms of Friederike, a seventeen-year-old
daughter, revealed to him the nature of the feminine per—
sonality after years of contact with only boys and men.
With pleasure he recalled how "In a stranger's home my
sense for the beauty of human fellowship was first

awakened."2

 

sixteen miles ENE of Frankfurt an der Oder, and today is
known as Osno, Poland.

1Schlobitten is located in northern Poland near the
present border with the U.S.S.R., and is now called Slobity.

2Schleiermacher, Soliloquies, p. 74.

 

33

The two eldest sons of Count Dohna, Alexander and
Wilhelm, with whom he became acquainted, were near him in
age and remained his friends later in Berlin. Eventually
the conservative social and political opinions of Count
Dohna led to a disagreement with Schleiermacher over his
performance as a tutor. Schleiermacher left Schlobitten
in May of 1793 on good terms with Count Dohna but with the
conviction that the time was ripe for a change. In a
letter he wrote,

Each period of my life up to the present time has
seemed to me like a school, and looking at it from
this point of view I cannot help thinking that it
was time my stay at Schlobitten should cease, for
all that I could learn there I had already learnt.

Schleiermacher continued to pursue his studies in
his own disciplined fashion wherever he was. After spend-
ing time in Drossen on his way, he came in due time to
Berlin. In the fall of 1793 he was invited to become a
member of the seminar for college teachers which was con-
ducted by Dr. Friedrich Gedike. At the same time he worked
as part-time teacher at the Kornmesser Orphanage, where he
was given free lodging. He successfully passed his second

theological examination on March 31, 1794 in Berlin and

was ordained a clergyman of the Reformed Church.

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 120.

 

34

Cleric of the Reformed'Church 1794—1804

 

Schleiermacher's first ecclesiastical appointment
was as assistant to Pastor Schumann, brother-in-law of his
Uncle Stubenrauch. The failing health of Schumann neces-
sitated an assistant to assume most of the parish duties.
This Reformed Church parish was at Landsberg an der Warthel
in Brandenburg, a few miles frongrossen. During the two
years at Landsberg, commencing in April 1794, Schleier-
macher's research resulted in his first published works.
He collaborated with F. S. G. Sack in translating sermons
of Edinburgh scholar Hugh Blair. The three volumes of
Blair's sermons appeared in 1794, 1795 and 1802, along
with a similar volume of translated sermons of the English
Baptist preacher John Fawcett in 1797.

During the Landsberg period Schleiermacher con—
tinued his analysis of the writings of Kant, whom he had

visited personally at Koenigsberg2 in 1791. Kant's book,

Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, which attracted

 

 

wide notice when it appeared in 1793, was scrutinized by
Schleiermacher in his attempt to define the function of
religion. The philosophy of Spinoza also occupied his
critical attention while he resided at Landsberg. He

attempted to reconcile the divergent philosophies of Kant

 

1Gorzow Wielkopolski, Poland.

2Koenigsberg is a Baltic seaport 320 miles northeast
of Berlin and today is known as Kaliningrad, U.S.S.R.

35

and Spinoza. These thinkers were the subjects of his early
philosophical essays.

A new position as the chaplain of the large Charité
Hospital again brought Schleiermacher to the cosmopolitan
environment of Berlin in the fall of 1796.

Here in Berlin from 1796-1802 he finally came into
immediate personal contact with the larger intel-
lectual currents of the time, meeting men whose minds
were working along lines similar to those in which his
own thought was half-articulately moving.

Upon renewing the acquaintance of Alexander Dohna,
the oldest son of the Count of Schlobitten who eventually
became Minister of State in Prussia, Schleiermacher was
introduced to a remarkable circle of friends. This elite
group was centered around the home of a prominent Jewish
physician, Dr. Marcus Herz, and his young wife, Henriette.
Prominent in this literary fellowship gathered about
Henriette Herz were Jewish women such as Dorothea Veit,
daughter of the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

The Swedish diplomat Gustav von Brinkmann (1764—
1847), an old friend of Schleiermacher's from student days
at Barby and Halle, was instrumental in initiating Schleier-

macher's friendship with Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829).2

Schleiermacher wrote, "I first learnt to know him in a

 

lFriess, "Introduction" in Schleiermacher, Solilo—

guies, p. xxv.

2Rudolf Haym, Die Romantische Schule: Ein Beitrag
zur Geschichte des DeutSChen Geistes (Hildesheim: Georg
Olms VerlagsbuchhandIung, I870), pp. 243, 395.

 

 

36

society of which I am a member, and which meets for literary
purposes, such as the reading of essays, communication of
literary news, discussion of important literary works."1
This informal group was known as The Wednesday Society. Its
participants included several individuals prominent in
government and the artistic and literary worlds. A sub-
stantial part of Schleiermacher's time was spent with the
leaders of the German Romantic movement in Berlin. Begin—
ning in December 1797, Friedrich Schlegel roomed with

Schleiermacher for nearly two years. Schleiermacher during

this time contributed essays to the Athenaeum, the journal

 

of the Berlin Romantics. At Schlegel's suggestion the two
men began a German translation of Plato's works.

Impressed with Schleiermacher's ability to express
ideas in conversation, the Romantics chided him for his
failure to put his inner thoughts into print. Finally,
while serving as interim court preacher at Potsdam early
in 1799, separated from his friends, he expressed himself.
In April his first original work appeared under the title

92 Religion: Addresses Eg_its CulturedDespisers.2 93

 

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 158.

2Friedrich Schleiermacher, Ueber die Religion:
Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Veraechtern, ed. by
RudoIf_5tto (6th ed.; Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1967). English translation: ggReligion: S eeches to its
Cultured Despisers, trans. by John Oman, intro. 5y Rudalf
Otto, Harper TorChbooks (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1958).

 

 

37

Religion elucidates explicitly Schleiermacher's concept of
religion and is undoubtedly his most widely read book. One

year later he published the MonolOgen,l an introspective

 

revelation of his thoughts on the course of his life. Both
the above—mentioned books display the influence of the mode
of expression he absorbed in the Romantic circle.

One of the themes of Romantic interest was love.
They emphasized that love should be a sincere expression
of the inwardness of two harmonious souls. The 1799
publication of Schlegel's novel, Lucinde, dramatically
portrayed a concept of love and marriage which was offen—
sive to most readers. In an attempt to defend Schlegel,
Schleiermacher anonymously published Confidential Letters

Concerning Lucinde,2 nearly equal in length to the Lucinde

 

itself. This controversy was further complicated by
Schlegel's affair (and eventual marriage) with Dorothea
Veit, wife of Berlin banker Simon Veit. Schleiermacher
ruminated on this problem and privately commented,

I often amuse myself in a sad way with speculating upon

which persons would have suited each other as man and
wife; for how often does it not happen, when one sees

 

1Friedrich Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schleiermachers
saemmtliche Werke, III. Philosophie: Band 1. Monologen
(Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1846). English translation:
Schleiermacher's Soliloquies, an English Translation gf
The MonoIogen, trans. by Horace—Leland’Friess (Chicago:
Open Court Publishing Company, 1926).

 

 

 

 

2Friedrich Schleiermacher, Vertraute Briefe ueber
Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde (Frankfurt am Main: Insel-
Verlag, 1964).

38

three or four couples together, that one is struck with
what good marriages might ensue if they were allowed
to make exchanges.

Prior to his composition of Confidential Letters

 

Concerning Lucinde Schleiermacher became acquainted with

 

Eleanore Grunow, the wife of a Berlin clergyman, who had
been betrothed at the age of twelve. Her marriage, child-
less and pitifully unhappy, appeared to Schleiermacher to
be devoid of the essential elements of love necessary in
marriage. Schleiermacher visited Eleanore regularly in
Berlin at this time2 and sympathized with her plight. He
offered to marry her if she obtained a divorce. This plan
was seriously considered for several years until her vacil-
lating indecision ended in the fall of 1805 when she with-
drew her suit for divorce shortly before it was to be
finalized.3
Reformed Church officials had been observing the
activities of this promising young cleric with deep con-
cern. Court preacher Sack confronted Schleiermacher

directly about his undesirable association with Jews4 and

with certain writers, and repeated his disapproval of the

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 187.

 

21bid., p. 242.

3Schleiermacher, Autobio ra h and Letters, II,
68-69; cf. Soliloquies, pp. 78-8I.

4Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I,
178-79, 186.

 

 

39

pantheistic tendencies he detected in 9g Religion. Sack
forcefully suggested that Schleiermacher accept an appoint-
ment far from Berlin, lest his career be ruined.1

In May 1802 Schleiermacher reluctantly took up his
duties as court preacher at Stolp2 in Pomerania near the
Baltic Sea. During the two years of his exile he performed
the necessary pastoral duties for the small Reformed Church
and continued his correspondence and writing. The pro-
jected translations of Plato, long since forgotten by
Schlegel, were continued by Schleiermacher. His analysis
and annotations of Plato stand as pioneering work in modern
philological and philosophical scholarship.3 "Schleier—
macher himself was deeply interested in the form of the
dialogues, believing that an understanding of the form
would offer the key to the problems of authenticity and
chronology."4 The six-volume Plato translations became
the standard German edition, comparable in usage to the

English edition by Jowett.

 

lIbid., p. 257.

2Stolp is now Slupsk in northwest Poland.

3Brandt, pp. 9, 16, 200, 300; Dilthey, "Friedrich
Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher," in Gesammelte Schriften, IV.
(Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft, 1959), 363;
Niebuhr, Schleiermacher 92 Christ and Religion, p. 29.

 

 

4Richard R. Niebuhr, "Schleiermacher on Language
and Feeling," Theology Today, XVII, 2 (July, 1960), p. 151.

40

Professor §E_Halle and Berlin 1804-1834

 

 

 

While in his remote exile at Stolp Schleiermacher
entertained an enticing offer to become professor of ethics
and practical theology at Wuerzburg in Bavaria.
The Prussian government, apparently desirous of caring
for its intellectuals, had stayed Schleiermacher's
reluctant decision to accept a professorship outside
Prussia at Wuerzburg in 1804 in place of his rather
isolated pastorate in Stolp in Prussian Pomerania with
the offer of a chair and pulpit in Halle.l

On October 12 he arrived in Halle to assume this dual

assignment as Professor of Theology extraordinarius and

 

preacher to the University of Halle. His half-sister Nanny
joined him as housekeeper and remained with him until her
marriage in 1817 to Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769-1860).

Slowly Schleiermacher gained acceptance as a
competent lecturer from the Halle faculty and students.
Additional volumes of his Plato translations were pub-
lished during this period. Shortly before his second
Christmas at Halle he received an inspiration to write

Christmas Eve, Dialogue 93 the Incarnation.2 This lively

 

 

 

1Richard C. Raack, "Schleiermacher's Political
Thought and Activity, 1806-1813," Church History, XXVIII
(1959), 376; cf. Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters,
I, 373-740

 

2Schleiermacher, Friedrich Schleiermacher saemmt—
liche Werke, I. Theologie: Band 1. Die Weihnachtsfeier:
Ein Gespraech (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1843). English
translation: Christmas Eve, Dialogue on the Incarnation,
trans. by Terrence N. Tice with intro._3nd notes (Richmond,
Virginia: John Knox Press, 1967). Studies of this work
available in English include Barth, Theology and Church,
pp. 136-58; Niebuhr, Schleiermacher og_Christ and Religion,

 

 

 

 

 

41

literary composition centering around a family's Christmas
Eve celebration clearly manifests the influence of Romanti-
cism.

In the fall of 1806 the tranquility of Halle was
suddenly shattered when French troops occupied the city.
In a letter of November 4 Schleiermacher described the
siege and the soldiers' pillage of his apartment.1 These
events were related to the humiliating October 14 defeat
of the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstadt by Napoleon's
forces. Even though the university was dissolved, Schleier-
macher continued to preach. Eventually the Halle area was
transferred by the French to Westphalian jurisdiction,
which required church prayers for the king and queen of
Westphalia. Out of loyalty to Prussia, Schleiermacher
returned to Berlin in May of 1807 as a private scholar and
supply preacher.2

Schleiermacher was active in patriotic activities
from the time of the French invasion until the War of
Liberation. In 1808 he made trips to Ruegen and to
Koenigsberg on secret missions to contact patriotic con-

spirators. He eagerly offered his help for the regeneration

 

pp. 21-71; Terrence N. Tice, "Schleiermacher's Interpre-
tation of Christmas," Journal of'Religion, XLVII, 2 (April,
1967), 100-26.

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, II,
64-65, 72-73.

 

2Ibid., p. 98.

42

of Prussia, and his advice was sought by high government

officials. He became the editor of the Preussischer

 

Correspondent, the organ of Prussian patriotism during the

 

war in 1813. While Fichte delivered his famous Addresses

 

52 the German Nation to evoke the unity of the nation,

 

Schleiermacher tirelessly labored for the same purpose

from the pulpit. Although the Prussian reform movement
under Stein and Dohna received Schleiermacher's enthusi—
astic support, Dawson's claim that Schleiermacher's life

was motivated chiefly by devotion to the nation is exagger-

ated.l

Schleiermacher, with the bases of freedom of asSociation
and civil liberty postulated by his political philosophy
and with his efforts both to enact his convictions
through his church reform proposals and to create a
responsible public opinion, remained among the men of
the Prussian reform movement the closest approximation
of Western European liberalism and democracy. . . .
Schleiermacher became the voice of political idealism

in Prussia.2

Schleiermacher's pamphlet of 1808, Gelegentliche

 

Gedanken ueber Universitaeten i3 deutschem Sinn,3 which

 

 

 

1Jerry F. Dawson, Friedrich Schleiermacher: The
Evolution of g Nationalist (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1966T.

 

 

 

2Richard C. Raack, "The Course of Political Ideal—
ism in Prussia, 1806—1813" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
Harvard University, 1957), pp. 198, 207.

3Schleiermacher, Saemmtliche Werke, III.
Philosophie: Band 1. Gelegentliche Gedanken ueber Uni-
versitaeten in deutschem Sinn: Nebst einem Anhang ueber
eine EEE §g_5frIChtende, pp. 535—644.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

43

contained plans for a new university with the conviction
that Berlin should be the intellectual center of Prussia,
provided the blueprint for the University of Berlin. An
official position under Wilhelm von Humboldt in the Section
for Public Instruction effective in July 1809 put Schleier-
macher in a position of educational influence in Prussia.

The University of Berlin opened in October 1810,
with Schleiermacher as the first dean of theology. He pre-
pared an encyclopaedia of theological disciplines for his
students in 1811, which related coherently the practical
and theoretical aspects of Christianity as he understood
them.l Approximately one-fourth of the university students
at Berlin were studying theology during the final decade of
Schleiermacher's career. At this same time Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was lecturing on philosophy
there. Schleiermacher was an active member of the dis-
tinguished Berlin Academy of Sciences, an honor never
bestowed upon his colleague at the University, Johann
Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), who was professor of philoso—
phy before Hegel held that position.

One year preceding Schleiermacher's appointment as
professor of theology at Berlin two significant events

occurred which affected the remainder of his life. They

 

lSchleiermacher, Saemmtliche Werke, I. Theologie:
Band 1. Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums.
English translation: Brief Outline on the Study of
Theology, trans. by Terrence N. Tice—TRiEhmond, Vifginia:
Jo n Knox Press, 1966).

 

 

 

 

44

were his marriage and the beginning of a long pastorate at
Trinity Church in Berlin. Since meeting Pastor Ehrenfried

1 Schleiermacher had maintained a warm

von Willich in 1801,
friendship and correspondence with Ehrenfried and his wife,
Henriette von Muehlenfels (1788-1840). Henriette found
herself a widow at eighteen with two children to care for
when Pastor von Willich died of typhoid early in 1807 while
serving the Prussian troops during the siege of Stralsund.2
Following an extended correspondence, Schleiermacher
married Henriette in May 1809 at Ruegen. Their family in-
cluded three daughters, a son, Nathanael (1820—1829), as
well as the two von Willich children and an adopted girl.

One month after his wedding Schleiermacher assumed

duties as pastor of the large Trinity Church (Dreifaltig—

 

keitskirche) in Berlin. His eloquent preaching was heard

 

by a large congregation of predominantly well-educated and
upper-class persons.

It was precisely in his sermons that Schleiermacher's
characteristic desires and achievements were made
evident, at any rate in their liveliest and most
eloquent form. . . . Those who know what preaching
and academic work involve should be truly impressed
by the fact that together with all other things that
claimed attention, Schleiermacher managed to perform
this office year in and year out, almost every Sunday.

 

1Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 260.

 

2Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, II,

 

77—80.

3Barth, Protestant Thought, p. 311.

 

45

Schleiermacher was above all else a Christian clergyman
with deep respect for the Church and its life. He contri-
buted leadership to a host of practical ecclesiastical
projects. When he met Stein, the Prussian Minister of
State, at Koenigsberg in 1808, Schleiermacher was requested
to draft a program of church reform. Zealously he strove
for a union of the Reformed and Lutheran ChurChes in
Prussia that would unite the two German confessions and

at the same time would free the churches from secular
political domination. He was the presiding officer at the
Brandenburg Synod when the two churches united as The
Evangelical Church in 1817. The full title of Schleier-

macher's church dogmatics of 1821 was The Christian Faith,

 

presented systematically according Eg_the fundamental

 

 

 

doctrines 9f the Evangelical Church. Here was a statement

 

of the essentials of the faith for the new Church, expressed
in original terms for the nineteenth century.

Friedrich Schleiermacher continued to exercise the
office of preacher and professor of theology and philosophy
vigorously until a few days before his death on February 12,
1834. The mile-long funeral procession included the king
and crown prince, along with many other persons prominent

in intellectual and literary as well as political circles.

CHAPTER III

CHARACTERISTIC GERMAN PHILOSOPHIES

OF RELIGION

The education and experience of Friedrich Schleier-

 

 

macher brought him into contact with important cultural '
currents characteristic of the age of Frederick the Great.

He was personally associated with theologians, philosophers

and literary figures representative of the Prussian tra—

dition. "Schleiermacher's background thereby combined many

of the great intellectual factors dominant in eighteenth

century Germany: orthodox Christianity, Pietism, and the

Christianized Enlightenment."l

Rationalism in Philosophy and Theology

 

Since the sixteenth century Reformation, religious
problems had been clearly interrelated with political and
intellectual questions. The territorial solution to the
Reformation adopted by the Peace of Augsburg in 1555

officially sanctioned the particularism of the German states

 

lRaack dissertation, "Political Idealism," p. 44.

46

47

which continued until the nineteenth century. The rivalries
and conflicts between those numerous principalities claiming
sovereignty inside the empire frequently had religious
dimensions. At the termination of the Thirty Years' War at
Westphalia in 1648 Germany found herself with a signifi-
cantly reduced population and a devastated economy. Still
the antipathy between the Christian confessions, Roman
Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed, continued among the party

theologians and their advocates.

Protestant Scholasticism

 

In the seventeenth century the prophetic insights
of the reformers were systematized with conceptual aids
from secular philosophy. Faith became transformed from
primarily a personal relationship between man and God to
belief in carefully formulated propositions. While Roman
Catholicism refined its doctrinal standards and practices
at Trent, the Lutheran and Reformed groups convened synods
to consolidate their respective positions. This period
when the rigid canons of orthodoxy were established by the
latter groups is known as Protestant Scholasticism.

Whereas the Reformation had launched Christianity
on a new course dissociated from medieval scholasticism,
Protestant orthodoxy in seventeenth century EurOpe evolved
into a new scholasticism remarkably similar to that of
Roman Catholicism. The priorities of the Protestant

scholastics tended to give the impression that faith is

48

nearly synonymous with intellectual assent to propositional
truth. The promulgation of official statements of faith
represented a process of defining and consolidating the
positions of Protestant confessions. The content of
theology was assumed to be timeless truth established from
the supernatural revelation of the Bible, the Christian
sourcebook of knowledge. The theologians were not satis-
fied to state the supernatural truth in broad, general
terms. They worked diligently to delineate every nuance
of truth considered essential to their confession, and
usually framed it defensively in contrast to that of other
groups. The terminology and argumentation was heavily
dependent on Aristotle. Aristotelian philOSOphy provided
the formal conceptual tools for expressing supernatural
truth with the characteristic precision the scholastics
desired. The supernatural truths of an inerrant Scripture
were buttressed by the support of philosophical certainty.
A premium was placed on systematic thought supported by an
elaborate rational basis.

In an effort to demonstrate the plausibility of the

Christian faith, many Orthodox theologians made

extravagant claims for reason and philosophy, so

that to many an observer it must have seemed that

there was very little actually remaining for divine

revelation to supply after philosophy had done its

best to discover the true nature of reality. . . .

The transition from late Orthodoxy to early Rational—

ism is barely perceptible, inasmuch as Orthodoxy was

rationalistic and Rationalism tried to remain
orthodox.l

 

1Jaroslav Pelikan, From Luther £9 Kierkegaard, A

 

49

Th3 Legacy of Leibniz

One of the most influential German philosophers
in the tradition of rationalism, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646—1716), had been educated by Lutheran scholastics. In
a typical rationalistic fashion Leibniz was impressed by
the precision and certainty of mathematical demonstrations.
In addition to making original contributions to the science
of mathematics, he attempted to apply the mathematical
methodology as a model for the establishment of truth in
philosophical logic and metaphysics. He strove for coherent
rational explanations of the ultimate purpose and harmony of
everything in existence at a time when competing religious
groups expounded conflicting claims for final truth. The
aim of philosophy, according to Leibniz, was to verify
truth through reason,l utilizing clear and distinct ideas
independently of ambiguous appearances and revelations un-
confirmed by logical reason. The correspondence between
truths ascertained in rational thought and the actualities
existing in the world Leibniz explained by the hypothesis

of a harmony pre—established by God.2

 

Stud in the Histor of Theolo (St. Louis, Missouri:
Concordia Pub 15 ing House, 196%), pp. 77, 83.

1Philip P. Wiener, ed., Leibniz Selections (New
York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951), pp. 93-98, 237—43,
480—85, 522—33; Herbert Wildon Carr, Leibniz (New York:
Dover Publications, Inc., 1960), pp. 165-76.

2Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Monadology and
Other Philosophical Writings, trans._WIth introductiofi and
notes by Robert Latta (London: Oxford University Press,
1898); Carr, pp. 59-138.

 

 

50

The Leibnizian philosophy achieved a commanding
authority in eighteenth century academic life through the
work of Christian Wolff (1679-1754). Wolff was professor
of mathematics and philosophy at.Halle from 1707 to 1723
and from 1740 to 1754. The University of Halle had been
founded in 1694 by pietists hostile to dogmatic rational-
ism, but Halle had become a stronghold of rationalism and
the Enlightenment before many years had passed. When
Schleiermacher came as a student to Halle the university
enrollment was at its highest point with 1,156 students,
800 of whom were Studying theology. Through his teacher
Eberhard, Schleiermacher became familiar with the Wolffian
climate at Halle.

Wolff's major contribution to philosophical
rationalism was the thorough way in which he borrowed the
theories of Leibniz, methodically modifying and adapting
them. Wolff's elaborate system of philosophy succeeded in
popularizing the fragmentary and little known writings of
Leibniz through a series of books which were widely read
and taught. These books purported to serve the practical
aim of substituting rational certainty for revealed cer-
tainty. Ostensibly the Wolffian system strengthened the
contents of revealed theology by means of universal and
necessary truths conclusively deduced via reason. The new
philosophy demonstrated that revealed Christian truth was

not contrary to reason and modern philosophy.

51

The metaphysical doctrines of Wolff received wide
currency in German universities.1 The harmonization of
reason and revelation assured the continued acceptance of
supernatural truth by most educated people at the time.
Wolff subsumed four areas under metaphysics: ontology,
rational cosmology, rational psychology and rational the—
ology.2 Ontology was the study of existence in general,
while rational cosmology dealt with the world as a whole.
The subject of rational psychology was the soul as a simple
non-extended substance. Rational theology established God's
existence and defined the attributes of God. This Leibniz—
Wolffian system of speculative metaphysical truths was
further propagated through several books written by Wolff's
follower, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten (1714-1762).
Baumgarten's books, especially one entitled Metaphysica,3
were commonly adopted as university texts in Germany and

were used for many years by Kant.4 According to the outlook

 

lCarr, pp. 185—190.

2Christian Wolff, Preliminary Discourse 93 Philoso-
h in General, trans. by Richard J. Blackwell, Library of
LibeFEl Arts (Indianapolis: Bobbs—Merrill Company, Inc.,
1963), pp. 33-58.

3Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Meta h sica
(Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1963).

4Friedrich Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, From
Thales to the Present Time, Vol. II: _History of Modern
PHilosofihyT—Erans. from the fourth German editISn by
George S. Morris (New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co.,
1874), p. 118.

 

 

 

52

of the rational supernaturalists, in agreement with the
dogmatic orthodox supernaturalists, the substance of
religion consisted in a certain kind of knowledge.

The orthodox dogmatists had appropriated the con-
ceptual framework of secular Aristotelian philosophy to
complete their intellectualized formulation of faith in
detail. They were satisfied that they had guaranteed the
fundamentals of faith to be unassailable. The next gener—
ation of philosophers was not convinced that philosophy had
been sufficiently employed. Taking the latest philosophical
discoveries, these men ventured boldly to prove that the
supernatural truths of Christian theology can be estab-
lished by reason independently of revelation. In spite of
this seemingly harmless shift in emphasis, however, it was
only a matter of time before philosophers would deny every
article of faith that could not be conclusively proven by

reason alone.

Enlightenment Religion

The mentors of the Enlightenment eulogized the
virtues of autonomous reason freed from its dependence on
past authority. Kant expressed the new spirit in these

words:

Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred
tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make use of
his understanding without direction from another.
Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause lies
not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and
courage to use it without direction from another.

53

Sapere aude! "Have courage to use your own reason!"
--that is the motto of enlightenment.1

 

The practical effect of the full use of reason
meant a reduction in the contents of theology. One group
of thinkers in the second half of the eighteenth century
who abandoned the traditional content of revelation because
they judged it unsubstantiated by critical reason were
called Neologians, i.e., innovators, modernists. Johann
Salomo Semler (1725-1791) is a representative Neologian.
During his tenure at the University of Halle, 1752—1791,
he attracted notice as an important scholar of the new
discipline of Biblical criticism. He analyzed the fallible
human factors in the production of the Bible which had
heretofore been beyond criticism or doubt. Though a sin-
cere Christian, Semler disputed doctrines of the orthodox

theologians such as original sin and predestination.2

Natural Religion.—-The intention to transform

 

Christianity by reducing its contents to a simple core of
beliefs universally discoverable by men of reason is known

as natural religion (religio naturalis). German expression

 

of natural religion was reinforced by English deism when a

German translation of Matthew Tindal's Christianity ii Old

 

 

1Immanuel Kant, "What Is Enlightenment," in 92_
Histor , ed. by Lewis White Beck, Library of Liberal Arts
(Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.,
1963), p. 3.

2Dillenberger, Protestant Thought and Natural
Science, pp. 180-81.

 

 

54

fig the Creation appeared in 1741 as the first of numerous

 

English books of this type issued in German editions.
One important early spokesman for natural religion
was the Hamburg philologist Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-

1768). His unpublished manuscript, Apology for Reasonable

 

Worshippers gf God, intended as a defense of rational

 

religion against atheism and materialism, contained devas-
tating criticisms of Biblical revelation, and thus of
Christianity itself. Receiving this manuscript from the
daughter of Reimarus, the dramatist Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing (1729-1781) published some fragments from it in
installments anonymously between 1774 and 1786. Lessing

included these fragments in his Contributions 53 Literature

 

 

and History on the pretense that he had discovered them in

 

the course of his work in the Duke of Brunswick's library
at Wolfenbuettel.1

While Lessing's views were not as radical as those
of Reimarus, he did not hold a traditional concept of
revelation and he hoped the fragments would stimulate
discussions about the nature of religion. The appearance
of several Reimarus fragments provoked a bitter controversy
in 1778 when Hamburg pastor Johann Melchior Goeze (1717—

1786) attacked Lessing personally.2 Immediately following

 

lJames Sime, Lessin (London: Kegan Paul, Trench,
Truebner, & Co., Ltd., 89 , II, l93ff.

2Ibid., pp. 220—23.

55

his polemical pamphlets against Goeze,l Lessing dramatically
portrayed the question of true religion in the play Nathan
thg_fli§g through three principal characters who are Jewish,
Moslem and Christian respectively.

The theology of Nathan is the familiar eighteenth—
century thesis that all "positive" religions are
equally true to those who believe them, equally false
to the philoSOphers, and equally useful to the magis-
trates: that the only absolute is the universal
"natural religion" of humanity as a whole. What is
required of man is not adherence to dogma but sin-
cerity, tolerance, and brotherly love.

Kant's Ethical Religion.--The repudiation by

 

Enlightenment thinkers of the usual Christian claim to
finality and truth eventuated in support for the concept
that religion's value lies in providing ethical ideals for
practical action.
Lessing and Kant represent the transition to a religion
independent of Christian substance, or to a view which
accepted Christianity as one illustration of the "re-
ligious". . . . For Lessing and for Kant, revelation at
best was the disclosure of what was potentially knowable
through human reason.3

The religion of morality (ethica naturalis) was most force—

 

fully articulated by Immanuel Kant.

 

lGotthold Lessing, Lessing's Theological Writingg,
Selections in translation with an introductory essay by
Henry Chadwick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1956),
pp. 62-64; cf. pp. 22-25.

 

2Henry Chadwick, "Introduction," in Lessing's
Theological Writings, p. 27.

 

3Dillenberger, Protestant Thought, pp. 182, 183.

 

56

Schleiermacher began studying Kant when he was in
his late teens at the very time Kant's recently published
books were the subject of live controversy. With the
encouragement of his father,1 Schleiermacher continued to
examine Kantian works simultaneously with his attendance
at Eberhard's lectures on metaphysics at Halle.

In Eberhard, Schleiermacher met a proponent of the
old "dogmatic rationalism." The ultimate principle
of philosophy was reason in and for itself. Upon
this principle, Eberhard constructed an elaborate
metaphysical system, and defended the ontological
and cosmological proofs for the existence of God.

This he did basically because he asserted that reason
was norma veri 33 falsi.

Since Eberhard taught metaphysics from within the Leibniz-
Wolffian system, he was an adamant critic of Kant.
Schleiermacher received a clear presentation of speculative
metaphysics from Eberhard and compared that with the new
critical idealism of Kant. After leaving Halle, Schleier-
macher reread Kant's writings3 previous to his half-hour
personal visit with Kant in May 1791.4

Kant aimed to destroy the epistemological pre-

suppositions of dogmatic rationalism, particularly as it

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 66.

2William Alexander Johnson, On Religion: A Stud

2; Theolo ical Method in Schleiermacher and Nygren_(Leiden:
E. 37‘8?III7‘I§8277‘5.‘I1.

3Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 80.

41bid., p. 88.

57

was commonly taught in German universities of that period.
He accused rationalism of speculative flights beyond the
limits of possible knowledge. In explaining his reason
for attack on the venerable philosophers Kant explained,

"I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge,
1

 

in order to make room for fgigh."
Kant's intention to define the requisite conditions
for the possibility of acquiring knowledge necessarily in—
volved a restriction of the realm of inquiry. The perennial
and inconclusive disputations among speculative thinkers
would persist indefinitely unless the unwarranted pre-
tensions of traditional metaphysics could be curbed. In

the Critigue o£_Pure Reason Kant approached metaphysics by

 

 

directing attention to the crucial question of manner,

scope and limits of knowledge. Kant's epistemolOgical
system begins with the common-sense assumption that the
thinker is aware of reality outside himself. The possi-
bility of acquiring any knowledge whatsoever is dependent
upon the reception of empirical data. Phenomena appearing
to the perceiver through the senses are intuited in a
temporal and spatial form. Space and time are not essential
properties of things-in-themselves, although appearances of
things as perceived must occur in the pure forms of space

and time. The manifold of intuited appearances does not

 

1Immanuel Kant, Critigue of Pure Reason, trans. by
Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929),
p. 29.

58

become objective until the perceiver organizes those
intuitions by means of the subjective categories of the
human mind. In other words, the cognitive process can
establish objective knowledge, Kant thought, not because
the mind conforms to an external appearance, but rather
because the appearance is objectified by the subjective
categories of the human mind.

The proper sphere of knowledge is confined to the
phenomenal world of appearances occurring in space and
time. "Since that which is not appearance cannot be an
object of experience, the understanding can never transcend
those limits of sensibility within which alone objects can

1 Kant admits that a thing-in-itself may

be given to us."
be different from the appearances man is capable of appre-
hending as an object of knowledge. Any non-phenomenal
entity Kant termed noumenon, which remains to man "an
unknown something,"2 since it is in principle unknowable
without a corresponding representation in time and space.
This is the crux of his criticism against the supernatural-
ists and rationalistic metaphysicians. The hypothetical
supersensible noumena can never be the object of knowledge,
in spite of the human mind's natural tendency to reach

beyond the circumscribed limits of phenomenal appearances.

Any attempt to defy the confines of the phenomenal realm,

 

1Kant, Critigue gf Pure Reason, p. 264.

 

21bid., p. 273.

59

Kant said, must inevitably result in illusions rather than
reliable knowledge.

The metaphysics of Wolff is specifically and
systematically refuted in the "Transcendental Dialectic"

of the Critigue of Pure Reason.1 The title of this

 

section relates to Kant's rejection of all dialectical
arguments. A dialectical argument attempts to discover the
unconditioned ground of all experience on the basis of a
conditioned series available in human experience. Kant's
paralogisms2 illustrate the futility of attempting to con-
struct a proof using a formally fallacious syllogism whose
defect is an ambiguous middle term. In his analysis of the
paralogisms Kant renounces the tenets of Wolff's rational
psychology which claimed that the soul exists as a sub—
stance, the soul is simple, the soul has identity through
time, and the soul exists independently of external objects.
The antinomies of reason are inescapable paradoxes
between certain pairs of propositions whose opposing members
are contradictory, and yet each has allegedly been proven
true by some writer in the name of reason. One side of the
antinomies3 is parallel to Wolff's rational cosmology.
These disputes about the beginning of the world, simple
substances, freedom, and unconditional substance can never

be resolved, according to Kant, since space, time and

 

1Ibid., p. 297ff. 21bid., pp. 328-83.

31bid., pp. 383-484.

IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIlIll-IIIIIIII-I-Il--L__

 

60

causality relate exclusively to phenomena, and can never
be applicable to noumena.

Wolff's rational theology is denied in the "Ideal
of Pure Reason."1 Kant maintained that reason cannot
demonstrate God's existence by means of any of the three
traditional proofs. The concept "God" is merely a non—
contradictory idea of the mind which is thinkable.
Certainty regarding God's existence can neither be proved
nor disproved, since there are no sensible intuitions which
correspond to this idea. Kant declined to entertain the
likelihood of there being any such thing as a supersensuous
intuition. God is an example of the "problematic"2 concept
of reason defined as a conceivable non—contradictory possi—
bility that can neither be proved nor denied. This pre-
cludes the vindication of rational or natural theology by
reason in the interest of securing the theoretical found-
ations of science, but has simultaneously rendered atheism,
determinism and materialism impossible of proof.

Three problematic ideas of speculative reason
(i.e., God, freedom, immortality) appear in Kant's Critigue
9: Practical Reason as postulates. Kant says, "By a postu—
late of pure practical reason, I understand a theoretical

proposition which is not as such demonstrable, but which is

 

lIbid., pp. 485—531.

211318., pp. 271-72, 292-93.

 

61

an inseparable corollary of an a priori unconditionally

l The function of reason is practical

valid practical law."
when man's reason effectively determines his will toward
the fulfillment of the moral law. The summum beggm of
rational man, according to Kant, is moral perfection and
its resulting happiness. The efficacy of the practical
employment of reason in ethical action is significant due
to the assumption of a "universal moral predisposition in
human nature."2

God is postulated by Kant to serve the functional
role of guarantor of the moral order wherein fulfillment of
the moral law assures happiness. According to this rational
religion God's existence is not an objectively established
fact of theoretical knowledge. On the contrary, the
existence of God is assumed because of a subjective moral
necessity from practical reasons in the moral argument.3

God is the moral laniver.4 "The moral law leads to

 

1Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans.
by Lewis White Beck, Library of Liberal Arts (Indianapolis,
Indiana: Bobbs—Merrill Company, Inc., 1958), p. 127.

2Immanuel Kant, Reli ion within the Limits of
Reason Alone, trans. by Theodore M. GreehE—and Hoyt—H.
Hudson, Harper Torchbooks (New York: Harper & Row, Pub—
lishers, 1960), p. 117.

 

3Kant, Critigue of Practical Reason, pp. 128—36.

4 . . . . . .
Kant, Reli ion Within the Limits of Reason Alone,
pp. 5, 95, 132, I75-7I.

62

religion. Religion is the recognition of all duties as
divine commands."1 The moral law is contained in the
universally valid categorical imperative: "So act that
the maxim of your will could always hold at the same time
as a principle establishing universal law."2 The reason
directs the will to obey the moral law from duty, rather
than according to sensuous incentives or natural incli—
nations.

Kant insists that the moral law would be meaning-

less if the command to obedience could not be actualized.
While natural necessity in the phenomenal world is affirmed,
freedom of the will is postulated since genuine choice is
a necessary ingredient of ethical action. The postulate of
immortality is based on Kant's conviction that the ulti-
mately perfect fulfillment of the moral law by man must
not be limited by time.3

Kant's treatment of religion represents the ful—
fillment of Enlightenment reason in secularizing Christi—
anity and reducing the content of religion to a few

"reasonable" fundamentals without entirely abandoning

 

lKant, Criti ue of Practical Reason, p. 134; cf.
Religion_ within t e Limits, pp. 79,100,142.

2Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 30.; cf.
Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the MetaphySics of Morals,
trans. by Lewis White Beck, Lihhary of Liberal_ Arts
(Indianapolis, Indiana: The Bobbs—Merrill Company, Inc.,
1959), P. 39.

 

3Kant, Critigue of Practical Reason, pp. 126—28.

63

Christian concepts. In his attempt to avoid an anthropo—
morphic image of God, Kant created an impersonal lawgiver.
The rejection of supernaturalism leaves the question of
divine help ambiguous. The stubborn resistance of man's
"radical evil" remains to be overcome through the rule of
reason. Man is obligated to become "worthy of divine
assistance"1 with the vague hope "that grace will effect
in us what nature cannot, provided we have made maximum
use of our powers."2 The value of prayer lies in its
influence on one's own moral disposition. The Bible can
be a useful aid in instilling morality, though it is not
necessary to the religion of reasonable morality. In the
ethica naturalis Jesus is extolled as the paragon of moral
perfection whose atonement is a powerful moral example to
be emulated. Thus, religion's essence lies in its
effectiveness in motivating moral action of practical

utility to society.

Reaction Egg Protest
Theology had been the primary intellectual concern
in Germany for several generations. In the eighteenth
century this concern was embodied in the rationalism of
dogmatic orthodoxy and Enlightenment philosophy. German

thinkers zealously praised the certainties realizable

 

lKant, Religion within the Limits, p. 180.

21bid., p. 179; cf. pp. 162, 183.

 

64

through reason alone, whereas in Britain and France the
philosophical empiricists shifted attention to the sensory
data of experience and became more cautious about the power
of pure reason. During the last half of the eighteenth
century resistance to rationalism developed in Germany.
The reaction against the narrowness of the approved
scientific methods of the eighteenth century had begun
first in the fields of art and religion; it was there
that the utter inadequacy of the two dominant scientific
ideals of rationalism and empiricism was first felt.
Religion could not be conceived as a mere set of scien-
tific propositions, and art was obviously more than a
system of rational rules.l
Rationalism was enthralled by the relatively un—
limited capacity of reason in human affairs. Pure mathe-
matics was its model of precise reasoning. An amazingly
complex system of consistent truths could be explicated by
deduction from a few self-evident axioms. Gradually reason
was directed toward nature with greater intensity than had
previously been the case. This resulted in the unprece-
dented growth and development of the natural sciences.
Formerly the natural world had been mainly an object of
mystery understood to be created and governed by a divine
being. The new sciences through refined methods of obser-
vation and a sophisticated use of discursive reason now

provided reasons to replace ignorance and mystery. Every

small gain inspired further confidence in man's ability to

 

lJohn Herman Randall, Jr., The Career g: Philosophy,
Vol. II: From the German Enlightenment 39 the Age 92
Darwin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 79.

 

 

 

 

65

explain the impenetrable mysteries of nature, thus enhancing
reason in public admiration and respect. Revelation seemed
less important when the exhaustive use of reason supplied
precise answers and explanations. Extreme confidence in the
capacity of human reason to expand knowledge meant an
exhilarated feeling of control over nature, in place of
dependence on nature controlled by God. The natural world,
as described by Newtonian science, was an orderly, mechani—

cal object capable of being analyzed and interpreted

 

according to universal laws.

Philosophical traditions, such as that of Wolff,
posited a logical identity between abstract thought and
actual reality. The concepts of formal logic used ration—
ally afforded a means to describe the structure of reality.
A general optimism pervaded this logical analysis and
systematization of knowledge by Enlightenment thinkers.

In one sense, Kantian epistemology, in a way similar to
Hume's empiricism, represented a criticism of confident
rationalism. On the other hand, Kant's philosophy has been
characterized as the self—critical apex and fulfillment of
the whole Enlightenment movement.l "Kant's philosophy is
the first to bring to full consciousness the tendency and

spirit of his time; in his thought the strengths and

 

1Frederick H. Burkhardt, "Introduction" in Johann
Gottfried Herder, God, Some Conversations, trans. by F. H.
Burkhardt, The Libhhhy of Liheral Arts (Indianapolis:
Bobbs—Merrill, 1940), pp. 21—23; cf. Randall, Career gf
Philosophy, II, 106; Barth, Protestant Thought, p. 150.

 

 

 

66

limitations of theological rationalism are fully realized."1

Kant was convinced that reason was effective in both its
theoretical and practical applications, providing reason
was properly employed. Thus, Kant's critical philosophy
became the object of attack by numerous authors in the

general reaction against the Enlightenment.

The "Faith and Feeling"
Philosophers

One aspect of the revolt against rationalism was
expressed through the so—called "faith and feeling" phi-

losophers (Gefuehlsphilosophie). The most explicit advocate

 

and exponent of this anti—rational movement was Johann Georg
Hamann (1730-1788). Hamann, a native of Koenigsberg and
friend of Kant, was well-known at that time as the "Magus

of the North." Hamann had been influenced by Hume's attacks
upon the assumptions of rationalistic philosophy. The con-
viction that feeling is more significant than reason led
Hamann to protest vehemently against the exaggerated role
assigned to reason, especially as it was embodied in the
Wolffian system. He despised the rationalists' preoccu—
pation with lifeless abstractions because this overshadowed
the vitality of real life as experienced. He claimed that
this one—sided emphasis overvalued discursive reason, thus

severely restricting knowledge.

 

1Peter C. Hodgson, The Formation of Historical
Theology, A Stud of Ferdinand Christian Baur (New Yor :
Harper & Row, 9 6): p. 42.

 

67

Subsequent to a fragmentary study of several
disciplines, and having held positions as diverse as a
tutor and a businessman, Hamann underwent a religious con—
version experience in London in 1758, at a time when he was
in a state of poverty and confusion. A return to the
Lutheran faith of his childhood influenced his thinking
and generated a religious enthusiasm that earned him the
reputation of a pietist and mystic. He pointed to the
irrational aspects of life with their inherent contra-
dictions and inconsistencies, which he held were ignored
by philosophy in the search for intelligibility. Hamann
felt that true understanding cannot be expressed in
abstractions of life established independently of all
tradition, belief and experience.

Hamann, an apologist for Christianity, appealed for
faith of the heart. A knowledge of the concrete, complex
experiences of life, he taught, necessitated apprehensions
received through immediate intuitions rather than reasons
of the mind logically deduced. His hostility to the
Enlightenment led him to an unrestrained praise of feelings
and the spontaneity of the emotions. Considerable attention
was devoted to language by Hamann, who considered language
a natural expression of the innermost soul of man rather
than an artificial or arbitrary convention. Language and
arts were understood as spontaneous products of a divine

revelation. Discursive reasoning was not considered

68

adequate to express fully the mysterious nature of
existence.

Hamann was widely known in his own day, although
today he is remembered largely for his influence on his
friends Jacobi and Herder, two other "faith and feeling"
philosophers. Together these three held a high positive
regard for feelings as a more significant means of knowing
reality than are concepts of the understanding. Gefuehls-
philosophie resisted inanimate abstractions which simpli-
fied and reduced the contents of life's actual experiences ';
by omitting many concrete details. Recognition of the
primacy of feelings dictated a pronounced stress on the
particular and individual character of existence. In
opposition to orthodoxy, the theoretical was considered
definitely secondary to real life, where reason is united
with sensuous experience. These thinkers were explicit in
unanimously criticizing so—called rational religion as
wholly inadequate.

The clearest interpreter of Gefuehlsphilosophie was

 

Friedrich Henrich Jacobi (1743-1819). His early life was
influenced by Pietism through his participation in the
sect, gig Feinen, which had originated in Holland. From
his sixteenth to twentieth years he studied at Geneva,
where his German philosophical training in an ecclectic
rationalism mixed with some British empiricism was supple-
mented by exposure to French writers. Under LeSage he

became familiar with the French empiricists and

 

69

encyclopedists. Together with Christoph Martin Wieland
(1733-1813) he founded the literary journal Der Merkur.
He became the president of the Academy of Sciences at

Munich and with his Politische Rhapsodie he was one of the

 

first to introduce Adam Smith's theories to the German
public. Letters on religious and philosophical issues were
exchanged between Schleiermacher and Jacobi.

The writings of Jacobi are unsystematic and lack
logical consistency. He exhibits an antipathy to all
demonstrative systems and furthermore he assails the impo—
tence of all purely rational knowledge. While he does not
condemn natural science, he insists that discursive reason-
ing is always limited in the conclusions it reaches,
especially when speculative reason is directed beyond
sensory objects. Jacobi's epistemology assumes that the
thinker is aware of reality beyond himself which is revealed
directly through immediate intuition. According to him,
there is an objective reality in phenomena which thought
discovers. His dualism affirms that in life man encounters
real individual objects existing externally to himself that
he is able to perceive by direct rational intuition.

Frequently he employed the term "faith" with an
intended meaning synonomous with his use of the word
"reason," especially in the later years of his life.

There are, then, two faculties of perception, Sense and
Reason (or Faith). . . . Sense, on the one hand, reveals

the sensible real, the real of the external world of
sense objects. Reason, on the other hand, reveals the

 

70

supersensible or spiritual objects. The process of the
first is an impression, and that of the second is a kind
of feeling. The conceptions of the first are called
objects; those of the second are called Ideas.
Faith is immediate intuition of supersensible reality.
Logical knowledge of the intellect, he thought, deals with
formal and partial facts. Jacobi's study of the philoso—
phers convinced him that the only logically consistent
rational philosophy was that of Spinoza, which he held

ended in atheism, a position entirely contradictory to

Jacobi's personal life experience and conviction. Rejecting

the subjective basis of Kantian categories, Jacobi inter—
preted those notions as objective dimensions of man's
experience of objects which can never be proved. "We
believe that objects exist independent of us, and exercise
causality between themselves and us. We have no other
grounds for believing this than the fact that we £231 it to
be so."2 Jacobi's study of Hume led him to agree that be—
lief was the guide of life, although any explanation of the
basis of belief must remain a mystery, in his opinion.
Knowledge begins with individual things immediately experi-
enced and even philosophy must proceed by faith. Faith

(Glaube) is the faculty of thought through which objects

 

lAlexander W. Crawford, The Philoso h of E. H.
Jacobi (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1 05), p. 38.

2Norman Wilde, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: A Study
13 the Ori in of German Realism (New York: Columbia
College, 18 ), p. 2.

 

 

71

are presented in the intuition of reason (Vernunftan-

schauung). The immediate consciousness of objects is

experienced as feeling (Gefuehl).

Feeling becomes the goal of all development. The whole
rational organism is only for the combining of facts
given in feeling. . . . The primary fact of his own
life, as of all his associates in that period, was
feeling. All science, all art, all religion, was of
value only as ministering to the individual life of
emotion.

To Jacobi, God, freedom and immortality are not mere postu-

lates as Kant assumed, but are facts directly apprehended

by faith through feeling. God's existence is not to be

proven, it is a self—evident inner awareness of feeling.

As in Schleiermacher, feeling represents the unity of

thought and being.

Inasmuch as Jacobi's philosophy was not suited to

found a philosophic school, his legacy remains

the influence which Jacobi exercised over a group of
men whose only bond in common was their debt to him
and Kant. These men were Fries, Schleiermacher and
Beneke. However diverse their systems are in their
completion, they all contain this element borrowed
from Jacobi——the importance of immediate feeling.

And yet perhaps it were a more correct statement to
say that Jacobi's writings were the means by which
their already latent thought was brought to expression,
for it is a significant fact that Fries and Schleier-
macher grew up in the same environment which was the
source of Jacobi's doctrine-—their parents were members

of the Bruedergemeinde.2

 

IV.

lIbid., pp. 51, 52.

2Ibid., p. 74; cf. Dilthey, Gesammelte Schriften,
Die Jugendgeschichte Hegels und andere Abhandlungen

 

zur GeschiEhte des deutschen Idealismus, 282.

 

72

Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773-1843), a native of
Barby, was a philosopher who perpetuated the emphasis of
Jacobi to the succeeding generation. He spoke of sensible
phenomenon as an object of knowledge and the suprasensible
thing-in-itself as an object of rational faith. The medi-
ating link between knowledge and faith was called a pre—
sentiment (Ahnung).l Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette
(1780—1849), who with Schleiermacher was one of the members
of the original faculty at the University of Berlin, was a
disciple of Fries. One early book summarizing the critiques
of Schleiermacher's dogmatics divided the responses into
four groups: the supernaturalists, the rationalists, the
Friesians and the Hegelians.2

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) left the very
modest circumstances of his child and youth in Morungen,
East Prussia and became a student at the University of
Koenigsberg in 1762. He was an enthusiastic student of
Kant, who looked upon Herder as his favorite pupil. A
lifetime friendship was established at this time also with
Hamann, who inspired many of Herder's literary interests

in opposition to the Enlightenment. Both Hamann and Kant

 

le. Friedrich Ueberweg, History of Philosophy,
II, 195, 203.

2Friedrich Wilhelm Gess, Deutliche Egg moeglichst
vollstaendige Uebersicht ueber das theologische S stem 23.
Friedrich Schleiermachers (RuetIihgen: Ensslin un
Laiblin, 1837).

 

 

 

 

 

73

directed his attention to Rousseau's writings, which
idealized the primitive, the natural and the original in
contrast to the artificial elements of culture. At the age
of twenty Herder was appointed teacher of the cathedral
school in Riga, Livonia through the influence of Hamann.
Later during a period of European travel and medical
treatment at Strassburg, Herder cultivated another enduring
friendship upon meeting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-

1832).

During the winter of 1770—71, much of which Herder was
obliged to spend in his room, Goethe often kept him
company. During the long winter evenings they con—
versed, read aloud and exchanged thoughts. . . . Above
all, Herder so impressed Goethe with the idea of being
true to oneself and to one's nationality that the
latter turned away from French to German literature.
Goethe, for his part, recognized the benefits which he
derived from his intercourse with Herder and freely
acknowledged his indebtedness.l
Following Herder's five years' service as pastor at Buecke-
burg, Goethe was instrumental in securing Herder's appoint-
ment in 1776 as General Superintendent of the Lutheran
Church in Weimar, where he remained for the balance of his
life.
In common with Hamann and Jacobi, Herder emphasized
the vitality of feeling and wrote against Kant's rational
philosophy, especially in his Kalligone and Metakritik.

Herder's philosophy of history explained the unity of human

 

lRobert Reinhold Ergang, Herder and the Foundations
of German Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press,
1931), pp. 68—69.

74

life in the world as a relationship between various cul—
tural organisms. Each nationality (Yolk) evolved spon—
taneously on the basis of the collective experience of the
group's distinctive language, literature, religion, heredity
and physical environment. The essence of each particular
group (Volksgeist) was interpreted as one unique expression
of humanity. Herder's early study of Leibniz is credited
with his fascination with the individuation of reality. The
underlying monistic tendency present in Herder's vision of
the unity of man and the universe is related to his admir-
ation of Spinoza. The drama of history is a manifestation
of divine immanence. Herder entered the Spinoza controversy
with the publication of Eppp, Gespraeche ueber Spinoza's
System in 1787, which portrayed Spinoza as a theorist of
the immanence of God.

Herder takes up a very reasonable position between

Jacobi and Mendelssohn, combining the "faith" which

Jacobi wished to substitute for "reason" and the

"rationalism" which Mendelssohn wished to substitute

for "faith" in an ideal of faith tempered by reason.
Religion is, therefore, more truly the expression of faith

and feelings than reason, according to Herder.

Moravian Pietism
A dissatisfaction with the thought and life of the

Protestant Church in Germany began to manifest itself

 

lFrank McEachran, The Life and Philosophy op
Johann Gottfried Herder (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1939), p. 80.

 

 

 

 

75

clearly in the late seventeenth century. Some people
within the Church were disillusioned by the polemical
wrangling of the theologians, the religious wars, and the
accretion of rational philosophy in theology. This protest
against the formalism of orthodoxy is known as pietism.
Pietism was one of the forces which brought the modern
age in the religious life of Germany. It preceded
rationalism, and, unlike the latter as it was in spirit
and interest, it yet prepared the way for it by weaken-
ing the hold of the ecclesiastical institution with its
creeds and sacraments. It was as individualistic as
rationalism, though in a very different way, and in
Germany at least it represented, on the whole, advance
not reaction in the development of religious thought.
. . . Its great influence was before long undermined
by rationalism, which spread rapidly after the middle
of the eighteenth century, but it never ceased to make
itself felt, and it became one of the factors in the
revival of religion, and the reconstruction of theology
at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Pietism originated largely as a church renewal
movement dedicated to revitalizing the spiritual life of
ordinary Christians. In Germany this movement was found
predominantly inside the Lutheran Church, although pietism
did not remain exclusively confined within the Lutheran
confession. While its primary focus was upon the regener—
ation of the private life of individual Christians, the
pietist revolt against an authoritarian and institutional

faith involved explicit criticisms directed against the

Church of those times.

 

lArthur Cushman McGiffert, Protestant Thou ht
Before Kant (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1911), p. 161.

76

German practice since the Reformation had given
the civil government of the princes influence and control
over the Church. Critics alleged that ecclesiastical
administration had failed to protect the holiness and
sacredness of the Church. The aggrandizement of mutual
interests between the secular rulers and the church author—
ities eventuated in the charge of worldliness in the Church.
This factor coupled with the formalism of theology was
adjudged to be the cause of the apparent decline in
morality.

The central issue of Luther's revolution had been
justification by grace through faith. In the development
of Protestantism, however, faith as a personal relationship
of trust between the Christian and God was superseded by
the increasingly prevalent concept of faith interpreted in
terms of intellectual assent to divine truth. "Pietism
represented a return of German Protestantism to the original
character of the Lutheran revolt and a reaction to the
standardized scholastic orthodoxy in which later Lutheranism
took shape."l Pietists professed to be reviving the ideals
of Luther which they felt had been obscured in the zeal for
purity of dogma. The exaltation of doctrine above personal
experience fanned the fires of religious controversy as

manifested in the strife and conflict among sects and

 

lKoppel S. Pinson, Pietism as a Factor pp the Rise

1—

of German Nationalism (New York: CSIufibia UniverSity

Phess, I934), p. I3.

77

indirectly between territorial units. The highly developed
scholastic argumentation on every theological topic pro—
vided the basis of pietists' accusation of dead formalism
against the Christianity they knew.

The first significant leader of German pietism was
an orthodox Lutheran pastor at Frankfurt on the Main,
Phillipp Jakob Spener (1633—1705). Spener was distressed
by the disappointing quality of religious and moral con-

ditions in his community. He was an avid reader of

devotional literature and was especially impressed by the
noted German mystic, Johann Arndt (1555—1621). Spener's
preface to an edition of Arndt's popular book, Wahres
Christenthum, was published separately in 1675 as Pig

desideria oder herzliches Verlangen nach gottgefaelliger

 

Besserung der wahren evangelischen Kirche. This widely-

 

read book was the manifesto of pietism, encompassing both
an attack on the existing evils in the Church, as Spener
interpreted them, and specific proposals for reform.
Spener blamed the lack of spiritual vitality on formalism
in orthodox theology, religious indifference and widespread
immorality among the common people. Pietism developed in
large measure as a lay movement, although it was not anti—
clerical.

The central theme of Spener's renewal proposals
is personal faith and inward holiness. This ideal was to

be implemented through the devotional study of the Bible

78

by all. Spener suggested the establishment of collegia
pietatis to make Scriptural study readily available to the
laity. Within the Church the organization of small cell
groups of converted and committed members (ecclesiola ip
ecclesia) was contemplated by Spener to actualize the
universal priesthood of believers. These intimate groups
were intended to provide a regular means by which the per—
sonal faith of regenerate Christians would be nourished.
This encouraged devotional exercises and subjective intro—
spection wherein the members mutually assisted one another
in their progress toward the perfection of holiness. The
cultivation of religious feelings was calculated to issue
in practical love and service. Justification by faith was
to be accompanied by regeneration and sanctification
genuinely evidenced by a transformed personal life. The
goal of pietism was the renewal of the Church by means of
a union between the inner piety of the heart and a corre—
sponding outward evidence of Christian character and con—
duct in the lives of individual Christians.

Pietism's characteristic priority of the will and
emotion over the intellect made it logical for Spener to
recommend tolerance and patience toward heretics and un-
believers. Spener offered practical suggestions for the
improved training of the clergy. He felt devotional
preparation of the heart to be more essential than specu-

lative knowledge of the mind in equipping the clergy for

79

their ministry. Spener pleaded for the independence of
theology from philosophy. The model of preaching was a
sermon which is simple and practical, and thereby relevant
to the spiritual needs of the common man.

The pietist movement developed its reputation due
to the organizing genius of the theologian August Hermann
Francke (1663—1727). Subsequent to his decisive conversion
experience and meeting Spener, Francke initiated the
Collegia biblica for Bible study and meditation. The term
"pietist" came into usage in 1689 as a derisive epithet
for Francke's group. In the following year he was forced
to resign his post at the University of Leipzig because of
the danger of open controversy with orthodoxy. Arriving
in the Halle area, Francke began his prodigious efforts
to establish charitable and educational institutions whose
pioneering activities made an impact on the nation.

When the Brandenburg government founded the Uni—
versity of Halle in 1694 Francke and his former colleague
at Leipzig, philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655—1728),
exercised an unmistakable influence over the institution
as prominent charter members of the faculty. Francke, with
the encouragement of Thomasius, spread the ideals of pietism
from this center at Halle.

The role of the University of Halle in the first stages
of German nationalism may be compared with that of the

University of Berlin in the period of the War of
Liberation. Halle was the center of all the most

80

important intellectual currents, and in Halle most of

the important Prussian officials were educated.
The rapid achievement of predominance by pietism in edu-
cational institutions was dissipated by the middle of the
eighteenth century with the ascendancy to the Prussian
throne in 1740 by Frederick II with his sympathy for the
Enlightenment.

Halle represented more than an academic center for
propagating pietism. Francke set a pattern for others to
follow by initiating numerous philanthropic projects, such
as a school for the poor in 1695 and an orphanage three
years later. He was desirous of improving the quality of
education as well as extending the benefits of practical
learning far beyond the select few who were considered
worthy and needful of an education in that society. At
the time of Francke's death the schools he founded had an
enrollment of 2,207 students under the guidance of 175
teachers.

The most significant achievement of Pietist education
was the influence it exercised on the development of
the Prussian public-school system. Francke and the
Pietists aroused an interest in the organization of
public schools and the personal example of Francke
was particularly stimulating. As a result largely of
his influence, wealthy citizens and reigning princes
became interested in the establishment of public
schools.

Pietism extended Christian compassion to those in need

with its social welfare activities and achieved marked

 

1Ibid., p. 142. 2Ibid., p. 137.

81

success in evangelizing among the lower classes. In a
highly stratified society pietism ignored class distinctions
due to the nature of its custom of bringing people together
in small groups where the only common element was a per—
sonal experience of justification through Christ.
It was the first step to organize such meetings wherever
Pietism gained adherents and struck root and it also
became the target for most of the criticism and attacks
by the enemies and opponents of the new movement. At
these meetings people of all professions, regardless of
rank or trade, were brought together: students, jur—
ists, doctors, merchants, artisans, and women as well
as men. Master and servant knelt together in prayer.
The meeting was usually opened by a prayer, then there
was either a repetition of the Sunday sermon or a dis—
cussion of some section of a devotional book, and then
reading from the Bible.
Pietism represented a renewal movement whose participants
were members of the established churches. Its groups were
deliberately structured to stimulate the involvement of
the laity. The sole example of pietism functioning as a
separate sect in Germany is the Moravians.

Count Nicholaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700-1760)
spent the years 1710—1716 as a student at Francke's Halle
Paedagogium. In 1722 a small group of exiles from Moravia
appealed to Count Zinzendorf for refuge. These Moravians,
religious descendents from the Hussite body known as
United Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), seeking an escape from

religious persecution in Bohemia impressed Zinzendorf with

their piety. He allowed them to settle on his estate at

 

lIbid., p. 113.

 

 

 

82

Berthelsdorf, Saxony in Upper Lusatia. Before long the
Count resigned his secular position in the Saxon state and
devoted all his energies to creating a model community.

They were settled on a hill which formed part of the
estate, and laid the foundations there of the flourish—
ing settlement which was to be known to the world as
Herrnhut. Others followed in a steady stream, not
only from Bohemia and Moravia, but from various centers
in Protestant Germany. It was all one to the Count;
haunted by the dream of a united Christendom, and re—
solved to make Berthelsdorf a microcosm for the world
to imitate.

Herrnhut was formally founded on August 13, 1727 as the

Erneuerte Bruederkirche.

 

Zinzendorf and the Herrnhuters, in common with
other pietists, strove for the revitalization and unity of
Christianity. The reason the Herrnhuters developed into a
separate sect was no doubt due to the fact that since most
in the original group were not Reformed or Lutheran, they
did not naturally relate themselves to the existing state
churches. Latitude was permitted in the members' acceptance
of the unique doctrines of particular confessions. The
Herrnhuters, or Moravian Brethren, recognized the orders
of Lutheran and Reformed clergy. For example, Schleier—
macher's father, a military chaplain of the Reformed Church,
ministered to a Moravian congregation in Anhalt without

ever becoming a member of the Brethren.

 

1Ronald A. Knox, Enthusiasm, A Chapter in the
History of Religion with SpeCiaI Reference to thE XVII

and XVIII Centuries (New York: Oxford UnivEESity Press,
_19505—, p'.' Vol.

 

 

83

The communal pattern of Herrnhut was duplicated
as other villages were formed under the auspices of the
Moravian Brethren. Each settlement became a self-sufficient
economic unit composed of individual persons and families
who had committed their lives voluntarily to the Brethren
community.

Literally the whole life of a Herrnhuter was expended
in the faith that he had been called to be member of
this corporate whole and to play his part in the
representation in and through that entirety of the
Savior's continued presence in the world.
The Moravian Brethren believed that their community was
called to be a living witness as a leaven in the world for
Christ. They carried on extensive missionary enterprises.
Sending large numbers of members out of the settlements
into the world to places such as America indirectly pre-
vented the hazard of overpopulation in their settlements.
Herrnhut had approximately 1,200 inhabitants during the
period when Schleiermacher was enrolled in the Moravian
school nearby at Niesky.

Each congregation of the Moravian Brethren was
separated into "choirs" according to age, sex and marital
status. Each choir was further subdivided into "bands"
or cells of ten or less members to facilitate mutual
assistance in spiritual growth. These organizations were

designed to stimulate a lively personal experience of

Christ in each individual. In addition to the exclusive

 

1Nelson, p. 453; cf. pp. 150-51.

84

Moravian settlements, other associations of the Brethren
existed in EurOpe. Town and country congregations existed
in some places, while simple fellowships, either organized
or informal, met in other places. In addition, there was a
"Diaspora" of isolated families in various places who were
sympathizers, but not members of any Moravian Brethren
society. Schleiermacher's father and mother would be in-
cluded in the DiaSpora.

Pietism espoused a distrust of the worldly, thereby
creating a gulf between the secular and sacred concerns of
life. The depreciation of philosophy and rational theology
is one evidence of this. The Moravian ideal of the settle-
ment community isolated from the corrupting influences of
ordinary society suggests a defensive attitude toward the
non-religious elements which are so pervasive in everyday
life. Schleiermacher rejected the Moravians' negative
evaluation of culture.

The most overt threat to spirituality that the
Moravian Brethren perceived in the last half of the
eighteenth century was rationalism and modern unbelief.

The secular humanistic culture of the Enlightenment repre-
sented an alien power which the Brethren resisted strenu-
ously. Their schools, which were excellent in several
respects, imposed a rigid censorship on books and periodi—
cals. Sensitive leaders tried to keep the world out, lest

their faith be subverted by worldly ideas. Schleiermacher's

85

mother expressed relief that her children, safely in the
Moravian schools, would be spared "the soul-endangering
opinions, principles, and habits that are so prevalent in
the present times. Alas! how should we have been able to
preserve them from the subtle poison of the present times?"l
Schleiermacher and his closest friends smuggled in
reading material to expand the scope of their learning
beyond the narrow limits of the anti-rationalistic stance
of the Herrnhuters. When the inquiring activities of their
little "philosophy club" were uncovered the boys were for-
bidden to meet for fear their critical studies would imperil
their faith. The failure of this repressive discipline
ended in Okely's expulsion and Schleiermacher's crisis with
both his teachers and father. Young Schleiermacher
lamented:
A dissenter like myself cannot be tolerated here: they
fear that I may impart to others the dangerous poison.
. . . It is the insufficiency of the proofs given here
in support of certain doctrines, as well as the fact
that the opinions of dissenters are either passed over
in silence or mentioned without any reference to the
reasons on which they are grounded, and also the absence
of every opportunity for investigating these subjects
myself, together with my natural predilection for what-
ever is evidently suppressed, that is the cause of my
having gradually attained the point where I now am.

The central emphasis of pietism was the supernatural

feeling of faith in Christ. This experience was described

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 25.

 

 

21bid., p. 54.

86

as a feeling of the heart experienced through direct
intuition by the individual believer rather than a cog-
nition of universal religious truth reached through mediate
rational thought. As the movement grew there was a tran-
sition from the testimony of a spontaneous conversion toward
an almost standardized pattern of regeneration of dubious
authenticity. The renewal movement that had purported to
restore a genuine personal experience of justification
which had been eclipsed by preoccupation with dogmatic
assent generated a new orthodoxy.

Count Zinzendorf held definite convictions about
the essential, basic content of Christian belief, in spite
of his tendency to minimize detailed differences between
confessions. The most authoritative statement of Moravian

Begriff der christlichen Lehre ip den evangelischen

 

Bruedergemeinen written at Barby in 1778 by Bishop August
Gottlieb Spangenberg (1704-1792).

The Herrnhuters claimed to establish their doc-
trines on Biblical revelation. In contrast to Enlightenment
philoSOphers they assumed the doctrine of original sin.
Schleiermacher reported his personal

struggle generated by the views held among the United
Brethren relative to the doctrines of the natural cor-
ruption of man and the supernatural means of grace,

and the manner in which these doctrines were interwoven
with every discourse and every lesson.

 

1Ibid., p. 6.

87

The sinful state of man, they believed, requires the atoning
sacrifice of Christ to effect salvation. "Their Christology
was beyond question in its orthodoxy. There is actually not
a single point at which even the most orthodox could funda-

1 Schleiermacher

mentally differ with Spangenberg's work."
appreciated the centrality of Christ, but became skeptical
about their literal interpretation of the atonement theory
and resisted all pressure exerted to enforce complete agree-
ment with their strict Christology.

The aSpect of Moravian religion which most deeply
affected Schleiermacher was the vivid feeling of communion
with the divine. He appropriated the original ideal of
authentic religious experience stressed by the pietistic
movement while simultaneously rejecting the later Moravian
insistence on a common theological uniformity. Schleier-
macher felt gratitude to the Moravian Brethren for awakening
his consciousness to the eternal. Several years after he
had been emancipated from the claims of the Moravian
religion he wrote to Georg Reimer, his publisher, "I may

say, that after all that I have passed through, I have

become a Herrnhuter again, only of a higher order."2

 

lNelson, dissertation, "Herrnhut,' p. 444.

2Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 284.

 

CHAPTER IV

SCHLEIERMACHER AND GERMAN ROMANTICISM

Schleiermacher moved to Berlin in September 1796
to assume duties as chaplain at the Charité. His six-year
residency in Berlin proved to be a crucial time during
which he gave expression to his creative thoughts in his
first important publications. His personal development
through the combination of experiences, education and
temperament from his first twenty—eight years became en—
hanced by exposure to the new cultural currents of Berlin
society. Before long he was a participant in the intimate
friendships of the Berlin Romantic literary circle. This
interaction with such cultured associates stimulated
Schleiermacher's intellectual powers to an intense sensi-
tivity and prompted an articulate statement of his inner-
most feelings. Schleiermacher revelled in the coveted
opportunities that came to him in this period, as he said,
"during this beautiful time of my life, when I came into
contact with so much that was new to me, when so much

became broad daylight to me which I had but darkly sensed

88

89

before, and for which I had no preparation!"l Here in the
heady atmosphere of the Romantic circle Schleiermacher
shaped his concept of religion for the new day.
Schleiermacher occupied a modest apartment on the
third floor of the Charité. In his duties as chaplain he
alternated the preaching responsibility with his Lutheran
colleague on the staff, which permitted him to preach at
various Berlin churches from time to time. During the first
winter he regularly visited the homes of Johann Joachim
Spalding (1714-1804) and F. S. G. Sack, aristocratic leaders
of the Reformed clergy in Germany. At that time, however,
Spalding was elderly, and had previously resigned his
position due to his displeasure with the reactionary edict
on religion of 1788 by Johann Christian Woellner. Sack was
an influential ecclesiastical official who acted as a
fatherly friend to Schleiermacher. The Charité was a state-
operated institution, then caring for 3,000 persons a year.
The lower floors of the building functioned as a nursing
home for the aged and the upper part was a 250—bed hospi—
tal.2 Undaunted by controversy, the Lutheran chaplain used
his influence to work for reform of the hospital, which was
notorious for its inadequate care. Schleiermacher was pre-

occupied with matters of the mind and spirit.

 

lSchleiermacher, Soliloquies, p. 41.

 

2Redeker, Friedrich Schleiermacher, p. 38.

 

90

The Berlin Literary Circle

Berlin was then a major European city of 142,000
inhabitants, including 4,500 Jews. In Berlin Schleiermacher
renewed his friendship with Count Alexander Dohna (1771—
1831). Alexander, the eldest son of the East Prussian
Junker who had a few years earlier employed Schleiermacher
as a tutor, was acquiring experience in government service.
Later during the era of the Prussian reform movement, at a
time when Stein was forced to relinquish command, Dohna
was elevated to national leadership as the Prussian Minister
of the Interior with primary reSponsibility for domestic
reforms in a brief ministry between November 1808 and June
1810. Other members of the Dohna family visited Schleier-
macher several times in Berlin between 1797 and 1799. Count
Dohna introduced Schleiermacher to the remarkable home of
Henriette Herz and her circle of friends in the summer of
1797.

Henriette Herz (1764-1847) was the daughter of a
Berlin Jewish physician of Portugese ancestry named Dr.
de Lemos. By parental arrangement she married the Jewish
physician Dr. Marcus Herz when she was fifteen years old.
Dr. Herz had been a student of Kant in Koenigsberg in his
youth, and he participated in some of the intellectual
discussions that centered in his home. Early in 1803
after twenty-four years of marriage with no children,
Henriette found herself a widow. She refused Count

Alexander Dohna's marriage proposal, preferring to remain

91

independent. After both her parents had died she received
Christian baptism in 1817 at Zossen.
Leading participants of the Berlin Romantic circle

(Fruehromantik) often met at the home of this attractive

 

and highly gifted wife of Dr. Herz. It was here that
Schleiermacher discovered the Swedish diplomat, Gustav von
Brinkmann, his friend from Moravian school days with whom
he corresponded until the end of his life. The leader of
the early romantic movement, Friedrich Schlegel, came to
Berlin from Jena in July 1797 and entered the company of
Henriette's friends. Through the encouragement of Brink—
mann, Schleiermacher and Schlegel became fast friends.

Thus Schleiermacher came into personal contact with the

current leaders of the movement, which on the foundation

of Goethe and Kant strove for a new philosophy, art and

historical science. These perSons and their standard of

life found themselves in opposition to the sober and

largely political vieWpoints accompanying the enlighten-
ment of the era of Frederick the Great, like those which

Spalding and Sack with moral propriety advocated. Thus

after a few years difficulties arose for Schleiermacher,

that brought about his long exile from Berlin.

The new movement was known generally as Romanticism.
The title delimits sharply from the other persons of the

younger generation the two Schlegels, Tieck, Novalis,
Wackenroder, Schelling, and Solger, in whom the same
characteristics appeared in a mellow combination.1

The German Tradition
in_Literature

 

The years 1770 to 1830 encompass a most creative

period in German literature. Before this time there were

 

lDilthey, "Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher,‘
in Gesammelte Schriften, IV, 359.

92

few great works produced in German. Whereas the French and
the English had developed their own standards in literary
achievement, Germany lacked a definite native tradition in
writing. In academic circles Latin had been the appropriate
tongue for centuries. Christian Thomasius was the first
person known to have the audacity to deliver an academic
lecture in the uncouth German tongue. He set this precedent
at the University of Leipzig in 1687. The aristocracy found
French to be the most useful and sophisticated language in
the early eighteenth century. The German predilection for
French is illustrated by two prominent persons. Works of
Leibniz which were studied had been written in either Latin
or French. The Enlightenment monarch Frederick II was more
fluent in French than German, and preferred the former. In
the late eighteenth century when Schleiermacher was a stu-
dent at Halle his father repeatedly emphasized the practical
value of mastering "the French language, which is now so
indispensable."1
The common use of French by Germans represented the
hegemony of French culture in Prussia. Nobles attempted to
imitate the French style of life. Books and periodicals in
the French language published in Germany were not uncommon.
It was assumed that good literature would copy the French

form. The arbiter of literary excellence in Germany was

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 62;
cf. pp. 69, 70, 71, 73.

 

93

Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700-1766). Gottsched's in-
flexible rules for literary composition idealized a narrow
French classicism.

A number of young writers manifested their rebellion
against the artificial conventions of Enlightenment reason-
ableness in dramas written between 1775 and 1785. This
group is known by the title of Fredrich Maximilian Klinger's

1776 drama, Sturm und Drang. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805)

 

was identified with Sturm und Drang in his early works. The

 

Sturm und Drang movement originated as a radical reaction

 

against the narrowness of the prevailing formal rigidity in
literary criticism. As well as championing spontaneity,
enthusiasm and individuality in the face of rationalism, a
note of social protest was expressed through the portrayal
of the ordinary man as a hero. In style and content these
artists exploded with a burst of emotion and irrationalism.
This pre-romantic cult felt emancipated from bondage to the
rule of reason by affirming the authenticity of subjective
imagination, total freedom of artistic expression, and the
significance of creative genius and passion.

The Fruehromantic circle of Jena and Berlin renewed

 

an exaltation of subjective intuition from the Sturm und

 

Drang .

The notion of organic growth and development and the
consequent interest in history and in living nature,
the arrogation of complete artistic freedom as the
birthright of the autonomous divine genius, the trust
in spontaneous emotion and instinct: all these were

94

inherited from the Sturm und Drang, although German
Romanticism was not a mere continuation of the earlier
movement.1

 

The contemporaneous Weimar school exemplified by Goethe
and Schiller was admired and discussed by the cultured of
the day. Leading citizens gathered at Henriette's salon
to reflect on Goethe's latest creative productions.

The Friendshi s of the
Romantic Sc ool

 

The principals of the Fruehromantic were active

 

participants in the Wednesday Society, along with a variety
of other admirers of culture. In addition to Count Dohna
and diplomat Brinkmann, public figures such as Gerhard
Johann Scharnhorst, the well-known military administrator,
shared in the fellowship. Government officials, such as
Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt who were personal
friends of Goethe and Schiller were seen in the company of
Henriette's friends. Wilhelm von Humboldt, with whom
Schleiermacher served in the ministry of education in 1809
and 1810, implemented major educational reforms that
exerted a lasting effect in German public school policy
and practice.

The aesthetic interests of this Berlin circle
attracted artists such as Johann F. Reichardt, a composer,

and Gottfried Schadow, a sculptor of note. Still other

 

lLilian R. Furst, Romanticism in_Perspective, A
Comparatiyg Study of Aspects of the Romantic Movements in
En land, France and-Germany (London: Macmillan, 1969),
pp. 36-37.

 

 

 

 

 

95

representatives of Berlin culture in the Wednesday Society
included the Enlightenment publisher Friedrich Nicolai,
August Ludwig Huelsen, a writer, the intellectual Jewess
Rahel Varnhagen, and later Fichte, the philosopher. One of
the most important members of the informal society was
Friedrich Hardenberg, the brother of the famous Prussian
chancellor, who is better known by his pen—name, Novalis.
This romantic poet is remembered for his Hymnen an die
Nacht and Die Christenheit oder Europa. Within this
illustrious circle Schleiermacher, the Reformed preacher
to the Charité, associated with Friedrich Schlegel,
Dorothea Veit, August Wilhelm Schlegel and his wife
Caroline. The German Romantic School existed as a dynamic
communion between a series of distinct personalities.
The romanticists were the pupils of no one individual
leader in their midst. Each brought romanticism to
fruition in its own individual way. The very character
of the whole movement, which aimed at the restoration
and maintenance of individual liberty, precluded the
adherence to any fixed doctrine. . . . "School" means
merely that a number of individual writers came to—
gether, who recognized in one another just that which
made them, and each of them, romantic. The units of
this loose association were a number of friendships1
which bound groups of two or more closely together.
Around Christmas in 1797 Friedrich Schlegel moved
to Schleiermacher's apartment. Both men were sons of

clergymen and greatly interested in Greek literature and

philosophy. Together they spent many hours sharing their

 

1Robert N. Wernaer, Romanticism and the Romantic
School in Germany (New York: D. Appleton and Company,

“—Y‘1910 , :75. 55—56.

96

insights by means of mutually rewarding philosophizing.
Schlegel conceived an ambitious plan to pool their talents
in a translation and commentary on Plato's works that would
make this ancient philosophy and modern philological eru-
dition available to the German—speaking world. This project
was begun after thorough discussions about its hermeneutics
and outline through scholarly and harmonious dialogue. At
the same time Schlegel attempted to persuade his brother,
August Wilhelm, that they should inaugurate a new literary
journal devoted to criticism as a guide to public taste and

understanding. This journal, the Athenaeum, was published

 

from 1798 until 1800 as the voice of Fruehromantiker.

 

During the time Schlegel roomed with Schleiermacher
they philosophized together as two kindred spirits, and
socialized with the cultured citizens of Berlin. Schlegel
introduced Schleiermacher to his brother August Wilhelm
(1767-1845), to the poets Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and
Novalis (1772-1801) and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder (1773-
1798), and he also arranged the meeting of Schleiermacher
and Fichte. Another member of their set supplied the
inspiration for Schlegel's romance, Lucinde, which was
published in June of 1799 one month before he moved from
Schleiermacher's apartment.

Brendel, the daughter of the Jewish Enlightenment
philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, was one of the central

personalities in the Berlin Romantic circle. Her father

97

had prudently arranged her marriage to a successful Berlin
banker, Simon Veit, who did not, unfortunately, have an
imaginative spirit such as his wife possessed and appreci-
ated. Falling passionately in love with Schlegel, she
obtained a divorce from her stunned husband in December
1798, after sixteen years of marriage to Veit. Subsequently
she took the name of Dorothea, by which she was known in the
veiled characterization of the heroine in Lucinde. Within
a few months Dorothea and Friedrich Schlegel migrated to
Jena to be near Tieck, Novalis and August Wilhelm Schlegel,
but were not officially married until 1802. Dorothea was
baptized a Protestant in 1804 and became a Roman Catholic
with her husband in 1808. The latter years of his life
were spent as a political pamphleteer and diplomat in
Austria.

The devastating reviews the Lucinde received evoked

Schleiermacher's defense through publication of Confidential

 

Letters ConcerningLucindel within a year of the appearance

 

of Lucinde. Schleiermacher was incensed by the narrow~
minded judgments he felt revealed a lack of insight into
the nature of love. He aimed to restore the unjustly

damaged reputation of his author friend. Also at this time

 

1A German edition of both works is currently pub-
lished as one volume. An analysis of them is found in
George Brandes, Main Currents in Nineteenth Century Litera—
ture, Vol. II: The Romantic SEhool in German (New York:
Boni & Liveright, Inc., 1923), pp. 81:108 an Wernaer, pp.
230-52.

 

 

 

98

Schleiermacher was personally vexed by the lack of true
oneness between his friend Eleanore Grunow and her husband.
Upon the subject of August Wilhelm Schlegel's domestic
turmoil, Schleiermacher lamented, "Upon the whole there is
no such difficult matter in the world as marrying. When I
look at all my friends, far and near, it makes my heart sad
to think of how few happy marriages there are among them."1
August Wilhelm Schlegel had achieved a substantial
reputation as a respected literary critic. In Jena he
enjoyed a good relationship to Schiller and Goethe. The
more than three hundred reviews he penned are recognized
as masterpieces of literary criticism and contain implicitly

the aesthetic principles of Romanticism which were system-

atically delineated in his Berlin Lectures on Literature

 

and_A£E_delivered during the winter of 1803-1804. His name
was popularized through his nine—volume Shakespeare trans-
lations and translations of Dante and Calderon. He was
ably assisted by his wife, Caroline.

Caroline, the daughter of Professor Johann David
Michalis, a German Orientalist of Goettingen, was married
to Dr. Boehmer, a physician, for four years before his
death in 1788, whereupon she traveled around the country.
At Mainz her zeal for the French Revolution culminated in
her arrest and degrading imprisonment for seven months.

This woman whose home-town had issued special edicts against

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 273.

99

her for her scandalous morality and Jacobin sympathy, was
rescued from her humiliation in 1792 by marriage with
August Wilhelm Schlegel, a former student acquaintance at
Goettingen.

The programme of the Romantic School was elaborated

in Friedrich Schlegel's 1803 essay, Gespraech ueber Poesie.

 

The ideals of poetry and its aims had been previously
enunciated in the esoteric fragments by Schlegel in the
Athenaeum. The Athenaeum was conceived as an avant—garde
magazine of aesthetic taste opposed to the propagators of
old rationalism exemplified by Nicolai's Allgemeine

deutsche Bibliothek. The Athenaeum is the one place where

 

the multi-faceted introspective effusions of the chain of
personal friendships were printed while they endured.
Naturally, the Schlegel brothers and their wives were
regular contributors. Schleiermacher and Novalis added
their distinctive essays. The journalist August Ferdinand
Bernhardi and Sophie, his wife and Tieck's sister, shared
their talents.

The Romantic School had disbanded by 1802. Death
had already taken three young writers: Novalis, Wacken-
roder and Auguste Boehmer, Caroline‘s daughter. Following
her divorce from August Wilhelm, Caroline married Friedrich
Wilhelm Schelling (1775-1854), the philosopher, and moved
to Wuerzburg. August Wilhelm Schlegel and Schleiermacher
were in Berlin, while Friedrich Schlegel resided in Paris

and Tieck lived in Rome.

100

The Middle—Class Orientation

 

Schleiermacher and many of his associates were
representative of the relatively small segment of Prussian
society we would call middle—class. In Schleiermacher's
youth approximately 85 per cent of the population resided
in a rural setting. The center of power lay in the hands
of an elite corps of nobility and hereditary landowners.
The landed aristocracy, commonly known as Junkers in
Prussia, exercised virtually autonomous control over their
personal territory and the vast peasant caste who tilled the
soil. The lives of the peasants, or serfs, were effectively
regulated from birth to the grave on the feudal estate by
the Junkers, who had full legal sanctions. The serf served
in the household of his lord as a child, spent his youth in
the army, and all his life devoted several days a week to
tending his lord's fields before he could care for his own
family's crops. Customarily marriage required the lord's
approval, and the peasant was assured of no choice in edu—
cation, vocation or place of residence in this static caste
society. A rigid social stratification normally precluded
social mobility. The towns were of small importance com—
pared to the agricultural segment, and urban society was
also hierarchical. Education, especially in a university,
was a special luxury reserved for the privileged few of
the appropriate class who demonstrated an obvious need

for it. In addition to nobility, middle class men sought

101

education for subordinate positions as experts in the
expanding government bureaucracy or in the professions such
as medicine, law, theology and teaching. Theology was a
favorite field for middle-class students who might hope for
one of the scarce ecclesiastical appointments dispensed by
the ruling class. Theological graduates would ordinarily
be forced to accept positions as tutors in the households
of the aristocracy as Schleiermacher did. Very few in
Prussian society had any political consciousness or felt

an identification with the state.

The middle-class exercised little direct influence
on the government. In the absence of an appropriate
channel for external political action, it was logical for
brilliant middle-class persons, such as the Romantics, to
become virtuosos of the inner life.

The Romantic movement was carried out by a generation
of young men mostly of the middle class who were dis—
illusioned and dissatisfied with the social order in
which they lived and who therefore turned against the
ideas which prevailed during the eighteenth century.1
In its early period German Romanticism was clearly non—
political. Later, however, leaders, including Schleier-

macher, had an impact on political theory and reality.2

 

 

lReinhold Aris, Histor of Political Thought in
Germany, from 1789 to 1815 (London: George Allen & Unwin,
Ltd., 1936), pp. 241-15.

 

2An examination of the influence of Romanticism on
politics is found in Aris, p. 207ff.; H. S. Reiss, ed.,
The Political Thought of the German Romantics, 1793—1815
(New York: The Macmillan Company, 1955); Brandes, pp.

 

 

 

102

This aspect of Romantic thought was frequently indebted to

Herder's concept of the state as an organism.

The Ideals 9£_Romanticism

 

 

In Berlin, the center of the Enlightenment in
northern Europe, Romanticism emerged and put the Enlighten—
ment's cultural supremacy on the defensive. Whereas
Enlightenment spokesmen emphasized the rational and ordered
kind of world described by Newtonian science, the Romantics
opposed a materialistic and mechanistic interpretation of
both men and nature. They eschewed uniformity and abstrac-
tion in order to celebrate the variegated multifariousness
they experienced in real life.

Romantics considered feelings and emotions to be
more significant dimensions of experience than strictly
rational thought. Their thought found expression through
direct and immediate intuition rather than in a chain of
logical deductions. Romantics marveled at the irrational
forces of the human spirit. A self-consciousness about
personal feelings resulted in a deliberate cultivation of
the inner life of individuals. Members of the Romantic

circle encouraged subjective self-examination which

 

293-329; Wernaer, pp. 303-20. Specific references to
Schleiermacher are made in Aris, pp. 291-304; Reiss, pp.
33-37, 173-202; Dawson, Friedrich Schleiermacher: The
Evolution of a Nationalist; Raack, dissertation, "The
Course of Political Idealism in Prussia, 1806-1813";
Raack, "Schleiermacher's Political Thought and Activity,
1806-1813."

 

 

 

103

stimulated introspection. The Romantiker felt a liberation

 

of the spirit in publicly exposing his private thoughts.

The disclosure of individuality was manifested by
the subject through intimate friendships and artistic pro-
ductions. Each personality was viewed as a unique embodi-
ment of humanity endowed with freedom. Characteristically
a friend would encourage his companion to develop fully his
uniqueness. Each person was regarded as a singularly valu-
able concrete aspect of humanity whose individuality was an
admired mystery. The Romantic had a feeling of wonder for
the unrepeatable individuality of each person. The Romantic
movement was linked together by a chain of friendships be-
tween people who felt an irresistable need to communicate
their innermost selves to others. It was common for one
person freely to acknowledge his dependence on specific
friends for the fulfillment and flowering of his own
individuality. Accounts of these friendships impress the
ordinary person today as sentimental or unnatural, but the
Romantics sincerely believed that each personality needed
to supplement his own self by communing with the individu—
ality of one or more special friends.

Schleiermacher testified to the significance of
this type of friendship in his own personal development.

In the Soliloquies, written in 1800, recurring references

 

to the significance of his own emerging individuality

appear. He confessed,

104

Everything I do, I like to do in the company of others;
even while engaged in meditation, in contemplation, or
in the assimilation of anything new, I need the presence
of some loved one, so that the inner event may immedi—
ately be communicated, and I may forthwith make my
account with the world through the sweet and easy
meditation of friendship. . . . Only if man is conscious
of his individuality in his present conduct can he be
sure of not violating it in his future acts, and only
if he requires himself constantly to survey the whole
of humanity, opposing his own expression of it to every
other possible one, can he maintain the consciousness
of his unique selfhood. For contrast is indispensable
to set his individuality in relief.
Schleiermacher's habit of meditating and studying closely
with another person was a pattern he initiated before his
association with the Romantics. One example of this sort
of significant growth through regular involvement in the
life of another is his inseparable companionship with
Albertini in the Moravian schools.2 For several months
Schleiermacher enjoyed a similar relationship to Friedrich
Schlegel in Berlin. Schleiermacher's deepest mutual
friendship, however, was maintained with Henriette Herz.
He ordinarily Spent several hours with her daily, and they
continued their heart—to—heart communication by corres-
pondence after he left Berlin. The morally upright
relationship of this pair, frequently seen together in

private and public, was the object of gossip and jest that

amused the two. Observers might have expected them to

 

lSchleiermacher, Soliloquies, pp. 37—38.

2Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 9—10.

105

marry when Dr. Herz died in 1803 and Schleiermacher had no
commitments to other women, but this apparently was not
considered.
. . . a relationship of most heartfelt intimacy yet
completely dispassionate, a relationship not of love,
but of unselfish friendship, is possible. Thus was
his relationship to Henriette Herz. Through a natural
habit he visited with his gifted and responsive friend
nearly every day; little excursions were taken jointly,
they would read and study together. They worked at
the study of physics together; together they read
Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; she became his teacher in
Italian, he tau ht her Greek and introduced her to the
books of Plato.
Romantics are known as lovers of aesthetic beauty.
For them the external object perceived represented the
interior reality of the artist‘s individuality. Frueh—
romantik excelled in criticism and philosophizing rather
than establishing a reputation primarily on the production
of literary masterpieces. Much Romantic writing took the
form of essays and fragments. They rebelled against the
prevailing standards of literary excellence by branding
the slavish imitation of artistic styles reprehensible
artificiality. Originality and creativity were eulogized
in their zeal for the maximal exercise of imagination in
every type of artistic composition. They condemned practi-

cal and outward conventionality in art and poetry in favor

of spontaneity.

 

lHaym, Die Romantische Schule, p. 414; cf. Redeker,
Friedrich Schleiermacher, p. 41.

 

.—_

106

The Romantics utilized Herder's concept of organic
growth.1 The Universe was envisioned as a macro-organism.
Romantic thought devoted considerable attention to man's
relationship to Nature, understood as a dynamic and living
organism. Nature, with all its rich complexity and beauty,
aroused a feeling of kinship and nostalgia. Each nation
represented one natural cultural unitary aspect of humanity,
rather than merely political power. An anti—French posture
was a consequence of their revolt against imitation in the
interest of developing a peculiarly German literary tra—
dition. The quest for authentic culture involved a search
for the genius of the past, in contrast to the Enlighten—
ment's tendency to depreciate the past as superstitious and
unenlightened compared to the new progressive age of reason.
Romanticists tended to idealize the past through their in-
vestigation of antiquity. The particular uniqueness of a
people, they insisted, expressed itself through its
language, folklore, and history. The observed diversities
and creativity of various peoples fascinated them. Members
of the Romantic circle learned languages, such as Greek,
Sanskrit, Italian or English, in order to be able to read
foreign masterpieces, and, in some instances, to publish
excellent translations. Henriette Herz, for example, knew

ten languages.

 

lErgang, pp. 192—95, 234—38.

107

The Romanticists were not content with bringing
European literatures within their province, they

aimed at harmonizing East and West, Europe and Asia.
"Ex oriente lux" became an accepted axiom. . . . The
Romanticists did not expend all their critical energies
on foreign literatures; they were also anxious to
recapture the spirit of the earlier periods of their
own Germanic past. They became the founders of the
modern sciences of comparative philology and litera—
ture.

Romantic writers felt their vocation commissioned
them to share sublime thoughts through poetic insight.
Their imagination did not remain tied to the prosaic ele—
ments of a mundane world. The deep mysteries of existence
attracted their attention and their vision soared toward
the Absolute. A reverence for nature frequently inspired
a pantheism. One of the themes inciting their creativity
was the representation of the Infinite in the finite through
symbolism.

The Romanticists theory of art and life thus owes its
existence to a mingling of poetry with philosophy,
. . . Hence its living and moving in a higher world,
a different nature. This too is the explanation of
all the symbolism and allegory in these half—poetical,
half-philOSOphical works. A literature came into
being which partook of the character of a religion,
and ultimately joined issue with religion.2
The Romanticists believed they were experiencing life on a
more profound level than other contemporary intellectuals

and ordinary people. Their self—image took on a quasi-

religious pathos.

 

lLeonard Ashley Willoughby, The Romantic Movement
in German (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), pp.
151, 15 .

 

2Brandes, pp. 40-41.

108

The Writing 9£_"Qn Religion"

 

Schleiermacher's friends of this Romantic circle
were essentially writers. They immediately recognized his
fertile and insightful mind from their learned conver-
sations, and were anxious to see a production of Schleier—
macher's creativity in polished form. Schleiermacher
disavowed any inclination or aptitude for literary achieve-
ment. In the morning of November 21, 1797, a surprise
birthday party for Schleiermacher was celebrated by two
Dohna brothers, Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Veit and
Henriette Herz. Upon the instigation of Schlegel the merry
party repeatedly taunted in unison: "Nine-and-twenty years,
and nothing done as yet."1 At last, Schleiermacher reluc-
tantly promised that he would prepare an original work
within the year. Belatedly this pledge was fulfilled by
writing 93 Religion. This book apprOpriately expressed
Schleiermacher's own individuality.

In late 1798 Court preacher Bamberger became
incapacitated. Until the king had time to arrange the
appointment of a new court preacher at Potsdam, Schleier-
macher was sent to fill that pulpit temporarily.2
Schleiermacher was away from his Berlin friends between

February and May of 1799. During this time he found the

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 163.

 

2Ibid., p. 202.

109

leisure to write the book On Religion expressly for the
Romantics. He completed the writing on April 15, sent it
to the censor, and arranged for its publication before
returning to Berlin. This book of 1799, reissued by
Schleiermacher in 1806, 1821 and 1831, found a wide
audience. As Rudolf Otto remarked,
It became one of the classical works of theological
literature as well as of German national literature.
. . . The spirit of the time around 1800 reflecting
its rich fermentation, quests and discoveries, the new
questions and objectives, the sympathies and antipathies
of the time, the old being overcome, the aspiring inno-
vations in philosophy, religion and ethics, in poetry
and life—style, in world-view and estimation of man, we
do not wish to say is revealed in any document of that
era at the same time so profoundly, certainly not as
broadly and diversely, as this.
This original work exemplified Schleiermacher's involvement
in the Berlin cultural milieu. On the eve of the nine-
teenth century he revealed his perception of the manner in
which religion was commonly understood.

The message of 9g Religion is addressed to the
"cultured despisers" of religion. They held themselves
conceitfully aloof from any contact with institutional
Christianity. They presumed to have transcended any need
for religion by their own poetic insight which lifted them
above the vulgar populace. Schleiermacher satirically

criticized their contempt for religion throughout the first

address. He admitted in advance the risk he ran, inasmuch

 

lOtto, "Zur Einfuehrung," in Schleiermacher, Ueber
die Religion, p. 7.

 

110

as his efforts might be doomed to futility since the
cultured had created their own universe via the imagination,
and obviously felt self-sufficient without any resort to
eternity. Whereas they ordinarily respected the expertise
of persons possessing skill and experience in some
Specialty, even that of a peasant tradesman, in religion
they were most highly suspicious of anything uttered by a
theological expert.

Schleiermacher sensed a crisis for religion at
the end of the eighteenth century. An accumulation of
experiences in various circumstances convinced him that
the divergent manifestations of Christianity being expressed
betrayed a confusion about the nature of religion itself.
Criticisms of Christianity had now eventuated in a low
regard for religion in general. Religion in the German
heritage had been associated with wars, endless contro-
versies, and inconclusive theological disputations.
Especially among the cultured, religion was identified
with the ancien régime they aspired to transcend. Increas—
ingly religion appeared to be an outmoded element from
another era which self-conscious writers considered unin—
telligent, superfluous and irrelevant to progressive modern
times.

The cultured dissociated themselves from religion
because it represented primitive folk practices accepted
by the ignorant masses. The clergy were suspect since they

perpetuated crude beliefs and rituals among the peasants on

111

behalf of both church and state. This conception of
religion's role would have had little resemblance to the
needs felt by the cultured despisers who viewed religion
with indifference. A simile used by Schleiermacher com-
pared religion to a garment which having gone out of style
was passed down to those unable to possess the finest and
best.1

Schleiermacher indicted the sophisticated intel-
lectuals for perpetuating a superficiality similar to that
of the common man and the traditional defenders of the
faith whom they criticized with such contempt. He accused
his cultured friends of closing their minds and refusing
to investigate seriously the area of experience religion
represented. Schleiermacher himself was disturbed by
clergy's preoccupation with externals to the exclusion of
a viable and articulate conception of religion.2 He invited
his readers to examine the internal essence of religion
itself instead of being content with mere externals, and
asked, "Why have you not penetrated deeper to find the
kernel of this shell? I am astonished at your voluntary
ignorance."3

Schleiermacher aimed to overcome the indifference
precipitated by distortions of religion peculiar to that

society. Duties as preacher to the Charité did not fully

 

lSchleiermacher, 92 Religion, p. 11.

2Ibid., p. 22. 3Ibid., p. 15.

112

challenge Schleiermacher's intellectual capacity, and he
did not include sermons preached at the hospital in his
collection of published sermons. His sophisticated Romantic
acquaintances, however, did pose an exciting challenge to
his ability. Believing that they potentially possessed

the most receptive spirits, he summoned them to consider
religion as the zenith of human experience. He attempted

to lead them to discover their artistic interests fulfilled
in a focus on religion. Thus, he promised, "I would conduct
you into the profoundest depths whence every feeling and
conception receives its form. I would show you from what
human tendency religion proceeds and how it belongs to what

1 In this way Schleier-

is for you the highest and dearest."
macher's concept of religion was developed with an apolo-
getic intention clearly before him. He was under conviction
that religion represented a distinct aspect of human experi-
ence rooted in a universal validity and necessity.
Schleiermacher offered a revised conception of
religion he believed succeeded in avoiding the offenses
that had formerly caused people to neglect religion. In
1811 he criticized those who continued to display disdain
for religion by saying, "It is clear that the sort of out-
look which represents Christianity merely as a source of

. . . 2
perverSions and retrogreSSions is out-of—date."

 

lIbido I pp. 11—120

2Schleiermacher, Brief Outline, p. 41.

 

CHAPTER V

SCHLEIERMACHER'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

The publication of Schleiermacher's book 92 Religion
is widely acknowledged as a pivotal point which marks the
beginning of a modern conception of religion. Schleier-
macher is an innovator who attempted to dissociate religion
from the old order while fruitfully elucidating the vital
role of religion for the modern era. Due to his predi—
lection for apologetics, he specified the essence of
religion as a step prior to a reformulation of Christian
dogmatics. Schleiermacher's philosophy of religion deliber—
ately avoids the treatment of religion as dependent upon
metaphysical and scientific knowledge by denying that
religion is essentially speculative knowledge of divine
truths. This, together with a refusal to found religion
on practical moral considerations, results in an identifi—

cation of religion with a feeling of God-consciousness.

Analysis 9: Alternative Approaches

 

The predominant German currents in the philosophy

of religion had been personally experienced and known by

113

114

Schleiermacher in his extraordinarily broad life experiences
and friendships. Showing an astute awareness of the intel—
lectual state of affairs in Germany, he strove to overcome
the disagreements between the respective champions of ortho—
doxy, pietism and rationalism. Observing those traditions
and the attitudes of others toward them, Schleiermacher
constructed a grand synthesis uniting and transcending
classical orthodoxy, pietist criticism of orthodoxy, and

the Enlightenment evaluation of them both.1

The Distinctive Nature
gf Religion

Religion denoted for Schleiermacher an autonomous

 

function in human existence possessing inherently its own
unique essence (sui generis). Ostensibly 92 Religion was
directed to the Romantics, who considered themselves above
religion due to their alleged achievement of new and
superior cultural insights transcending both Enlightenment
rationalism and dogmatic orthodoxy. Schleiermacher
attempted to demonstrate to the Romantics that an ade—
quately understood conception of religion was actually the
fulfillment of their highest ideals. Some critics, how—
ever, interpreted 92 Religion as a Romantic attack upon

traditional Christianity. Its pages carried repeated

 

lTillich, Perspectives, pp. 11—12, 90ff; Tillich,
History gf Christian Thought, p. 292; Barth, Humanity gf
God, p. 12; Barth, Theology and Church, p. 166.

115

castigations of the common conceptions of religion per—
petrated or sanctioned by the Church. Schleiermacher
decried this tendency to cluster around extremes which
represented distortions of religion. His intention was
to expose inadequate conceptions of religion and modify
public opinion. The stark query "What is religion?" was
his point of departure.

Years later in his maturity when Schleiermacher
presented his magnum eggs, The Christian nghh, as a
systematic formulation of Christianity, the definition of
religion E23 generis had not been totally superseded. The
essence of religion described in Oh Religion in 1799
appeared in Th3 Christian nghh of 1821 in a revised form
as the prolegomenon without being radically altered. In
both works Schleiermacher discussed the positive religions
through which piety is manifested in historical existence.
While he did not hold non-Christian religion in very high
regard, he refused to express unequivocally a claim to
finality for Christianity as the only true religion.1 His
analysis of the various types of religion led him to con—
clude that "this comparison of Christianity with other
similar religions is in itself a sufficient warrant for
saying that Christianity is, in fact, the most perfect of

the most highly developed forms of religion."2

 

lSchleiermacher, Christian Faith, p. 33.

2Ibid., p. 38.

116

Schleiermacher's apologetic attention to "religion"
has been the focus of recent attacks on Schleiermacher by
certain twentieth century theologians.l Critics such as
Brunner and Barth claim Schleiermacher's theology is doomed
to failure because he theorized about religion in general
without recognizing from the outset a qualitative superi-
ority of Christianity over every other possible religion.
These critics insist that Christianity is the only true
religion, rather than simply being the best of its class.
Some theologians, living in the face of prevalent thorough—
going relativism in the twentieth century, panic at the
thought of any philosophy of religion based on historically
conditioned consciousness devoid of absolute claims to
finality. Niebuhr, correctly noting the unfairness of such
criticism of Schleiermacher's objective, says,

It would never have occurred to Schleiermacher that
the category religion was in itself compromising of
Christainity or t at reli ion as a human phenomenon
stands in radical contradiction to faith mediated
through Jesus Christ and the Spirit of God.2

Schleiermacher aimed to establish religion on the
basis of a predisposition having its own intrinsic nature

which is essential to human life. His perception of the

 

lBrunner, Do matics: Vol. I, The Christian
Doctrine 9E God, pp. 96-97; Barth, Theology and Church,

p. 198.

2Niebuhr, Schleiermacher 9h Christ and Religion,

p. 178.

117

cultural situation in 1799 at Berlin convinced him of the
futility of reviving dead options which he believed would
not be viable in the nineteenth century. Recalling the
customary functions of religion, Schleiermacher wrote "that
there are a Knowing and a Doing which pertain to piety, but
neither of these constitutes the essence of piety."1

In the second address Schleiermacher maintained

that religion's essence is a tertium quid, which he desig-

 

nated as feeling (Gefuehl).2 This was precisely stated in

the third proposition of The Christian Faith: "The piety

 

which forms the basis of all ecclesiastical communions is,
considered purely in itself, neither a Knowing nor a Doing,
but a modification of Feeling, or of immediate self—

3 In his dogmatics at this point, as well

consciousness."
as at others, he cited correlative passages in Oh Religion.
Among the explanations he appended to the third edition of

Oh Religion Schleiermacher directed the reader expressly to

 

"my 'Glaubenslehre,‘ the Introduction of which contains the

outlines of what I take to be the philosophy of religion,

and therefore has many points of contact with this book."4

 

lSchleiermacher, Christian Faith, p. 10.

 

2Schleiermacher, 92 Religion, pp. 38, 41, EE El°

3Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, p. 5.

 

4
O7, 117.

Schleiermacher, 9h Religion, p. 111; cf. pp. 105-

118

His explanation for the rigid tripartite classification of
possibilities is that it seemed logical for him to oppose
his concept to "those divergent views which are actually in

. l
eXistence."

Schleiermacher proceeded to specify the
essence of religion by eliminating certain alternatives at
the outset.

The Religion 2: Supernatural
Truth

 

Schleiermacher was keenly aware of the admiration
that the educated and cultured among his contemporaries
entertained for new knowledge. The Enlightenment devotees,
intoxicated by the potentialities of human reason for
breaking the shackles of ancient custom and superstition,
insisted on truth at any price. Philosophers and poets
who protested the narrowly circumscribed limits of reason
set by Enlightenment thinkers claimed new discoveries of
the spirit surpassing in depth the knowledge of the en—
lightened. Philosophy, for long the handmaiden of theology,
became a rival competing for speculative truths. In the
popular mind theology represented truths pertaining to
specific elements of cosmic reality, such as God, the soul
and eternal destiny. Schleiermacher denied that religion
was a particular kind of specialized knowledge, thus
repudiating the claims of supernatural religion as well

as so—called natural religion.

 

lSchleiermacher, Christian Faith, p. 7.

 

119

In the second address of Oh Religion, Schleier-
macher utilizes the familiar classification of knowledge
into two kinds, the theoretical and the practical.1
Theoretical knowledge is treated in physics, or natural
science, and metaphysics. Ethics is characteristic of
practical knowledge.

The former describes the nature of things, or if that
seems too much, how man conceives and must conceive of
things and of the world as the sum of things. The

latter science, on the contrary teaches what man should
be for the world, and what he should do in it.

 

The prevailing rational orthodoxy Schleiermacher
had encountered generally interpreted religion as a body of
supernatural truths. Therefore, he said, "It seems neces—
sary to guard myself against this interpretation, especially
as so many theologians seem to maintain at present that
. . . the Christian religion, is the highest knowledge."3
Orthodox dogma was constructed speculatively from a synthe—
sis of rational philosophy and divine revelation. Religious
knowledge had been combined into intricate systems of
eternal truths. Schleiermacher had an aversion to any
scholastic system whose advocates considered it to be the

finest expression of truth.4 In the first edition of Oh

 

lSchleiermacher, 9h Religion, pp. 27, 30, 32.
2 . 3 .

Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., p. 102.
4

Ibid., pp. 47, 50, 52-53, 55.

120

Religion Schleiermacher satirically voiced his contempt
for dogmatic truth.

We have systems from all schools, yea, even from

schools that are mere habitations and nurseries of

the dead letter. The spirit is neither to be confined

in academies nor to be poured out into a row of ready

heads. It evaporates usually between the first month

and the first ear.1
Schleiermacher repeatedly employed the expression "dead
letter"2 to denote verbal expositions of theologians which
he contended were devoid of the essence of religion itself.
Religion, he asserted, is not a system of objective knowl—
edge, nor "a way of thinking, a faith, a peculiar way of
contemplating the world, and of combining what meets us in
the world."3 His writing manifested disdain for repre-
sentatives of the confessional traditions who equated
religion with intellectual assent to propositional truth.
His interpretation of the function of theology meant that
dogmatic formulations represented a metalanguage for
religion. Schleiermacher hoped to rectify the miscon-
ception of religion viewed as "chiefly ideas, opinions,
dogmas, in short, not the characteristic elements of

religion, but the current reflections about them."4

 

1Ibid., p. 275.

2Ibid., pp. 16, 55, 110, 126, 150, 161, 238, 275;
cf. Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, II, 21.

 

3Schleiermacher, Oh Religion, p. 27, cf. p. 35.

41bid., p. 160.

121

In discussing the essence of religion Schleier-
macher made a distinction between the inner nature as
contrasted to the outward form of religion.1 Theological
dogmas pertain to the outward form of religion which should
not be mistaken for religion itself. The external formulas
of dogma describe the inner experience of religion. Dogma
thereby remains second-hand, always an imperfect reflection,
which is in danger of being isolated from its source and
thus rendered lifeless. Schleiermacher construed dogmatic
theology as an empirical description of states of God-
consciousness in human experience at a particular time,
rather than as a body of eternal truths.2 The subjective
religious affections, stimulated especially through fellow-
ship in religious groups, of necessity become expressed
verbally and concretely in action in history.

If the essence of religion were to be identified
with knowledge, Schleiermacher claimed that this would
logically suggest an inescapable corollary that the most
religious or pious person would be the one who possessed
the most perfect knowledge about religion.3 He did not

expect anyone to grant that the degree of piety increases

 

1Ibid., pp. 13-15, 33; Schleiermacher, Christian
Faith, p. 30.

 

2Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, p. 127.

 

3Ibid., p. 9.

122

in proportion to the level of an individual's theological
talent and proficiency. Schleiermacher had witnessed in
Germany the consequences of zealous and inflexible adherence
to religion conceived as Ehg truth. External coercion had
been applied when religious truth was reinforced by the
political powers-to-be. In Schleiermacher's own personal
experience his sensitive spirit had been subjected as a
teenager among the Moravians to the subtle pressure for
verbal conformity as a condition for personal acceptance by
the fellowship. He maintained that practices of this sort
were likely to stifle religion itself. The denial of
knowledge as the essence of religion was an implicit plea
for tolerance.

A de-emphasis of the noetic character of religion
was occasioned by Schleiermacher's desire to establish
religion as a species of human self—consciousness with its
own independent basis distinct from philosophy. Schleier-
macher deplored the situation where the metaphysical
speculations of philosophy were considered synonymous with
religion.1 Philosophy aimed to describe or explain the
nature of reality in a cognitive fashion by means of
deductions and logical systems. During the later years of
Schleiermacher's life Hegel, his colleague at the Uni-
versity of Berlin, interpreted religion philosophically

in conceptual and rational terms in a most thorough—going

 

lIbid., p. 82.

123

way. One of the serious deficiencies of philosophers,
according to Schleiermacher, was their neglect of the vital
role of the senses. He lamented, "With pain I see daily
how the rage for calculating and explaining suppresses the
sense."1 This passion for logical analysis and explanation
reduced human perception at the same time that its advo-
cates advanced pure reason as a guarantor of truth.
Schleiermacher concurred with the Romantics in their pro-
test against such a restriction of human experience as the
Enlightenment represented. Schleiermacher suspected that
contempt for religion manifested by its cultured despisers
was rooted in a new barbarism of the mind,2 which limited
meaningful significance to the lowest common denominator
of logical objectivity.
Denying that the center of the religious response is
primarily noetic he leveled his protest against the
common error of both scholastic orthodoxy and En-
lightenment Deism. Despite their wide divergence both
groups confuse the acceptance of certain metaphysical
beliefs with the living center of personal religious
faith.3
A perspective common among eighteenth century

thinkers who rejected supernatural religion was known as

natural religion. Natural religion signified belief in a

 

1Schleiermacher, gh_Re1igion, p. 124; cf. p. 127.

2Ibid., pp. 11, 15, 20, 131.

3John Wallhausser, Jr., "Schleiermacher's Early
Development As Ethical Thinker" (unpublished Ph.D. disser-
tation, Yale University, 1965), p. 151.

124

bare minimum of speculative concepts in harmony with the
mechanistic Weltanschauung of science and philosophy at
the time. The contents of natural theology were alleged
to be universally discoverable by reason alone. This was
accomplished by a reductionism of theology through the
removal of any doctrines offensive to their rational sense.
The exponents of natural theology claimed that their princi-
ples were self-evident truths established independently
from the particularism of any supernatural revelation. In
effect, natural religion represented an intellectual ab—
straction from life of certain noetic affirmations.
Schleiermacher considered the human capacity for
religion to be innate.l This sense for the divine was
grounded in human nature, but religion needed to be culti-
vated like any other inherited endowment. Schleiermacher
charged that this inborn religious instinct was being
suppressed by the philosophical interests of natural
religion.2 Natural religion was a denial of unique reli~
gious experiences of the kind Schleiermacher esteemed and
commended to his readers. According to his convictions
religion originates in concrete experiences which are
particular and historical rather than abstract and general.

He held that due to its indeterminacy natural religion is

 

1 . . .
Schleiermacher, On Religion, pp. 115, 124, 131,
190; cf. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, pp. 22, 26ff.

2Schleiermacher, 93 Religion, pp. 124—25, 131-32.

125

a conception that can never be religion.l Religion in
general, for him, was a fiction that had no more possi-
bility of being actualized than the possibility of anyone's
being born as man in general rather than as one particular
person. Schleiermacher cited English and French natural
religion as clear cases of this misconceived religion of
externals which could not be regarded as religion at all.2
The natural religion of deism was portrayed as a jumble of
bits and pieces from metaphysics and ethics deserving the
reproach and deSpisal of the cultured.3

Schleiermacher's diversified experiences before 1800
convinced him that the disconcerting erosions of Christi-
anity by the Neologians and attacks from the skeptics were
symptomatic of more far—reaching crises yet to come for
religion. In the words of an early twentieth century com-
mentator, "The course of philosophical speculation on one
hand, and the rapid emergence of the physical sciences on

the other, were making great inroads on the position of

those who attempted to retain any religious Weltanschauung."4

 

 

lIbid., pp. 233-34, cf. p. 155; Schleiermacher,
Christian Faith, pp. 30, 48.

 

2Schleiermacher, Oh Religion, p. 265.

31bid., pp. 14, 31, 214, 232.

4William Boothby Selbie, Schleiermacher, a Critical
and Historical Study (London: Chapman and Hall, I913),
p. 237.

 

 

126

Schleiermacher proposed an innovative philosophy of religion
perceived as a break with an untenable orthodox tradition
and prepared with the intention of achieving a new con-
ception of religion which would be acceptable and beneficial
to modern culture in the long run. Perhaps Schleiermacher
had some premonition of the divisive controversies that
raged openly between the religious and scientific com-
munities later in the century.

Schleiermacher precluded the conflict between

religion and natural science by means of a Kantian episte—
mology wherein possible objects of scientific study are
confined to phenomenal entities. The scientist with an
appropriate methodology analyzes and describes relations
perceived between such finite objects. The nature of God,
or the Infinite in itself, can never become a legitimate
object of scientific knowledge. Since Schleiermacher denied
that religion was a system of knowledge, he did not antici—
pate that science would pose any threat to religion.
Schleiermacher's conception of religion as intuitions of
the Infinite in the finite suggested to him a parallel
relation between natural science and religion rather than
one of mutual exclusion. Schleiermacher had a positive
regard for nature and science. A miracle did not represent
an anti-scientific proof of faith because Schleiermacher
believed "Miracle is simply the religious name for event.
Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes a

miracle, as soon as the religious view of it can be the

 

 

 

127

dominant."l Religion, then, does not originate as a knowl—

edge of either the world or God.2

Kant and the Religion
9: Morality

Kant was the most important thinker to Schleier—

 

macher in his early philosophical study. The early works
of Kant were published for the first time during Schleier-
macher's youth. Almost immediately Kant's philosophy
became the subject of vigorous controversy in the late
eighteenth century among intellectuals in Prussia. In his
coherent system Kant articulated some ideas typical of
certain Enlightenment viewpoints which were critical of
traditional philosophy and theology. Schleiermacher whole—
heartedly agreed with Kant's repudiation of the rationalism
of the Wolffian system which was in vogue at that time.

The main thrust of Kant's Critigue gf Puhg Reason
imposed a limit on theoretical knowledge by specifying its
necessary presuppositions. Anything not appearing as
phenomena through the pure forms of intuition (time and
space) Kant excluded from ever becoming an object of
knowledge. The existence of an extramundane God, there-
fore, could never be rationally demonstrated by means of

the classical proofs since, in Kant's opinion, "It is

 

lSchleiermacher, 9h Religion, p. 88, cf. pp. 89,
113—14; Christian Faith, pp. 71—73, 178-84.

2Schleiermacher, 9h Religion, pp. 35—36.

128

impossible by means of metaphysics to progress from knowl-
edge of this world to concepts of God and a proof of his
existence through cogent inferences."l Schleiermacher held
that rational proofs of divine existence are superfluous
as well as invalid. He condemned the illicit intrusion of
such proofs into dogmatic theology.2 He maintained that no
value, either practical or speculative, accrues from proofs
of divine reality. In harmony with Kant's position
Schleiermacher asserted,

But just as it could only injure science to employ

expressions belonging to the religious consciousness

or to mingle with science anything belonging to that

sphere, so it can only be harmful to faith and the

system of doctrine to intersperse them with scientific

propositions or to make them dependent on scientific

foundations.3

Schleiermacher's rejection of rational deductions

in establishing religion, however, made no exception of
Kant's treatment of religion. Six years before Schleier-

macher wrote Oh Religion, Kant's book, Religion within the

Limits pf Reason Alone, was published. At that time

 

Schleiermacher and his father in their correspondence
commented on the wide range of divergent responses to

Kant's treatise on religion.4 Some critics hailed Kant's

 

lKant, Critique pf Practical Reason, p. 144.

 

2Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, pp. 135—37.

3Ibid., p. 137.

4Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I,
126—28.

129

work as a conclusive philosophical argument in favor of
Christianity in contradiction to other reviewers who viewed
it as a perilous portrayal of religion.

Religion, in Kant's philosophical system, is
elaborated as an extension of his ethics of practical
reason. The goal of Kantian ethics is obedience to the
moral law from duty. The possibility of fulfilling the
moral law is assumed in order to assure the significance
of freedom and obligation in morality.l In other words,
it would make no sense to say "I ought to obey the moral
law" without simultaneously affirming "I can obey the moral
law." Another basic principle of Kant's ethics is that a
life of virtue in harmony with the moral law will eventu-
ally be accompanied by happiness. The worthiness to be
happy is dependent on virtue since Kant assumes "virtue and
happiness together constitute the possession of the highest
good for one person, and happiness in exact proportion to

morality."2

This common—sense assumption is rejected by
Schleiermacher as lacking the rational necessity claimed
for it by Kant.

The role of religion in Kant's practical philosophy

is to sanction and support rational morality. In Kant's

words, religion "must consist not in dogmas and rites but

 

lKant, Critique pf Practical Reason, pp. 38, 118,
123, 129, 163.

 

2Ibid., p. 115, cf. p. 129.

130

in the heart's disposition to fulfill all human duties as

1

divine commands". and "the performance of all human duties

as divine commands . . . constitutes the essence of all

2 From this standpoint Kant explained all reli—

religion."
gious beliefs and practices in terms of their specifically
moral value, and every aspect of religion that he retained
remains contingent upon its moral utility.

In order to account for the disparity between
perfect obedience to the moral law and actual human achieve-
ment Kant introduced the concept of "radical evil."3
Radical evil, analogous to the Christian doctrine of origi—
nal sin, is the natural predisposition which frustrates
perfect obedience to the moral law. Kant postulated immor—
tality to vindicate his previous claims that virtue produces
a corresponding happiness and man has the capacity to ful-
fill his moral obligation. He believed that every religion
affirms a belief in a future life.4 The Kantian postulate
of immortality provides an infinite span of time for the

culmination of moral perfection in rational man beyond the

finite limits of this imperfect earthly life.5 Kant's

 

 

lKant, Religion within the Limits, p. 79.
2 .

Ibid., p. 100, cf. p. 142.

3 . 4 .

Ibid., p. lef. Ibid., p. 117.

5Ibid., pp. 125-26; Kant, Critique pg Practical
Reason, pp. 126-28.

 

 

131

moral argument purports to justify God's existence as the
supreme lawgiver who has the power to insure the moral
certainty of the universe.1

Schleiermacher did not believe Kant's rational
demonstration of the postulates hypothesizing God and
immortality were valid. In spite of Kant's insistence
that they do not have a speculative use in theoretical
reason,2 Schleiermacher regarded Kant‘s treatment of reli-
gion as an abrogation of the strictures in the Critigue 9:

Pure Reason. Kant had transformed his agnosticism regarding

 

certain non-contradictory problematic ideas into definite
convictions with practical utility. This suggests,
Schleiermacher contended, that Kant had transgressed his
own restriction against moving from a regulative to a
constitutive use of reason in the absence of sensible

intuitions.3 In the Critigue pf Practical Reason the

 

postulates are rationally established as subjectively
practical assumptions which admittedly lack the objective
necessity to be knowledge, yet they have ceased to be merely
thinkable possibilities. The postulates (i.e., freedom,

God, immortality) used to substantiate moral virtue are

 

1Kant, Critique pf Practical Reason, pp. 128-36.

 

2Ibid., p. l37ff.

3Kant, Critigue 9; Pure Reason, p. 449ff., 517-18,

 

532ff.

132

remarkably similar to the minimum beliefs of deism that
are criticized by Schleiermacher for their noetic import.
Schleiermacher directed sharp criticism against
Enlightenment utilitarian religion which identified the
function of religion with moral activity. Since it was
Schleiermacher's conviction that religion, properly con-
ceived, represents an independent and essential experience
in human self-consciousness, he resented any patronizing
acknowledgment of religion as beneficial to moral action.
He felt this attitude contributed to contempt for religion
itself. Addressing the scoffers he said, "Do not declare
to the disgrace of mankind that your loftiest creation is
but a parasitic plant that can only nourish itself from

strange sap."l

"What is loved and honoured only on account
of some extraneous advantage may be needful, but is not
itself necessary. . . . To recommend it merely as an acces—
sory is too unimportant."2 "Whosoever would proclaim
religion must do it unadulterated."3 Those who failed to
appreciate the unique role of religion because of their
disproportionate emphasis on ethical ideas myopically
focused on the mere externals, "being occupied in the outer

court of morality,"4 Schleiermacher thought. Schleier—

macher met many in his day, even among the defenders of

 

lSchleiermacher, 9h Religion, p. 20.

2Ibid., p. 21. 3Ibid., p. 173. 41bid., p. 74.

 

f w.

133

Christianity, who extolled the side—effects of religion.
He challenged them to search beyond the superficial and
obvious. Lamenting the popular misconception of religion
he exclaimed,
How have you come to this torn off fragment? I will
tell you. You do not regard it as religion but as an
echo of moral action, and you simply wish to foist the
name upon it, in order to give religion the last blow.
What we have agreed to acknowledge as religion does
not arise exclusively in the moral sphere.l
Schleiermacher made direct reference to the prag-
matic resort to religion by people who insist "how neces—
sary religion is for maintaining justice and order in the
world."2 Schleiermacher was uneasy about the expectation
that the Church ought to teach morality for the benefit of
the State.3 Throughout his life he championed the separ—
ation of Church and State to protect the freedom and
integrity of the Church. He even suggested that perver—
sions of religion are partially occasioned by "those who
have dragged forth religion from the depths of the heart
into the civil world."4
A stress on the ethical aspect of religion commonly

included implicitly some form of a doctrine of retribution.

Schleiermacher criticized those who extraneously attached

 

1 2

Ibid., pp. 83—84. Ibid., p. 18.

31bid., pp. 173, 204, cf. p. 19.

41bid., p. 216; cf. p. 167.

134

happiness, either in this life or the next, to the summum
hphum of ethics.1 Schleiermacher did not envision
religion's essential function as merely to provide the
hopeful anticipation of moral recompense through " a
divine Nemesis that those who, being predominantly ethical
or rather legal, would, by selecting from religion only
the elements suited to this purpose, making of it an in—

2 Schleiermacher did not

significant appendage to morals."

intend to isolate religion from other sciences even though

he believed religion represented experiences sui generis.

A moral dimension of religious experiences was not denied

by Schleiermacher. He explained,
Piety and morality can be considered apart, and so far
they are different. As I have already admitted and
asserted, the one is based on feeling, the other on
action. . . . but piety and morality form each a series
by itself and are two different functions of one and
the same life.

In other words, religion and ethics are different, but

complementary.

Th3 Feeling pf Egg-Consciousness
Schleiermacher intended to delineate religion as
a distinct and independent dimension of human self-
consciousness. Religion, he contended, possesses an

indispensable and valid role in life with its own unique

 

lIbid., pp. 20, 116—17. 2Ibid., p. 84.

3Ibid., pp. 57, 59; cf. pp. 28-29, 113.

- - ;;i#-..,i milligiggg 1444.1.

135

essence. Repeatedly Schleiermacher differentiated reli—
gion's essence from the functions of speculative sciences
and ethics. He expressed his conception concisely in these
words:
Religion neither seeks like metaphysics to determine
and explain the nature of the Universe, nor like morals
to advance and perfect the Universe by the power of
freedom and the divine will of man. It is neither
thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.
Intuition and feeling (Anschauung und Gefuehl) signify the
basic experiential quality of religion. Schleiermacher
believed that "to the man who has not experienced it him—
self"2 religion can never be grasped nor appreciated.
Anyone who observes the outward manifestations of religion,
consequently, cannot understand religion unless he has
already experienced religious feeling himself.

The Subjective Aspect
pf Religious Feelihgs

 

 

Schleiermacher's apprehension of religious feeling
developed during the impressionable years of his youth
among the Moravians. The foundation of Moravian piety was
supernatural feeling. The atmosphere of daily life in the
Moravian communities was infused with feelings of reverence
and piety. Speaking autobiographically, Schleiermacher

acknowledged, "Piety was the mother's womb, in whose sacred

 

1Ibid., p. 277, cf. pp. 37-38. Schleiermacher,
Ueber die Religion, pp. 49ff.

2Schleiermacher, 9h Religion, p. 9, cf. p. 16.

136

darkness my young life was nourished and was prepared for

a world still sealed for it. In it my spirit breathed ere
it had yet found its own place in knowledge and experi-
ence."1 Moravian devotion cultivated the feeling of one-
ness with the divine. The sacred events of the life of
Jesus were frequently recounted in graphic and dramatic
terms calculated to stimulate pious feelings.2 Lively and
vivid feelings of communion with Jesus, the saving Redeemer,
were considered normative by the Brethren.

Schleiermacher was impressed immediately by the
moving devotion of Moravian worship which he observed at
Gnadenfrei in 1783. Imaginative descriptions of inner
feelings derived from union with the Savior were depicted
in sermon and hymnody. Schleiermacher did not doubt the
reality of those existential feelings that the Moravians
shared through empirical testimony of their personal
experiences.3 In spite of his sincere and joyful partici—
pation in a Moravian congregation, after a period of time
Schleiermacher suffered difficulty in sustaining the
specific religious feelings integral to Moravian piety.
Schleiermacher related this dilemma in his autobiography
by saying, "in vain I aspired after those supernatural

experiences, . . . the reality of which, externally to

 

1Ibid., p. 9. 2Nelson, p. 556.

3Ibid., pp. 486, 557.

137

myself, every lesson and every hymn, yes, every glance at
the Brethren, so attractive while under their influence,

persuaded me."1

The stumbling-block to his achievement of
supernatural feelings was the literal, orthodox Christology
which was inseparable from those pious feelings. This
reminded him of the trauma of the sleepless nights he had
endured anxiously puzzling over the doctrines of original
sin and atonement when he was only eleven years of age.
While Schleiermacher did not remain uncritical of Moravian
piety, he acknowledged his debt to the paramount emphasis
of pietism on subjective religious feelings.2 He affirmed
the validity and centrality of "feeling" in religion as a
result of his association with the Moravians. In corre—
spondence written in 1805, nearly twenty years after his
departure from Barby, he reported, "On Wednesday next I
contemplate going to Barby, to visit the Herrnhut school,
where I spent three of the best years of my youth, during
which my love of knowledge and my religious feelings first
developed themselves."3

Schleiermacher defined religion as the consciousness

of God apprehended through feeling. The religious experi—

ence is likewise one of immediate awareness. In Qh_Religion

 

lSchleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 7.

 

2Schleiermacher, Oh Religion, pp. 145, 183, 189.

3Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, II, 21,
cf. 22-24.

 

138

the words "feeling," "intuition," and “consciousness" are

often modified by "immediate" (unmittelbaren).l Thus, piety

 

is an experience wherein "only what . . . is feeling and
immediate consciousness, can belong to religion. . . . the
true nature of religion is . . . immediate consciousness of
the Deity as He is found in ourselves and in the world."2
The presupposition of religious perception specified in his
dogmatics is "the immediate feeling of absolute dependence."3
This stress on the immediacy of religious intuition by

Schleiermacher is held in common with Gefuehlsphilosophie.4

 

Jacobi, for example, assumed that knowledge of supersensible
reality was actualized through direct intuition which he
termed faith.5 Schleiermacher was sympathetic to the

refusal of Gefuehlsphilosophie to separate rationality from

 

sensuous experience. Religious intuition through immediate
experience involves a unity of reason and sense, according

to Schleiermacher. In The Christian Faith Schleiermacher

 

carefully explained that "immediate self-consciousness"

must not be confused with reflective contemplation.6

 

lSchleiermacher, Oh Religion, pp. 16, 36, 70, 90,
93, 94, 99, 101, 217, 228.

21bid., pp. 93, 101.

3Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, p. 131; cf. p. 5.

 

4wilde, p. 75. 51bid., pp. 59, 62-63, 66—67.

6Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, pp. 6—7.

 

139

Immediate self-consciousness in religion is, therefore, a
specific type of feeling. Feeling, thus understood, is
disparate from a series of logical inferences or deductions
and any system of mediate ideas. The reception of immediate

feelings and intuitions is the sine qua non of religion in

 

Schleiermacher's philosophy of religion.

Schleiermacher does not isolate feeling as one
faculty of perception unrelated to other functions of the
self. "Religion, as the sum of all higher feelings"1 is
an experience of the total personality. It was Schleier—
macher's conviction that such a holistic conception of man
represents truly the actual experience of human life at its
best. This is in contrast to any versions of a faculty
psychology assumed by some thinkers in that period. Other
forms of self-consciousness, according to Schleiermacher,
are derived from the basis of religious self—consciousness.
Pious feelings of the undivided self do not originate from
some delimited emotional stimulus "by any one faculty, but
by our whole being. The divine in us, therefore, is
immediately affected and called forth by the feeling . . .
this immediate and original existence of God in us through
feeling."2 For several generations Schleiermacher's

philosophy of religion has been subjected to gross mis—

representations of his conception of feeling. From Hegel

 

lSchleiermacher, 9h Religion, p. 85.

21bid., pp. 93-94, cf. p. 115.

140

onward his principle of religious feeling has been cari—
catured as a non—rational animal instinct or parodied as
mere emotion and unrestrained sentimentality. Other popu-
larized portrayals have endeavored sympathetically to adopt
Schleiermacher's authority in order to psychologize reli—
gious practice or zealously encourage ecstatic, emotional
subjectivity in religion. Schleiermacher's viewpoint has
greater affinity to traditional Christian reverence than it
is characteristic of the excited enthusiasm of contemporary
pietistic sects. The widespread failure to understand
Schleiermacher in his own terms has on one hand resulted
in a condemnation of his position because of an alleged
-resemb1ance to abhorrent contemporary expressions, while,
on the other hand, Schleiermacher's terms have been
appropriated uncritically to support quite different views.
Tillich properly noted, "It was a misunderstanding of
Schleiermacher's definition of religion . . . and a symptom
of religious weakness when successors of Schleiermacher
located religion in the realm of feeling as one psycho-
logical function among others."1
One serious deficiency that Schleiermacher per—
ceived in Kant's philosophy of religion lay in the role of

feeling. Kant interpreted moral feeling "as the subjective

 

lTillich, Systematic Theology, 1, 15, cf. 41—42,
153; cf. Redeker, WEinleitung" in Schleiermacher, Der
christliche Glaube, I, xxxi-xxxii.

 

 

141

effect which the law has upon the will to which reason
alone gives objective grounds."l He refused to assign any
reliable function to feeling in religion.2 Schleiermacher
contended that this neglect of feelings made Kant's practi—
cal philosophy inadequate due to a too narrowly conceived
apprehension of human nature. Schleiermacher believed

that an adequate treatment of religion would be precluded
if attempted on the foundation of Kant's rational morality.3

The Objective Source pf
Religious Feelings

 

The subjective experience of religious feelings
is traced to an objective origin. Religious feelings, far
from being self—induced, are the effect of something on us
according to Schleiermacher's assumption. The immediate
self—consciousness of feeling absolutely dependent has an
objective basis which Schleiermacher specified as "the
Whence of our receptive and active existence."4 Romanti-
cism influenced Schleiermacher's manner of expressing the
objective source of religion.

Schleiermacher has been identified with Romanti-

cism through his ideas as well as his friendships. The

 

lKant, Metaphysics pf Morals, p. 80.

 

2 . . . .
Kant, Religion Within the Limits, pp. 104—05.

3Schleiermacher, 9h Religion, pp. 84—85, 113.

4Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, p. 16.

 

 

142

significance of these associations to Schleiermacher's
thought was recognized and analyzed in detail in the nine—
teenth century by Dilthey and Haym. Writers still allude
to Schleiermacher as the theologian of Romanticism.l
Schleiermacher's 9h Religion, as well as the Monologen,

Confidential Letters Concerning Lucinde, and Christmas Eve,

 

exhibit the discernible influence of that cultural milieu
on his expression. At the time Oh Religion was composed
his closest friends were members of the Romantic literary
circle in Berlin. He framed the ideas in Oh Religion in
terms calculated to communicate his message effectively to
the Romantics. He did not, however, completely adopt the
Romantic style and interests nor remain captivated by
Romanticism.

Romanticism exalted an aesthetic type of feeling
stimulating an acute awareness for the broad spectrum of
impressions experienced through every sense. The unity and
origin of all finite impressions is the Universe (Universum)
or the Infinite (Unendlich). The Romantics celebrated
their appreciation for the Universe through aesthetic

intuitions of finite realities in the world. The Romantic

 

lRandall, pp. 239- 44, 345- 50; H. G. Schenk, The
Mind of the European Romantics, An Essay in Cultural—
History, Anchor Books (Garden City, New York. Doubleday
& Company, Inc., 1969), "Emotional Christianity, " pp. 110-
16; Selbie, Schleiermacher, pp. 4- 6, 19— 23; Matthew Spinka,
Christian Thought from Erasmus to Berdyaev (Englewood
Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice—Hall, Inc., 1962), "F. D. E.
Schleiermacher, the Theological Exponent of Romanticism,"
pp. 99—112.

 

 

 

 

 

 

143

imagination was based on an openness or receptivity to the
ground of experience in the Infinite.
The principle of the relation between the finite and
the infinite is the first principle of Romanticism on
which everything else is dependent. Without it Romanti—
cism and a theologian like Schleiermacher become com—
pletely unintelligible.

The Romantic appeal to experience became synthe-
sized with Schleiermacher's previous encounter with the
prominence of feelings in Moravian piety and Gefuehls-
philosophie. Schleiermacher's concept of the Infinite is
not equated with Nature nor limited to the totality of
finite things. An awareness of the "whence" (Woher) of
religious feeling is, however, related to finite impressions
impinging upon the self-consciousness. Schleiermacher
elucidated this by saying,

Your feeling is piety in so far as it is the result
of the operation of God in you by means of the oper-
ation of the world upon you. . . . The religious man

must, at least, be conscious of his feelings as the
immediate product of the Universe.

Schleiermacher and the Spinoza Controversy.——

 

Schleiermacher's inclination in Oh Religion to speak of
God as the Infinite and his reluctance to characterize God
unambiguously in personal terms incurred the immediate

accusation that his philosophy of religion was Spinozistic.

 

lTillich, Perspectives, p. 78.

2Schleiermacher, 9h Religion, pp. 45, 90; cf.
pp. 48, 58, 86, 93—94, 173.

 

 

144

The German Romantic writers with whom he associated were
among the hyghp—ggpgg who resurrected Spinoza's philosophy
in the late eighteenth century. Benedict Spinoza (1632—
1677) suffered reproach by the Amsterdam Jewish community

in being excommunicated from the synagogue in his youth,

and in being condemned repeatedly by Christian theologians
later in his life and even after his death. The sixth
definition of Spinoza's Ethics posits God as infinite

Being, the only substance of the entire universe. Spinoza's

term natura naturans designated Being in itself, the in—

 

finite attributes of which are modified to produce neces—
sarily natura naturata, or all the particular existing
things. Spinoza's philosophy was the object of contempt
for a century primarily due to its offensiveness to
theology.

The most common source of information regarding
Spinoza during the eighteenth century was the 1697

Dictionnaire historique pp critique of Pierre Bayle

 

(1647-1706).l Bayle's article on Spinoza was a combi-
nation of truth and half-truth, gossip and innuendo. It
begins with the report that Spinoza, the atheist from

Amsterdam, "was a systematic atheist who employed a

 

lBurkhardt, "Introduction" in Herder, God, p. 14;
Chadwick, "Introduction" in Lessing, Lessingjs Theological
Writings, p. 46; Frederick Pollock, Spinoza, His Life and

 

Philoso h (London: Duckworth and Company, 189 ), p. 361;
Sime, Lessing, pp. 296—97.

 

145

totally new method."1 The charge of atheism imputed to

Spinoza is repeated on nearly every page. Bayle was
encouraged to note that among Spinoza's small number of
followers only a few had studied his philosophy, and most
of these did not understand it. Spinoza's ideas which had

been presented by him more geometrico with a claim for

 

impeccable logic and certainty appeared to Bayle as
"monstrous absurdities"2 hardly worth examination since

"of all the hypotheses of atheism, Spinoza's is the least
capable of misleading anybody; for, as I have already said,
it opposes the most distinct notions in the human mind."3
Bayle's evaluation of Spinoza was accepted generally by

European thinkers including the German philosopher Christian

Wolff in his Theologia naturalis of 1737. Since Spinoza

 

was widely maligned in the eighteenth century, the epithet
"Spinozist" was an invective to be assiduously avoided by
every self-respecting thinker.

The visit of Jacobi to Lessing at Wolfenbuettel on
July 5, 1780 was the occasion for a lengthy correspondence
between Jacobi and Moses Mendelssohn in 1785 which became

a public controversy over Spinoza's philosophy.4 Among the

 

lPierre Bayle, Historical and Critical Dictionary
Selections, trans. by RiChard H. Popkin (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1965), p. 288.

 

 

2Ibid., p. 308. 31bid., p. 301.

4A collection of the important documents of the
German Spinoza controversy is included in Heinrich Scholz,

 

 

146

things which Jacobi provided for Lessing to examine was a

fragment from the closing section of Goethe's Prometheus

 

which had not yet been published at that time. To Jacobi's
astonishment, Lessing recognized the influence of Spinoza
in Goethe and confessed,

The point of View from which the poem is taken, that

is my own vieWpoint. The orthodox concepts of the

deity are no longer for me; I can not use them. Opp

and all! I know nothing else. This poem also follows

EHIs?‘3hd I must admit I like it very much.1
An interruption cut the conversation short, but Lessing
reintroduced the subject of Spinoza the next morning,
during which conversation he flatly declared, "There is no
other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza."2 Jacobi,
though conceding that Spinoza's philosophy was logical when
compared to other rational philosophies, found Spinoza
unacceptable. Jacobi vehemently insisted in all he wrote
on this subject that Spinoza's philosophy is a paradigm of
atheism and fatalism, and is, thereby, repugnant to

Christianity. The expositions of Spinoza written by

Jacobi were shaped by this bias of his outlook wherein

 

ed., Die Hauptschriften zum Pantheismusstreit zwischen
Jacobi undfiMendelssohn, Neudrucke seltener philosophischer
Werke Herausgegében von der Kantsgesellschaft, Band VI
(Berlin: Verlag von Reuther & Reichard, 1916).

 

lFriedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Werke, Band IV, Abt. l,
"Ueber die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an Herrn Moses
Mendelssohn" (Leipzig: Gerhard Fleischer, 1819), p. 54.

21bid., p. 55.

147

. . . he regards not simply Spinozism, but all

demonstrative philosophy, as atheistic and fatal-

istic; that in fact, according to him, every kind

of demonstration results in fatalism and atheism;

and that religion can exist only where faith takes

the place of reason.1

Moses Mendelssohn, who was in the process of
preparing a book on Lessing, became appalled by the impro-
priety of Jacobi's advancing such scandalous libel against
Lessing's character.and making it public four years after
the death of Lessing. Mendelssohn felt constrained to
defend Lessing's reputation. Mendelssohn refused to
believe that Lessing had wholeheartedly embraced Spinozism,
and further criticized Jacobi's misconstrued elaboration
of Spinoza's philosophy, even though Mendelssohn himself
found the Spinozistic philosophy unsatisfactory.2 This
controversy attracted the attention of most German intel-
lectuals, many of whom offered their critique whether or
not they had studied the primary sources.
The revival of interest in Spinoza, as previously

noted, affected Goethe, who assimilated some of Spinoza's

ideas in his poetry. The Romantic poet Novalis enthusi—

astically proclaimed Spinoza as the "God—intoxicated man"

 

lArthur Cushman McGiffert, "The God of Spinoza as
Interpreted by Herder," Hibbert Journal, III (1904-5), 709.

 

2Cf. Hans Hoelters, Der spinozistische Gottesbegriff
bei M, Mendelssohn und E. h. JacObi und der Gottesbegriff
S inozas (Emsdetten: Verlags-Anstalt Heinr. & J. Lechte,

 

 

148

1 The

and Spinozism as "supersaturation with the deity."
first important work of that era to defend Spinoza's
philosophy was Herder's §ppp_which appeared in 1787.
Herder's dialogue opens with a discussion of the regrettable
preconceptions of Spinoza which are traceable to Bayle.2
A modified form of Spinozism received acceptance by means
of Herder's interpretation that Spinoza was not an atheist,
but a monistic theorist of the immanence of God.
Schleiermacher became aware of the Spinoza contro-
versy while he was at Barby. Several months later in a
letter to his father from Halle on August 14, 1787 he con-
fessed his perplexity with Jacobi's philosophy and expressed
an intention to reread the Jacobi-Mendelssohn corres-
pondence.3 This study aroused his continuing interest in
Spinoza.
Like most Germans at that time, he had acquired his
first particular knowledge of Spinoza in the outline
which Jacobi had presented in his 1785 Briefen ueber
die Lehre des Spinoza; since he did not possess this
book, he copied for his own purpose the forty-four

propositions in which Jacobi summarized the doctrines
of Spinoza.

 

 

1Quoted in Haym, p. 359.

2Herder, pp. 76—80.

3Schleiermacher, Autobiography and Letters, I, 69.

4Hermann Mulert, "Schleiermacher Ueber Spinoza und
Jacobi," Chronicon Spinozanum, III (1923), 295.

 

 

149

Jacobi's forty-four propositionsl provided the basis for
two related essays on Spinoza that Schleiermacher wrote.
The first Spinoza essay, "Brief Description of the Spino-
zistic System," was prepared either in late 1793 or early
1794 at the beginning of his residency at Landsberg,
according to Dilthey.2 Though not intended for publi-
cation, it was published posthumously as an appendix to
his "History of Philosophy.”3
Schleiermacher's judgment, derived from Jacobi's
commentary and brief quotations from Spinoza contained
therein, was that Jacobi had misinterpreted Spinoza.
Schleiermacher perceived a similarity between Spinoza and
Kant. He attempted to harmonize the two philosophies since

both distinguished between existence per pp and existence

per aliud. Kant's noumena, according to Schleiermacher's

 

analysis, is analogous to Spinoza's infinite substance.
He made this parallel:

The material world is purely a product of the world of
intellect and of man, and the world of noumena is
directly in this way the cause of the materiaI world,
jUSt as Spinoza's infinite thing is the cause of the
finite things. . . . According to Spinoza the infinite
thing itself is related to the finite, just as accord—
ing to Kant the noumena is related to phenomena, in

 

lJacobi, pp. 172-205.

2Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers I, 148,
"Denkmale," pp. 64-65. —

 

 

3Schleiermacher, "Kurze Darstellung des
Spinozistischen Systems," Saemmtliche Werke, III. Philoso—
phie: Band 1, Abt. l (1839), pp. 283-311.

 

 

 

 

150
that case Spinoza must have discovered the Kantian
philoSOphy before Kant.l
Schleiermacher composed a second Spinoza essay,

"Spinozismus," before leaving Landsberg in 1796.2 The only
publication of this manuscript appeared in 1923 in an
abridged version edited by Mulert.3 This is essentially a
commentary on Jacobi's texts. In this essay Schleiermacher
stated what he considered to be the epitome of Jacobi's
forty-four propositions.

One can bring all of them that appear in this outline

under three main points: 1. The doctrine of the

infinite thing in itself, 2. the doctrine of the

relationship of finite things to the infinite, 3. the

doctrine of the relationship of extension to thought

in the finite things.4
Sometime between 1796 and 1799, prior to the composition of
9h Religion, Schleiermacher read Spinoza's Ethic first—hand
for the first time.5

The criticism directed against Oh Religion most

frequently by religious leaders accused Schleiermacher of

Spinozism. Among the citations Schleiermacher made to

Spinoza in On Religion, one overt reference is especially

 

1Schleiermacher, "Kurze Darstellung des
Spinozistischen Systems," pp. 294, 298. Cf. Dilthey,

Leben Schleiermachers I, p, 149; Haym, pp. 410—12; 425;
Mulert, pp. 299—300. —

 

2Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers I, "Denkmale,"
pp. 65-69.

3 4 .

Mulert, pp. 296-311. Ibid., p. 297.

5

Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers 3, pp. 319—20.

 

 

151

salient. In that place Schleiermacher bids the reader to
honor the memory of Spinoza.

With me offer reverentially a lock of hair to the holy,

despised Spinoza! The high World-Spirit permeated him;

the Infinite was his beginning and end, the Universe

his sole and perpetual love. . . . He was full of

religion and full of the holy Spirit.l
Variations of the pantheistic formula, "the one in the A11,"
occurring in several places in 9h Religion contributed to
the enormity of the intimations of Spinozism.2 Schleier-
macher denied the charge of materialistic pantheism.3 As
far as he was concerned, the term "pantheism" functions as
a pejorative taunt that had been devised to harass one's
theological opponents.4

Even though Schleiermacher thought that it was

erroneous to regard Spinoza as a villain, he later insisted
that he was not a Spinozist.5 Schleiermacher directed his
detractors to the fact that he had never defended the

Spinozistic system nor implied that Spinoza possessed

Christian piety. Schleiermacher attempted to defend

 

lSchleiermacher, Ueber die Religion, p. 52.

 

2Schleiermacher, 9h Religion, pp. 7, 45, 101, 104,
137, 142, 180. '

31bid., p. 115.

4Ibid., p. 97. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith,
pp. 38—39.

 

5Schleiermacher, gh_Religion, pp. 104-05.

 

 

152

himself against the false impressions the ecclesiastical
authorities, such as Sack, had received from his writing.
In a recent book Gerhard Spiegler summarized Schleier—
macher's predicament.
Schleiermacher rejected the idea that his Speeches were
an apology for pantheism, or a means by which he wanted
to propagate Spinoza's system. He protested Sack's
impugning of his personal integrity while rejecting the
idea that religion is necessarily connected with the
"metaphysical concept of God's personhood."
Schleiermacher's concern was to avoid a decidedly anthro-
pomorphic conception of God, rather than promote either
pantheism or Spinoza.2 Through a less personal image of
God, he believed he might be instrumental in reaching the
deSpisers of religion and, simultaneously, "will not make
the idea of the personality of God more uncertain for anyone

3 Schleiermacher indicated his intention

who truly has it."
to develop a more inclusive concept of God without denying
any special significance to the description of piety tra—
ditionally held by Christians.4 Schleiermacher employed
several impersonal terms in expressing man's relationship

to God: Highest Being, the Infinite, the Universe, the

World-Spirit. The appellation "World—Spirit,"5 for example,

 

lGerhard Spiegler, The Eternal Covenant, Schleier—
macher's Experiment ih Cultural Theology (New York: Harper
& Row, 1967), p. 20. Cf. Selbie, pp. 6, 23-24, 241—42.

 

 

 

2Schleiermacher, Oh Religion, pp. 95—98, 115—16.
3 . 4 .
Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., pp. 111, 115.

51bid., pp. 49, 7o, 81, 84, 111, 135, 211.

 

 

153

can be viewed as the focal-point of religious experience
whereby "the aim of all religion is to love the World—

Spirit and joyfully to regard his working."1

The Principle pf Individuality.-—Schleiermacher's

philosophy of religion and its terminology reveal his

indebtedness to the thought—forms of his age. Religion
signified for him intuition and feeling of the Infinite.
The relationship between the Infinite and the finite was

the object of Schleiermacher's intense preoccupation in his

 

Spinoza essays. In 9h Religion Schleiermacher elaborated
this relationship in terms of a correlation between the

Universe and individuality (principium individui). Religion

 

is the perception and perspectivity which an individual has
for the Universe. In piety the individual, by means of his
innate receptivity, is self-conscious of his dependence
upon the Infinite. The openness of the total individual
self in religion he vividly termed "instinct for the Uni—
verse,"2 or "sense for the Universe."3 The individual's
relationship to God is one which transcends rationality.

In Schleiermacher's words "religion is sense and taste for
the Infinite."4 (Religion ist Sinn und Geschmack fpgpg

Unendliche.)5

 

lIbid., p. 65. 2Ibid., p. 86.
31bid., pp. 123, 225.
4Ibid., pp. 39, 103, 278.

5Schleiermacher, Ueber die Religion, p. 51.

 

154

The theory of individuality appearing in Oh Religion
is rooted in Schleiermacher's Spinoza study.1 It must be
remembered, furthermore, that individuality was an important
element in the Weltanschauung of Herder, Jacobi and the
German Romantics. In the Monologen Schleiermacher communi—
cated his discovery "that each man is meant to represent
humanity in his own way, combining its elements uniquely,

2 Humanity

so that it may reveal itself in every mode."
manifests itself concretely through an infinite variety of
unique concurrences of spirit and matter where "the indi-

3 The individual

vidual is only one form of humanity."
always remains limited, or dependent, inasmuch as the
finite inheres in the Infinite.4 According to Schleier-
macher's philosophy, the Infinite in itself can never be
directly known or experienced as a whole. The Infinite is
related to man's experience only through the finite. Un—

assuming finite experiences constitute sacramental possi—

bilities in which an individual's higher self-consciousness

 

 

is cultivated. In contrast to rationalism, the sensory
lDilthey, Leben Schleiermachers l, pp. 322—25;
"Denkmale," p. 68; Haym, pp. 425-26.

2Schleiermacher, Soliloguies, p. 31.

3Schleiermacher, 9h Religion, p. 82; cf. pp. 4,
75-76, 79.

41bid., p. 70.

 

 

155

intuitions of finite life are not depreciated by Schleier-
macher. He says, "Never forget that the fundamental intu—
ition of a religion must be some intuition of the Infinite
in the finite. . . . From all finite things we should see

the Infinite."1

Schleiermacher's doctrine of the immanence
of God in the finite world is similar to Herder's reinter-
pretation of Spinoza's monism.

Schleiermacher's final address in Oh Religion
relates to the emergence of specific religions. A concrete
form of religion is based on a fundamental intuition
(Grundanschauung) of the Infinite in the finite.2 Since
there is an infinitude of possible intuitions,3 Schleier—
macher considered it illogical for anyone to expect there
to be only one true religion.4 Christianity, for example,
originates from a consciousness of redemption in Jesus of
Nazareth. All Christians experience God—consciousness
through Jesus in some way. This experience is described
in the personal and corporate witness articulated by the

Church.

 

lIbid., pp. 237, 245; cf. p. 88.

2Ibid., pp. 228, 238. Schleiermacher, Christian
Faith, p. 51.

 

3Schleiermacher, 9h Religion, pp. 51, 54.

4Ibid., pp. 212, 214, 216.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

Although a central concern of Schleiermacher's
philosophy of religion is the delineation of the essence
of religion EEi generis, he developed his position in terms
of the alternatives he perceived in the historical context
of his culture. Hoping to strengthen the Christian witness,
he came to believe, in the light of his situation in 1799,
that the most crucial issue at stake was the function of
religion itself. Attempts to debate which religion is the
true religion would be empty if thinking men dismissed the
need for religion in the modern age. Schleiermacher refused
to resurrect those interpretations of religion which
appeared to him no longer viable in the new day.

Schleiermacher rejected those options which he
felt compromised the uniqueness of religion. The develop—
ments of eighteenth-century philosophy had rendered
unconvincing religion's claims to supernatural truth.
Theology no longer reigned as the master of philosophic

and scientific knowledge. Enlightenment thinkers who

156

 

 

 

157

reduced the noetic content of religion to a bare minimum
commended religion for its moral utility. Schleiermacher
insisted that approaches which characterized religion pri-
marily in either cognitive or ethical terms eliminated the
recognition of specifically religious experiences.
Schleiermacher failed to persuade many to accept
his analysis and definition of religion, despite his
enormous influence. In contrast to the responses which
developed around his colleague Hegel, no school formed
specifically to advance Schleiermacher‘s philosophy. The
movement of religious liberalism in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century attracted an impressive follow—
ing in Europe and America. Liberalism, while freely willing
to de—emphasize the noetic objectivity of theology, vigor-
ously championed religion in predominantly ethical terms.
Neo-orthodoxy, which emerged in the twentieth century after
World War I, rejected this moralistic liberal religion.
Barth, for example, appreciated Schleiermacher's valiant
efforts to rescue Christianity from oblivion, but condemned
Schleiermacher's approach and its resulting achievement.
Schleiermacher's solution was deemed an unsatisfactory
compromise because its subjectivity made revelation rela—
tive to human self-consciousness. The rigidity of Barth's
insistence on the revealed basis for theology suggests a
reversion to the objectivity of orthodoxy Schleiermacher

proposed to transcend.

 

 

158

Although Schleiermacher challenged the priority of
the noetic factor in religion, he realized that the reli—
gious experience itself is not entirely devoid of a cogni—
tive element. Religious intuition signifies a receptivity
to the Infinite apprehended through feelings. Theology was
characterized by Schleiermacher as an empirical science
which describes states of God-consciousness, or piety,
actually experienced by people at particular times and
places. The content of theology, which is derived from
religious experience, defies the predication of truth or
falsity. Schleiermacher's relational theology repudiates
any understanding of religion which claims the authority of
either metaphysical truth or scientific fact.

In his own historical situation Schleiermacher was
persuaded that no resolution of prevalent religious dis—
agreements was possible without fresh attention to the
nature and function of religion itself. In assessing the
effect of the Enlightenment on modern man's understanding
of himself and his world, Schleiermacher concluded that the
prevailing preconceptions about religion would prove in—
creasingly untenable and result in more widespread skepti—
cism. In order to convince his contemporaries of the
irreplaceable value of religion, to say nothing of tra—
ditional Christianity, Schleiermacher challenged the
fundamental presuppositions regarding religion held by his

contemporaries. Until a valid and unique character were

 

 

 

159

granted to religion, discussions about which particular
religion is best would be pointless.

If it was important in Schleiermacher's cultural
milieu to focus on the unique character and function of
religion, presuppositions about the nature of religion
cannot be overlooked in the current era of rapidly acceler-
ating social and scientific change. The value of religion
is, no doubt, being even more seriously challenged today
than it was in Schleiermacher's time. Much contemporary
criticism of religion is preoccupied with the problem of
noetic content of religion. At the present time writers,
in the name of honesty and candor, adopt stringent scien—
tific models for evaluating religious language which,
according to Schleiermacher's conception, must result in
the impoverishment of religion. Placing an undue priority
on cognitive truth may eventuate in a progressive reduction
of the noetic contents of religion, within the framework of
analytical philosophy and empirical science. Despite the
importance of the thesis that a satisfactory concept of
religion must be found in some other more adequate alter-
native than either the noetic or the ethical, Schleier—
macher's particular philosophy of religion may not be
widely imitated. In a new generation of "cultured

despisers of religion, however, his contribution remains
relevant. He forces attention to presuppositions about
religion which can foreclose crucial issues, and locates

the underlying question: What is religion?

 

 

160

Among contemporary theologians Paul Tillich bears
the closest affinity to Schleiermacher. Both men were
educated in the German philosophical tradition and they
were scholars of classical Greek philosophy. Tillich, like
Schleiermacher, was not afraid to devote separate consider—
ation to religion without feeling his Christian commitment
compromised. Tillich pursued even more self—consciously
Schleiermacher's conviction that religion and culture are
inextricably interrelated. As Schleiermacher strove to
overcome the dichotomy between nature and supernature by
envisioning the whole man in one universe, Tillich attempted
to avoid the subject—object cleavage. The holistic emphasis
of Tillich attacked prevalent distortions of faith. More—
over, Tillich credited Schleiermacher with establishing
the autonomy of religion with respect to ethics1 and pointed
out the mistaken understanding of religion as feeling por-
trayed in strictly emotional and psychological categories.2

In spite of the fact that Tillich is philosophically
oriented, he recognized the danger of an intellectualistic
distortion of faith. He believed that, since philosophy
through detached objectivity is concerned with ontology in
a cognitive fashion, philosophy is incapable of appre—

hending religious meanings.3 Both Schleiermacher and

 

1Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, 158.

 

2Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1, 15, 41—42; III,

 

132.

3Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 22.

 

 

 

 

 

161

Tillich were engaged in a search for new language through
which religious meanings can be expressed under conviction
that there can be no scientific substitutes for religious

statements. In his Systematic Theology, Tillich wrote,

 

I must confess that the present system is essentially,
but indirectly, influenced by the Spirit—movements,
both through their impact on Western culture in
general (including such theologians as Schleiermacher)
and through their criticisms of the established forms
of religious life and thought.1
Both Schleiermacher and Tillich have been accused of
pantheism. This charge is related to their aversion to
an anthropomorphic concept of God. Tillich made an explicit
comparison of his terminology with that of Schleiermacher
on this point. "Schleiermacher's 'feeling of absolute
dependence' was rather near to what is called in the pre-
sent system 'ultimate concern about the ground and meaning

III2

of our being. In addition, Tillich acknowledged his

debt to Schleiermacher's Christology3 and the existential
interpretation of it.4
The influence of Schleiermacher on Tillich is not

sufficiently noticed. Each of these men was a philosophical

theologian with his own unique formulations that cannot be

 

1Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, 126.

 

2Tillich, Systematic Theology, I, 42.

 

3Tillich, Systematic Theology, 11, 150.

 

4Tillich, Systematic Theology, III, 285.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

162

equated. The present inquiry suggests possibilities for
future study of the importance of Schleiermacher in the

development of Tillich's thought.

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Hodgson, Peter C. The Formation pf Historical Theology,
A Study 9: Ferdinand Christian Baur. New York:
Harper & Row, 1966.

 

 

Hoelters, Hans. Der spinozistische Gottesbegriff bei M.
Mendelssohn und F. H. Jacobi und der Gottesbegriff

Sp1nozas. Emsdetten: Verlags—Anstalt He1nr. &
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166

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. Werke, IV. Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968.

Johnson, William Alexander. 93 Religion: A Study pf
Theological Method 1p Schleiermacher and Nygren.
Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1964.

 

Kant, Immanuel. Critigue pf Practical Reason. Translated
by Lewis White Beck. L1brary of Liberal Arts.
Indianapolis: Bobbs—Merrill Company, Inc., 1958.

. Critique pf Pure Reason. Translated by Norman
Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin‘s Press, 1929.

 

 

 

. Foundations pf the Metaphysics of Morals.
Translated by Lewis White Beck. Library of Liberal
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1959.

On History. Edited, with an Introduction, by
Lewis White Beck. Translated by Lewis White Beck,
Robert E. Anchor and Emil L. Fackenheim. Library
of Liberal Arts. Indianapolis: Bobbs—Merrill
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. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Translated by Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H.
Hudson. Harper Torchbooks. New York: Harper &
Row, 1960.

 

 

Kantzenbach, Friedrich Wilhelm. Friedrich Daniel Ernst
Schleiermacher in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddoku-
menten. Reinbek—bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch
Verlag GmbH, 1967.

 

 

Knox, Ronald A. Enthusiasm, A Chapter in Ehe History pf
Religion with Special Reference pp 223 XVII 2E9
XVIII Centur1es. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1950.

 

 

 

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. The Monadology and Other
Philosophical Writing§T~ Translated, with Intro-
duction and Notes, by Robert Latta. London:
Oxford University Press, 1898.

 

 

Lessing, Gotthold. Lessing's Theological Writings.
Selections in translation with an introductory
essay by Henry Chadwick. Stanford: Stanford Uni—
versity Press, 1956.

 

McEachran, Frank. The Life and Philosophy pf Johann
Gottfried Herder. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1939.

 

 

 

 

 

167

McGiffert, Arthur Cushman. Protestant Thought before Kant.
London: Gerald Duckworth & Co., 1911.

 

Mackintosh, Hugh Ross. Types of Modern Theology,
Schleiermacher pg Barth. New York: Charles
Scribner's Sons, 1937.

 

 

Niebuhr, Richard R. "Introduction." In Friedrich
Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith. English
translation of the—Second German Edition. Edited
by H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart. Harper
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. Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion. London:
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Otto, Rudolf, ed. "Zur Einfuehrung." Ueber die Religion:
Reden 22 die Gebildeten unter ihren Veraechtern.
Sixth edit1on. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
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Pelikan, Jaroslav. From Luther to Kierkegaard, A Study $3
the History of Theology. —Saint Louis: Concordia
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Pinson, Koppel S. Pietism as a Factor in the Rise of

German National1sm. New York: Columbia Un1versity
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Pollock, Frederick. Spinoza, His Life and Philosophy.
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Randall, John Herman, Jr. The Career of Philosophy.
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pf Darwin. New York: Columbia University Press,
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Redeker, Martin, ed. "Einleitung des Herausgebers.‘
Der christliche Glaube, nach den Grundsaetzen der
evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange dargestellt.
Seventh edition. Two volumes. Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter & Co., 1960.

 

 

 

 

. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Leben und Werk.
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1968.

 

 

 

Reiss, H. 8., ed. The Political Thought of the German
Romantics, 1793— 1815. New York: The Macmillan
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Schenk, H'. G. The Mind of the European Romantics, An
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168

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Brief Outline 93 the Study 2:
Theology. Translated, with Introductions and Notes,
by Terrence N. Tice. Richmond, Virginia: John

Knox Press, 1966.

 

. The Christian Faith. English translation of
the Second German edit tion. Edited by H. R.
Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart. Edinburgh: T & T
Clark, 1928.

The Christian Faith. English translation of
the"§econd German edition. Edited by H. R.
Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart. Introduction by
Richard R. Niebuhr. Harper Torchbooks. New York:
Harper & Row, 1963.

 

. Der christliche Glaube, nach den Grundsaetzen
der evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhange

dar estellt. Edited by Martin Redeker. Seventh
edit1on. Two volumes. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter
& Co., 1960.

 

 

 

. Christmas Eve, Dialogue on the Incarnation.
Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by
Terrence N. Tice. Richmond, Virginia. John Knox
Press, 1967.

 

. Friedrich Schleiermachers saemmtliche Werke.
31 volumes. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1834-1864.

 

 

The Life of Schleiermacher as Unfolfed in His
Auto 51 iography —and Letters. Translated By Frederica
Rowan. Two volumes. London: Smith, Elder and Co.,
1860.

 

. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.
Translated by John Oman. Introduction by Rudolf
Otto. Harper Torchbooks. New York: Harper &
Brothers, 1958.

 

 

. On Religion, Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers.
Translated by John Oman. Abridged, with an Intro—
duction by E. Graham Waring. New York: Frederick
Ungar Publishing Co., 1955.

 

 

. Ueber die Religion: Reden g2 die Gebildeten
unter ihren Veraechtern. Edited by Rudolf Otto.
Sixth edition. Goettingen: Vandenhoeck &
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169

Schleiermacher, Friedrich. Schleiermacher's Soliloquies.
Translated, with a Critical Introduction and
Appendix, by Horace Leland Friess. Chicago: Open
Court Publishing Co., 1926.

Vertraute Briefe ueber Friedrich Schlegels
Lucinde. Frankfurt am Main: Insel—Verlag, 1964.

Scholz, Heinrich, ed. Die Hau tschriften zum
Pantheismusstre1t zw1schen Jacobi und Mendelssohn,
NeudruCke seltener philosophisdher Werke

Herausgegeben von der Kantsgesellschaft, Band VI.
Berlin: Verlag von Reuther & Reichard, 1916.

Selbie, William Boothby. Schleiermacher, a Critical and
Historical Study. London: Chapman and Hall, 1913.

Sime, James. Lessin . Two volumes. London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Truegner, & Co., Ltd., 1896.

Spiegler, Gerhard. The Eternal Covenant, Schleiermacher's
Experiment in Cultural Theology. New York: Harper
& Row, 1967.

 

Spinka, Matthew. Christian Thought from Erasmus £9
Berdyaev. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-
Hall, Inc., 1962.

 

 

Tice, Terrence N. Schleiermacher Bibliography, with Brief
Introductions, Annotations, and Index. Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1966.

 

 

Tillich, Paul. A History gf Christian Thought. Edited by
Carl E. Braaten. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

. Perspectives 93 19th and 20th Century Protestant
Theolog . Edited, With an Introduction, by Carl E.
Braaten. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.

. Systematic Theology. Three volumes. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1951-1963.

Ueberweg, Friedrich. History 9: Philosophy, from Thales
to the Present Time. Vol. II: History of Modern
Phiiosophy. Translated from the Fourth German
edition y George S. Morris. New York: Scribner,
Armstrong & Co., 1874.

 

 

Waring, E. Graham. "Introduction." In Friedrich Schleier—
macher, 93 Religion, Speeches 22 Its Cultured

Despisers. Translated by John Oman. Abridged.
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Wernaer, Robert M. Romanticism and the Romantic School i3
Germany. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1910.

Wiener, Philip P., ed. Leibniz Selections. New York:
Charles Scribner's Sons, 1951.

 

Wilde, Norman. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi: A Study in the

Origin of German Realism. New York:_ Columbia

College, 1894.

 

 

Willoughby, Leonard Ashley. The Romantic Movement in
Germany. London: Oxford University Press, 1930.

 

Wolff, Christian. Preliminary Discourse on Philosophy in
General. Translated’by Richard JT_Blackwe11. _—
Library of Liberal Arts. Indianapolis: Bobbs—
Merrill Company, Inc., 1963.

 

Articles and Periodicals

Barth, Karl. "Liberal Theology: Some Alternatives."
The Hibbert Journal, LIX (April, 1961), 213-219.

Hamilton, Kenneth. "Schleiermacher and Relational
Theology." Journal 9: Religion, XLIV, No. 1
(January, 1961), 29—39.

 

Luelmann, Christian. "Schleiermacher, der Kirchenvater des
19. Jahrhunderts." Sammlung gemeinverstaendlicher
Vortraege und Schriften, Nr. 48. Tuebingen, 1907.

 

 

McGiffert, Arthur Cushman. "The God of Spinoza as Inter—
preted by Herder." The Hibbert Journal, III
(1904—1905), 706—726.

Mulert, Hermann. "Schleiermacher Ueber Spinoza und
Jacobi." Chronicon Spinozanum, III (1923), 295—316.

Niebuhr, Richard R. "Schleiermacher on Language and
Feeling." Theology Today, XVII, No. 2 (July, 1960),
150—67.

Raack, Richard C. "Schleiermacher's Political Thought and

Activity, 1806—1813." Church History, XXVIII
(1959) , 374-90. "“—

Selbie, William Boothby. "Schleiermacher." Encyclopaedia
9: Religion and Ethics. Edited by James Hastings,
XI, 236—39. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1920.

 

 

 

171

Tice, Terrence N. "Schleiermacher's Interpretation of
Christmas." Journal 9: Religion, XLVII, No. 2
(April, 1967), 100-26.

 

Unpublished Materials

 

Nelson, James David. "Herrnhut, Friedrich Schleier-
macher's Homeland." Unpublished Ph.D. disser—
tation, University of Chicago Divinity School, 1963.

Raack, Richard C. "The Course of Political Idealism in
Prussia, 1806—1813." Unpublished Ph.D. disser-
tation, Harvard University, 1957.

Tice, Terrence N. "Schleiermacher's Theological Method
with Special Attention to His Production of Church
Dogmatics." Unpublished Th.D. dissertation,
Princeton Theological Seminary, 1961.

Wallhausser, John, Jr. "Schleiermacher's Early Development
As Ethical Thinker." Unpublished Ph.D. disser-
tation, Yale University, 1965.

 

 

 

   

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