Der Christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der Evangelischen Kirsche im zusammenhange dargestellt
[In the following essay, an anonymous reviewer examines Schleiermacher's ideology and his powerful influence on German theology.]
Two countrymen, says the fable, were walking in the fields when they saw a cloud approaching, huge and dark. Ah, cried John, there comes the hail; our crops will be ruined, a famine in three months, then a pestilence, then—Hail! interrupted Thomas, that cloud carries rain, the very thing we want, we shall make a fortune this summer. The dispute grew warm. Meanwhile the wind had carried the cloud almost out of sight. They had neither rain nor hail. So the appearance of some new system has been frequently observed to awaken expectations the most opposite. Such principles, exclaim some, are the evil portents of the age, fraught with mischief to religion, to morality, to the nation at large. Such principles, it is rejoined by others, are our happiest auguries for the future, they make an epoch in the progress of enlightenment. But the phenomenon in question, having made its way to the zenith, is presently seen drifting rapidly off towards the horizon. It accomplishes its transit without leaving behind it on the earth any result whatever, whether disastrous or benign. This process has been more than once exemplified in the case of our German neighbours. From time to time some speculation of unusual boldness, some perversion of singular ingenuity, raises its head above the rest, awakens general attention, and then subsides, without realizing either the hopes of one party or the fears of the other. Not unfrequently when such an appearance has begun to excite notice in England, it has nearly ceased to exist in its native country. The good people there who ran out to see the strange meteor have already returned to their repose, while we are clustering about some man loudly reading from his hand-bill all about ‘the wonderful new comet!’ Lest the practical good sense of our English readers should apprehend any such profitless consumption of their time, and so decline at once what might be possibly a post festum invitation, we must be permitted to remind them, at the outset, that the writer whose opinions we propose to examine has exerted an influence on German theology of great extent during his lifetime, conspicuous at the present day, and likely to endure in its results for a long period to come.
Friedrich Schleiermacher was one of those comprehensive minds who assume an independent position between two extreme parties, and are consequently disowned by each, yet powerful in modifying both. His services are to be estimated not merely by what he himself accomplished, but scarcely less by the activity he infused into others. The result of his efforts does not lie within the definite compass of a certain measure of detail. He did not desire to form a school. His aim was, as he himself expressed it, ‘to stimulate individuality.’ Accordingly his influence is traceable, not so much in particular opinions, as in general modes of thought, and in the beneficial change he effected in the spirit and direction of inquiry. Neander, the pupil and colleague of Schleiermacher, announced the intelligence of his death in these words,—‘We have now lost a man from whom will be dated henceforth a new era in the history of theology.’ That ideal of the church which Neander has developed with such skill and learning was derived from Schleiermacher. Among the Germans he was the first to make so near an approach to the scriptural conception of the Church of Christ.
Rationalist criticism has always been content with the endeavour to destroy. In the time of Schleiermacher a second reformation in the theological world was needed to construct. In this movement he took the lead. Orthodoxy had, for a long period previously, substituted the letter for the spirit. Rationalism broke down in every direction the empty framework. It was the aim of Schleiermacher to revive the spirit of Christianity, while he retained that freedom of inquiry, and that independence in criticism, which the law of progress was thought imperatively to demand. The youth of Schleiermacher was passed in a stormy period. In politics, in literature, in religion, all was commotion. He emerged from the quiet seclusion of the Moravians, the Essenes of modern times, to take his place among these conflicting elements. What he found among the brethren of Herrnhut was inadequate to satisfy the demands of his understanding. But a somewhat of their spirit of love and of their pious mysticism he found ever afterwards indispensable to his heart. The requirements of his feeling constituted throughout his mental history a wholesome counterpoise to the rigorous demands of his dialectics. He displayed a keen power of analysis in separating those independent provinces, theology and philosophy, faith and speculation. At the same time he maintained their intrinsic harmony. A faithful pursuit of each must have for its issue agreement not discord. Schleiermacher was not the first to detect the error and the evil of the attempts which had been made to unite the two. But others, when they became aware of this incompatibility, had decided too hastily that one of them must be false, and sided therefore with the religionist or with the free-thinker exclusively. Schleiermacher, while devoting himself to theology, could look with complacency on the efforts of the philosopher at his side. He stands, like a second Boethius, between the heathen philosophy of the Rationalist and the Neologian, and the Gothic zealotry of the extreme orthodox. Too philosophical for the pietists, he was too credulous for the philosophers. That comprehensiveness and impartiality which united in one person the contradictory tendencies of the age, was not likely to have place among all his disciples. Very many, after a period of subjection to his influence, passed onward to more sceptical or more orthodox opinions. When his hand was removed, the equilibrium was destroyed, and the scale, which had been more heavily laden from the first, would immediately preponderate. Averse to extremes, he was not among those who dread diversity of opinion, and can find nothing to hope in the collision of honourable controversy. He rejoiced when he had imparted an impulse; it was not his desire to prescribe a course. His lectures, his sermons, and his writings, influenced numbers of every grade of opinion. While, in many quarters, they infused into the old supranaturalism a youthful vigour, they were not without a beneficial influence, even upon the extreme sceptical party. His theology may be said to have given the first impulse to that improved spirit of theological inquiry, which has become conspicuous in Germany of late years. He made manifest, as no German had hitherto done, the distinction between essentials and non-essentials in religion. We should not draw the line precisely where he has drawn it, but he rendered eminent service to his countrymen, in directing so many able minds among them to that union of a reverent temper with an impartial research, on which are based their most valuable contributions to theological science. An acquaintance with his system is indispensable, in the case of any one who would trace the origin, or apprehend the character of German theology in its more praiseworthy efforts. Like the Libripens of the old Roman law, Schleiermacher has been the personage without whose presence no compact could be concluded. His influence is invariably to be presupposed in the acquisition or the transfer of that precious commodity, theological opinion, during the greater part of the last half century. The present representatives of a liberal orthodoxy, were, with scarcely an exception, his scholars. Among these are found the distinguished names of Julius Müller, Tholuck, Nitzsch, Bleek, Lücke, Dorner, and Twesten. The last named has succeeded Schleiermacher in the chair of divinity at Berlin, and advocates a theology, identical in its main positions with that of his predecessor.
Schleiermacher was born at Breslau, in the year 1768. His earlier education was received in the Moravian school, at Niesky. He pursued his theological studies at Halle. Entering college, the subject of considerable religious conviction, his faith was unsettled by the study, first of Spinoza, and afterwards of Fichte. It is remarkable that nearly every distinguished sceptic since the days of Spinoza, has dated his departure from Christianity from the perusal of his writings. The philosopher of Amsterdam attracts the perplexed inquirer by his semblance of exactitude, and obtains credit accordingly. By this implicit surrender of faith to the first comer, it would seem that each new deserter to the quarters of infidelity has believed in the German popular superstition, that the first dream dreamt in a new house must be true. From 1796 to 1802, Schleiermacher occupied the post of chaplain to the hospital at Berlin, and in 1803 became professor of theology, and university preacher at Halle. On the occupation of that place by the French, three years subsequently, he repaired to Berlin, where in 1810 he was appointed theological professor in ordinary. Here he continued until his death in 1834. In addition to his theological lectures he was accustomed to deliver courses on philosophy, embracing all its branches, excepting that of natural science. The name of Schleiermacher is well known to many classical students as the translator of Plato, and the author of much valuable criticism on the Dialogues. His labours in this department were directed with considerable success, to separate the spurious from the genuine writings, and towards the introduction of a more adequate principle of classification.1 He wrote also monographies on Anaximander, Diogenes of Apollinaria, and Socrates. But it is with his services as a theologian that we have here to do. His first work in this department appeared in 1799, without his name. Editions were subsequently published in 1806 and 1821, the last accompanied by numerous apologetic and explanatory notes, with a view to harmonize certain expressions which had been thought to savour of Pantheism, with the more evangelical views of his systematic theology, which appeared the same year. The book was entitled Discourses on Religion, addressed to the educated, among those who despise it. We cannot here do more than briefly indicate the object of these essays, but even for this, it will be necessary to review the state of parties, at the time when Schleiermacher thus entered the arena.
The experiments upon which men have ventured with religion resemble those which the curiosity of the chemist has led him to try with light. The sunshine, or white light, is best adapted for vegetable growth. But what, asks the man of science, if we subject plants to the influence of only one of the prismatic colours of which the solar ray is composed—to the red, for instance, the yellow, or the blue? Plants have been reared, accordingly, under glasses of these several colours. Experiment shows that the yellow, while yielding the largest amount of light, prevents, as might be expected, the germination of seed; the red produces the most heat, but the plant is unhealthy; beneath the blue the strongest chemical effect is realized, but under this influence the strength of the plant fails to keep pace with its growth. It is thus that men have separated in religion those influences which ought to be combined. One class of religionists will admit only light for the intellect, another only warmth for the heart. Under the influence of the first, the good seeds must remain dead; subject to the glowing rays of the second, growth is artificial and diseased. A third class, again, are less concerned either about the light or the heat, about religion as a mere idea or religion as a mere sentiment, than they are about the security of that merely chemical result—an established orthodoxy. These three forms of religious one-sidedness have been frequently repeated in the history of the church. They were all in existence in Germany when Schleiermacher commenced his career as a theologian. The Rationalism of Semler, and the philosophy of Kant, had sought to reduce religion to mere morality. French infidelity and English deism had contributed more or less directly to an exaltation of natural religion at the expense of revealed. Semler had propagated the notion, that it mattered not what views a man entertained of Christianity, so that he made it serviceable in some way to his moral improvement. Rationalism was not the result of a more laborious and impartial criticism of the Scriptures. On the contrary, the doctrinal opinions of these men determined their mode of interpretation. They endeavoured to remove from Christianity all that was peculiar to it. In retaining only the common, they arrived at natural religion as the residuum. Such were the despisers of religion whom Schleiermacher principally addresses in these discourses. He shows the inefficacy of the mere religion of nature. Something positive, he urges, is indispensable. If Christianity be anything, it must be the one religion. The scepticism he thus assailed was widely spread. It was the prevalent opinion with a large class of cultivated minds, among whom a contempt for Christianity was accounted the finishing stroke of a liberal education. The utmost they were prepared to admit in behalf of evangelical religion was its utility in the hands of the state for the maintenance of morality and subordination among the lower classes.
Schleiermacher was almost farther removed, on the other side, from the extreme orthodox party than from the rationalists themselves. For a long time previous, the Lutheran clergy, jealous of the Calvinists, and fearing as much as they hated the sceptics, had shown themselves equally destitute of the prudence requisite for a judicious concession, and of the necessary ability for an effective attack. Schleiermacher aimed at both. He combated their enemies, though not on their behalf. He contended on a ground, and with tactics, to which they could never have become parties. The advocates of religion had injured their cause, he thought, by attempting to defend too much. Could he but succeed in maintaining the citadel, he was content to abandon many of the outworks. The creed by itself is useless as a sundial after sunset. These men were necessarily inadequate to the emergencies of the time. Bigotry cannot advance. The very weapons it employs make retrogression unavoidable. It resembles the Garamantian oxen, of whom Herodotus gravely tells, that they were compelled by the length and position of their horns to graze backwards. The preaching of the Lutheran clergy was more commonly declamation against what they regarded as false, than proclamation of what was true. What they extolled was not so much the Gospel, as their creeds and confessions of faith—those symbolical books, so numerous, so complex, and, in many points, so erroneous. There was too much of that unfortunate connexion between preaching and castigation which obtained at Bridewell, when the criminals were whipped immediately on the conclusion of the church service. Their sermons commonly exhibited, not a Saviour crucified, but a heretic anathematized. Under the name of orthodoxy, the very spirit of the papacy had crept into the church of Luther. In one of our old English Moralities, the seven cardinal virtues are represented as besieged by the seven deadly sins; and there is a serviceable lesson in the discovery made, that the roses thrown by Caritas beat her adversaries black and blue. But the Lutheran clergy refused to admit within their walls an auxiliary so gentle and so formidable. There is no little truth even in the overcharged satire of Jean Paul in the ‘Greenland Lawsuits.’ He makes one of them say—‘since the world has been smitten with such blindness that it begins no longer to be able to see in the dark, which every owl can do, it is but proper that we should strike light into its eyes with fisty-cuffs.’ Men of this class had risen en masse against the devoted Spener, as did the doctors of the Sorbonne against the anti-Aristotelian Ramus, and the clergy of England against the founders of methodism.
There existed a third order of minds with whom Schleiermacher possessed much more in common. These were the Romanticists. The epithet, romantic, has recently been somewhat changed in its application. It is now employed as a term of reproach by the extreme Left of Germany to designate piety, orthodoxy, or conservatism. Nearly every opinion which runs not to their own excess is stigmatized as redolent of the Middle Age. About as justly might the socialists call every man who shrank from communism a tractarian. At the time to which we now refer, the Romanticists, in the true sense, were more numerous and more influential than at present. They were men who are better represented among ourselves by Mr. Carlyle than by any other writer. They aspired to become philosophers; they were seldom really more than artists. Smitten with a visionary admiration of the past, they were so far from desiring, like our Puseyites, its practical resuscitation, that they claimed a foremost place among the advocates of improvement, and the scornful assailants of prejudice. This school could boast of Tieck, Novalis, the Schlegels, and Fouqué as their poets and men of letters; and of Schelling as their philosopher. To the Lutheran of the old school, philosophy was what the malignant fays of their mythology were to the Northmen. To young Germany, what was thus regarded as a dark and treacherous power appeared, on the contrary, the benign priestess of nature. As the gayer imagination of the south of Europe transformed the gloomy personages of northern superstition into kindly enchanters, so the romance of the new school wooed as divine that speculation which the old had proscribed as Satanic. The richness of fancy, the allegory, and the mysticism, which, derived from the East, became the soul of the troubadour poetry in the twelfth century, was revived with higher powers in the romantic poets of modern Germany. Their spirit is expressed in the dreamy wish of Keats—
‘O for a draught of vintage, that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and the country-green,
Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker full of the warm south,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.’
The pursuit of truth was carried on by them as a kind of chivalrous adventure. Philosophy held the secret of life, that wealth which would enrich all coming time. The successful aspirant might win it. ‘Divine philosophy’ alone could raise a palace in our desert with a word, and cause groves of perfume, and fountains of freshness to spring, where man had found before only sandy barrenness or a blasted heath. The old romance says that Ogier the Dane, when he had received a crown from the Fairy Morgana in her castle of Avalon, forgot his sovereign, his compeers, his exploits, his vowed adventures, and was bound by the spell to be mindful only of her love. So has it too often happened that these enamoured paladins of modern times have forgotten, while lost in their passion for the speculation they adore, how many grievances call loudly for redress, and how many giant wrongs still stalk abroad with none to do them battle. Heinrich Heine says, ‘For my part I divide all things into two great classes—the things which can be eaten and the things which can not.’ In the philosophy of Kant, and in the earlier philosophy of Fichte, the universe was parted off between the subject and the object in a manner deemed satisfactory. All things were either the outside or the inside passengers of the human vehicle. Schelling pronounced the subject and object identical in the absolute. The deity, according to his system, is the negation of all such antitheses—as real and ideal, spiritual and natural, me and not-me, &c. This notion may remind us of the ancient pantheism of the Buddhist, where Sansara, the appearance, and Nirwana, the spirit, become one in the perfection of consciousness. The infinite, with Schelling, is the unio correlata of either series of the finite. For the solution of the great problems of existence, the romantic philosophy found neither in logic nor in psychology an adequate instrument. By the speculative method alone could any satisfactory result be attained. It discovered its organum in the faculty of intellectual intuition. This is described as the gift indispensable to the philosopher as to the poet—the insight of genius. The element of mysticism in the philosophy of Schelling, found a partial echo in the temperament of Schleiermacher. He was more affected by it at first than afterwards. Though he separated so carefully the departments of philosophy and theology, he could not wholly escape the influence of the speculative philosophy. He addressed a public who had hailed the discovery of the intellectual intuition with rapture. The youth of Germany hastened at the call of Schelling to merge their individuality in the All. Impatient genius must abandon the laborious induction for the flight of a neo-platonist abstraction. This instrument, which was to achieve such wonders, was applied in every province of inquiry. In natural science, where these efforts were most futile, they were most strenuous. A modern Aristophanes would have represented the youthful speculatists as repairing from all quarters to the workshop of Schelling, to be furnished with wings by the great Dædalus of the day. There is reason to believe that the ascents performed were seldom more real than that of the worthy knight of La Mancha, who, while seated on the wooden horse in the garden, believed himself traversing the regions of upper air. This discovery of Schelling's may be ranked, in point of utility, with the boastful philosophy of the empiric Paracelsus, who recommended in place of toilsome research a genial glance that should pierce the mysteries of nature; who extolled an intuition which was to behold the divinity whom nature held in solution; and who held the doctrine of a correspondence between the macrocosm of the world and the microcosm of man, somewhat like the identity of the real and the ideal in Schelling's system. These ill-directed speculations damaged at the outset many minds fitted for better things, much as the vain fancies of the Cabbala seduced and wasted the enthusiasm and the learning of Reuchlin and Pico and Mirandola. The powerful logical faculty in the mind of Schleiermacher prevented him from erring greatly on the side of mysticism. His dialectics rendered him the same service in his own province which scientific study did to Jean Paul, when it prevented him from falling a prey to the prevalent sentimentality induced by the Sorrows of Werther.
At the time when he wrote the discourses, Schleiermacher associated but little with his clerical brethren. His friends lay principally among a coterie of young Romanticists, talented, capricious, and dogmatical, who waged perpetual war with prose and conventionalism in the pages of the Athenæum. This periodical was edited by the two Schlegels, Tieck, and Novalis. The party it represented despised all who were not of their school, as men who, like the fabled dwellers about Mount Atlas, had never any dreams. They were the devotees of taste. Morality with them was subordinate to æsthetics. By the love of beauty, man was to arrive at his religion. The inward purity of the worshipper of the beautiful was untainted, though the social relations might be set at nought. The spiritual and the sensuous must be cultivated together, and the weaker power ought to yield to the stronger.
Schleiermacher is known to have received an impulse also from the writings of Jacobi, the contemporary and opponent of Kant. His opinions were similar to those of Hemsterhuys and Hamann, though approaching much less nearly the evangelical standard. Like Kant, he began with the study of the mind itself, and, inverting the old process, advanced from the inward to the outward. But his results were very different. Jacobi denounced philosophy altogether, and opposed equally the barren ethics of the sage of Königsberg, and the speculative philosophy which succeeded. Schleiermacher was not prepared to go so far. Repudiating every theological dogma, Jacobi placed the essence of religion in devout sentiment. In the eyes of the faith-philosopher, as he was called, an ideal Christ eclipsed the historical. According to him it was neither requisite nor possible to prove the truth of Christianity. His position was a false one on either side. To overlook the facts of Christianity, and to appeal solely to the feeling, is as much to oppose it as to reject the facts—appealing solely to the reason. Religion is degraded when assigned to faith to the exclusion of knowledge—this is to remove it from the region of certitude at once, and to concede almost all for which the infidel philosopher is concerned to contend. On the other side, it is not true that philosophy has existed altogether in vain, though it can never accomplish all that its votaries anticipate. These alchemists will never find their wondrous stone or distil the desired elixir; but, as they have in the past, so will they in the future frequently stumble upon what is useful in their search after what is impossible.
The Discourses on Religion appeared at the close of the eighteenth century. It may not be uninteresting to see how some of Schleiermacher's distinguished contemporaries were employed during this border period between the two centuries, when he came forward to take his place among them. Goethe, laborious and methodical, having dieted himself for hard work, was busy at Weimar with his ‘Faust.’ Schiller was there also, hastening the decay of his constitution by immoderate draughts of coffee and malaga; writing ‘Mary Stuart’ in his sickness, and seen often wandering in solitary reverie about the park, meditating works which he was destined never to complete. Wieland, in the enjoyment of literary leisure, wearing about his head his favourite red scarf, thought and wrote, and conversed, not without affectation, of himself and of his works. Herder was engaged with his ‘Metacritik;’ he was now in his sixty-sixth year. His residence at Weimar contributed to embitter his declining days. The exertions he made in the cause of education and ecclesiastical reform, his attempts to check the growing imitation of the licentious infidelity of France, ended in disappointment. He was preparing to withdraw from the field as Schleiermacher entered it. Jean Paul, Herder, and Jacobi, were to have united in conducting a literary periodical entitled the ‘Aurora,’ which, among other objects, was to oppose the transcendental egotism of Fichte, and advocate that positive Christianity to which a common sentiment, partly religious and partly poetical, had attached them. But Herder was losing hope, Jacobi was now ill, and the project was abandoned. Fichte was in the height of his popularity, not the less so that the year 1799 saw him driven from his chair at Jena on a charge of atheism. Booksellers paid him six louis d'ors a sheet for his lectures, a greater sum than even Goethe could command. His system was attacked in 1801 by Jean Paul, in his ‘Clavis Fichtiana.’ The boldness and humour of the caricature drew general attention. Thus these two noble-hearted Iconoclasts, Schleiermacher and Jean Paul, employed almost simultaneously, the one his eloquence and the other his satire, to tear down those images of the Ego which philosophy had set up. In 1800, Jean Paul repaired to Berlin, and, occupied as he was, in suing vainly for a prebend's place, and successfully for a wife, found time to commence an intimate friendship with Schleiermacher, whose discourses he styles, ‘An inspired and inspiring work, a chaste and fair temple, wherein is carried on a veritable divine service.’2
In these essays Schleiermacher meets the rationalist objector on his own ground. In what aspect, he asks, have you considered religion that you so despise it? Have you looked on its outward manifestations only? These the peculiarities of an age or a nation may modify. You should have looked deeper. That which constitutes the religious life has escaped you. Your criticism has dissected a dead creed. That scalpel will never detect a soul. Or will you aver that you have indeed looked upon religion in its inward reality? Then you must acknowledge, that the idea of religion is inherent in human nature, that it is a great necessity of our kind. Your quarrel lies in this case not with religion itself, but with the corruptions of it. In the name of humanity you are called on to examine closely, to appreciate duly what has been already done towards the emancipation of the true and eternal which lies beneath these forms,—to assist in what may yet remain. Schleiermacher separates the province of religion from those of action and of knowledge. Religion is not morality, it is not science. Its seat is found accordingly in the third element of our nature—the feeling. Its essential is a right state of the heart. To degrade religion to the position of a mere purveyor of motive to morality is not more dishonourable to the ethics which must ask than to the religion which will render such assistance. It is worthy of remark that the vain and frivolous Semler, educated, like Schleiermacher, in the bosom of Pietism, derived a conclusion the very opposite of this from a similar study of the fluctuation and variety in religious opinion. Morality, with Semler, was the sole aim, with Schleiermacher, the necessary attendant of religion. The feeling Schleiermacher advocates is not the fanaticism of the ignorant or the visionary emotion of the idle. It is not an aimless reverie shrinking morbidly from the light of clear and definite thought. Feeling, in its sound condition, affects both our conception and our will, leads to knowledge and to action. Neither knowledge nor morality are in themselves the measure of a man's religiousness. Yet religion is requisite to true wisdom and morality inseparable from true religion. He points out the hurtfulness of a union between the church and the state. With indignant eloquence he descants on the evils which have befallen the church ‘since first the hem of the priestly robe swept the marble of an imperial palace.’
This work excited notice, not more by the brilliance of its style than by the independence of thought it displayed. It may not be difficult to detect here and there the influence of a study of the Greek philosophers, of Spinoza, of Jacobi, and even of Fichte. But as a whole, the book affects the reader, as do all those works which embody strongly a man's own character. The tendencies it combines were all existent within himself, the result of his previous history. Schlegel called it, in genuine German phrase, ‘The most characteristic of books, a work of infinite subjectivity.’ In his endeavour to take as comprehensive a view of religion as possible, that he may show its nature to be the same, though its manifestations have been so diverse, he fails to keep adequately in view the distinctive truths of Christianity. Some loose declamation on this subject, and the use of many expressions more in accordance with the philosophical cant of the day than with either Christianity or common sense, laid him open to the charge of Pantheism. He writes an apology for religion in general rather than for Christianity itself. He defends positive religion against a mere negative deism. He seems to have forgotten that because the altar without the flame is worthless, it is not therefore of little consequence upon what altar the flame is kindled. The discourses produced less effect on the Rationalists for whom they were more immediately intended, than on the Romanticists of the Fichte and Schelling school.
The mind of Schleiermacher was partly dialectic, partly mystical in its composition. In this point he strikingly resembles Hugo of St. Victor, who, half schoolman, half mystic, united with great advantage the feeling of the one and the erudition of the other. In another sphere a Sydney represented in himself with similar success both the chivalry and the learning of his day. Schleiermacher and Hugo were alike in the combination of a high idealism with a subtle power of analysis. The intellect and the feeling were almost equally vigorous. The position of Schleiermacher in the nineteenth century was more original than that of Hugo in the twelfth. William of Champeaux, the founder of the institution of St. Victor, had set an example to the French mystic which Schleiermacher did not find in Jacobi. It is true, also, that Anselm had already uttered his credo ut intelligam, and Bernhard had taught the interchange and reciprocal action of love and knowledge. Yet the faith intended by Hugo had more resemblance to that definition of the term which Schleiermacher would have given. With the theologian of St. Victor faith was the devout condition of the entire inner life. With his predecessors it was more equivalent to the necessary orthodoxy, that historical belief which was at once the foundation and the prescribed limit of the labours of scholasticism. The schoolmen held their busy mart upon a frozen river; the spring came, and their occupation was gone. In these discourses the twofold power of which we have spoken is signally displayed. They read throughout their greater part much like a dialogue in Plato. The same quiet irony, the same alacrity to make all due concession, even to argue for the adversary or to warn him of an approaching dilemma, a similar well-arranged yet apparently casual succession of interrogations and of topics. We seem to hear Socrates perplexing Gorgias, or confuting Hippias, on each position he successively assumes. In many passages, again, the disputant becomes the orator; the language and the thought are vehement and glowing. There are passages in the book which, in point of beauty and force, will stand comparison with any prose composition in the language.
After the interval of a year, there appeared from the pen of Schleiermacher another small volume, intitled Soliloquies. In their highly-wrought and impassioned style, these essays possess, as a work of art, a greater charm than even the Discourses. In truthfulness they are inferior. The space of time between the two publications was short, yet there appears a wide gulf between the opinions advocated in each. The Discourses proclaim the excellence of a sense of dependence. The Soliloquies are devoted to the praise of independence. The explanation is obvious: the former indicate his theological, and the latter his ethical position at that period. Absolute as is our dependence in relation to God, as regards man and nature we reciprocally act and are acted upon—we are free. The same man who in devotion loses himself in the Divine, in moral action manifests the autocracy of his will, creates or governs circumstance, and forms himself by collision with his fellows. These ethics are of the school of Fichte. The truly moral man is the ‘imperator’ of Cicero's Paradoxes; he enjoys the ataraxy and ‘apathy sublime’ of the stoic philosophy. The man of virtue may be said to know the hereafter, for he constructs within himself his own future. Age has no power over him, for he can keep his heart young. The great office of morality is the development of character. The words of the poet convey the leading maxim of the theory—
‘Thou within thy world art monarch,
Hast thyself?—then thou hast all.’
These essays are sparkling extravaganzas in praise of individuality. ‘What they call world,’ says Schleiermacher, ‘I call man; what they term man is to me the world. In my view, mind stands first and stands sole. What I recognise as the world, is its fairest work, its self-made mirror.’
The Soliloquies were received with enthusiasm. They were in exact accordance with the spirit of the age. Literary coteries were in their glory. The correspondence and the soirées of these little circles all tended to nourish that egotism which Schleiermacher's book ennobled. The fashion of the day fully realized his definition of friendship, as ‘the enjoyment of another's individuality.’ The reciprocal admiration of friends was subservient to the display or the completion of what was characteristic in each. A refined cultus of individuality was the favourite worship of society. The association of literati at Weimar was only the most luminous among a number of similar systems. The aged Gleim, patriotic, benevolent, and vain, with his gifted niece Gleminde, were the centre of a literary circle at Halberstadt. Jacobi, at Nürnberg, spoiled by his two aunts, Lehna and Lotta, shut up, like Southey, to the society of admirers and of women, carried about with him constantly the favourable reviews of his books, neatly wrapt up in paper. The correspondence between him and Wieland is largely occupied, like that contained in Forbes' Life of Beattie, with the traffic of compliments. Their works passed continually to and fro for criticism—that is, for commendation. When Jacobi could not praise, the friendship of Wieland cooled. The periods of indifference and the epochs of reunion appear to have been regulated by the abundance or the scarcity of the praise secured.
In attempting to furnish an account of an author's works, a writer is destined not unfrequently to find himself in a position of doubt similar to that of the topographer, who, in his description of a city, arrives at some house rendered famous by the birth of a great man, and hesitates as to whether he shall proceed to describe at once, in that place, the other localities and mention the other incidents relating to this personage, or wait till he reaches them, one by one, in his prescribed route. In the present instance, the choice lies between a violation of the order of time or of subject. But as the Soliloquies have introduced the subject of ethics, it may be most advisable briefly to indicate here the ethical method finally adopted by Schleiermacher. His moral philosophy in its latest form was published six years ago by Jonas, a distinguished preacher in Berlin, warmly attached to the principles of his master. Schleiermacher had made successive improvements in these lectures, consisting partly of an alteration in the arrangement, as well as a more extensive elaboration of particular sections; and had intended to lay his ethical system finally before the public in a form similar to that of his Outlines of Theological Study. But his life was not spared, and he bequeathed to Jonas the task of editing the papers he left behind. None of his academical courses conveyed so strongly the impression of his extraordinary powers of mind as did that on ethics. The contrast is even more striking than could be anticipated between the rhapsodical fervour of the Soliloquies, and the logical sequence, the depth, and the comprehensiveness of the system matured in his later years. He has invented a novel terminology, to which an English rendering can hardly do justice. The work is entitled, A System of Christian Ethics on the Principles of the Evangelical Church. It was the office of moral philosophy, he thought, to carry out systematically and to apply with greater minuteness, the ethical precepts of the Scriptures; and also, in some measure, to supplement the sacred writings with a view to meet the requirements of the present day. Such a system, he observes, must be understood as resting on a strictly Protestant basis, since we do not recognise that duty of obedience to the church which occupies so prominent a place in the casuistry of the Romanist. The Scripture must furnish the moralist with his standard; though he should refer for subordinate direction to the symbolical books and the usage of the church, where such creeds and such practice are in harmony with the principles of the New Testament. Christian ethics may be defined as a description of the various kinds of action which result from the supremacy of the devout consciousness in the Christian.
In the consciousness of every man the opposites, movement and repose, must have place. These two conditions furnish the impulse towards the two great classes of actions which divide between them the system of Schleiermacher. These are realizing actions and actions of manifestation. The Christian life is one of process. Our happiness as members of Christ's kingdom is not absolute, but relative. This condition of imperfectness is manifest in the alternations of pleasure and pain. When we feel that we cannot do as we would—that our devout convictions are not effective as they should be—a sense of dissatisfaction arises. A painful consciousness of this kind impels us towards a species of realizing action, which Schleiermacher terms reinstative or purifying. Again, the pleasure consequent on actions of this kind supplies the impulse towards those which constitute the second species of realizing action—viz., expansive action. The gratification which follows the willing surrender of the lower to the higher nature, awakens the desire to realize more fully what has thus been commenced. Hence our efforts after moral self-preservation; the educating process of the spiritual and temporal association with which each individual stands connected, and the desire to disseminate truth among others. Under this division fall those actions which make a part both of the interior and the exterior advance of the church towards perfectness and universality. In this department, also, he treats of the ethics of marriage, as the germ of that social connexion which is implied in expansive action, and of the casuistry of social progress in the community at large. These two species of action are called realizing, because it is their immediate aim to accomplish an improvement in man's condition. But between the emotions of pleasure and of pain, with their resulting actions of realization, lies an intermediate state of satisfaction. This, of course, is only relative, it is associated with impulse, and must find its expression in action. But the action it induces is not intended, like the two former kinds, to realize any process in ourselves or in others. Schleiermacher calls it, therefore, manifestive. By actions of this class a man seeks simply to express, and, as it were, to fix by an outward action a certain inward frame of mind. This department includes Divine worship in the ordinary sense, and, in a wider signification, the Divine service which the Christian seeks to render throughout his entire life. Here Schleiermacher ranges the four Christian virtues, Chastity, Patience, Long-suffering, and Humility. The province of manifestative action embraces also the ethics of art, church festivals, popular amusements, play, &c. Art and worship are alike the expression of emotions and ideas within, independent of a purpose to produce a change in any sphere of life. Thus, pleasure or pain, or the indifference of either, determines the consciousness whence every impulse and every action must proceed. It will be obvious that this threefold division, strictly understood, must be a mere abstraction. Schleiermacher was quite aware of this. He does not mean to say that in actual experience any of our actions will be found to arise simply from one of these three impulses, to the exclusion of the other two. But in some actions one, and in some another, determines the predominant character. Every manifestative action contains a realizing element, and vice versa. So, in our social feelings, there is contained a minimum of the personal, and similarly in the actions in which they result.3
The cultivated mind of Germany traversed three philosophical stages in an astonishingly short space of time. The rapidity of their transit from the moral rigours of Kant and Fichte, to the æsthetic libertinism of Schelling, surprised even themselves. Some Saturnalian extravagance might be looked for. Labours like those of a Hercules had once been thought necessary to raise a mortal to a place among the stars; but now the doctrine of the ‘intellectual intuition’ invited every fisherman Glaucus to take his leap, and become a sea-god in the ocean of thought. About the same time that the Soliloquies appeared, Frederick Schlegel produced a clever and licentious fiction, called ‘Lucinda.’ That Schleiermacher could approve of the practical tendency of the book was impossible, but, influenced partly by personal friendship, and partly carried away by some of its theories, he attempted an anonymous defence of it, intitled, Confidential Letters on Schlegel's Lucinda. He endeavoured, in a manner, to spiritualize it; to indicate a possible application of its principles more moral than the obvious one, and produced an apology rather for a parallel theory than for the work itself. To have done even thus much was a great disgrace. Frederick Schlegel carried the subjective idealism of Fichte to an extreme which that high-minded philosopher must have regarded with abhorrence. His fundamental principle is the Immanent Infinity of the Ego, a favourite tenet of the romantic school. In answer to the question, How shall we maintain in practice the sense of this infinity? Schlegel replies—‘By abstaining from strenuous action, by separating ourselves from contact with the finite.’ That which is finite does not really belong to us, it is but the vanishing appearance of the Ego. Work is the flaming sword that debars man from his paradise. It is in repose that we should serve the cause of science, of art, and of religion. Man should claim the Olympian quiet of the gods of old. These are his words—‘The more divine a man or his work, the more will they resemble organic nature; of all the forms of existence, that of the vegetable is the most moral, the most pure. The highest and most perfect life would be, therefore, that of simple vegetation.’ The book was directed principally against the ‘English prudery,’ and tended to increase the corruption of society, already too regardless of virtue. The social restrictions to vice. But the philosopher, it will be said, must conform in practice to the laws of his country, and yield a something, at least, to the opinions of society. True, Schlegel would answer, but the enlightened man accommodates himself to such prejudice with a secret irony. By irony he preserves himself intact within the consciousness of his own infinity. Such absurdity and such wickedness Schleiermacher could hold up to admiration. We believe that his friends have omitted these Letters in the posthumous edition of his complete works.
In 1806 he wrote the Christmas Eve, the last of these works of the more popular and romantic cast. After this he became the theologian exclusively, and abandoned his ornate style for one more scientific and strictly argumentative. The Soliloquies contained a theory of friendship; the Letters on Lucinda, a theory of love. Schleiermacher had adopted successively the various forms of the discourse, the monologue, and the epistle; he attempted next the dialogue. The book opens with a description of Christmas eve, and then follows a conversation suggested by the season. The various speakers represent shades of opinion which had each of them their place, more or less prominently, in the belief of the author. Leonhard represents the sceptical; Ernst and Edward advocate the mystical view of the Gospel narrative. The first speaker pronounces the synoptical gospels untrustworthy; the other two claim homage for what is called the Christ of John. In the Gospel of this evangelist, Schleiermacher thought he perceived a unity of aim and an elevation of spirit in which the others were deficient. In the Commentary on Luke, written some years afterwards, he endeavours to show how Luke proceeded when he undertook to weave into one narrative the many anecdotes and scattered memorabilia, of unequal authority, which were current among the Christians. Objective as his criticism professed to be, the very reasons he assigns for the preference given to the narrative of John, show that his depreciation of the others rested on grounds subjective and arbitrary. The myths which Strauss subsequently introduced throughout, were admitted by Schleiermacher at the commencement and the close of the synoptical narratives. He was disposed to explain in this way the miraculous conception and the ascension. Strauss was an auditor of Schleiermacher's Lectures on the Life of Christ, and he may possibly have derived from them the idea of applying universally a mode of interpretation which Schleiermacher restricted to those parts of the scriptural account which he deemed non-essential. Within a year after the publication of the Christmas Eve, his Critique of the so-called First Epistle of Paul to Timothy, issued from Halle. Schmidt in Giessen had previously ventured to express some doubts as to its genuineness, but even Semler had not denied its authenticity. Schleiermacher endeavoured to prove that the train of thought and cast of expression were altogether unpauline.
In 1810 the University of Berlin was established, with Schleiermacher as its head in theology, as Savigny was in law. Shortly after this appointment, Schleiermacher published his Plan of Theological Study, a small volume intended as an introduction to his theological course. This outline was succeeded, after an interval of ten years, by the larger work containing the complete development of his system. The first edition was intitled An Account of the Christian Faith on the Principles of the Evangelical Church. Subsequent editions of the Glaubenslehre, or, as we should term it, systematic theology, appeared in 1830 and 1831. This book marked the epoch of a general reform in doctrinal theology. In historical importance, says Dr. Lücke, it can be compared only with the Institutes of Calvin. We shall now proceed to indicate the main points of this system.
For the less definite term religion, the word piety is substituted by Schleiermacher; and piety he defines as in itself neither knowledge nor action, but a certain condition of the feeling, or immediate self-consciousness. By the term immediate, he designs to distinguish from the consciousness of ourselves which we have through the medium of reflection (e.g. self-condemnation or self-approval) that consciousness which, like the simple feeling of joy or sorrow, is independent of any such intermediate process. Of the three provinces, knowledge, action, and feeling, the last is the seat of piety. Not that devotion is excluded from the other two; it should be their constant accompaniment, though distinct from them. Piety must pervade the entire nature. The devout man is one who may say,
“I've made my heart a Holy Sepulchre,
And all my land of thought a Palestine.”
The ideal at which the theologian should aim, is to combine the deepest feeling with the highest knowledge. The inalienable characteristic of devout feeling, how manifold soever its manifestations, is this—that we are conscious of ourselves as completely dependent. To be conscious of ourselves as absolutely dependent, and to be conscious of ourselves in our relation to God, are one and the same thing. Our self-consciousness, as partly free and partly dependent, is the sense we have of our relation to the world. In respect to it we have no complete feeling of dependence excluding all possibility of reaction; nor, again, so complete a sense of freedom as precludes influence from without upon ourselves. The subject, for example, is dependent on the state, and the child on the parent, but neither so completely so as to exclude all reaction from the subject-quarter. With regard to God only can our dependence be said to be absolute; and therefore, with Schleiermacher, to be conscious of our relation to God, and to be conscious of absolute dependence, are convertible terms. That to which the mind refers as the determining, in this its consciousness of being absolutely determined, is God. This feeling constitutes the highest stage of human consciousness. So far from degrading man, as the philosophers (the Hegelians principally) have objected, this sense of dependence is the spring of all true power and joy within him. Here alone the opposition between subject and object disappears. Knowledge supposes the distinction between the person knowing and the object known; and action, that between the doer and the object acted on, but this sense of absolute dependence is the simple oneness of the self-consciousness. This feeling is the divine element in our constitution; that whereby we are capable of fellowship with the Infinite. In this aspect of Schleiermacher's fundamental proposition, the influence of Schelling's philosophy of Identity is apparent.
Here, perhaps, some of our readers are ready to exclaim, this is mysticism undisguised. What else can be meant by reducing piety to an absolute, changeless condition of the mind, which is independent of time, ignores the external world, and is in effect a blank? It would seem that we are sent back at once to the fourteenth century, to the doctrines of Eccard and Henry of Basle, of Suso and Tauler, who define devotion as an essential reception of the Deity, so that the worshipper, without thought, will, or action of his own, loses himself in the abyss of the Infinite. But another step restores us to the world of reality. This higher self-consciousness, Schleiermacher is quite prepared to admit, cannot in itself be realized, or become an object of cognizance at all. It exists, for us, only in connexion with a feeling of an inferior order. This lower feeling serves, as it were, to embody and reveal the higher. It operates somewhat as the material chill of the earth, to condense and make visible the more ethereal dew. Schleiermacher calls it our sensuous consciousness. By it he understands the sense we have of our condition as respects the world about us, as one of action and reaction, modified and conditioned in various ways; a state of subjection in some respects, and of freedom in others. The term includes also those feelings which come nearest to our sense of absolute dependence—viz., the moral and the social, because these fall within the sphere of the individual, are subject to vicissitude and interchange. Both these kinds of feeling are necessary to us. On the one side, experience denies the possibility of our being wholly lost in a sense of absolute dependence. On the other, the conscience God has given us, forbids us to live, as independent, only for the visible and the finite. In the association of the two lies our religiousness. The feeling of the infinite cannot be realized but through the feeling of the finite. The latter, which awakens, is always present to modify it. But that man is most religious, in whom the higher is most completely and most constantly predominant over the lower consciousness. The higher, or infinite feeling, which in itself is unchangeable, is linked with the successive and changing forms of the lower or finite. Thus our devout emotions are at one time joyous, at another sad. Hence the different ways in which different minds describe their consciousness of God. The sense of absolute dependence common to all takes definite shape in one form with one temperament, or in one age, and assumes a different aspect in another. The most religious man is accordingly the most charitable.
The substantial truth of the principle thus laid down is acknowledged by many, who would fail to recognise their own belief in this more speculative shape. The Gospel is designed to enlighten the mind, and to sanctify the life. Between these two departments, lies the central province of the feeling. Here are located those hopes and fears, those joys and sorrows, without which neither correct notions nor correct actions partake of a devout character. Feeling is thus the heart of our mental system. Whether our movement be operative or acquisitive—extensive in action, or intensive in knowledge—out through the arteries of the one, or back through the veins of the other, the centre of circulation is the feeling.
From this fundamental idea of our consciousness of God, Schleiermacher proceeds to develop, step by step, his entire system. His Philosophy of Religion divides the various religions of the world, first, into different grades of development; and, secondly, into certain species within these genera. In the inferior grade of development, the lower and higher consciousness are not yet distinctly separated. The finite feeling, the mere sensuous consciousness, with its manifold and mutable affections, is confounded with the infinite, is deified. Hence polytheism. Again, there are religions of different species, but of the same grade. The polytheism of India and of Greece, for example, are distinct species of the same lower stage of development. In the higher grade, the separation between the consciousness of absolute dependence and our finite feeling is effected. The former rises into a distinct and influential existence. In this evolution of the higher feeling, result the various forms of monotheism. The monotheistic religions are divided into the teleological and æsthetic species, or, as they might more appropriately be designated, the ethical and the fatalistic. In the former, the moral predominates over the natural, in the latter, the converse. In Judaism, the prevailing consciousness of God is that of a commanding will. In Mohammedanism, the passive prevails over the active; responsibility is lost in necessity. Christianity is the most perfect species of the higher stage. It is related to other religions, not as the true to the false, but as the perfect to the imperfect.
Schleiermacher does not, like Hegel, assume a methodical progress of religions. Hegel takes us from the religion of Fetichism, or magic, to Llamaism; thence to the Indian religion, that of fancy; next to the Persian, that of light; and then to the Egyptian, which he styles the religion of riddles. In another and higher class there follow, first, and therefore lowest, the Jewish religion, that of Sublimity; the Greek, that of Beauty; and the Roman, that of Utility. According to this philosopher, the transition was made, not from the Jewish to the Christian religion, but from the Stoical philosophy of Rome to the doctrines of Christ. And the parallel is certainly very close between his idea of Christianity and the philosophy of the Porch. The Hegelian employs the facts of the Gospel as the mere outward symbols of his philosophical ideas. In the same way, the Stoics of Rome sought to harmonize the popular religion with their necessitarian Pantheism. The Hegelian adopts the ordinary religious language, with a sense of his own beneath the words. So did the ancient Stoic. He believes that all individual existence has flowed from, and will return to the All-Spirit. So did the Stoic. The Deity of the Hegelian devours his own children. So did the Jupiter of Stoicism. According to the Hegelian, evil is determined; an immanent necessity of reason governs all. This is the Heimarmene of the Stoics revived. In order to make it appear that the mind of the world has passed through the kind of process in which Hegel would have us believe, the sequence of history must be distorted to accommodate a system. If, however, you point the Hegelian to the vices of Grecian antiquity, and to the ignorance of the dark ages, as facts militating against that systematic advance necessary to his method, he will reply, those were periods of retrogression previous to a fresh advantage; the world-soul retreated, as it were, some paces, to gain purchase for another spring, a renewed onset into self-consciousness! The various religions are ranged by Hegel in procession; they advance like the pageantry of a Roman triumph, the victor of the day last. Schleiermacher groups his religions at various elevations; they stand, like the philosophers of Raphael's School of Athens, in disarray upon the temple steps. Another point of contrast should be noticed. With Hegel, the individual is the embodiment of a period, the expression of its consciousness. With Schleiermacher, the individual is the founder of a faith. According to Hegel, influence from the many centres on the one, the religious hero: Schleiermacher represents it as radiating from the one to the many. Schleiermacher was directly opposed to the philosophers of the day in the importance he attached to the historical, to individuality in religion. They resolved Christianity into an idea. But according to Schleiermacher, every religion takes its rise, in the first instance, in the religious views of some individual: it must begin with a personal founder, externally; and it must possess a character and individuality of its own, internally, in its subsequent social development.
It is the peculiarity of the Christian Monotheism that everything in it has reference to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth.4 This, amidst all diversity of opinion, is the common ground of Christians. By the word redemption is understood deliverance from a previous evil condition, or state of bondage. The evil of this state consists in our want of power to develop the consciousness of God. It does not come out into union with our finite consciousness, with the varying phases of our daily life. It is deficient in freedom, authority, and application. Like King Arthur's sword, Excalibur, the blade of celestial temper lies buried in a mass of rock; he only who has the right to reign can withdraw it from this unwieldy scabbard. The Redeemer possessed this power. In him was the ‘absolute facility’ of such development; by union with him we become similarly endowed. Thus, inability in man, redemption in Christ, constitute the essential and centre of the Christian faith. In other religions, the idea of redemption has only a partial place in certain purifications and sacrifices. In the Christian system it is all-important, it is all-pervading. In other forms of Monotheism the founder is not the object of faith. But the Christian believes in Christ as did no Jew in Moses, as does no Mussulman in Mahomet. Another man might have occupied their position, Christ stands alone, and in contrast to the rest of humanity, as not needing, and as bringing, redemption. Christianity is the absolute religion. Could an advance be made beyond it, the appearance of Christ would be reduced only to one among many transition-points. There would then be a redemption from Christ, as well as a redemption by him. Strauss has shown what is the only position which can be acceded to the Redeemer consistently with the Hegelian philosophy: he was a religious genius; he should be introduced into our worship only on the ground that the progress of the world now demands a worship of genius in place of the worship of a religious mediator. Sinlessness is not to be attributed to him, since through sin only could he or any other arrive at perfection. According to Schleiermacher the religion of Christ will be extended, but cannot be improved. Christ displays the perfected life and power of the religion he has founded; all divergence from that standard must be for the worse. Religion has nothing higher for man on earth than that which has been displayed in the person of Christ. The Hegelian maintains, on the contrary, that his principles may be more fully realized by us than they were personally by himself, and that advancing science will add depth and fulness to the imperfect commencement.
Judaism and Paganism are regarded by Schleiermacher as equidistant from Christianity. The elevation of Paganism by the loftier Monotheism of the philosophers, and the gradual incorporation of foreign elements into the Jewish system had reduced the two to much the same level, and rendered the greater proximity of Judaism to Christianity more apparent than real. Thus Schleiermacher was prepared to say with Clement of Alexandria, ‘As the Jews had their law, so the Greeks had their philosophy, until the coming of Christ.’ Yet he is well aware that to admit Christianity to be a mere modification of either would be to deny it altogether. Hence, in his view, the comparatively slight deference due to the scriptures of the old economy. He thought that the Christian must seek there in vain for any reflection of the feelings peculiar to his belief. Unless he will spiritualize and underlay passages with a meaning they had not, he has nothing there left him which is serviceable to his piety, except those general truths which are applicable to humanity at large, and of such ethical maxims he may find a store scarcely inferior in the pages of the classic moralists. What Marcion is said to have done literally, that Schleiermacher does virtually in his system: for ‘I am not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfil,’ he reads the converse. Both saw in Judaism one idea, that of retribution. The system of rewards and punishments there set forth appeared to them radically defective. Like Schleiermacher, Marcion regarded redemption as the great central truth of Christianity. With a quick eye for differences, he was slow to detect an analogy. The impetuous and practical theologian of Sinope could see God only in Christ; beyond the religion of Christ there was but the Demiurge with his imperfectness, and Satan with his kingdom of enmity. Marcion, in the second, and Schleiermacher, in the nineteenth century, were one in their dislike of the views prevalent among many of their contemporaries in Asia Minor, and in Germany respectively, which, as they thought, Judaized Christianity and Christianized Judaism. Both, therefore, placed these dispensations in strong contrast. Beyond this point they differ as might be expected. According to Marcion the two economies were different in their origin; according to Schleiermacher they were different in their species. Schleiermacher had reverence for the ‘wild olive,’ as Clement calls it, of pagan truth and pagan virtue. Marcion found no witness for God in nature or in reason—only in Christ. The Asiatic mind could dispense altogether with any principle of development; the European could rest satisfied with nothing thus sudden and inexplicable. This dread of everything Jewish, the general characteristic of gnosticism, has been carried to its extreme in modern times by Baur of Tübingen, who has misspent no ordinary learning and ability in the attempt to show that the history of early Christianity is that of a struggle out of a Judaized atmosphere into a purer element; and that when the Christian religion shall have been entirely freed from that Jewish prejudice which narrowed the minds of our Lord and his immediate followers, its work will be accomplished, and the law of love universal. This Judæophobia, as we may call it, has been exemplified among ourselves of late in ‘A History of the Hebrew Monarchy.’
Faith in Christ is described by Schleiermacher as the conviction that our spiritual need has been supplied by Him as our Redeemer. It is the certainty of an event within us. It has its commencement not with ourselves but in an influence proceeding from Him. To preach Christ is to bear witness to our individual experience, and to endeavour thus to stimulate others to seek a similar confidence for themselves. Unbelievers are blameworthy, not as deaf to argument, but as deficient in self-knowledge. The necessity of redemption cannot be demonstrated. He who is content to live without the blessing will always find some sophism to deny the duty. Rationalist criticism had been laborious in its endeavours to explain away the evidence from miracle and prophecy. Schleiermacher thought he rendered Christianity a service by showing that the faith of the Christian would remain the same had he no miracle or prophecy to which to appeal. An argument on such grounds, he says, presupposes, and cannot, therefore, awaken faith. Such evidence may serve to confirm belief when already in existence as matter of experience. If there be no faith previously existent, one of two replies will be made; either the facts will be denied, or their explanation deferred;—they will be consigned to that daily diminishing number of marvels which are vanishing before the path of science. Inspiration may be acknowledged and yet no inward conviction result. All that concession to argument can produce, even if sincere, is an impulse to self-examination, an effort after a more adequate apprehension of Christ; and that is a preparation for faith and not faith itself. As Bernhard of Clairvaux sings in the old hymn,—
‘Nec lingua valet dicere
Nec litera exprimere,
Expertus potest credere,
Quid sit, Iesum diligere.’
Schleiermacher makes the words of Anselm his motto,—‘qui non crediderit non experietur, et, qui expertus non fuerit, non intelliget.’ It was in a similar spirit, and with more justice on the whole, that Tertullian, when he saw many of his brother apologists rivalling each other in ‘the dark dexterity of groping well;’—searching into Trismegistus, Hystaspes, and the Sibyls for latent prophecy;—fell back on what he called the testimonium animæ. This distinction, however, should not be overlooked, that the testimony alluded to by Tertullian is equivalent to what we should term the moral sense, whereas that to which Schleiermacher appeals is identical with Christian experience.
Schleiermacher parts off from the Christian faith what is heretical in the following simple and striking manner. Our Christian consciousness refers all in our devout experience to the redemption effected by Christ. That which contravenes this fundamental proposition is heresy. Such error may arise in two ways. A false view of man may deny the possibility or the need of redemption,—a false view of Christ his power to redeem. Both as regards man and as regards the Redeemer, the possibility of error is twofold. The fallen state of man may be so conceived of as to preclude all capacity for receiving redemption, or his corruption be so explained away that he shall have no need of it. The various modifications of these two extremes constitute heresies of the Manichæan and Pelagian class. Those, again, with regard to Christ, are such as tend either to resolve the Divine into the human nature, or the human into the Divine. These are classified as the Ebionitic and Docetic heresies. All heresies fall under one of these four divisions;—opinions which do not are no longer merely heretical, they are Anti-Christian.5 The difference between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism is thus ably defined: in Protestantism Christ is the Mediator; in Catholicism, the church. The former makes the relation of the individual to the church dependent on his relation to Christ. The latter makes the relation of the individual to Christ dependent on his relation to the church.
Schleiermacher separates his theology into two leading divisions, the first having reference to man's consciousness of God prior to any experience of the opposed conditions of sin and grace; the second recounts the facts of his devout consciousness when aware of this opposition, i. e., first as the subject of sin, secondly as the recipient of grace. This twofold division, with a subdivision of the second branch, is equivalent, as far as the method is concerned, to the old triple arrangement which sets forth, first, the state of innocence, secondly, that of sin, and, thirdly, that of grace. Through each of these three leading departments there runs a counter-division into three, describing the condition of man, the attributes of God, and the constitution of the world, as they have relation each of them to these three states of humanity respectively. Thus the attributes of God, instead of being considered in sundry introductory chapters, are distributed throughout the successive divisions of the system. To the state of innocence he assigns the attributes of eternity, omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence; to that of sin those of holiness and justice; to that of grace, love and wisdom. In his view, the attributes denote not particular characteristic of the Divine nature, but only so many modifications of the way in which we refer our feeling of absolute dependence to God. They express the varying relations of the devout consciousness in its successive stadia to the Divine causality. They have only a subjective existence, they indicate changes of relation in us; much as (if we may adduce a material analogy) the common phrase, the rising or setting of the sun, expresses phenomena produced by the rotation of the earth; the change being not in his position, but in ours. Omnipotence he defines as the living causality of God. He denies the possibility of that self-limitation in the Supreme Being so necessary, as it appears to us, if the theologian would not virtually destroy the freewill of man. Abelard reasoned thus, God is able to do all that it becomes him to do, that which he does not do it would not become him to do, ergo, he can only do that which in any case he does. The conclusion of Schleiermacher is equivalent to this dictum of the schoolman—‘id tantum facere potest quod quandoque facit.’ The holiness of God is with Schleiermacher, as it were, the reflection cast by the light of conscience when it shows us that we are sinners. The love of God is the divine causality in redemption; his wisdom, that love in operation,—the art of the Divine love. The doctrine of the Trinity is dismissed in a few pages of appendix at the close of his book. In its ecclesiastical shape, he declares it no immediate expression of our Christian consciousness; it is rather a combination of several such. Our faith in Christ and our life in him would have been the same had we never received intelligence of this transcendental fact, or if the fact itself were otherwise than the received belief regarding it. It is still, in his view, an open question whether the passages adduced in support of the Trinitarian doctrine are not all fairly explicable on the Sabellian hypothesis. ‘The Godhead is the absolute causality, that which corresponds to our sense of absolute dependence, and is, as the Father, everlasting in creation, as the Son in Christ, and as the Holy Spirit in the Church.’ Hegel, on the contrary, assigned to this doctrine the foremost place in the Christian system, employing theological terms as symbols for his philosophical ideas.
In accordance with the philosophical objections of the day, and not unsupported by some great names in the history of the church, Schleiermacher assumes the eternal duration of the world. He cannot conceive of God as causality without a something caused. He maintains the immanence of God in the universe. This is not necessarily Pantheism, it stands midway between the rationalist deism and the scriptural doctrine of the supranaturalist.
Schleiermacher did not regard the fall of man as an historical epoch terminating a period of sinlessness. In his view the Mosaic account of Paradise, and the universal tradition of a lost golden age, are significant as expressive of an idea which finds its realization in the heart of every man. By our original perfection he understands that inalienable substratum of good upon which God raises in every believer the edifice of redemption. In other words, it is that without which we should be incapable of receiving what grace has provided; and it has not been annihilated, but only disordered and obscured by sin.6 Thus original righteousness and the corruption of the fall denote, with Schleiermacher, not two conditions of the race, but two elements within each individual. Adam was the first of a series of sinful creatures, not the head of the race entailing corruption on his posterity. He was the first-fruits of sin, he did not introduce it. The individual can never alter the nature of the species in which he is included. Again, if Adam were not one of the species, his transgression could not affect its condition. The Redeemer, as possessed of a nature both within and without the pale of humanity could change its state. Christ is the founder of the kingdom of grace, Adam did not found the kingdom of sin, he was merely its earliest subject.
The unhindered development of the higher consciousness, was peculiar to the sinless Jesus. In man the sensuous consciousness stands opposed to the divine as so much disinclination. The flesh lusteth against the spirit; this is sin. Our sensuous consciousness, in itself, is not sinful; manifested in opposition to our consciousness of God, which ought to control it, it becomes so. As long as we possess only the lower consciousness, sin is not realised within us. It enters first with the awakened consciousness of God. Then the latent hostility to good becomes apparent. By a universal law of our nature the sensuous consciousness is the first to develop itself. The consciousness of God enters therefore at a disadvantage; the ground is pre-occupied. The start which our lower consciousness has thus obtained, is the cause of the effectual hindrance made to the influence of the higher. In our state of sin, therefore, the consciousness of God exists within us as a something ‘becoming’ rather than fully realized. It is there in posse, not in esse. When this possibility becomes actual, we are in a state of grace. We arrive at this condition only through faith in Christ. Thus it will be seen that in the system of Schleiermacher, sin is the result of the disproportionate development of our higher and lower consciousness. In other words, it is the unequal growth of discernment and of will. Our corruption is not complete, in the orthodox sense. Sin is man's wintry side, the inclement aspect of his nature, which tends to wither the growth of goodness. On the other hand, he is prepared fully to admit that without Christ we can do no good thing. He opposes the speculative philosophy which makes the sinful identical with the finite. He is equally averse to the Rationalistic or Pelagian view, which attributes to man the power to be virtuous if he will, and assigns to Christ the office of an assistant, who confers the requisite quantitative addition of goodness which enables virtue to preponderate. Schleiermacher adopts the usual division of sin into original and actual, understanding by the former the sin of the race as a whole, by the latter the sin of each individual. Original sin is a universal sinful habit, which lies at the root of the particular sins of the individual: it is the act and the guilt of the race as a totality.7 The Catholics have their thesaurus bonorum operum. Schleiermacher appears to suppose a kind of thesaurus peccatorum, the common property of the human race, on which each man draws, and to which each in turn contributes.
The advent of Christ he regards as an event partly supernatural and partly not so.8 It was supernatural in this sense, that mankind possessed nothing in itself, the natural development of which could have resulted in such perfection. The incomplete could not supplement itself. The coming of Christ was the consequence of a divine creative act. By the divine act to which he thus refers the appearance of our Lord, he means the implantation by the Deity, of a certain germ of divine life in man. This commencement is supernatural, but the development of the principle thus imparted up to its perfected manifestation in the person of Christ, took place according to a certain natural law of progress. In this sense, the coming of Christ was not a supernatural event. When the divine activity had given the first impulse, it followed a certain organic development. The ultimate cause, therefore, is God, the resulting effects are the offspring of what is immanent in humanity.
This notion will remind some of our readers at once of the Logos Spermaticus of Justin Martyr. The ancient apologist believed that the Word, who had become incarnate a hundred and fifty years before his time, had revealed himself in the mind of man from the beginning, by certain scattered seeds of the truth; that he had thus originated, in fact, a moral consciousness to which the message concerning himself, as manifest in the flesh, might, in the fulness of time, be commended. In Christ we behold the concentration and perfection of all those dispersed germs of the good and the true, which had been committed to the bosom of humanity. According to Schleiermacher, this divine element was appointed to develop itself gradually in the history of our race, till it bore its appointed fruit, and realized its consummation in the person of the Redeemer. Of supernatural origin, it was of natural growth. As will be expected, Schleiermacher denied the personal pre-existence of Christ. The Redeemer he considers to have been actually, what the rest of mankind are only, potentialiter. ‘A perfect in-dwelling of the Supreme, constituted the peculiarity, the inner self of Christ.’ By the residence of Deity he understands a perfect consciousness of God. The divine consciousness in Christ was unhindered, absolute. His human nature was merely receptive, this was the vehicle which contained, the organ which was moved by the divine Potency. Fearful of erring on the side of Docetism, he will exempt Christ from none of the ordinary laws of humanity. He regards him as the realized ideal of humanity solely in its religious and moral aspect. He criticises with much acuteness the ecclesiastical formula of two natures in one person. For ‘divine nature,’ he proposes to substitute ‘being of God.’ With Schleiermacher, God in Christ is a divine activity in humanity, not an eternal person. This activity becomes personal only in the historical Jesus of Nazareth. In this opinion he resembles less Sabellius than Beryllus and Marcellus. The modification of Monarchianism which Beryllus introduced, is described in language strikingly similar to that employed by Schleiermacher.9
In his views concerning the work of Christ, Schleiermacher leans toward that aspect of it which partakes most largely of the character of mysticism. Here all is resolved into the mystical union of Christ with his members. The Redeemer draws the soul of the believer to himself, receives his life into his own, and communicates his own life to him. In the church of Christ, we have visible proof that the Lord ‘is not dead, but risen.’ In his members, his earthly life is yet perpetuated. The Christ of the true believer is a Christ within him. Only through union with Christ can we appropriate the blessings he came to bestow. Schleiermacher is averse to that isolation of the sufferings and death of Christ which would centre in them alone the work of our salvation. The whole life of the Redeemer was a redeeming act. His death was the necessary consummation of a complete obedience. The peculiar constitution of his nature rendered it unavoidable; it perfected the manifestation of his oneness with God. The entireness of that self-surrender on our behalf which could become obedient even unto death, constituted the sufficiency of his sacrifice. That conception of our Lord's mission which regards him merely as a teacher and a pattern, is most repugnant of all to the theology of Schleiermacher. He differs from the orthodox opinion concerning the vicarious satisfaction made by Christ. In his view, Christ is our substitute as the head and representative of his people; God beholds them in him; and in this way, his fulfilment of the Divine will even unto death was an obedience on their behalf. He made satisfaction inasmuch as he brought in an eternal redemption. But this satisfaction was not a substitution. The death of Christ was vicarious, inasmuch as suffering could be endured by the sinless only when he stood in the place of the sinful. But this substitution was not a satisfaction. Schleiermacher inverts the theological formula; for vicarious satisfaction, he would employ the terms, satisfactory substitution.10
The attendants of conversion are repentance and faith. We are not justified by imputed righteousness. The believer, as one with Christ, becomes an object of the Divine love. Not that he was before an object of wrath. Under the Christian dispensation, we can speak no longer of the wrath of God. The sinner, prior to conversion, is overlooked, and is not in this respect a person at all in the eyes of God. He is a particle of the mass, out of which the continued operation of the same creative act of God which gave us the Redeemer, does, through Him, call him into personality. Augustine employs similar language concerning a massa perditionis (De Pecc. Or. 36), though far from merging individual responsibility in the common evil, as the language of Schleiermacher would seem to do. Nothing in man himself, apart from the means of grace introduced by the Redeemer, can change his condition, or effect his justification. Thus Schleiermacher denies the existence of merit on the part of man in every sense of the word. He retains the fundamental proposition of justification by faith alone in this sense—that by faith alone are we united to Christ, and, in that union, justified. We bring with us no works of our own: all that we possess by nature is the capacity to receive the grace thus freely given. The views maintained by Schleiermacher on the subject of justification are little else than a revival of the doctrine of Andrew Osiander, which called forth so much opposition in the days of Melanchthon and Calvin. Like Schleiermacher, the Königsberg professor denied the common doctrine concerning imputed righteousness. According to Osiander, salvation is accomplished, and man is justified, by the indwelling of Christ within him (Christus justitia nostra inhabitatione essentiali). Regarding faith as a regenerating principle, he rejected the notion of a separate and abstract actus forensis, on the part of God, as a mere theological refinement. Such an opinion, though tending to confound justification and regeneration, certainly did not merit the harsh judgment of Calvin, who said of Osiander, ‘Ego semper inter dedecora nostra eum numeravi.’11
On the question of election, the opinions of Schleiermacher amount to a combination of Predestination and Universalism. The doctrine of election should be regarded, he thought, as a form of expression for the Divine Omnipotence. The predestination believed in by Schleiermacher is unconditional as that of Calvin, but it is not an election of some to salvation to the exclusion of others, but of some to salvation at an earlier, and of others at a later period of time. This opinion has been farther carried out by Schweizer, one of his distinguished followers, who lays it down in his theology as the necessary development at which Calvinism must arrive in the present day.
In the theology of Schleiermacher the Holy Spirit is that common spirit of love and holiness which actuates the entire body of those who are born again, which makes them one, and renders them the image of the Redeemer. His opinions concerning inspiration are modified accordingly. To the Old Testament he assigns none of that normative authority which all Christians are agreed in ascribing to the New. The Jewish Scriptures are indebted to the quotations in the New Testament for a mere historical significance. The New Testament occupies a twofold position. In one respect, it is the first member in the series of those successive expressions in which the common spirit of Christians has found utterance; in another, it is the rule for all such manifestations in the future. It is not requisite that all later expressions of the Christian spirit should be equally deducible from the canon, so that we can point to them there as in the germ. Since the Spirit has been poured out on all flesh, every age has a flow of Christian thought peculiar to itself. Yet no subsequent production can be regarded as the faithful and unmixed utterance of the Christian spirit, if it fail to harmonize with these primitive records. Nothing written since their appearance can rival them in authority to decide, in all cases, whether a doctrine be Christian or the contrary.
His theory of church polity appears somewhat indistinctly through the rhetoric of his Discourses on Religion, and the wavering statements in the elucidations appended to them. It amounts to a somewhat extreme ideal of Independency. Individuality is all in all. Christian churches should be associations of devout persons finding their bond of union in the similar character of their religious feeling, and choosing their own instructor in one found most adequate to supply their spiritual wants. The relation between pastor and people should be rendered easily dissoluble, and the churches themselves should be free to dissolve, to amalgamate with others, or to reorganize themselves, at the will of their members. The example of America called forth his admiration. Yet he is not quite sure, on second thoughts, whether the happiest effects do not result from the existence of a large established church surrounded by a number of dissenting communities, as in England. The consequent ebb and flow, the absorption now of separatists into the larger body, and again, the secession from it of some new society, would act as a preservative, he thought, against the lethargy of formalism.12 To the surveillance of the State in religious matters he was decidedly opposed, justly remarking, that such a course is as though the Emperor of China should consent to tolerate Christianity, and should appoint a board of mandarins to watch over the purity of Christian doctrine. The refusal of one department of the visible church to hold communion with another he condemned as contrary to the law of Christ. By ‘the church’ we are not to understand any one merely of the visible associations of professing Christians. Schleiermacher rendered essential service by raising this great truth from the oblivion to which party spirit had consigned it.
Such is a brief outline of this remarkable system. No one can rise from the study of Schleiermacher's theology without admiration for an intellect so sagacious and so comprehensive. To deduce thus ably his entire scheme of religious faith, from the one fundamental idea of our consciousness of God, was a feat for no mind less than commanding. To a scholarship concerning most questions of ancient philosophy and theological research profound, even for the learned leisure of Germany, Schleiermacher added a keen power of analysis, detecting the discrepancies of arguments seemingly compact, and the secret of distinction where others had confounded things which differed; as the eye of the geologist detects the crevice that promises the fossil where others could only see the surface of a solid mass. He possessed, beyond this, a faculty yet more rare, that which discerns the deeper harmony where most perceive only discord, and compatibility where prejudice, that will search only in one direction, and indolence, that will not search at all, can see only things incompatible. The tribute of such homage is our debt towards an inquirer after truth so sincere, and towards an opponent so conscientious and so fearless of all he deemed erroneous. But there is much, also, in the perusal of his system, to affect painfully the mind accustomed to turn with simple reverence to what comes to us from Him who spake as never man spake.
In all our theological systems we must presume on the existence of some ‘hay and stubble,’ though the foundation may be the true one. In the theology of Schleiermacher the worthless is found in contact singularly frequent with the gold and the precious stone; as in some great metropolis, squalidness and splendour stand in startling neighbourhood. That some things should be so clearly seen, and others so perversely overlooked, might well surprise us, were the infirmity as novel as it is glaring. We see in this edifice many a stately pediment resting, not on Doric columns—on a few reeds merely. It could stand only in a dream. It should not, however, be forgotten, that, in his amount of belief and the quasi-evangelism of his doctrine, Schleiermacher was much in advance of the majority of his readers. A large proportion of the theologians to whom he addressed himself, were more ready to wonder at and to mistrust him for believing so much, than to blame him for believing so little. While eagle-eyed to discern the weak point in the adverse line, he appears seldom to be aware that his own position has its quarters no less vulnerable. Ecclesiastical dogmas are passed through a rigorous ordeal. Philosophical assumptions are treated with far more deference. The days of the Centuriators of Magdeburg, of Illyricus, Baronius, and Rainaldus, are gone by. Theologians no longer think it incumbent upon them to ascribe all truth and piety to the orthodox, and to exaggerate to the utmost the mistakes and the sins of heterodoxy. This is well. It is high time that the persecuted memory of many a sincere and earnest thinker should be rescued from the reiterated slanders of several centuries. But the opposite extreme is not less to be avoided. The ecclesiastics of other ages are not to be judged by our own more enlightened standard of tolerance. We must not assign all the virtue to the champions of speculation, and all the bigotry to the heroes of the church. We may admire Vigilantius without anathematizing Jerome, and pity Servetus without detesting Calvin. The theological systems of the reformers, the polemical loci communes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were, it is true, no more fit to be the boundaries of religious thought in Schleiermacher's time, than city walls, built in the middle ages, to pen the teeming population of some prosperous municipality in the present day. But this theology would subject us to the opposite evil; it carries us from the pains of constraint to the perils of isolation. The individual is in danger of forfeiting the benefits, while he escapes the evils, of association. The common bond of Christians is so reduced as to become scarcely tangible: it is the undulating reflection of a truth in the feeling, rather than the solid objective truth itself. It is no more equivalent, in point of serviceableness, to the scriptural standard of faith, than a general notion among a number of scattered settlers that they are located east of a certain forest or lake, which no one of them ever saw, is comparable, in practical utility, to the scrupulous exactitude of a legal deed of conveyance.
The question may already have occurred to our readers, how can Schleiermacher consistently write a system of theology at all, when he lays such undue stress on the individual in religious matters, and carries to such an extreme the truth that religion must be felt to be understood? It is undeniable that he is inconsistent here. If true to his principle he must ignore the universal in the province of religion, and find the sole basis of his system in a something common. His aim was to shelter religion from the attacks of philosophy. By withdrawing it into the province of the heart, and denying in this sphere the argument, current elsewhere, from the universal to the particular, he did so far effect his purpose. But he did so in a spirit partaking, only too largely, of the temper of that very philosophy whose path he crossed. He could not effect the rescue of Christianity on these principles without serious loss to the object of his care. His efforts resemble the benevolent intervention of the deities of the classic legends, who, to save the nymph from her pursuer, changed her into a river or a tree. It may be that the stream and the foliage have their music and their beauty, that we may think we hear a living voice still in the whispers of the one and the murmurs of the other, yet the beauty of divine Truth, our heavenly visitant, cannot but be grievously obscured by the change, for ‘the glory of the celestial is one, and the glory of the terrestrial is another.’ Such ecclesiastical doctrines as contain what he regards as the essence of Christianity are received. All others, as being feelings embodied in the concrete form of dogmas, as man's objective conceptions of the divine, he considers as open to criticism. This distinction was first fairly laid down, we believe, by Aconcio, in 1565. The Italian refugee placed among the non-fundamentals the doctrine of the real presence and the Trinity. Schleiermacher accounts as thus indifferent the doctrine of the Trinity, the supernatural conception of the Saviour, many of his miracles, his ascension, and several other truths of the same class. This one reply—‘That doctrine makes no necessary part of our Christian consciousness,’ stands solitary, like a Cocles at the bridge, and keeps always at bay the whole army of advancing queries. But surely it does constitute an essential part of our Christian consciousness whether we regard the New Testament writers as trustworthy or otherwise. If certain parts of their account are myths, and others the expression of Jewish prejudice, and we are bidden dismiss them accordingly from our faith, how are we sure that in what is left these historians were faithful, or these expositors true representatives of the mind of Christ? Our Christian consciousness is likely to become a consciousness of little else than doubt if we give credit to the assertion,—Your sole informants on matters of eternal moment were, every here and there, misled by prejudice and imposed upon by fable.
It is not easy to determine how far Schleiermacher was guilty of the charge of Pantheism, an accusation brought against him more than once. In the elucidations to his Discourses he appears only anxious to exonerate himself from the imputation of material Pantheism. He admits that ‘for the enjoyment of communion with God, to attain the highest stage of devotion, and to interpret our own religious feelings to others, there lies on us an almost inevitable necessity of forming a personal conception of the Divine Being.’ But he shared in the prevalent philosophical dread of Anthropomorphism. We have already seen that this apprehension has carried the Hegelian Pantheists so far, that, to avoid worshipping an Anthropomorphic God, they have chosen to believe in an Anthropophagic one. Schleiermacher forms one of a numerous class who have agreed to adopt the word ‘living’ in place of personal, hoping to escape the difficulties on either side. He trusts in this way to exclude every view hostile to devout feeling, while leaving it to each individual worshipper to form a conception of God, farther removed from, or more nearly approximating pantheism, on the one side, or anthropomorphism on the other, as the demands of his imaginative or of his reasoning faculties may be the more imperative.13 Thus the question of belief in a personal or impersonal God is transferred by Schleiermacher from the facts of the case to the temperament of the individual. He does not inquire—What is God? but what is your disposition—logical or poetic? Choose your Deity accordingly.
Schleiermacher defines Omnipotence as the ‘absolutely living causality of God.’ He objects, as Schelling would do, to the term spiritual, and when he does apply that epithet to the omniscience of God, it does not involve essentially more than what he understands by the word ‘life.’ But in the possession of life only a being is not superior to man. Life is the property of mere organic nature. As applied to the Divine Being, if the epithet stands alone, it represents him as above a blind necessity, but also as equally below personality. With Schleiermacher the omnipotence of God appears reduced to the level of a mere power of nature. It is analogous to gravitation. There is an immanent necessity of causality in God: He must by his nature act always, and act everywhere. And yet while it is the law of the plant that it must grow, if unhindered, it is the privilege of man to act, or refrain from acting, at will. We have seen how Schleiermacher makes the possible and the actual identical in God, i. e., all that God could do, He does. Otherwise, argues he, we must suppose a self-limitation in God. And why not? we answer. If all the possible must be realized by God, then that little sphere of the possible left open for a free being such as man to act in, is preoccupied by this all-pervading causality. If this be true, our actions are only another name for the actions of God in that department of the caused to which He assigns us. Man is no longer free. Schleiermacher, no doubt, honestly intended to raise our views of the Divine nature above such conceptions as he deemed derogatory. But his reasoning lowers instead of exalting the character of God. This imagined irrepressible causality of the Divine nature would, from its very excess, become an obstruction, and so a defect. God would have to be delivered from His own omnipotence before He could clear a space for freedom, and, bringing His creating work to a climax, call into existence that which most resembles Himself,—a being with will free and choice open. We need not enlarge here on the obvious consequences of such a doctrine. The freedom of man has not sufficient tangibility assigned to it to serve as a defence for the character of God. If God be not the author of sin, He must have given to man a power to do what He himself should not determine him to do. But this is virtually denied in the position assumed by Schleiermacher. He allows man freedom as respects his fellows, but as regards God, it is entirely taken away.
Schleiermacher defines sin as the positive opposition of the flesh to the spirit. He employs the term flesh not in the more extended sense of the Apostle Paul, but as denoting the inferior powers of the soul; the spirit, on the other hand, is the seat of our consciousness of God. The opposition of the faculties resident in the former to the authority of this consciousness constitutes sin. An objection which a profound thinker has urged against this definition appears to us unanswerable.14 Will Schleiermacher maintain that the spirit is the seat of the consciousness of God only? Then man is distinguished from the animal creation solely by his being a creature capable of religion. Such an admission theology does not find it requisite to demand, and philosophy, certainly, would be the last to concede. On the contrary, we find much evidence going to establish the conviction that there must exist some other power, or powers, side by side with this religious susceptibility, and occupying with it the upper department of our nature. What proof can be adduced to show that the opposition evinced to the consciousness of God does not arise among them? There is no evidence from experience (rather, indeed, to the contrary) to show that the higher powers must maintain harmony with the devout consciousness, and that sedition can arise in the lower region of the sensuous alone. This word ‘sensuous’ is not employed by Schleiermacher with sufficient accuracy. We have had occasion to point out the extension he gives it as embracing our social and moral feelings. But his use of it, now in this wider sense, and again as denoting our mere animal life, leads to confusion. He oscillates between the two significations, and would seem sometimes to ascribe sin, as in the inadequate theory of some theologians, to sense alone, as commonly understood; and elsewhere, with a more scriptural as well as philosophical insight into the essence of transgression, to define as sinful every tendency of the soul which leads man to exalt self above God.
The theory of Schleiermacher is substantially correct as regards the universality of sin, but it is wholly inadequate to explain how sin is the free act of man as an individual. It is certainly not easy to understand how it can be said, as he asserts, that our consciousness of God must attain a certain quantum. Sin, he says, arises from the start the sensuous consciousness has obtained, thus counteracting and outnumbering the higher unity of the spirit. Let it be granted that this higher consciousness, in itself homogeneous, independent of time and change, ‘becomes actual for us by union in one momentum with the successive modifications of the lower consciousness.’ Still the difficulty remains, how is it that this higher consciousness becomes a certain mensurable magnitude, a more or less, before such union? If it exists at all, it must exist absolutely. A feeling of absolute dependence which yet is a limited dependence is a contradiction in terms. If so, our finite consciousness cannot limit the infinite consciousness, which is the immediate and immutable reflection of the Deity within us. But, if not, sin is absolutely impossible. On this supposition, sin is only really possible when perfection is imperfect. A sense of the great difficulty here appears to have led Schleiermacher to the employment of frequent periphrastic expressions when he has to speak of our consciousness of God as greater or less, and as restricted by our sensuous consciousness.15
The sin and redemption of Schleiermacher's theology are not equivalent to the sin and redemption of Scripture. If sin be only the result of the unequal development of the higher and lower faculties, the name may be retained, but the reality is gone. It is then inherent in the order of our natural development, and, as resolved into a negation, loses its criminality. Thus in a necessitarian system we find ourselves apparently on the high-road to Pelagianism. Sin and grace are not opposed conditions but successive stages. For conversion we must write progression. The imperfect consciousness of God previously experienced is supplemented by the complete consciousness which is given us in Christ. The state of imperfection was the inevitable preliminary to the subsequent development. The advent of Christ would therefore be, not the turning point, but the consummating transition-point in the history of our race. If the inadequacy of the higher consciousness be the appointed condition of redemption, sin is necessary, and, therefore, sin no longer. The error to which Schleiermacher is thus led springs from the source just pointed out, viz., a conception of the divine causality which deprives man of freedom. Let such an aspect of omnipotence be received as the true one, and there are only two courses open in consequence; either, if sin be an actual opposition to what is good, to ascribe its origin to God; or, in order to exclude the causality of God, to reduce sin itself to a mere negation. The unscriptural results at which Schleiermacher has arrived are the consequences of the artificial theory by which he has attempted to unite both these hypotheses.
Sin, therefore, in this aspect of it is a condition of unequal development. Yet in another it involves a sense of guilt. There is an opposition to God of which we are conscious. This criminality is recognised in the theology of Schleiermacher, yet only subjectively. His theory represents us as guilty at the bar of our conscience, but not in the eyes of God. He would obviously be unjust if we were. Sin, therefore, has a real and positive existence only for us. Our unequal development is made patent to us by conscience as sin.16 It is obvious that, in any system where man's freedom is virtually denied, his guilt cannot possess a real existence either. The result at which Schleiermacher here arrives places humanity in a light altogether novel. We have been accustomed to think that the work of religion was accomplished in proportion as the thoughts of man were brought into harmony with the thoughts of God; and that the difference between the human and the divine estimate of sin lay in this, that even the most humble and devout would see but little of their sinfulness compared with the All-wise. But here we find that God has so constituted us, that we must perpetually accuse ourselves, though He has no charge against us whatever. What then is conscience but a terrible lie, the torturing falsehood that preys upon our life—let us drive away the vulture. Not so, answers Schleiermacher, this sense of guilt is appointed by God as a part of our organization, that we might be enabled to apprehend the perfection of our humanity in Christ, the deliverer from this suffering. We reply that, on Schleiermacher's own principles, this result might have been realized without a cost so fearful. It seems to us to exalt neither the truth, the wisdom, nor the love of God, to represent Him as thus deceitfully scaring our race into an appreciation of moral beauty. Moreover, if these things be so, what shall we say of the theology which has thus fathomed the secret of the Most High? God, it would seem, has kept one standard of judgment for Himself, and assigned another to us. This He could never have intended we should discover, but a Titanic effort has detected the secret policy of the celestial legislature. If the theory be true, devotion is paralyzed as soon as the discovery is made, and no mere words will withhold men from banishing conscience as an enemy. If God be true, this contradiction cannot exist, penitence is no delusion, conscience is reinstated, and the theologian dismissed. We do not mean to accuse Schleiermacher of actually intending all that we have just said; we merely say that, in our judgment, his mistakes legitimately issue in such results.
His statements concerning the person of Christ and the authority of Scripture are self-contradictory and vacillating, and constitute the least satisfactory part of his theology. In his philosophy of religion he assigns too great an importance to the founders of religious systems. His idealism has here led him into one extreme, and in his view of mankind as a totality, he has been betrayed by the same cause into an opposite one. The human race exists only in idea as that aggregate of which he so frequently speaks. Mankind are separated by a multitude of circumstances, and no individual can be influenced by more than a portion of his species at a time. Those who follow us affect us not at all, those who precede and accompany us, only partially. The generations are a flowing stream, not a standing water. Thus his explanation of original sin as a universal habit of humanity in the aggregate is less philosophical, as well as less scriptural, than the doctrine of hereditary transmission, with all its difficulties. The same is true to a large extent of his exaggerated impression concerning the influence of individuality in originating religious belief. He pays too little regard to the results of national culture, foreign influence, and the manifold testimony of history and geography against a view so partial.
In such a theological system Spinoza and Zinzendorf might each claim a share. Yet the essential truth of the vital union of believers with Christ was at once the starting and the returning point of this fine intellect in its daring excursions. On this ground Schleiermacher would appear to have retained throughout the sympathies of many among the Pietists. Much that we should account both puerile and irreverent in the expressions of affection for Christ employed by the community of Herrnhut he had from the beginning renounced. But the brethren saw their main truth still retained, and, though modified, set forth with profundity of thought and variety of learning as the cardinal doctrine of Christianity. The mother would have retained her son in the seclusion so dear to herself; she could augur nothing good from his determination to join the company of Free Lances bound for that seat of war where so many gifted minds had met defeat: but, once gone, she was not a little proud of his prowess, and glad at heart to find that the lessons of his childhood were reverenced in some degree to the last. The Rationalist critics on the other hand, could not despise a theologian so learned, and so little fettered by ecclesiastical prejudice. The labours of Schleiermacher contributed more than any other cause to diminish the number of those who could remain content with that negative Deism, formerly so prevalent. Rationalism has not yet recovered the blow it received. Even those thoroughgoing contemners of the subjective theologian, the hierophants of the World-Soul, the chosen repositories of absolute ideas, as they thought themselves, who looked down on the advocates of feeling as men in the childhood of their religious life, were shown that such feeling was not only consistent with, but based upon, an objective historical truth. Numbers of these who were journeying towards the frozen extreme of scepticism turned back to tarry, at least, in that more genial region of belief to which Schleiermacher invited them. His theology was the intermediate stage through which so many were conducted by a gradual process to a belief in that gospel which had been the object of their contempt. Schleiermacher himself experienced a somewhat similar transition, his views previous to his death becoming far more definite and scriptural. The portraiture of the Christian faith which he produced was of service likewise as an example of earnestness united with charity. He sacrificed in many instances solidity to extent, and truth to love. But it is frequently requisite that some men should go too far to induce others to proceed far enough. He appears to have foreseen some such attack on Christianity as that made by Strauss. Had he lived he would doubtless have entered the lists against him, though prepared to make many concessions altogether unjustifiable.
True to his fundamental principle, Schleiermacher never replied to any attack made upon his theology by the adherents of the current systems of philosophy. He was only careful to show that his theological opinions could not be incorporated into their results, or translated into their terminology. He stood in opposition to the speculative school inasmuch as he laid the foundation of his theology in the feeling. This process the speculatist of course repudiates, since he has abandoned consciousness for intuition. He endeavours to deduce the being of the universe from the being of God. Enquirers of this class, starting with a common principle, pursue different paths; some, with Schelling, supposing a kind of fall from the absolute resulting in the universe; others, with Hegel, regarding it as a step in advance out of the indefinite towards the more real. It is not a little curious to observe, that the speculations of the ancient Gnostics were divided in a similar way; Basilides, with his holy Ogdoad and magical Abraxas, lamented the incoming of evil in the downward process first in the formation of our world; and Hermogenes, on the other side, traced to the immediate operation of God the elaboration of matter into ordered beauty—the development of the Hyle into Cosmos.
Schleiermacher was attacked in his turn by that philosophical Ishmael, Hegel. He had assailed the Rationalists as removing God too far: their vanity, he would say, banished the Infinite beyond cognizance. His absolute Idealism had no mercy for ‘subjective Rationalism.’ Not less did he oppose the junction between the Infinite and the finite as it was believed in by the Supranaturalist. Here were certain bridges across the gulf—Revelation, Miracle, &c. These he stigmatized as mere finite ideas. He pitied the theologian who could not see that history was the ‘eternal incarnation of God;’ that the Fall was an epoch of progress—the foundation of personality—and that Paradise, prior to its occurrence, could have been no better than ‘a park for wild cattle.’ The Identity of Schelling he called the night of philosophy—‘a dark in which all cats are grey.’ To the immediate of the Romanticists—feeling, he opposed his mediate—thought. ‘The dog,’ said he, ‘is the best Christian, if Schleiermacher's absolute-dependence theory be true.’ Feeling he represents as the lowest of our faculties—a mere capacity for reception. It was in his view susceptibility only, it might be good or evil; it was a chaos until the brooding thought had fashioned it into shape. Here, however, it has pleased him to overlook entirely the distinction drawn by Schleiermacher between the higher and lower consciousness. It is not true, moreover, even as regards the sensuous feelings, that we possess them in the same way as the brutes. Man does not perform even the most ordinary functions of life, like them, from mere instinct.
We must now advert to the position occupied by Schleiermacher as a biblical critic. The active cultivator in a civilized country seldom bestows much attention on those plants which the land would produce in a state of nature. We have expelled the native produce of our island, and colonized it with vegetation of foreign growth. Fruits native to Persia and Armenia, Caramania and Syria, fill our fields and our gardens. It has been thought the triumph of enlightened criticism in modern days that it pursues a similar course, though with a result as evil in the spiritual as it is advantageous in the natural world. The Rationalist commentator overlooks or eradicates what he finds, and substitutes for the rose and the vine of scripture what he brings—the prunus spinosa, or bramble. Thus the Hegelian accounts it the glory of a commentator to show how the simple language of the word of God may be made the receptacle of his philosophical ideas. In attributing to their authors opinions and intentions which they never entertained, and in detecting profound mystery in what was obvious, these critics have outdone the commentaries of Averrhoes on Aristotle, the theological expositors of the Romance of the Rose, and even those of their own countrymen whose acumen has discovered Guelphs and Ghibelines beneath the Nibelungen and the Amelungen of the old German epic. Schleiermacher takes a prominent place among those who have pursued the investigations of what the Germans call the higher criticism. Verbal or practical exposition he seldom attempted, but he loved to try his skill in that art of critical divination which seeks to separate, on internal grounds, the spurious from the genuine in the New Testament canon. He has displayed much ingenuity; the well-covered assumption, the plausible hypothesis, the skillfully directed objection, evince the dexterity and the scholarship of the critic—but the results are worse than useless. Even those who have been sanguine with respect to the advantages of investigations so conducted have confessed, that here the commentator has been more successful in the display of himself than in the examination of his author. Classical scholars have admired the labours of Schleiermacher in this department; but such praise is of a very equivocal description. The records which relate to Christ, and the stories concerning Romulus, are not to be assigned to the same category. Schleiermacher criticised the gospels in the spirit of Niebuhr, and the epistles in the spirit of Bentley. It was obviously a rule with Schleiermacher to presuppose in his author a strictly logical course of thought and manner of expression. He forms an ideal of the way in which Paul would think and write, and employs this as a test. But he was deficient in that faculty requisite to enter into the character, spirit, and circumstances of another, so essential to the task he undertook. The consequence is, that he requires Paul the Apostle to think and write constantly after the manner of Schleiermacher the dialectic. A writer may be distinguished generally for closeness of reasoning, but surely allowance should be made for susceptibilities, where the heart as well as the understanding has its share, and which will not always be found reducible to a standard coolly and elaborately preconceived. Yet of not a few passages thus wrought in fire Schleiermacher stands in doubt. Such an arbitrary course finds at once a parallel and a practical refutation in that egregious failure, the critique of Bentley on the Paradise Lost. The Rationalist critic has commonly approached his task as destitute of taste for religion as was the Aristarchus of Cambridge of taste for poetry. Many of these classical scholars have been little better able to apprehend aright the allusions to Hebrew ritual and Hebrew poetry, than was Bentley to appreciate the references, so frequent in Milton, to the poets of Italy and the romance of the Middle Age. But neither German nor English critic could venture openly to impugn the author himself. Accordingly, a man of straw, a kind of whipping-boy, is created for the occasion. Bentley assumes the existence of some friend of the blind poet, to whom he entrusted the overseeing of the press, and supposes that he and the bookseller between them ‘brought out the first edition polluted with such monstrous faults as are beyond example in any other printed book.’ But this is not all, this imagined editor is accused of having interpolated numerous verses of his own. Similarly, the critics of the Scriptures have always at hand some imaginary collector of anecdotes and legends, too easy of belief; or some transcriber, too unscrupulous, on whose negligence, credulity, or fraud, the blame may be thrown, and any passage explained away as a myth or rejected as a forgery.
It has been generally remarked that Lutheranism tends to make theology the affair of theologians exclusively, while Calvinism, wherever it has prevailed, has diffused a theological taste and culture among the people. In this respect the practice of Schleiermacher resembled the results of Lutheranism as much as his theory leaned towards the doctrines of Geneva. He wrote for theologians. To direct the student of divinity, to contribute towards rendering the ministerial body an order of men more harmonious and more enlightened, was the work of his choice. He was not the first who attempted to improve the arrangement and the method adopted in the several branches of theological science. But a great advance beyond anything that had previously existed, was made in Schleiermacher's Plan of Theological Study. This book, concise to a fault, (an error not frequent with his countrymen, whose books, like their miles, are the longest in Europe,) little more than a string of aphorisms, and much in need of the notes he subsequently added, signally displayed his remarkable power, at once of generalization and analysis. In his conception of theology, as a whole, he was before his contemporaries. Results since realized have gone some way to confirm the epithet, ‘prophetic,’ which his admirers applied to these masterly outlines. To Schleiermacher the theology of Germany is indebted for the introduction of that systematic union between doctrinal and practical theology which Professor Nitzsch has laboured with such ability to develop in his recent work on practical theology. Before his time the divines of Germany had not assigned to practical theology its due place as the contemplated result and consummation of the systematic. Schleiermacher sought to separate from doctrinal theology, the metaphysical and philosophical elements which long usage had mixed up with it. In his nomenclature, exegesis, ecclesiastical history, and dogmatical theology, are all classed together as parts of historical theology. This is not surprising in the case of one who regarded a system of theology as properly nothing more than the annals of devout experience. The events of this experience he found in the growing life of the Christian church, from its commencement until now. Thus the exposition of Scripture, and the biography of the church as a whole, are the data whereon to build a theological system. We believe that a system of theology should be more than such a mere record, and that not Scripture and the ‘evangelical church,’ but Scripture alone must supply the material.
The independence and the ability which characterized the sketch were not less conspicuous in the lectures. Schleiermacher was accustomed to lecture with merely a slip of paper before him, on which the main topics of discourse were indicated. The students—in admiration of that affluence of thought and facility of language with which he displayed a subject in its process, presenting it in changing aspects and successive stages, and, when it seemed exhausted, suddenly opening ‘a deeper depth’—were accustomed to call him the idea-spinner. His manner as a lecturer was monotonous. It is said that, on one occasion, when some of his auditors were indulging their mirthful propensities, he administered a brief reproof in a tone so similar to the declamatory manner of the lecture itself, that several of the ingenuous youth were found to have recorded it duly in their notebooks, as a part of their theological course. His great acquirements were not apparent in his ordinary intercourse. He was not more averse to ostentatious quotation in his books than to self-display in his conversation. With the students he usually conversed merely on the common topics of the day. Only when the occasion demanded, and when the absence of reserve in the questioner called for a similar freedom in the reply, did he lay aside this affected indifference. He had a penchant for representing himself as merely one of the many. Like Socrates, he was fond of conversing with tradesmen and operatives, and of enjoying a little good-humoured irony in his character of a simple inquirer.
To his duties as professor, were added those of a preacher and a pastor. In the last-named capacity his services were restricted, almost entirely, to occasional catechizing, and the preparation of youth for confirmation. He was open to receive visits, but he could find no time for that perambulatory dissipation which is frequently understood as pastoral duty. That he should at the same time have written for the public, lectured to his class, and preached to his congregation, producing so much in amount, and of such excellence, constitutes an example of systematic assiduity, which might cause many a man who is no idler, to feel anything but self-satisfied at the comparison.
The sermons of Schleiermacher occupy four thick and closely printed volumes. They and the Theology reciprocally illustrate each other. The language employed in them respecting the Redeemer, is such, that the reader is scarcely anywhere reminded that the preacher did not hold His divinity in the orthodox sense. The critical doubts of Schleiermacher with respect to parts of the canon, did not affect his quotation of Scripture. He very seldom, however, selects a text from the Old Testament. His earlier sermons are too exclusively ethical in their character; in his treatment of the theme suggested, he frequently turns aside to some minor topic, some collateral difficulty, or to an analogy comparatively irrelevant. The majority of his discourses, and especially those of later date, are of a very superior order. They contain thus much of Gospel-truth, that man is invariably spoken of as needing redemption, and all is rendered subordinate to the proclamation of Christ as our Redeemer. He is most fond of dwelling on the union of each individual, and of the church as a whole, with Christ, the true vine, the head of the body, the corner-stone of the edifice. It is his general object to animate his auditory afresh with the joyous consciousness of their fellowship with Christ and with each other. He dwells with delight on the wisdom and the love which accounts each Christian an essential part of the community of the saved, and causes all to work together for the good of each and of all, equally and at once. The style of the sermons is grave and unadorned; the rhetoric of his earlier writings never reappears: the peroration is usually animated and devotional, not unfrequently a direct supplication to the Deity: the main body of the discourse argumentative and didactic, rather than hortatory. They contain not a little that is exegetically valuable. Schleiermacher displays considerable skill in deducing instruction from the attendant circumstances of a narrative, and in applying these less obvious lessons to Christian practice in daily life. Thus the history of our Lord's intercourse with the disciples in the days of his flesh, furnishes him with a copious variety of analogies, suggestive of instruction and comfort to His followers of the present time. These sermons found many imitators, who imitated, as usual, their defects. But in numerous cases the evangelical preacher was stimulated by their example to venture on a wider range of thought, and to aim more at the conveying of information as well as the revival of devout feeling. These discourses showed how high an order of ability might find in the sermon adequate scope for its effort, and how little that kind of composition need necessarily consist of the meagre common-place drilled in the trite division. They labour under one serious defect,—well-calculated, as most of them are, to interest the believer, there is nothing in them tending directly to awaken the irreligious. Schleiermacher appears to have presupposed the existence of genuine religion in all whom he addressed. These compositions are characterized for the most part by the excellencies of thought rather than of expression. The sentences are often lengthy, seldom obscure. The almost total want of quotations from the Old Testament has deprived them of a warmth they could ill spare. The constitution of Schleiermacher's mind,—altogether western, knew little sympathy with oriental modes of thought. He could follow Paul in his argument with the Romans; he failed to appreciate the sublimity of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The sermons of Tholuck are superior in poetry and pathos; they possess more fervour, but less depth of thought. Tholuck, with his glowing diction and solemn earnestness of manner, is better fitted than we can imagine Schleiermacher to have been, to carry with him an auditory, and to interest and impress the careless. Schleiermacher was gifted with such a rapidity in the operations of thought, and enjoyed so complete a mastery of language, that he never required more time to prepare for the sermon, or the lecture, than that necessary for a thorough consideration of the matter in hand. He resembled Robert Hall in this respect, being able to think out his entire subject without resorting to the use of the pen. But he did not equal the English divine in the power of then determining, and retaining in his memory, the very words of a discourse. The text would be selected, and the topics it suggested would occupy his thoughts at various intervals during the week. On Saturday evening the divisions were written down, and he trusted to the moment for the precise shape which the thoughts thus prepared should assume. He commenced in a deliberate and somewhat colloquial tone of voice, increasing in rapidity and vehemence towards the close. ‘I heard him,’ says Dr. Lücke, ‘for several years every Sunday. He was always himself, always attractive by his peculiar treatment of the text, the freshness of his thoughts, his methodical arrangement, and flowing diction. I never knew him fall into an inaccuracy, or find it necessary to correct any expression. When not wholly occupied by the thoughts he was presenting, I had opportunity repeatedly to admire the skill with which, in spite of his tendency to involved periods, he always contrived to secure the precise word he needed,—and to retain unbroken the clue of thought which was to conduct him to the conclusion he had in view.’17 This facility was obtained by degrees. He began by ceasing to write the close of his sermons, and proceeded, step by step, till he was able to extemporize even the unimpassioned exordium.
The later works of Schleiermacher were almost all of them occasional and controversial pieces, called forth by the various disputes which arose on the question of Ecclesiastical Reform. A pamphlet which he published in 1804 pointed out with an unsparing hand the abuses of the establishment, and advocated the union of the Lutheran and Reformed churches. The union which had become so desirable was effected, and the reform so requisite was headed by the king himself. But in the very quarter whence the good came were the seeds of a formidable evil. The Agenda, issued from the royal cabinet in 1822, opened the theological trenches on the momentous question—how far, if at all, may the secular power prescribe to the church? Augusti, Marheineke, and Ammon, appeared as combatants in behalf of the temporal authority; Schleiermacher, under the name of Pacificus Sincerus, maintained the cause of ecclesiastical freedom. When once engaged in controversy, he threw his whole soul into the conflict; he was witty, sarcastic, and ironical; he made many enemies, and the reaction was painfully felt by himself. He could not, like Priestley, write a bitter pamphlet as a relief to his system, and, leaving the venom to rankle in the mind of the object of his satire, go his way lightened and rejoicing.
In person Schleiermacher was diminutive and humpbacked. A head of unusual size, and large flashing eyes, gave indication of the power of the mind inhabiting the deformed body. Unlike many to whom nature has thus denied external advantages, he was generous and charitable. A considerable element of pugnacity in his disposition was associated in him, as in every noble mind, with a yet stronger love of fair play. Always ready to acknowledge ability and goodness, it gave him pleasure to defend them. A mere personal dispute or a literary controversy could not have summoned him from his repose in the decline of life; but he thought the prosperity both of the church and of the state at hazard, and, in the old Roman spirit, felt that he ought not to be wanting to the common weal. A constitution naturally delicate he strengthened by exercise, so as to become distinguished among literary men for his feats as a pedestrian. He rose early and sat late. After an evening protracted to a late hour among a circle of friends, whom he had enlivened by his conversational powers, he would rise before six on the following morning for his lecture.
The importance of the service Schleiermacher was destined to render has become signally apparent in the religious crisis at present agitating Germany. Had he never appeared to restrain the sceptical tendencies of one party, and to enlighten and stimulate the activity of another, the orthodox clergy in Germany would now find themselves completely alone. Few in numbers, and deficient in influence, their prospects must have been of the gloomiest description. But the recent convocation at Wittenberg has shown that a body of men far stronger than themselves are prepared to coalesce with them. The great majority of that assembly consisted of men who, having early embraced the principles of Schleiermacher, had all of them a leaning, more or less strong, towards orthodoxy. But though there were few of these divines who did not subsequently approach evangelicism still more nearly than their master had done, the strictly orthodox regarded them generally with a jealous distrust. Now, however, they will make common cause against a common antagonist,—the infidelity so prevalent. This coalition will be no less ultimately beneficial than it is at present expedient. The rigidly orthodox will become more liberal: the excesses of scepticism will warn, and intercourse with their new friends will evangelize, those farthest from orthodoxy.
But Germany requires no second Schleiermacher. She now needs a man, or rather many men, of a very different description. When he appeared, the head-quarters of infidelity lay still among the higher and educated classes. It prevailed wherever there was culture enough to allow a man to think himself authorized in extolling knowledge and depreciating faith. The early Rationalists had been content to leave religion where it was for the common people. Among them, however, indifferentism was almost universal. But now Hegel is popularized, and comfortless poverty is instructed in a comfortless atheism. The workman and the artisan are ready to meet the believer in God and immortality with some current philosophical reply. The last state is worse than the first. These evils must be encountered on their own ground. The German theologians have been too long men of theory only. Now practical effort is indispensable, and that not of the kind made by Schleiermacher, among the universities and the clergy, but effort among the masses of the people. Not that Christianity is to be deprived of erudition. The religious men of Germany have learnt the lesson which such a separation is sure to teach. All remember how an illiterate asceticism left the successors of Arndt, Spener, and Franke defenceless before the assaults of Semler, Baumgarten, and Michaelis. Schleiermacher did not, with the transcendentalist, virtually deny a historical christianity. He did not, with the Unitarian, regard Christ as an example only. Yet he failed to apprehend evangelical truth in its fulness and its certitude. His system, with its arbitrary treatment of scripture, and its oscillation between the sceptical and the mystical, occupies, by its very nature, an intermediate position. He himself, at the last, would scarcely have claimed for it more. As a step in the progress towards a belief at once more positive and more reasonable, the service it has rendered is great. As a system of faith definite and complete, it cannot maintain its ground. But that man has earned no common praise of whom it can be said that, but for the preparation his labours afforded, many good and learned men would never have attained the belief they now enjoy. Though the theology of Schleiermacher should be a continuing city for no man, it has been a hospice for multitudes whom it has received, sheltered, and invigorated on their upward journey towards the Truth. But to reduce our English theology to his standard,—which some persons among us, we are sorry to see, appear disposed to do,—would be to send us back to an immature and mischievous style of thinking which Germany itself is fast outgrowing. The position of Schleiermacher was one of advance in his own day, and in Germany; it would be one of retrogression at present, and in England. In our passion for progress, it behoves us to be careful that we do not mistake the road. Change and onwardness are not identical.
Notes
-
His principal fault is too great a reliance upon his own estimate of the internal evidence, furnished by the Dialogues themselves. If one of them is thought to fall much beneath a certain standard of excellence, or to advocate opinions inconsistent with those supposed to be Plato's, it is rejected. See, as an example, the remarks on the criticisms of Schleiermacher and Ast on the Ion, in the Prolegomena of Nitzsch, (quoted in Bekker's Plato, vol. ii. p. 423,) and, in general, the very just observations of Mr. Lewes, on this school of criticism, in his Biographical History of Philosophy, vol. ii. p. 40.
-
See Life of Jean Paul Fr. Richter, vol. ii. c. 6.
-
In an accusation he brings against the pretension and clamorous party-spirit which characterized a large portion of the criticism and the literature of the day, Jean Paul praises the modesty and candour of Goethe and Schelling. He continues—‘The same encomium is due to the few works we possess by the acute, ironical, and comprehensive mind of that great-great-great-grandson of Plato—Schleiermacher.’ He then adds in a note, in his grotesque manner—‘His work on ethics will found a new epoch in moral philosophy; it is full of luminous and glowing foci, rich in the antique spirit, in learning, and enlarged views. Here we find no Fortune's wheel turned by a man who cannot see, and giving us a jumble of notions at haphazard, but the fiery wheel of a great system makes its revolutions.’—Vorschule der Aesthetik, p. 104. Sämmtliche Werke, vol. xix. This was written in 1812, and refers to the earlier edition of the Sittenlehre.
-
Glaubenslehre, § 11—14
-
Glaubenslehre, § 22.
-
Glaubenslehre, § 68.
-
Glaubenslehre, § 71.
-
Glaubenslehre, § 93—99.
-
‘This divine nature of Christ had, prior to the incarnation, no personal existence (μ[UNK] προ[UNK][UNK]εsτάναι); it then first possessed a personal individual existence,’ (οδία ο[UNK]sιας πε[UNK]ιγ[UNK]αφή.) See the well known passage, the locus ecclesiasticus, for the opinions of Beryllus, in Euseb. VI. c. 33.
-
Glaubenslehre, § 104.
-
Henry, Leben Calvins, vol. iii. p. 297.
-
Reden, p. 230.
-
Reden, p. 138.
-
Müller, Lehre von der Sünde, vol. i. p. 415.
-
See Müller, vol. i. p. 424.
-
Glaubenslehre, § 79.
-
Stud. u. Kritik. 1834. Heft 4.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.
