SOURCE: “Religion Within the Limits of Human Perception: Schleiermacher,” in A Romantic Triangle: Schleiermacher and Early German Romanticism, Scholars Press, 1977, pp. 65-79.

[In the following excerpt, Forstman critiques Schleiermacher's Speeches as evidence of his evolving religious philosophy, which makes a clear distinction between religion and morality.]

In the early romantic circle in Berlin, at a time when polemics, not least against religion, had not yet given way to rebuilding, Friedrich Schleiermacher was something of an enigma to the others. He had won his rights to membership by solid performance on the salon circuit. An engaging conversationalist, sensitive to the new mood and attuned to it, his friendship was valued and his views honored. But he was also in the camp of the enemy. An ordained clergyman, he had been appointed by the superintendent of churches, Sack, to be the Reformed chaplain to the Charity Hospital in Berlin, a position of few responsibilities which happily left the young preacher free not only to pursue his private studies but also to move in the lively circles of Berlin salons.

Those who knew him realized that he had liberated himself from the pietistic Herrnhuter brotherhood of his upbringing and that he had no stomach for the orthodox or enlightened religion they all viewed with disdain. They also knew that he had maintained throughout it all his intention of pursuing a vocation in the church. They enjoyed his intelligence, judgment, and wit; his devotion to an institution that they and others like them had come to despise puzzled them. Those early days of the circle, however, were buoyed not only by polemics but also by openness and expectancy, by an eagerness to see what anyone might do with the new perceptiveness. So Friedrich Schlegel devised a means of winning from Schleiermacher a promise to try his hand at being an author.

Schlegel's plan was carried out on the morning of November 21, 1797. Schleiermacher, in a rather disheveled state, sat working at the table in his small apartment. About 10 o'clock the young Count Alexander Dohna appeared. Schleiermacher and Alexander had first become friends when Schleiermacher served as tutor to the younger Dohna children at the family castle, Schlobitten. Alexander, more recently, had helped to introduce his friend to the Jewish doctor, Marcus Herz, and his young and beautiful wife, Henriette, who conducted one of the liveliest salons in Berlin. Schleiermacher had not seen Alexander since his recent return to Berlin and was mystified by his suspicious behavior as he moved about the room uncertainly, repeatedly glancing out the window.

Shortly Alexander was joined by his brother who gave away the secret with his exuberant birthday greetings. Schleiermacher's surprise had not run its course when three others arrived: Madame Herz, the brilliant Dorothea Viet, a daughter of the popular philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn, and wife of a humdrum Berlin banker, and Friedrich Schlegel. The friends showered Schleiermacher with gifts, cleared the table and laid out chocolates and pastries. “Friendly good wishes streamed to me from all sides, and small gifts for the remembrance of this happy occasion.”¹ So Schleiermacher described the surprise party to his sister.

For Schleiermacher, who tended to be conscious of anniversaries—above all, of his own—it was an especially happy occasion. The warmth of human companionship, of men as well as women, was essential to his contentment and happiness, and this delight in one another with special focus on himself by those who were of special value to him was enough to leave him in high spirits even at the end of the day when he recounted the occasion for his sister.

The execution of Schlegel's plan was the only diversion in the celebration. On his signal all five guests exhorted in a chorus, “You must write a book.” Schlegel then took the lead and kept repeating that here Schleiermacher was, 29 years old, and he hadn't yet accomplished anything. The only antidote to this scandal was for him to take pen in hand and become industrious with it. Schlegel would not cease with his cajolery until Schleiermacher gave him his hand in promise in the presence of all the witnesses. In exchange for this vow Schlegel magnanimously announced that he was willing to move in with Schleiermacher at Christmastime, an arrangement that had been talked about for several weeks. Schleiermacher was glad to accept this side of the contract. He liked Schlegel and considered him greatly stimulating and vastly superior to himself in intellect and wit. The other side weighed heavily on him “because I have no inclination at all to be an author.”² Even so, he agreed to the terms.

Due to the press of other responsibilities and the difficulty of conceiving a subject, he was slow in starting. Not one to take promises lightly, however, he did begin the project in earnest in August of 1798. From that time the gestation period was nine months, and the issue was the astonishing book, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers), a work that aimed at the heart of his enigmatic relationship to his friends.

After Schleiermacher transferred for an interim to Potsdam to substitute for a pastor on leave, the work moved ahead steadily. He finished the manuscript on April 15, 1799. “Today,” he wrote Henriette Herz, “April 15, at 9:30 a.m., I gave the final stroke to Religion. Here it is. Now it can go forth and see what will happen to it.”³ He had good reason to wonder how it might be received. Although it was entirely permeated with the spirit that reigned in Henriette Herz's salon, it was not a book calculated to leave his urbane friends undisturbed. With reference to them it is an apology in the classical sense. Starting out by trying to establish a genuine common ground and to eliminate objections to the subject matter, he hoped to lead them to a new ground—his, not theirs. What he had to say, he knew, would not please orthodox churchmen, nor would it resonate with representatives of enlightened religion or irreligion. These, too, however, he had in mind. For all these types of people the book was, as Friedrich Katzenbach put it,⁴ a Kampfschrift, a fighting piece.

1.

The Speeches begin with an apology or explanation of the work. Schleiermacher is confessedly a religious man, and as such he cannot keep silent about what is most important to him. To whom can he speak but to those “cultured despisers” in his own land with whom he had so much in common? The British are much too utilitarian and the French barbarously indifferent and frivolous. The uncultured certainly need to be addressed on high matters, but Schleiermacher knows that his readers would not turn to these people when they wish to treat matters most serious to themselves. Neither will Schleiermacher. However unexpected it may be, Schleiermacher will address those “who have lifted themselves above what is common and are permeated by the wisdom of the centuries” (1).⁵ He wants to lead them “to the innermost depths where religion first speaks to the heart,” to show them “the human condition from which it emerges and how it belongs to what is highest and dearest” to them (15). In short, Schleiermacher believes that precisely these cultured despisers, from whom he should expect so little response, are the best candidates for his speeches because what he wants to talk about is, under other names, what is most important to them.

Under other names. That is the main issue from the beginning, and Schleirmacher wants to open up the possibility of recognizing it. Thus his first substantive discussion finds him describing the new view that had daily currency with the cultured despisers with only an occasional reference to the deity as the source of the reality he and his friends perceived.

All the world, he says, is “an eternally continuous play of opposing forces” (4-5). Each human life consists in the dialectic of two opposing impulses. On one side, every man wants to be himself, an individual, and to that end he tries to draw as much of the world as possible into himself. He wants to possess. On the other side, he is afraid of standing alone against the whole and thus yearns to become a part of something greater. He wants to be possessed. Everyone wants to be unique, completely free, and like others, guided and subject to order and necessity. There are extremes in which one of the two tendencies is almost entirely blocked out by the other, but the beauty of life is the richness of the possible combinations that actually exist in humanity.

Those at the extremities are deficient. The one in his energetic embrace of the world in its particularities will never rise above a consciousness of the individual. The other who looks only to the whole will lose all sense of differentiation and definiteness and levitate around “empty ideals” (6). The extremes, however, should not be joined in an equilibrium that is only dull and static. There are always some, sent by the deity, Schleiermacher suggests, who manage to meld the opposing forces into a living unity. These give new and dynamic expression to the whole through their own particularity. Such a person is “a true priest of the highest” (10) calling the “purely speculative idealist” (9) back to the world and its matter and calling the purely sensual up to the higher power of humanity and to the universe. To all he describes “the heavenly and eternal as an object of pleasure and unification, as the only inexhaustible source of that to which all their energies are directed” (10).

The statement is crucial to Schleiermacher. Beneath the yin and yang of the polarities that characterize human life there is a ground that founds and unites the opposites. He does not describe this ground, but he does insist that it can be mediated to men through persons who exhibit in themselves a creative interplay of the two poles in which each is affirmed through the other. Thereby this ground (the heavenly and eternal) is understood as an object of both individuality (pleasure) and universality (unification), as the inexhaustible source of both human impulses (that to which all their energies are directed). The sense for this foundation, which Schleiermacher says is mediated through particular people whom his readers, already persuaded of the dialectic, could at least imagine, points toward what Schleiermacher wants to call religion.

It is not the way his readers conceive religion. They view religion as it has manifested itself institutionally and dogmatically, and they understand it in the terms of their perceptions of polarities. Schleiermacher accepts the analysis but denies that it penetrates to the essence of religion. Thus he conducts them through an exercise in their own analysis. Religion, according to their view, he says, arises either from the particular or the general, “from the different types and sects of religion as they have existed in history or from a universal concept” (16). The cultured despisers have rejected both these types, and Schleiermacher is in full agreement with them. He knows, as well as they, “the history of human foolishness” (19) as it has shown itself in religion “from the senseless fables of uncivilized peoples to the most refined Deism, from the raw superstition of our common folk to the badly contrived fragments of metaphysics and morals called reasonable Christianity” (19). The one rests at the pole of the particular and unique, the other at the pole of the general and universal. Even should one, however, project a gradual progress toward a final perfect form somewhere between these extremes (comparable to the dull equilibrium of the person who balances attention to palpable reality and general ideas), such a construct would share with the extreme representations an understanding of religion as maxims and systems of doctrines. In that commonality all such forms obscure what Schleiermacher means by religion. Thinking about the domination of this view makes Schleiermacher indignant. It has “alienated the high and glorious from its destination and surrendered its freedom in order to hold it in a hateful slavery to the scholastic and metaphysical spirit of a barbaric and cold age” (20). “These systems of theology, these theories of the origin and end of the world, these analyses of the nature of an incomprehensible being where everything runs to cold argumentation render religion into an ordinary school debate” (20). Schleiermacher's readers haven't found religion in this game, and they won't find it because it isn't there.

If these people, who in other matters always press beyond superficialities, wish to understand religion rightly they must try to see what actually constitutes a genuine religious person. The real heroes of religion have never themselves engaged in the Sisyphean work of system building. They are not to be classified with “those theologians of the letter who believe that the salvation of the world and the light of wisdom can be found in a new coat woven from their formulas or in a concatenation of their imagined proofs” (23). Doctrines are not the source of religion but at best an issue from it. The source is in the heart, the self to which the new group thought it must turn for the building of a new mooring and the creation of a new world. To this source Schleiermacher wants to direct his readers and thus announces his thesis: “that religion springs necessarily of itself from the inner reaches of every better soul, that it has its own special province in the disposition in which it reigns without restriction and that it is worthy to move the most noble and excellent through its most inner power and to be known by them in its most inward essence” (28-29).

2.

In his second speech, “On the Essence of Religion,” Schleiermacher wants to display the special province that belongs to religion and to indicate how it operates in people. At the beginning, however, he acknowledges a severe problem. His subject simply will not submit to a straight-forward analysis. He wishes he could set it before his readers in a well-known form, but that would not penetrate the original character of the subject nor touch the special faculty for it. He wants to talk about a possibility of the spirit, and his readers know quite well how futile it is to seek a straight line to such a matter in a day when everything is subject to “harmonious cultivation” (33). The world rarely exhibits religion purely, unmixed with foreign elements. It's the same with other spiritual matters. So he must call on his readers to use their imaginations in order to visualize what he sees but cannot point to directly.

The foreign elements that have been introduced into and even identified with religion are metaphysics and morality. These activities represent the polarity Schleiermacher had introduced in the first speech. The duality permeates much of early nineteenth century literature. In metaphysics a person points himself to the whole, in morality toward a particular part of the world.

If you place yourself at the highest standpoint of metaphysics and morality you will find that both share with religion the same object, namely the universe and man's relationship to it. This similarity has, for a long time, been the cause of numerous aberrations. Metaphysics and morality have invaded religion with large armies, and much that belongs to religion has been concealed in improper dress within metaphysics or morality.

(35)

Just as Schleiermacher, two decades later in the introduction to his major theological work, argued that religion is not a thinking or a doing, so here he wanted to correct the confusion of religion with metaphysics and morality. For him it is the best route to the distinctive sphere of religion. “I ask you,” he writes,

what does your metaphysics do? Or, if you want nothing to do with this old term with its historical encumbrances, your transcendental philosophy? It classifies the universe and divides it into such and such essences. It traces the foundations of what exists and deduces the necessity of the real. It unwinds out of itself the reality of the world and its laws. But in this realm religion has neither the presumption nor the impulse to posit essences and to determine natures, to lose itself in a countless number of foundations and deductions, to search for final causes and to articulate eternal truths.

(36-37)

He is not less adamant about the dissociation of religion and morality.

And what does your morality do? It develops a system of duties from the nature of man and his relationship to the world. It orders and prohibits deeds with unrestricted authority. But religion may not presume to do that. It may not use the world to derive duties. It contains no codex of laws.

(37)

For too long men have viewed religion as a collection of fragments of philosophy and morality, as a “hodgepodge of opinions about the highest being or the world and commandments for one human life or, indeed, for two!” (39).

Schleiermacher knows his readers do not like religion, but he also knows they are serious and honest people and that they therefore do not want to strike at shadows. Genuine religion is neither an acceptance of certain ideas nor a submission to stated rules. It is not a matter only of the mind or the will, both of which are partial in their effects on men, at best mediated by reflection or choice. In religion a man is affected immediately in the center of his self. Thus religion is not and cannot be “either a thinking or a doing.” It is “a mode of perception or intuition and feeling.” “It wants to perceive the world. It wants to listen attentively to it in its own representations and activities. It wants to be filled and grasped by its own immediate influxes in childlike passivity” (46-47).

Thinking and doing are human activities, the one striving to conceive the necessary structure of the universe, the other trying to expand the range of one's freedom in the world. Religion, on the contrary, is a being acted upon, a perception of the infinite in every finite particularity and an insight into a man's mode of being whether he wants it that way or not. Metaphysics and morality try to push beyond human limitations in knowledge or control of the world. That's why religion is a necessary counterpart. “To want to have speculation and practice without religion is audacious presumption, impudent enmity toward the gods. It is the unholy impulse of Prometheus who stole in such a cowardly manner what he could have asked for and expected in calm certainty” (49). But the Promethean impulse only robbed man of the feeling of his own infinity and likeness of God Schleiermacher means, however, an infinity and likeness to God that has its locus precisely in man's reflective self-restraint (Besonnenheit). Religion is not a means whereby a man is elevated above the human sphere to omniscience or omnipotence. Metaphysics or transcendental philosophy strives for the one, aggressive activity in the world for the other. Religion does not make men gods; it gives them a new perception of humanity in which the infinite discloses itself in everything finite. Within the boundaries of human life, on the near sides of the opposing poles of the whole and of particularities, it endows a man with a sense of the interpenetration of the one and the all, with an intuition of the boundless in the bounded.

Speculation, even at its best, needs religion as a counterweight keeping it sensitive to a higher realism. Otherwise it will “negate the world at the same time it seems to be constructing one. It will degenerate into a pure allegory, an empty shadow image of our own limitations” (52). Religion is a way of perceiving the world (or an effect of the perceived on the one perceiving) that is then grasped and conceived by one in a mode suitable to one's nature. It affects every part of a man, body and soul, and reveals to him his limits, within which, however, the whole is constantly active. What is perceived, in short, is “not the nature of things but their effects” on one (55). “To accept everything singular as a part of the whole, everything limited as a representation of the infinite, that is religion” (57). To try to rise beyond this to a conception of the nature of the whole will inevitably bog down in an empty mythology. Religion is not a new knowledge about another reality; it is a new and immediate way of seeing the reality we know.

As such it knows nothing of deductions and connections. It will not unfold by necessary steps of thought into a system of concepts. Take, if you like, he says, the highest possible standpoint available to the human spirit for viewing the universe. What you will see is an infinite series of singular entities, each one in relation with those adjacent to it and those with others. “This infinite chaos in which every point presents a world is as such the most proper and the highest image of religion” (64-65). Or place yourself at the most distant point of the bodily world. You will see not simply the same objects in new arrangements. Rather you will find entirely new sets of objects reaching from there in still further distances, and you will be no closer to the boundary. The world is inexhaustible and in its countless variety inexhaustibly active. To be able, at any point in this fluid and dynamic reality, to feel and untuit the infinite is to have religion.

Such an understanding of religion distinguishes itself also from moral systems. Religion, he says, is “the sworn enemy of all pedantry and onesidedness” (69). When a man is grasped by an intuition and feeling that also reconciles him to his limitations he finds himself wary of the Promethean impulse in morality as well as in thought. This is not to say, however, that the religious man is inactive just as it does not follow that he is unthinking. If a man were nothing but religious he would forsake the world and give himself entirely to idle looking on. This is not Schleiermacher's recommendation. Religion affects activity but only as an accompaniment “like sacred music” to every act. “One should do everything with religion but nothing from religion” (71). Calm and restraint are essential to sound morality. The immediate feelings of religion are not always characterized by these qualities. More important, morality lives on a sense of freedom, religion on a sense of being determined. The must of morality appeals to the will and its sense of obligation; the must of religion describes a necessity originating in a determination of the self. Religion roots in its own distinctive sphere.

The confusion of religion with thinking and doing, formulas and precepts, however, is understandable. Schleiermacher has tried to discuss religion as perceptions or intuitions and feelings. In the religious event these are united, but it is an unstable chemical. The intuitions tend to express themselves in formulas; the religious man wants to talk about what has happened to him. The feelings tend to express themselves in life and consequently in deeds that will constitute for the religious man an “order of salvation.” But the formulas and orders of life can only be understood as articulations and descriptions of the intuitions and feelings which themselves are funded out of their original unity. That original unity is “the birth hour of everything living in religion” (80).

The locus of the religious event is not in the contemplation of nature, however inspiring and joyful it may be. On the contrary, religion enables one to perceive the infinite and the whole in every aspect of nature. The sense of affinity and conflict, of individuality and unity rises originally in the inner disposition and then is transferred to nature. Nor is the locus in humanity, although here we are much closer to religion. “In order to perceive the world and to have religion, a man must first find humanity, and he finds it only in and through love” (94). Again, it is not humanity that bequeaths the sense of the unity of the one and all, the finite and the infinite. Rather, religion makes possible the perception of the representation of humanity in every single person. Not even history, “the highest object of religion with which it begins and ends” (102), is the place of its generation. Religion causes one “to detect and to follow in everything that belongs to human activity, in play as in earnest, in the smallest as in the greatest, the activities of the world spirit” (108). Religion itself is an immediate and original event in the disposition that transforms one's perception of and feeling for nature, humanity, and history.

Finally, Schleiermacher wants to explain the status of religious doctrines and dogmas. Some, he says, are “abstract reflections of religious intuitions, others are free reflections on the original functions of the religious sense or results of the comparison of the religious with the common view” (114). Under no circumstances, however, should one “take the content of a reflection for the essence of the event” (114). One can be genuinely religious and know nothing at all about miracle, inspiration, revelation, prophecy, or grace, for example. A man who reflects about his religion will have something to say about these concepts, but what he says will never be independent of the religious event itself. Thus miracle, according to Schleiermacher, is simply the religious name for event. “To me,” he says, “everything is a miracle” (116). Any original and new perception of the world is a revelation. Inspiration is “only the religious name for freedom” (116). Prophecy is the anticipation of the second half of a religious event when the first half is given. Every religious feeling, since it occurs with a sense of passivity, can be described as an operation of grace. None of these concepts is a theory; the terms articulate and describe the religious perception or feeling on which they are inseparably dependent. Thus he pleads with his readers: Religion, “however loudly it claims again those belittled concepts, leaves your physics and, please God, your psychology alone!” (115).

To the concepts of God and immortality, those foundation stones of enlightenment religion without which all apparently believe there can be no religion, Schleiermacher is indifferent—except for a vigorous attack on those who make specific formulations essential to religion. To be sure, some will speak of a personal God and others of an impersonal God. But Schleiermacher thinks (and he doubts his readers can deny it) that although every perception of the universe can yield up a concept of God, a religion without God can be better than one that speaks incessantly about God. Moreover, most who have made a fuss about immortality have been “entirely irreligious” (131). No one, he thinks, has a right to speak about immortality who has not lost himself in the one and all and become one in his finitude with the infinite. Talk about immortality, like talk about God, is only legitimate when it issues from the distinctive sphere of religion.

3.

The third and fourth speeches deal with the cultivation of religion and its social aspect. Both of these are inevitable accompaniments of religion and consequently essential to it. The religious person will not be able to keep what he has seen and felt to himself; he will try to arouse it in others and to foster its development just as he wants it to grow in himself. Moreover, he will associate himself with others whose religion stems from the same perceptions and feelings. Not only is man “by nature” a social being; religion “especially” draws men together (181).

Schleiermacher recognizes perils in both impulses, and both draw the full force of his polemics. Those who represent religion distort or even destroy its cultivation and its church by making it external. They suppose that one can confirm others in religion by teaching (the communication of religion by instruction in its doctrines) or by demonstrating its civic values (the communication of religion by training in its morality). The one supposition is “silly and meaningless” (151); the other, utilitarianism, is the “new barbarism” (163). In the church there is, on the one side, emphasis on creeds (association founded on doctrinal conformity) and, on the other, the establishment of the church by the state (association based on politics). Both are, again, external, the one transforming religion into ecclesiastically sanctioned formulas, the other destroying religion with favors in lieu of control, thus affecting the church “like the terrible head of Medusa” that caused everything to turn to stone (203) and polluting it by introducing its own interests “into the deepest mysteries of the religious society” (205).

None of these distortions places religion in its proper sphere. There it must be free, indigenous, and internal. The church that emerges from the proper communication of religion should be spontaneous and fluid and as indefinite in its definition as possible. Proper communication, dependent as it is on the spoken word, is not impossible. One should employ not direct speech with its tendency toward mechanical thinking but confessional speech that draws the hearer toward the place where the religious event occurs. The hearer must be made reflective, turned to look upon himself. One can understand, therefore, why “all religious people have had a mystical tinge” and “all those given to fantasy” have at least “stirrings of religion” (164). Both, however, fail in the full exhibition of religion: fantasy tends to be superficial and the mystic cannot get beyond himself.

Schleiermacher expresses hope in the cultured despisers. They have turned their backs on Friedrich Schlegel's “harmonious dullards” who have enslaved the senses for the purpose of “exercises of understanding in which nothing is understood, clarifications in which nothing is clarified and analyses that resolve nothing” (168). The best among them have chosen to limit themselves in order to become something definite. They know that “unless everything is limited and separated there would be no objects” (168). This restriction is important to religion. Although religion strives for an unbounded freedom of intuition, its intuiting has to be focused on something definite. It has, once again, to do with the intuiting of the infinite in the finite. Schleiermacher thinks the cultured despisers are close to a rediscovery of religion.

There are three directions of the sense or intuition: inward toward the self, outward toward the indefiniteness of a world view, and a third that finds the sense oscillating between the two in an inward-outward movement seeking always the unity of the two. Each of these three directions is a way to religion. The first two issue in well-known forms. The inward way leads to mysticism as in the ancient East where everything was thought to border on nothingness. The outward way leads to schematic explanations of the heavens and nature with representatives ranging from those with “the purest perception of the infinite and living reality” to those given to “the darkest superstition and most senseless mythology” (172). The third way, which is closest to art, has always brought beauty and dignity to the other two, but it has not produced much of its own in religion. Here, however, so Schleiermacher believes, is the hope of the present moment, not only for the purification of the other two forms, each of which is incomplete in itself, but for the new expression of living religion in its most perfect form. This is why he feels such affinity for the cultured despisers of religion. If they would recognize how close they are they could be the harbingers of a new age.

4.

The Speeches undulate between identity and friendly difference with the cultured despisers of religion. In the first two Schleiermacher praises their scorn of religion in its popular representations but tries to correct their distorted view of its essence. The third concludes with a paean of anticipation for what they could do for religion in the new age. Another breach seems to open in the fourth speech with its insistence on a church or the social element of religion, but the separation was not severe. Despite their individualism they felt the impulse toward association. The salon was to art and culture not unlike what the church was to religion as Schleiermacher explained it. The fifth speech, however, which was crucial to Schleiermacher, threatened to open an unbridgeable chasm. Schleiermacher's subject is “The Religions,” and he means positive or specific religions.

Now I have a new subject to treat and a new resistance to overcome. I want to lead you, as it were, to the God who has become flesh. I want to show you religion in the often indigent form in which it has surrendered its infinity and appeared among men. You should discover religion in the religions and seek out in what stands before you in earthly and polluted form the particular currents of the same heavenly beauty whose form I have sought to reconstruct.

(239)

Schleiermacher has come full circle returning to one of the major objections of his readers, for the cultured despisers were alienated from the visible forms of religion and from institutional Christianity in particular. Even so, the speaker thinks he has developed a point of contact from which to move toward an affirmation of positive religions and engage in a sympathetic discussion of Christianity. He has argued that religion is a perception and feeling of the infinite in the finite, and he has encouraged his readers in their impulse to limit themselves in order to deal with something definite. By now his readers should know that by “finite” Schleiermacher does not mean the world in general but finite particularities. If he wants, as a religious man, to speak of every event as a miracle because he perceives the infinite and whole in every event, it is not a general statement applying to nothing in particular but a description of whatever particular event the religious man focuses upon. Anyone who has come this far with him should understand that although religion is determinable in an infinite variety of ways, if it is religion it will be determined in some quite specific way with reference to some definite perception within the limitations of time and space. Every man is finite and is thus determined in a specific way. “Religion by its concept and essence and even for the understanding is infinite and immeasurable. It must therefore have in itself a principle by which it is individualized. Otherwise it could neither exist nor be perceived” (242).

This is why the positive religions are usually so “indigent.” When the infinite is perceived in something finite and takes form, the finite is not made infinite or released from all its limitations. “Much of this corruption is unavoidable as soon as the infinite takes on an imperfect and limited shell and steps down into the sphere of time and the general influence of finite things to be governed by them” (245). Once that is understood, however, it is not impossible to distinguish the essence of a religion from its foreign elements. The foreign elements are inevitable because of the limitations within which human beings live and because their only access to genuine religion is through these limitations, not in negation of them.

No man can become an individual without at the same time being placed in a specific world and order of things and among particular objects. Likewise, a religious man cannot attain his individuality unless in the same act he houses himself in some definite form of religion. Both are the effect of the same condition and cannot be separated from one another.

(266)

Other ways of discussing religion are entirely unsatisfactory. Some want to deal with types and divide religion into three general ways of perceiving the world: “as chaos, as system, and in its elemental diversity” (253). These modes of perception translate religiously into polytheism, pantheism, and naturalism, but the types are merely conceptual. Though they may serve the purpose of general descriptions of collections of aspects of individual forms they will not at all serve as a means to move toward genuine religion. “You know that however much a person divides a concept, even should he do it infinitely, he will never arrive at individuality but only at less universal concepts” (253). These conceptual devices and others like them are “only types in whose sphere many individual types have developed and still others will develop” (256).

More important to Schleiermacher is his insistence that so-called natural religion is a bogus enterprise. His readers have rejected all religion, but they have been more patient with natural religion. This rage of the Enlightenment wanted to reduce all religion to its essentials that a man could know or believe with confidence, usually God and immortality. Schleiermacher views this as a “uniformity of indefiniteness” (268). It should be clear, he says, that the adherents of such religion have not begun with a living moment of self-consciousness. “They never ask a person who has religion how he came to it but how he can demonstrate it. They assume he can demonstrate everything. … They have a providence in general” (268-269). Everything is general, airy, and conceptual; nothing stems from concretely determined conviction. Genuine religion, however, is “real, potent, and definite.” It has its “definite content,” “its own sphere and its special relationship” (271). It is thoroughly human and therefore “thoroughly historical” (273). So it is always open to misunderstanding, but not if one remembers that “the fundamental perception of a religion can be nothing but some kind of perception of the infinite in the finite” (274).

His readers, therefore, must look to the positive religions. If they are convinced all religions are equally bad they could found a new one, but surely sober reflection will discourage such a venture. Schleiermacher wants them to consider Christianity. In Germany Judaism is the only other religion, but its narrow focus on judgment and retribution made a long duration impossible. Schleiermacher's jaundiced understanding of Judaism is moderated by an admiration for its “beautiful childlike character” (276), but he despises its political and moralistic cast and thinks it has been dead since the sacred books were closed and “the conversation of Jehovah with his people ended” (278).

The original perception of Christianity is “more sublime, more worthy of adult humanity” and “more extensive” (278).

It is nothing else than the perception of the universal resistance of everything finite to the unity of the whole and the way by which the deity handles this resistance, how it mediates the enmity against itself and sets limits to the expanding alienation by strewing single points over the whole that are simultaneously finite and infinite, human and divine.

(278)

The form of Christianity and its articulation are determined by the polar combination of corruption and redemption, enmity and mediation. Christianity sees how everything finite tends to spread corruption by arrogating to itself more power or knowledge than its place within the whole justifies (the Promethean impulse) and how God is constantly active in new revelations and mediations to reconcile and how he leads each person to recognize himself. Even so, Christianity “never overcomes the old complaint that man cannot comprehend what is of the spirit of God” (279). It is modest in its knowledge.

The source for its modesty is also the source for its polemics. Founded on the perception of the finite through which the infinite reveals itself without violating the limits of the finite, Christianity is “thoroughly polemical” (279) not only against every irreligious, distorting elevation of the finite but against itself as well. It not only seeks to unmask “every false morality, every bad religion and every unfortunate mixing of the two” (280), but its own hubris as well. Leaving the finite in its finitude not only provides a basis from which to criticize every pretension to exceed finite limitations, it also endows every polemic with a degree of circumspection and provides the freedom to turn the criticism on itself. It knows that because its perceptions and feelings are focused in the finite realm it will never be purely divine in its form. “The corruptibility of everything holy insofar as it becomes human is a part of its original perception of the world” (283).

This understanding is not mitigated by the Christian view of Jesus as the redeemer, the mediator of the eternal in time, or by the consequent attribution to him of participation in the divine essence as well as in finitude. What is divine in him is not his moral teaching or his singularity of character. These are human. “The truly divine is the remarkable clarity that the great idea he came to present developed in his soul—the idea that everything finite requires a higher mediation in order to cohere with the deity” (283-284). To try to comprehend the origin of this in him, to presume to know the conditions and the state of affairs, “to want to remove the veil that covers and should cover” it, is “vain audacity” (284). Christians view Jesus as mediator and therefore as participant in divinity as well as humanity because they understand themselves to be redeemed by him. The view does not rest on a special knowledge that exceeds finite limitations; it is a conviction based on the event of redemption that one understands to have occurred in oneself through the mediation of Jesus. It carries with it the two parts of the original perception of Christianity. “The one half is the corruptibility of everything great and divine in human and finite things” (289). “The other half is that certain sparkling and divine points are the primary source of every improvement of this corruptibility and of every new and closer unification of the finite with the deity” (289). For Schleiermacher this is the most perfect mode of perceiving the infinite in the finite, it is the closest to what the cultured despisers have perceived in their new vision of the world, grounding and enlivening that vision, and it is what he wishes to commend to them.

5.

In the Speeches on Religion Schleiermacher declared that the foundation on which the moorings for the new vision of the world should be built is religion, specifically Christian faith. In developing this assertion he came into conflict repeatedly with various opinions of the cultured despisers, but at no point did he want to violate their basic vision. He himself had assimilated it. Consequently, he saw no way to reaffirm the supposed objective foundations of religion from the past. Sacred books containing revealed truths, authoritative creeds and churches, divinely sanctioned moral codes, or beliefs demonstrated or approved by reason are not authentic representations of religion. First of all, they distort religion by transferring its focus from the center to the periphery. More fundamentally, they foster the illusion, foreign to the new vision and to Schleiermacher's understanding of religion, that something finite can itself be infinite, whether it be authors of books, framers of creeds and moral codes, leaders of churches, or deep thinkers. In short, the supposed objectivity of these forms of religion is a bogus objectivity. In each case the source can be traced to a finite subject. Once the consciousness of consciousness has dawned such “objective truths” assume the dress of “orientations” or “conventions,” and that gown has not nearly so many sequins.

The problem with moorings for the new age was precisely the disappearance, in the wake of the new perceptiveness, of the shimmer of previous foundations. In his description of religion and of Christianity Schleiermacher did not try to find a back door to old securities. On the contrary, he pointed to the consciousness itself and tried to describe the event of religion there. One could say he created a new god as a mooring for the new age, but such a suggestion violates the consciousness he wanted to describe. “To create” is an active verb more appropriate to the acts whereby a person tries to conceive the whole (metaphysics, transcendental philosophy) or to extend his freedom over or from the world (morality). The consciousness Schleiermacher wanted to describe is passive, a consciousness of being acted upon. If it were a new religion Schleiermacher commended, the possibility of which he acknowledged, “creation” might even so be appropriate. But he was wary of a new religion and in any case was certain its origin would also be veiled in impenetrable mystery. He wanted to commend Christian faith as the highest possibility, and although Christianity, so long as it is alive, will always produce new mediators and purifiers, it will also always require responsibility to its origins in history. The religion Schleiermacher described is rooted in the subject, but it is a subject determined in its own consciousness by its object, if such language is any longer appropriate. As Schleiermacher put it, it is a perception of the infinite in the finite in which the finite remains finite. It is a religion within the limits of human perception.

Notes

1. Briefe (Propyläen Verlag, 1923), p. 65.

2. Ibid., p. 66.

3. J.-D., I, p. 224.

4. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (Reimbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1967), p. 50.

5. References to the Speeches (Pünjer edition) here and in the remainder of this chapter are indicated by page numbers in parenthesis in the text. A handy and reliable printing of the first edition only, with which this chapter deals, is in Friedrich Ernst Daniel Schleiermacher, Werke, hrsg. von Otto Braun und Johannes Bauer (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1967), Bd. IV, pp. 207-400. The two English translations by John Oman (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), and Terrence N. Tice (Richmond, Virginia: John Knox, 1969) were consulted. These books are translations of the third edition (1821) although Tice's notes include referenced to changes in the editions.

Abbreviations

Athenaeum: Athenaeum, edited by A. W. and F. Schlegel, three volumes, photomechanical reproduction of the original. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960.

Dial. (J.): F. E. D. Schleiermacher, Dialektik, edited by Ludwig Jonas. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1839.

Dial. (O.): Friedrich Schleiermacher's Dialektik, edited by Rudolf Odebrecht. Leipzig: J. C. Heinrichs Verlag, 1942.

F. S. u. N.: Friedrich Schlegel und Novalis; Biographie einer Romantikerfreundschaft in ihren Briefen, edited by Max Prietz. Darmstadt: Hermann Gentner Verlag, 1957.

GL: Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube, seventh edition, edited by Martin Redeker, two volumes. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, and Co., 1960.

Herm. (K.): Fr. D. E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik, edited by Heinz Kimmerle. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1959.

Herm. (L.): Hermeneutik und Kritik mit besonderer Beziehung auf das Neue Testament von Dr. Friedrich Schleiermacher, edited by Friedrich Lücke. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1838.

J.-D.: Aus Schleiermacher's Leben in Briefen. Volumes I and II edited by Ludwig Jonas. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1858. Volumes III and IV edited by Ludwig Jonas and Wilhelm Dilthey. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1861, 1863.

K. A., XVIII: Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, edited by Ernst Behler with Jean-Jacques Anstett and Hans Eichner. Volume XVIII: Philosophische Lehrjahre, 1796-1806, Erster Teil, edited by Ernst Behler. München, Paderborn, Wien: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Zürich: Thomas-Verlag, 1963.

K. S.: Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Schriften, edited by Wolfdietrich Rasch. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1964.

N. S.: Novalis Schriften, Volume 1 edited by Paul Kluckhohn and Richard Samuel, Volumes 2 and 3 edited by Richard Samuel and Hans-Joachim Mähl and Gerhard Schulz. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1960, 1965, 1968.

N. S. (K.): Novalis Schriften, edited by Paul Kluckhohn, four volumes. Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institute A. G., 1929.

Speeches: Friedrich Schleiermacher's Reden über die Religion, edited by G. Ch. Bernhard Pünjer. Braunschweig: C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1879.