SOURCE: “Schleiermacher's Influence,” in The Philosophy of Schleiermacher: The Development of His Theory of Scientific and Religious Knowledge, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941, pp. 299-317.

[In the following excerpt, Brandt asserts that Schleiermacher's vast influence on theologians was due in part to his ability to mediate between supernatural theology and naturalism, thus allowing both orthodox and liberal theologians to accept modern science while also defending religion and theology.]

An adequate discussion of Schleiermacher's influence, especially in Germany, would require a separate book. For his work in theology was so significant in bringing about a revision of the idea of the nature and purpose of theology that his books may be regarded as a substantial part of the root of modern theology. It is agreed on all sides that Schleiermacher has been the most important figure in Protestant theology since the time of the Reformation. Seeberg, in his History of the German Church in the Nineteenth Century, remarked that “one can say that all the work of the church on dogmatic theology in the nineteenth century acquired its ideals and its direction from Schleiermacher's work.”¹ He set the climate of liberal theological opinion for the next generation, so much so that he has influenced even writers who either had not read him or repudiated him, because the influence which he left was in the air they breathed. Almost every theologian at the present time has therefore been affected by him either directly or indirectly.

Schleiermacher's vast influence has been partly due to the fact that his system is very adaptable. (One historian has remarked that, strangely enough, his doctrine of religious feeling and dogma enjoyed a good reception from liberal and orthodox theologians alike, for the reason that his view left the liberals free to stray as far from tradition as they pleased, while the orthodox felt perfectly free to continue using old modes of expression.²) But his real distinction rests upon his success in mediating between supernaturalistic theology and naturalism. He showed theologians a way in which they could both accept modern science and defend religion and theology. In this his contribution has been compared with that of Kant; it has been said that his transcendence of the opposition between naturalism and supernaturalism is similar to Kant's transcendence of rationalism and empiricism. Both, it is pointed out, found solutions along the same line, that is, through an analysis of experience, the one basing a priori knowledge upon the nature of thought, the other basing religious doctrine on the fact of subjective religious feeling.³ This comparison at least makes clear the outstanding place which Schleiermacher has held in the minds of leading theological writers.

During his lifetime and thereafter in Germany Schleiermacher enjoyed an enormous reputation not only as a theologian but as an historical scholar, a philosopher, and a scientist. His philosophical system (never published) did not have the systematic grandeur, the inclusiveness, and the considered finish of Hegel's, and probably on this account he did not establish a “school.” But his lectures were widely attended because of his vast erudition, his original analysis, and his great suggestiveness. Owing to these qualities his ideas have borne fruit in German thought in many spheres outside of theology—a fact attested to by the bulk of the literature on the many sides of Schleiermacher's work.

Of these many lines of influence only two can be discussed here, that on theology and that on logic and epistemology. The impact of his publications in the romantic period can be only briefly mentioned. His contribution to the theory of education was significant in the development of German thought on that subject.⁴ I have already mentioned the usefulness of his work on aesthetics, unfortunately little known in England and America.⁵ His work on ethics has also exercised some influence in Germany. His share in reviving interest in the study of ancient philosophy, particularly of Plato, was a large one; and his approach to the composition of Plato's Dialogues is to be honored as one of the first attempts at a scientific analysis.⁶ His internal criticism of the New Testament, his reconstruction of the life of Christ, and his examination of church history, as well as his endeavors in other fields, played a significant part in the progress of those studies, even though his work has today been superseded. His work on psychology and the theory of the state, however, has made little impression.

Before turning to the points of his major influence, I wish to recall the reception of his earliest publications (around 1800), which have been taken by many to be an illustration of the possible place of religion in the romantic view of life. Friedrich Schlegel praised the Discourses publicly in a review in the Athenaeum (although he remarked rightly that Schleiermacher had not yet achieved a fully organic view of the human mind); privately he seems to have been less enthusiastic, possibly because of somewhat strained personal relations between them at the time. The Discourses seem to have had some influence on his “Gespräche über Poesie,” which appeared shortly after the publication of Schleiermacher's book.⁷ Schlegel introduced the book to Novalis and Tieck, who read it most enthusiastically of all the romanticists. They planned to write a new book of songs and sermons for Christianity, in accordance with Schleiermacher's suggestion that there could be a new Holy Writ for Christianity.⁸ This book was to be dedicated to Schleiermacher. The program was never carried through as planned, but it did result in the appearance of Novalis' religious hymns. Schleiermacher's ideas also found expression in other works of Novalis who because of his sensitive and lonely spirit was initially disposed to religiousness like that portrayed in the Discourses. His Heinrich von Ofterdingen displayed a religious attitude and an interpretation of religion plainly manifesting the growth from seeds planted by Schleiermacher's book. The same is true of his Die Christenheit oder Europa.

I have already mentioned the reception of the Discourses by Schelling and Hegel. At first Schelling was unappreciative, but later—despite the fact that he was critical of their too subjective theory of religion—he spoke warmly in praise of them. Both his idea of “intellectual intuition” and his view of religion show traces of the impact of Schleiermacher's work. Hegel's indebtedness to these early works was comparatively slight. His early essays on religion, as published by Nohl, show that his view of religion had been developed independently. There are passages in his Systemfragment, written in 1800,⁹ however, which are so strikingly similar to the Discourses that we must believe that Hegel was at least encouraged by the confirmation he found in Schleiermacher's book, even if he found at the most only a few suggestions which he could use. Professor Haering believes that Schleiermacher's influence on Hegel did not extend at most beyond the introduction of the term “Universe” and suggestions relative to his idea of universal history (an idea which was in the air at the time, and had been emphasized by Herder).¹⁰ Hegel commended the Discourses highly, although like Schelling he objected to their subjective tendency—a fault, at least of Schleiermacher's exposition, which Hegel was never able to forget. Commenting on the relation of Schleiermacher's work to the philosophical milieu in which it was written, he said:

In the Discourses, nature is abolished as a collection of finite actualities and recognized as a Universe; so that the [subjective] longing [of Protestant religion] is recalled from its flight beyond reality to an eternal Beyond. The partition between the subject or knowing and the absolutely unattainable object is torn down, the pain atoned for in enjoyment, the endless striving satisfied in intuition.¹¹

Hegel's reaction to The Christian Faith is discussed elsewhere.¹²

1. HIS INFLUENCE OF PROTESTANT THEOLOGICAL THOUGHT

The justification of theologians' high estimation of Schleiermacher's work lies in its relation to the theological movements of his time, and its formulation of a new approach to theology which escaped many objections to the old and bore within itself the capacity for further development along a fresh line.

It will be recalled that after the Reformation several different tendencies had gradually found expression. First there was orthodoxy. After 1600 there was little to distinguish orthodox Protestantism from the Catholicism of the Scholastic period. Its philosophical foundation was similar. It was believed that there are evidences and arguments which enable the natural reason to establish the existence of God, the sinfulness of man, and so on. It was thought that God has, however, acted and revealed himself on man's behalf in a special way. The record of this revelation and action is contained in the Bible. The whole of the Bible is inerrant because of the miraculous inspiration by God of the writers of its several books. The inspiration of its authors, it was held, has been attested by performance of miracles and fulfillment of prophecies. Salvation is to be had by belief in the Bible, and especially in the doctrines of the work and significance of Christ taught therein, but belief must be accompanied by moral conduct (including worship), as it has been commanded by God in his revelation.

In England and later in Germany, this orthodox theology became the target of the rationalistic Deists. The Deists did not question certain fundamental assumptions of orthodoxy, such as its belief in the existence of God, and the future punishment of man for his sin; but they did come to question (encouraged by the development of science and a scientific attitude toward the world) the features of orthodoxy which had more specifically to do with Christianity. There were various grades of heterodoxy among the English Deists, and most of them did not deny the actuality of a special revelation by God in Christ and the Bible. But, tired of theological dissention, they came more and more to whittle away at the special significance of Christianity in favor of the religion of natural reason. They pared away the elements of Christianity which they regarded as mysterious and above reason. They questioned the reality of any work of Christ on behalf of man other than his being a specially clear and needed revelation of the will of God—the nature of which could have been known by human reason from the beginning, but which had been obscured by human sin and therefore needed to be republished. For example, they adduced moral reasons for the impossibility of Christianity's being a new and necessary means of salvation; it would not have been fair, they argued, for God to have withheld the means of salvation until such a recent date. Attention was directed upon factual inaccuracies and evidences of a low moral level in both the Old and the New Testament, in order to shake confidence in the infallibility of the Bible as a whole. The orthodox had based the authority of the Bible on attestation by miracles and the fulfillment of prophecies. The Deists now threw doubt on the reality of fulfillment of prophecies, and they raised questions about the validity of arguments from the alleged occurrence of miracles to the infallibility of the ideas of persons supposed to have performed them. For the Deists, belief in God, virtue, and worship comprised the requirements for salvation.

Two further opposite movements grew up, at least partially as the result of the influence of orthodoxy and Deism. Both of them were skeptical of the capacity of human reason. One of them was theological skepticism; the other was Pietism in Germany (Evangelicalism in England). Hume is the best example of English skepticism; Kant, although he was favorable to religion, held that it was impossible to give a rational foundation to belief in the existence of God along the lines of traditional theological thought, and affirmed that religion is simply the acceptance of the moral law as a divine command. By 1800 the success of the natural sciences and the freedom of thought and discussion had diverted a large element to the ranks of skepticism.

The Pietistic and Evangelical movements also disparaged the capacities of human reason. But they did so in favor of an active commitment to the ideals of Christianity. Like the Reformers (especially Luther) they seem to have suffered but little from intellectual difficulties in Christian theology. For them Christ was not merely a new revelation of God, but a necessary means of redemption from sin. They opposed orthodoxy's emphasis on the importance of intellectual assent; for them a new life through contact with Christ, expressing itself in loving service to others and through emotional experience, was the essence of religion. In England it was the Deists who were theologically farthest removed from the new evangelical group. [In addition to the groups I have mentioned, there was at the time of the publication of The Christian Faith a party of speculative idealists, followers of Hegel, among the theologians. Schleiermacher's book was roundly criticized by its many reviewers, even by those who were closest to him, like Fries. A good summary of the various reviews of The Christian Faith is to be found in Karl Dunkmann's “Die Nachwirkungen der theologischen Prinzipienlehre Schleiermachers” in Beiträge zur Förderung christlicher Theologie, vol. XIX, 1915.]

Of these four groups, Schleiermacher undoubtedly felt himself nearest in spirit to the Pietistic movement. He always remained very sympathetic to the type of religion which he had known in his boyhood, and it will be recalled that he said he would gladly rejoin the Moravians if it were not for their theology, which, however, he did not regard as the kernel of their religion. He also once referred to himself as one of them, only “of a higher order.” By this he probably referred both to theological differences and also to the molding which his religious experience had undergone as a result of contact with Spinoza, the romantic movement, Plato, and the German idealists. He felt himself closest to the Pietists, of these several groups, because he felt that among them a religion “of the heart” had become real. The religious experience which he himself so strongly felt and valued he thought to be foreign to the other groups, who made it a matter of beliefs and external observances.

One of the main themes of Schleiermacher's theological work was that religion is a unique activity of the human spirit, which consists neither in arguments, proofs, and ideas, nor in being morally upright and worshipping God in specified ways. This point Schleiermacher drove home so thoroughly and emphatically that, even if his statement was one-sided and exaggerated, the truth in it was not and cannot now be forgotten.

Schleiermacher did not assert that there is anything mysterious about this activity of spirit. It is not produced by a mechanical and magical act of God (a point on which he broke away from most previous theological thought). It is simply the most perfect development of the affective side of the life of man, which in the Christian tradition is inspired by contact with the personality of Christ through the community of believers. It is a fact which is open to the scrutiny of science, which ideally should be able to see its continuity with social and aesthetic experience, and the way in which it is the rounding off of the human personality.

A second main theme of Schleiermacher's theological thought was his idea that this spiritual activity is autonomous, immediate, not only different from but (in his later works) independent of the results of thought or moral conduct. Religion is an activity grounded in the universal essence of man just as is the manner in which man organizes sense experience by thought. Religion is an “infinite force.” Eduard Zeller, writing on Schleiermacher's view of the personality of God,¹³ said that his chief historical significance lies in the fact that he attempted to show that the content of the Christian faith is somehow the original property of the human mind, evolved from its own deepest nature and not brought in from outside through a mechanical transmission of information from God. This statement is essentially correct. Religion, according to Schleiermacher, is a universal and essential tendency of mind. It does not need to be induced artificially. It is natural, and the human spirit is not fully developed until it has become religious. Religion does not need to be created in a person, although the tendency to be religious may need to be released (for example, by Christ). But it is an innate capacity for experience—and the experience does not depend on the results of other activities of mind (upon philosophical proofs, for example), but is an independent activity which has to be taken account of both by the scientific and practical sides of human nature.

It is because religion is an autonomous spiritual activity, it is because the content of faith is brought up from the depths of mind (the feeling of dependence, the spirit of love) that there can be a science of faith which is not simply a collection of speculative arguments and deductions from proof texts—an empirical theology.

On the basis of these assumptions Schleiermacher was prepared to deal with the criticisms coming from the Deists, from the skeptics, and from science. It was not necessary for him to defend the infallibility of Scripture, for as he said, faith does not depend on Scripture but Scripture gets its authority from the fact of faith. So it was possible for Schleiermacher to take a very liberal attitude toward the Bible. He accepted and encouraged the work of the critics of the Bible and he was able to acknowledge errors in the book, since he did not have to assume the orthodox doctrine of inspiration. The Bible he could regard as a natural product of human minds thinking under the influence of the impression of Christ and the spirit of the early church. For similar reasons he did not have to defend the evidential value of miracles, or the fulfillment of prophecies. The mere fact that an event cannot be understood at the present time does not make it of any special significance for the religious consciousness.

The old contrast between reason and revelation took an entirely new turn in his system; it became the contrast between scientific thought and religious experience. Supernaturalism was ruled out, for both science and religion are “natural,” when the natures of the world and of man are properly understood.

The result of Schleiermacher's theory was that it was not necessary to defend the actuality of sporadic interruptions of the course of nature by the Deity; his emphasis was on the immanence of God, and he could say that God is present in scientific thought, in moral conduct, and in any religious experience or insight and not merely in certain special events. As we have seen, Schleiermacher's actual view of the activity of God was more pantheistic than most theists would wish to allow, but it was not necessary to read his theological works in that manner.

Schleiermacher's views also enabled him to dispense with a number of other traditional doctrines the defense of which before science and philosophy was a serious difficulty for the church. When he reinterpreted, on the basis of his view that theology is an empirical description of the religious consciousness, such doctrines as creation, original sin, the atoning work of Christ, the presence of the Holy Spirit among men, the church's “power of the keys of heaven and hell,” and others, these doctrines were no longer supernatural mysteries but expressions of some fact in the experience of the church which was real and defensible. Schleiermacher hoped that on the basis of his work it would not be possible for science and philosophy to accuse religion of alliance with superstition.

Schleiermacher thus offered a view of religion and theology which apparently made them secure against attack, not by dropping essential parts of it but, as he claimed, by purifying it and striking out alien elements which had entered through misunderstanding. Schleiermacher's theology seemed to answer the challenges of Deism, rationalism, and skepticism, while preserving what was valuable and true in Pietism and orthodoxy.

Schleiermacher did not actually refute orthodoxy. But his work had the effect of superannuating it. He presented an alternative more suited to the modes of thinking, the intellectual currents of a critical and scientific age. He offered a mode of approach to religion more satisfactory to the mind of the nineteenth century, more congruent with its science and philosophy. Therefore largely as a result of his work, the great mass of Protestant theologians of the succeeding generation followed him in his distinction of religion from knowledge and conduct, his break away from dogmas supernaturally transmitted to infallible oracles, his insistence upon the autonomy of religious experience, his view that theology is a description of this experience in some sense. Attention was focused on the nature and value of the religious consciousness itself. This is true even of many theologians who remained predominantly orthodox; it was striking in the case of men like Ritschl, Herrmann, and Troeltsch, who were all heavily indebted to Schleiermacher.

The discoveries of Darwin which were a hard blow for orthodoxy supported Schleiermacher's view of religion. Schleiermacher and Darwin were probably the two persons most directly responsible for the shaping of modern Protestant religious thought.

The philosophy of Troeltsch offers an interesting example of the remarkably strong influence of Schleiermacher's idea of the autonomy of religion at a very recent date. Troeltsch said that the Kant-Schleiermacher view (which he regarded as the idealist alternative to materialism) is that there is a “possibility of seeing in religion a qualitatively individual and creative power of spiritual life.”¹⁴ He believed that there can be a scientific defense of religion, and that it consists in making clear, through an analysis of the psychological and historical facts of religion, the a priori law of the formation of religious ideas or events in the human spirit, and the relation of this law to the other laws of mind. This view is only a development of Schleiermacher's idea, to which Troeltsch expressly attached himself.

Probably the best known contemporary German theologian who acknowledges that his fundamental principles come from Schleiermacher is Professor Georg Wobbermin. Following along the lines laid down by Schleiermacher, Wobbermin argues that the most important desideratum for the philosophy of religion is the determination of the nature of religion, viz., of the moving-spring of religious phenomena in the mind of the religious man. What is needed for the understanding and defense of religion, he says, is appreciation of the “fundamental underlying motive of religious life common to all forms of religious expression.”¹⁵ Professor Rudolf Otto is a second well-known German theologian much influenced by Schleiermacher, although his work has been more affected by the writings of deWette and Fries. Professor Karl Heim of Tuebingen is another contemporary writer who has taken a great deal from Schleiermacher.

Almost all German theologians since Schleiermacher's time have been influenced by him to some extent, and therefore to mention those who have followed the main lines of his thought to a greater or less degree is practically to mention the leading figures of German theology since his time. There was naturally considerable variation in the extent to which the details of his view were acceptable to individual theologians. One must say that it is the general tendency of Schleiermacher's work which has been historically influential, rather than the detailed elaboration of his system. Most of his contemporary theologians were sharply critical of him on many important issues, and The Christian Faith was roundly criticized by many of its reviewers, although most of them were also aware of its importance. Of the writers prominent in Germany immediately after his death, those who could most appropriately be called disciples of Schleiermacher were Alexander Schweitzer, A. Twesten, C. J. Nitzsch, Richard Rothe, and Johann von Hofmann. Perhaps further away but very sympathetic were R. A. Lipsius, A. E. Biedermann, Dorner, and Julius Müller. Feuerbach and D. F. Strauss were also to some extent obligated to him, as were the more influential theologians I have already mentioned, like Ritschl and Herrmann, who received from him only general ideas. Two Continental writers of wider reputation among philosophers, who have received suggestions from his work, are Harold Höffding and Otto Pfleiderer. [For an account of Schleiermacher's theological influence in Germany, one should consult Karl Dunkmann's, “Die Nachwirkung der theologischen Prinzipenlehre Schleiermachers,” in Beiträge zur Förderung christlicher Theologie, vol. XIX (1915); Kattenbusch, Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl, 1819; and Ernst Schrecker, Der Religionsbegriff in Schleiermacher, 1890.]

Schleiermacher's fundamental ideas have had a wide influence in English-speaking countries, both in the past and at the present time. V. F. Storr, writing of the development of British theology from 1800 to 1860,¹⁶ acknowledges the very far-reaching effect which Schleiermacher's writings had in England. Storr says he was the “champion of experimental religion.” Referring to the influence of his rejection of infallibility and inspiration, Storr says that it was “Schleiermacher more than anyone else who helped to dispel false opinions as to canonicity and inspiration.”¹⁷ In America Schleiermacher has been less directly influential than Ritschl, Herrmann, and Harnack (through whom of course his work has had an indirect effect), but Wieman and Meland point out that Horace Bushnell,¹⁸ L. F. Stearns,¹⁹ and W. N. Clarke²⁰ formulated his thesis that religious doctrines should be founded upon religious experience, although it is not clear that he had any direct influence on them.

Schleiermacher's main ideas have been widely influential among contemporary writers on theology. Professor E. W. Lyman has remarked that a study of Schleiermacher revealed to him the autonomy of religion.²¹ Professor John Baillie praises Schleiermacher because he saw (according to Baillie) that religion has insight of its own which cannot be had in nonreligious cognitive experience.²² This insight, he says, is obtained through the practice of religion and is superior to what is obtainable from any of the conflicting schools of philosophy. These acknowledgments of indebtedness are indicative of the contribution Schleiermacher has made to those theologians who build theology on the basis of “religious experience,” and indeed anyone who thinks there can be an empirical science of theology thereby acknowledges at least indirect dependence upon Schleiermacher. In England, H. R. Mackintosh, C. C. J. Webb, John Oman, and H. H. Farmer are among writers of recent theological books indebted to him in this way. The same situation exists in America, with a somewhat different emphasis, especially among some of the younger theological writers.

There is some resemblance between Schleiermacher's ideas of religious experience and what is now called mysticism. The similarity is not very great and Schleiermacher was strongly opposed to mysticism like that of Boehme, which he thought was empty. He was opposed to intellectualism in religion; he emphasized the value of the higher spiritual life especially in its emotional phases; he thought that religious feeling could be understood only by those who had experienced it;²³ he regarded religious experience as the crown of human life; he was much more interested in religion as a personal experience than as an activity of a community, although he recognized that the latter is indispensable to the former; he thought that God is immanent in the world and that in some sense God is specially present in religious experience, more so than in any other event in the life of man. (Of course, all these phrases are to be understood in terms of Schleiermacher's theory of God and his general system of philosophy.) He came so close and no closer to mysticism. Modern mystics, however, have been able to find theoretical support in Schleiermacher's doctrine, partly in that he insists on the autonomy and self-vindicating character of the religious life, and partly in that he sometimes seems to assert that there is a special nonrational kind of insight in religious experience. Presumably on this account it has been said that most modern mystics like Rufus Jones, Evelyn Underhill, and Dean Inge are indebted to Schleiermacher in one way or another.²⁴

A clear implication of Schleiermacher's idea is that there should be a special study of the psychology of religious experience. Schleiermacher himself, however, did not lay down any explicit program for this, and his own psychological analysis is quite defective. There is some controversy about the actual extent of his influence upon the development of this branch of psychology, and in general it appears that his direct influence was slight although his indirect influence must have been considerable.

A result of Schleiermacher's view of theology was that he was able to develop his system of doctrines in a much more systematic way than had previously been possible. The reason for this is that, following the methodological theorems laid down in his introduction, he relates everything in Christian thought to the religious consciousness of absolute dependence upon God, as mediated by Christ. The Christian doctrines of creation, preservation, the original perfection of man, and others, are shown to be an expression of the religious consciousness. Sin is explained in terms of conflict between the religious consciousness and the sensuous consciousness, and the process of redemption by Christ through the church is the process of the development of the religious life through the impression of Christ's personality. Schleiermacher reinterpreted the entire body of Christian doctrines on this basis, and the consequence was that Christian doctrines became an organic intelligible system. This had not been the case before. V. F. Storr writes that prior to Schleiermacher British theologians had evolved artificial systems of dogma, the doctrines of which showed no affiliation for each other, and the education of which from fundamental principles was not even attempted. (A similar situation prevailed in Germany.)²⁵ He says, “Schleiermacher did more than anyone else to effect a change in this matter, and to sketch for theology an evolutionary ideal which profoundly influenced the whole subsequent development of the science.”²⁶

Thus far I have mentioned only ideas of Schleiermacher's which have met with a generally favorable reception, at least among a large group of theological writers. They represent his large-scale positive contribution to religious thought. (There are of course many points of detail which theologians have been able to use.) But I shall now consider a matter on which there have been both disagreement about the interpretation of Schleiermacher and also a widespread critical reaction.

This disagreement is focused on his decision concerning the essential nature of religious experience, his view that religion is primarily a matter of “feeling,” and that feeling is what is expressed in the statements of dogmatic theology. It has been generally agreed since his time that he was right in emphasizing the place of noncognitive or nonintellectual and nonpractical experience in religion, which had previously been neglected by theologians. On the other hand, there is very widespread agreement that if Schleiermacher meant by “feeling” simply affective states or emotional experience, he was mistaken in believing that the essence of religion is feeling and in believing that the affirmations of dogmatic theology can be derived from feeling.

There are two opposite interpretations of Schleiermacher on this point. Some writers hold that Schleiermacher himself saw that there is a special kind of religious insight or cognition (in the feeling of dependence on God, for example, or in the “intuitions” of his earlier thought), and that it is this cognitive experience that he was expressing or formulating in his theology. Baillie, Storr, Otto, Wobbermin, and Mackintosh are among those who believe that Schleiermacher thought there is special nonrational “knowledge” in religious experience. Wobbermin, for example, says that Schleiermacher's “feeling” included objective cognition, and that in particular its content was “precisely the Supreme Reality determining all existence.”²⁷ Mackintosh says that “in the majority of passages, especially in his Dogmatic [The Christian Faith], Schleiermacher seems to mean by ‘feeling’ a laying hold by the soul of a trans-subjective Reality, supreme over the world. Feeling is an experience … in which the self ‘apprehends’ not itself but God.”²⁸ The writers I have mentioned approve of this view which they attribute to Schleiermacher.

On the other hand, other theological writers deny that Schleiermacher believed anything of the sort. These writers are divided into two groups, those who think Schleiermacher ought to have insisted on this kind of intuition and those who believe he was right in not doing so, but who think that he was mistaken in trying to separate religion from and make it independent of philosophy. Wilhelm Herrmann belongs to the first of these two groups²⁹ as does Troeltsch, who remarked that Hegel's theological influence has been much stronger than Schleiermacher's at some points, precisely because he more adequately met religion's claim to be in contact with ultimate reality.³⁰ Of Schleiermacher's critics who believe that he should not have separated theology and religion so sharply from the reflective consciousness, the first to be mentioned is of course Hegel. [See appendix II.] English speaking writers influenced by him, including Baillie, Lyman, and W. A. Brown, all protest against Schleiermacher's narrow limitation of religion to feeling, his too rigid separation of it from reflective thought, science, and philosophy. [Baillie says Schleiermacher believed in a special insight in religion but thinks he was mistaken in identifying religion so closely with feeling.] Wilhelm Herrmann, without denying that intuition has a place in religious experience, thought that Schleiermacher's segregation of religion from other modes of spiritual activity was adverse to the well-being of religion and a very superficial analysis.³¹ Zeller took a slightly different line. Protesting that feeling is an appropriation of what is given in knowledge in the form of meanings and “not a capacity for a self-active production of a definite content,” he charged that Schleiermacher's “consciousness of dependence” could not be a feeling at all but is an idea.³²

Schleiermacher may not have intended to defend the reality of a nonrational intuition in religion, but it is this interpretation of him which has been most influential historically.

One fact is surely clear in the light of this controversy as well as our own analysis, and that is that Schleiermacher's explanation of his own view was not very careful or precise. Historically, this fact may well have been to his advantage. Being vague, his idea was elastic and adaptable. Had he carried through a rigorous analysis of his concepts of “feeling” and religious experience, it is quite possible that the idea would have proved less powerful.

2. SCHLEIERMACHER'S INFLUENCE ON EPISTEMOLOGY AND LOGIC

Ueberweg's research in the history of logic has been freely drawn on in this section.

We must now take leave of Schleiermacher's work on theology and religion to consider his influence on logic and epistemology.

In philosophy proper, as in theology, Schleiermacher did not found a school, but there was nevertheless a group of philosophers who were influenced by him in varying degrees. Most closely dependent on his work were Heinrich Ritter³³ and Franz Vorländer.³⁴ Leopold George,³⁵ the editor of Schleiermacher's manuscript remains on psychology, was also close to him in logic and epistemology and attempted to mediate between him and Hegel. Writers on logic better known in English-speaking countries who have been influenced by him are Ueberweg³⁶ and Eduard Beneke.³⁷ There has apparently been contact between Schleiermacher's work and that of Trendelenburg, Lotze, and Sigwart, although in these cases the influence was slighter and the dependence is largely indirect.

Aside from the smaller points on which Schleiermacher made constructive suggestions, that to which the logical writers of last century owed most is expressed in the following remarks of Ueberweg:

Schleiermacher, whose philosophical significance appears to be overlooked only too often in comparison with his theological work, in his lectures on “Dialectic” has attempted to comprehend the forms of thought from knowledge as the purpose of thought, and to establish insight into their parallelism with the forms of real existence. This concept of the forms of thought is midway between the subjective-formal and the metaphysical logics, and is in agreement with the central ideas of Aristotle. The subjective-formal logic, represented chiefly by the Kantian and Herbertian school, asserts that the forms of thought are out of all relation to the forms of being; whereas the metaphysical logic, as Hegel formulated it, identifies the two forms and believes itself to have discovered the self-creation of being in the self-movement of pure thought. Aristotle, equally distant from both extremes, sees in thought a representation [Abbild] of being, which is different from its real correlate without being out of all relation to it, and which corresponds to it, without being identical with it.³⁸

Schleiermacher believed that there is a parallelism between the forms of thought and the forms of things. He began with analysis of the meaning of “knowledge,” and argued that if there is to be knowledge, there must be correspondence between thought and its objects—not merely between thought and the phenomenal “things,” as Kant believed, but independently real objects existing in their own right. Schleiermacher next inferred that if this correspondence is to be possible, the forms of thought must be applicable to the real world, neither meaningless nor misleading when used to refer to the independently real. Coherently with this, he believed that the sense impressions caused by the interaction of external objects with the sense organs have themselves an implicit order responsive to the forms of thought; they are not merely passively receptive to the imposition of an alien form upon them because they are utterly formless in themselves, as Kant sometimes stated. Things can really be known as they are, not fully to be sure but at least to some extent, because of the harmony of the forms of intelligence with the nature of physical existents.

On the other hand, Schleiermacher never considered identifying experience and knowledge with their objects. Experience or thought is one part of the natural world, but there are other parts and it is the unique and further unanalyzable character of thought to reach out and apprehend the other part of reality, to reflect it as in a mirror. Furthermore, Schleiermacher recognized that thought, taken by itself apart from the sense experience which gives it content, is empty and meaningless. Thought can organize and mediate the given of its own strength, but it cannot construct the world dialectically even if granted the initial concept of being. Schleiermacher grasped firmly the two poles of thought, given sense experience and organizing “deductive” logic, and would not permit either to be suppressed in the analysis of expanding scientific knowledge. He was neither an Hegelian nor a sensationalist.

The fundamental these of Schleiermacher's theory of knowledge were therefore that thought is different from its object, but is capable of reaching out and grasping it intellectually, since things and sense data are intelligible and capable of being ordered by thought. In this process thought is a spontaneous, organizing factor without which sense impressions could not become experience, but the given, with its implicit order, plays a role, providing content and guidance for thought which without the given would be empty and meaningless.

In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Schleiermacher was thus distinguished as a realist and an empiricist (not a sensationalist). It is not surprising that he influenced minds which rebelled at the Hegelian system. The marks of his work can be seen in Ueberweg's summary of his own position in contrast to Kant and Hegel:

The essence of my objection to Kant [he said] lies in the proof of how scientific insight … is achieved not by means of a priori forms of purely subjective origin, which are applicable only to the objects of appearance present in the consciousness of the subject (and also not, as Hegel and others urge, a priori and nevertheless with objective validity) but through the combinations of facts of experience according to logical norms themselves conditioned by the objective order of things, adherence to which secures objective validity. I wish to show how in particular the spatiotemporal and causal order … is not brought into a chaotic given stuff by the intuiting and thinking subject, but is copied, through successive experience and thought of the subjective consciousness, in agreement with the reality in which it originally is.

Had Schleiermacher not been so preoccupied both with theology and practical concerns and had his work not appeared in so forbidding a form, he might very well have had a much greater influence here than he actually exercised. For there were in his thought the germs of a moderate empirical realism, and in many matters his theories displayed an accurate description of psychological facts.

I now enumerate a few less important contributions which Schleiermacher has made to the stream of philosophical thought. He was the first to suggest that awareness of the external reality of other persons is prior to the awareness of the impersonal external world and is the basis of the more general distinction between the subjective and the objective—an idea which has been developed by several writers. Second, his theory that judgment is the form for the expression of matter-of-fact relationships, especially causal relations as opposed to the timeless relations of essences, reappeared in practically the same form in the works of Ritter, Trendelenburg, and Lotze. Schleiermacher thought that a complete event included active and passive agents in a certain active relationship and he distinguished primitive, incomplete, and complete judgments according to the comprehensiveness and completeness with which the event is expressed. Thus the primitive judgment, for example, is the action unrelated to agent or patient, expressed in an impersonal verb. Third, he was one of the first to question the operation of conversion in traditional logic. He also doubted the usefulness of syllogistic argument, a matter on which he may have influenced Trendelenburg but where he seems to have gone somewhat too far.

There are other points of direct and indirect influence, but Schleiermacher's significance in the history of philosophy proper rests on his general view of the relation of thought to reality and his analysis of scientific thought.

APPENDIX II

SCHLEIERMACHER AND HEGEL

Hegel's reaction to Schleiermacher's earliest publications has been described already, and we can therefore limit ourselves here to an account of Hegel's criticism of The Christian Faith.

It is a well-known fact that the two men had little sympathy for each other. Schleiermacher, for example, kept Hegel out of the Berlin Academy of which he was the secretary. It is not clear just what the causes of the bad feeling were nor at what date it began. According to one letter there was talk of their mutual antipathy in 1819. The reason for it may have been the clash of personalities or it may have been simply rivalry at the university, possibly between Hegel's lectures and Schleiermacher's courses on Dialectic. However, the fact is that there was personal animosity, as a result of which Hegel probably never seriously attempted to appreciate Schleiermacher's later theological work. He had made sarcastic comments about Schleiermacher's capacities before the book was published, and the marginal comments he wrote in his own copy of the book reveal that he approached it in an extremely critical humor. He had ignored all Schleiermacher's work since the Lucinde letters, according to Glockner, with the exception of the translation of Plato and his essay on the idea of predestination, which Hegel described as “extremely barren.” In 1822, presumably after reading the first volume of The Christian Faith, he wrote asking “whether then the dogmatic theology of the United Evangelical Church be what one has had the impudence and shallowness to offer as such.”

The most direct assault by Hegel on Schleiermacher's theological views occurred in a preface written (after reading the first volume of The Christian Faith) for Hinrich's Die Religion in innerem Verhältnisse zur Wissenschaft. Schleiermacher was not explicitly named in this preface, but (although the whole historical movement toward a philosophy of feeling was discussed) there were many extremely caustic remarks which could have been directed only at The Christian Faith, which had just appeared. Schleiermacher and his friends were considerably annoyed by the discussion which scarcely did justice to Schleiermacher's views, but some of the criticism was legitimate.

Hegel began by admitting that there is a perennial conflict between reason and faith, each of which is a legitimate interest of the human mind. It is desirable that there should be some reconciliation of this conflict, but it must be a reconciliation in which the claims of both reason and faith are really satisfied. No satisfactory solution is to be found either in merely becoming indifferent to the higher things of life, or in yielding up the claim about the universe which is the very essence of the religious life, or in dropping the attempt to make experience and beliefs a rational whole. The theology of the Middle Ages, he said, had the great merit of offering a reconciliation which did not require that any essential part of the ideal life be surrendered. It was “a science which has cultivated religion on the side of thought and reason, and has taken pains to grasp by means of thought the deepest doctrines of revealed religion.”

Any philosophical or theological theory which neglects some one or more of these essential factors, Hegel thought, falls short of perfection. On the one hand he thought (and here he was in full agreement with Schleiermacher) that the claims of the emotional side of man's being could not be ignored. “Religion will and should,” he said, “become a matter of feeling, and turn about into the heart, just as freedom in general sinks itself in feeling, and a feeling of freedom grows in man.” Religious knowledge and ideals should penetrate experience; they should enter into the affectional structure of the human mind. But on the other hand—and this was the real point of his criticism, for there was no danger in his day that the emotional side of anything would be neglected—the claims of reason and thought may not be ignored; neither faith nor the rational life can flourish unless in religion (as well as philosophy) there “is a substantial objective content of truth.” The whole point of the Christian religion historically, he claimed, is that it has been supposed to offer knowledge of God, given by revelation.

The “philosophy of feeling” (not only of Schleiermacher, presumably, but also of Jacobi and others) was, he thought, a view which in the end frustrated religion by disparaging the rational side of life. This philosophy, however, he admitted, was perfectly intelligible or even necessary as a result of the agnostic outcome of the Aufklarung. The Kantian philosophy, in legitimate reaction against the overweening metaphysics of the past, had gone so far as to deny knowledge of God and the independently real in general. All thought, according to Kant, is infected with the blight of finitude by the conditions under which thought in human subjects is alone possible. As a result, although religion has been supposed to be a revelation of God, the Divine Being was thrust out into the unknowable by Kantian epistemology, and as a consequence of Kantian influence “one of the absolute assumptions of the culture of our time is that man knows nothing of the truth.” But the natural longing of the soul for the Infinite has avenged itself for this thievery by taking possession of the realm of feeling, and fortifying itself therein against the claims of the finite understanding. The understanding having limited its own proper use to the temporal world given in sense experience, and having emptied the Beyond of all objective content, the soul which seeks unity with and certainty and enjoyment of the Infinite can only retire within the shell of an exclusively emotional religion which is impervious to the dialectical attacks of reason. This was what had happened, Hegel thought, in the philosophy of feeling, as proposed by Schleiermacher and others.

In this emphasis on feeling, Hegel said, these writers claimed that feeling was the only proper form in which religiousness occurred in its purity, and in their consequent disparagement of the importance of rational thought they upset the balance between reason and thought which is necessary to the ideal life. How unsatisfactory this identification of religion with emotional experience to the exclusion of thought must turn out to be is made clear, Hegel thought, simply by an examination of the nature of feeling. For feeling is a form of experience which can be either religious or irreligious, and what transforms (redeems) the feelings of the natural man into spiritual feelings is precisely the ideas of the intellect. Religion is not just being emotional; it is the emotional life of the man whose being has been imbued with the significance of religious ideas. It is the possibility of rational certification of the ideas which gives to religion its objective standard; without this standard, religion is likely to be guided merely by subjective caprice. This subjectivity in religion is apparently what Hegel thought would be the natural outcome of Schleiermacher's theology—a judgment that receives a great deal of support from the historical course of German theology after Schleiermacher's death.

So Hegel struck at the theology of feeling in these words: “There can be no doubt that feeling is a sphere which, itself undetermined, includes both the most manifold and the most antithetical. Feeling for itself is natural subjectivity, equally capable of being good or bad, pious or godless.” “Among the feelings of the natural man is a feeling of the divine; but the natural feeling of the divine is one thing, the spirit of God another. … But that this natural feeling, even, is a feeling of the divine, is not due simply to its being feeling: the divine is only in and for spirit. If feeling is to constitute the chief character of man, he is thereby put at the level of the animal, for it is characteristic of animals … to live according to feeling. And if religion in man is based solely on feeling, it is correct that this has no further determination than to be a feeling of dependence, and so a dog would be the best Christian, because it has this feeling most intensely. … A dog also has feelings of salvation, if its hunger is satisfied by a bone.”

As a parting shot, perhaps more directly intended for Schleiermacher, Hegel added that the book he was prefacing could expect only a cool reception in those quarters where “that which calls itself philosophy and is always carrying Plato on its lips, has no notion of what is the nature of speculative thought, the contemplation of an idea—where in philosophy as in theology, the bestial ignorance of God, and the sophistry of this ignorance which substitutes individual feeling and subjective opinion for a system of doctrine … carries great weight.”

It is clear from this evidence that the later work of Schleiermacher had little or no positive effect on Hegel, and that Hegel's view of Schleiermacher's system was an abbreviated and distorted one. Of course, there was much in Schleiermacher's published work to justify such an interpretation. But if one emphasizes the other (more consistent) side of Schleiermacher, consisting of those ideas in which the complete independence of the religious life is not insisted upon, one will find that there was much less disagreement between the two men on this subject than has often been supposed to have been the case. There was a distinctly agnostic antirational side to Schleiermacher's later views (perhaps not more so than the traditional theory of negative knowledge of God) but in those passages in which he came closest to defining the relation of God and the world clearly, he seems to identify God with the universe, when viewed as an infinite logical self-organizing system (or at least he came close to this). And while his theories made if possible for him to assert that religion was somehow a natural, necessary, and instinctive aspect of the life of feeling at its highest, there are many passages in which he did not neglect the function of rational thought in the spiritualization of feeling, in the “relating of all feeling to the Infinite.” The differences between them here were not clear-cut logical disagreements but more matters of temperament and emphasis—differences which however have been historically decisive, as is clear from the development of German thought after their time.

Notes

1. Quoted, Herrmann, Kultur der Gegenwart, pt. I, vol. IV, art. “Christlichprotestantisch Dogmatik,” p. 601.

2. Ibid., p. 606.

3. Eduard Zeller, Vorträge und Abhandlungen, Leipzig (1875) 2nd ed., p. 195.

4. For his significance for the theory of education, see Osborne, Schleiermacher and Religious Education.

5. See E. von Hartmann, Die deutsche Aesthetik seit Kant, first part, 1886. For a more considered evaluation of his achievement, based on the study of better manuscripts, see R. Odebrecht, Schleiermachers System der Aesthetik, Berlin, 1932. Also B. Croce, Gesammelte Philos. Schriften, 1st ser., vol. I (1930), pp. 324, 336.

6. Leon Robin, Platon, Paris (1935), p. 34.

7. Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers (1870) p. 438 f.

8. Ibid., p. 434.

9. Nohl, Theologische Jugendschriften Hegels, pp. 345-351.

10. Theo. Haering, Hegel: Sein Wollen und Sein Werk, vol. I, p. 560; cf. Richard Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel, vol. II, p. 63.

11. Glauben und Wissen, Lasson ed., p. 311.

12. See Appendix, Hegel and Schleiermacher.

13. Kleine Schriften, Berlin (1911), p. 66.

14. Die Kultur der Gegenwart, pt. I, vol. IV, “Wesen der Religion und der Religionswissenschaft,” p. 464.

15. Nature of Religion, New York (1933), p. 42.

16. The Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century, 1913.

17. Ibid., p. 171.

18. God in Christ, 1849.

19. Evidence of Christian Experience; Present Day Theology, 1893.

20. An Outline of Theology, 1898.

21. Contemporary American Theology, ed. Ferm, New York, 1933, p. 111.

22. Ibid., pp. 46, 50 ff.

23. The Christian Faith, 2nd ed., sec. 100, par. 3.

24. American Philosophies of Religion, Wieman and Meland, Chicago, 1936.

25. See Kattenbusch, D. F., Von Schleiermacher zu Ritschl, Giessen, 1893.

26. V. F. Storr, The Development of English Theology in the 19^th Century, p. 150.

27. Wobbermin, The Nature of Religion, p. 79.

28. H. R. Mackintosh, Types of Modern Theology, p. 65.

29. Loc. cit., p. 604.

30. Loc. cit., p. 477.

31. Loc. cit., p. 593.

32. Kleine Schriften, pp. 91-92.

33. Vorlesungen zur Einleitung in die Logik, 1823; Abriss der philosophischen Logik, 1824; System der Logik und Metaphysik, 1856; Encyclopaedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 3 vols., 1862-1864.

34. Wissenschaft der Erkenntnis, 1847.

35. Die Logik als Wissenschaftslehre, 1868.

36. System der Logik und Geschichte der logischen Lehren.

37. Erkenntnislehre in ihren Grundzügen dargelegt, 1820; Lehrbuch der Logik als Kunstlehre des Denkens, 1832; System der Logik als Kunstlehre des Denkens, 1842.

38. System der Logik, 5th ed., p. v.

39. Hegel Archiv, Lasson ed., Bd. I. Heft 2, p. 37 ff.

40. H. Glockner, “Hegel u. Schleiermacher im Kampfe um Religionsphilosophie u. Glaubenslehre,” in Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literatur u. Geistesgeschichte, 1930, p. 235 ff.

41. Hegel Archiv, Bd. I, Heft 2, p. 42.

42. Another (but posthumous) publication which contrasts his position with Schleiermacher's is in Lasson's edition of his lectures on the philosophy of religion, Die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes, 1930, p. 32 ff.

43. Werke, 1st ed., vol. XVII, pt. II, p. 279 ff.; p. 301.

44. Ibid., p. 297.

45. Ibid., p. 299.

46. Ibid., p. 289.

47. Ibid., p. 294.

48. Ibid., p. 295; cf. also Lasson's edition of the Die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes, p. 34.

49. Ibid., p. 303.