SOURCE: “Romanticism and the Sensus Numinis in Schleiermacher,” in The Interpretation of Belief: Coleridge, Schleiermacher and Romanticism, Macmillan, 1986, pp. 104-25.

[In the following essay, Streetman illustrates the ways in which Schleiermacher influenced religion during the nineteenth century, noting his revitalization of the sense of divinity which led to the creation of an experiential faith rooted in Romantic philosophy.]

These words of Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768-1834) will surely be subjected to new assessments during the several events commemorating the 150th anniversary of his death: ‘I, for my part, am a stranger to the life and thought of this present generation, I am a prophet-citizen of a later world, drawn thither by a vital imagination and strong faith; to it belong my every thought and deed.’¹

This essay will illustrate the many ways in which this herald of an age to come was able to breathe new life into religion, through his rediscovery of the sensus numinis, during the Romantic period, and to utilise this revivified sensus as the basis for reintroducing religion to the thinking people of his age. I shall argue that taking seriously Karl Barth's statement that Schleiermacher ‘wanted in all circumstances to be a modern man as well as a Christian theologian’ will help to explain how he constantly extricated himself from potentially unholy alliances, while still appropriating something crucially important from the encounter with the various movements of his day.² The focus will be on the sensus numinis and on Schleiermacher's engagement with German Romanticism. And Romanticism, in turn, will be interpreted as an expression of the coincidence of opposing forces seeking creative reconciliation in a centre.

I THE RESURGENCE OF THE SENSUS NUMINIS

The title of the present essay was suggested by an essay of Rudolf Otto entitled ‘How Schleiermacher Rediscovered the Sensus Numinis’. In Otto's view, a survey of the history of Christianity revealed a continuing need for revitalisation through the stimulation of a creative genius in religious experience, who then became the catalyst for the renewal of the Church. Among such catalyst were Paul, Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Luther, the German Pietists (albeit in an abortive sense) and Schleiermacher. To Schleiermacher fell the task of completing a revivification that had only been discharged very inadequately by Pietism, ‘as an endeavour to shake off the crippling shackles of lifeless orthodoxy and of a new scholasticism’.³

‘The sense of the numinous’ is the phrase which describes the power by which one apprehends the presence of the numinous dimension in any religious experience, regardless of how simple or complex that experience may be. In order for any experience to qualify as ‘religious’, that experience must contain a dimension of numinous depth. Now the term ‘numinous’ (coined by Otto as an alternative for ‘the Holy’) is ‘the essentially religious element in religious experience, prior to, and apart from, any rational and moral overtones it [the Holy] may accrue, as it develops itself in experience and history’.⁴ The sensus numinis, then, is the power by which the numinous dimension, the essential ingredient which is the foundation of religious experience, is apprehended. Thus, Otto was crediting Schleiermacher with revitalising religion and thereby bringing Christianity, with its head held high, into the modern age.

Schleiermacher never had access to the term ‘numinous’, since Otto did not coin it until several decades after Schleiermacher's death. The early Schleiermacher of the Speeches preferred to speak of religion as a ‘sense and taste for the infinite’, or in terms of ‘feeling and intuition’, while the later Schleiermacher of The Christian Faith spoke of ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’. Terminological differences aside, however, Otto was undoubtedly correct in ascribing to him the role of catalyst for the renewal of Christianity. Yet it may be even more accurate (and certainly more faithful to Schleiermacher's thought) to recognise that the initial stimulus that triggered the catalytic reaction in him must have come from elsewhere—from the transcendent basis for numinous feeling. In other words, were this essay to have a subtitle, it would have to be ‘How the Sensus Numinis Discovered Schleiermacher’. To careful readers of his early life it appears that the transcendent holy power which was apprehended through the sensus numinis had been plumbing the hearts of the German children of the last half-century of rationalism, in search of a suitable dwelling-place. On 21 November 1768, in a modest pastoral home in Breslau, the numinous finally discovered the sensitive heart that it had been seeking.

Account should here be taken of the deep experiential roots of the family which nurtured and nourished this young life. The paternal grandfather—the Reformed pastor Daniel Schleiermacher—had exhibited pietistic tendencies so intense that they swirled him into an extreme sectarian movement, and eventually caused him to be accused of dabbling in witchcraft and magical practices. In 1749 he fled to Holland to escape prison. His son Gottlieb was a case study in tension ‘between the thought of the Enlightenment and orthodox preaching [which] gave his personality some contradictory traits’.⁵ Over his entire lifetime, as a gifted intellectual, he devoured with relish the most crucial theological literature of the day. Letters to his son Friedrich continually recommended the works of Kant and other demanding thinkers to the young man. But, because of the problems of excess in the pietism of his father, Gottlieb suppressed the deep pietistic strains within himself, until, late in life, he encountered the Moravians. Although he held fast to his Reformed pastoral affiliation, he entrusted his children to the keeping of Moravian boarding-schools and one of their seminaries, all of which proved to be nearly perfect environments for developing and strengthening their pious feelings.

In later years, long after the tensions of the father had been reincarnated in the son, Friedrich could still say,

Piety was the mother's womb, in whose sacred darkness my young life was nourished and was prepared for a world still sealed for it. In it my spirit breathed ere it had yet found its own place in knowledge and experience. It helped me as I began to sift the faith of my fathers and to cleanse thought and feeling from the rubbish of antiquity. When the God and the immortality of my childhood vanished from my doubting eyes it remained to me.⁶

He could acknowledge that the seed of piety had already begun to flourish at Gnadenfrei—the place of his first encounter with the Moravians.

Here it was that for the first time I awoke to consciousness of the relations of man to a higher world. … Here it was that that mystic tendency developed itself, which has been of so much importance to me, and has supported and carried me through all the storms of scepticism. Then it was only germinating, now it has attained its full development, and I may say, that after all that I have passed through, I have become a Herrnhutter again, only of a higher order.⁷

The tension between, on the one hand, a deep experiential faith rooted in the sensus numinis and, on the other, the honest doubt stemming from Enlightenment rationalism is evident in both of these quotations. But the most concise statement of Schleiermacher's doubts, some of which persisted for the rest of his life—and were only intensified by the stringency of Moravian censorship and surveillance—was given in a cataclysmic revelation of the eighteen-year-old to his father:

I cannot believe that he who named himself only the Son of Man was the eternal and true God; I cannot believe that his death was a substitutionary atonement, because he never expressly said so himself, and because I cannot believe it was necessary. God, who has evidently created humankind not for perfection but only for the striving after perfection, cannot possibly wish to punish persons eternally because they have not become perfect.⁸

After numerous painful struggles, gripped on the one side by the sensus numinis and on the other by an equally probing doubt, the young Schleiermacher grew to be a mature theologian, who refused to relax either pole of this tension. Rather he formulated and maintained positions which continually played one pole against the other as a check to extremes. After his Moravian period of school and seminary, and his rebellious entry to the Pietist University of Halle, which had also been moved deeply by the Enlightenment spirit, both sides of the tension had been developed to such a degree that they were present in strength in Schleiermacher throughout his life.

Karl Barth attempted to identify this tension in the young Schleiermacher, as he progressed toward maturity as a Christian theologian, as between the cultural and the theological. In Barth's view, ‘He wanted in all circumstances to be a modern man as well as a Christian theologian.’ But it might be more accurate to describe the two poles of the tension as the sensus numinis and the critical rationalistic intelligence engendered by the Enlightenment. Once we have corrected Barth's interpretation of the terms of the tension, however, the quotation serves us well. For these polar impulses held each other in check. Paul Tillich helps us to understand the process by which Schleiermacher coped with his theological inheritance:

Friedrich Schleiermacher, the father of modern Protestant theology, was theologically educated within the framework of Protestant Orthodoxy. If you read his dogmatics, The Christian Faith, you will find that he never develops any thought without making reference to classical orthodoxy, and finally to the Enlightenment criticism of both, before he goes on to state his own solution.⁹

These three movements—Protestant scholasticism, Pietism and the Enlightenment—are, then, the major components of Schleiermacher's religious heritage. It was the tensional dialectic of piety and responsible doubt that guided him into the highly original position which we celebrate today.

II SCHLEIERMACHER AND ROMANTIC MOTIFS

In the decade before the beginning of the nineteenth century, German Romanticism arose, and a great deal of its energy was expended in overcoming some of the inadequacies that it saw in the Enlightenment and in forging a new historical consciousness. The young Schleiermacher occupied a formative position—both in shaping and in being shaped by—the new Romantic spirit. Indeed, during his first sojourn in Berlin (1796-1802), he was an honoured member of the Romantic circle which convened in the home of Henriette Herz, cultured wife of a prominent Berlin physician. Within the circle, he gained the friendship of the Schlegel brothers and Novalis, and made a few contributions to the Athenaeum, which was the literary ‘weapon in the struggle of the youthful school against the defenders and upholders of the old order and of rationalism’.¹⁰

This old order and rationalism was that of the Enlightenment, with its tendencies toward natural, rational and universal concepts of morality and religion. A spirit of tolerance had encouraged freedom of individual religious belief, yet the more dominant emphasis of the Enlightenment upon the orderliness of reason, and the resultant rational uniformity of the religious essence, was coercive of conformity. Conversely, Romanticism extolled individual creativity, the cultivation of the affective nature, and held in reverence the great periods of the past, such as the Middle Ages, in which cultural syntheses had been achieved.

Now these various traits were all synthesised, to one degree or another, in what Raymond Immerwahr, Paul Kluckhohn and others consider to have been the most ‘salient characteristic’ of German Romanticism: ‘the striving to synthesize antinomies, to experience life in terms of polarities that are to be resolved in a higher unity’.¹¹ This conception of the coincidence of the finite and the infinite had roots as far back as Plato and Plotinus, yet in the form in which it was transmitted to the Romantics it was probably derived from Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64), of the late Middle Ages. Tillich explains this principle:

His main principle was the coincidentia oppositorum (the coincidence of opposites), the coincidence of the finite and the infinite. In everything finite the infinite is present, namely, that power which is the creative unity of the universe as a whole. And in the same way the finite is in the infinite as a potentiality. In the world the divine is developed; in God the world is enveloped.¹²

In a memorable sentence from the Speeches, which were published anonymously and were addressed to the ‘cultured’ among the ‘despisers’ of religion, the young Schleiermacher wrote, ‘Praxis is art; speculation is science; religion is sense and taste for the infinite.’¹³ The last part of this quotation is already familiar to us. But now we are able to see a connection between the sensus numinis and the coincidence of opposites. In another passage he described religious contemplation vis-à-vis the coincidence of the infinite and the finite:

The contemplation of pious men is only the immediate consciousness of the universal being of all finite things in and through the eternal. To seek and to find this infinite and eternal factor in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all action and passion, and to have and to know life only in immediate feeling—that is religion. Where this awareness is found, religion is satisfied; where this awareness is hidden, religion experiences frustration and anguish, emptiness and death. And so religion is, indeed, a life in the infinite nature of the whole, in the one and all, in God—a having and possessing of all in God and of God in all.¹⁴

Now the term ‘infinite’, as Schleiermacher made clear, was ascribed not ‘to the supreme being as the world's originating cause but to the world itself’. The ‘infinite’, therefore, referred to the totality of the world as the Naturzusammenhang, or the coherence of nature. Nevertheless, he added that he left to the critics of this view ‘the attempt to conceive of the world as a true “all” and “whole” without God’.¹⁵ Later, in The Christian Faith, in his discussion of the divine causality, Schleiermacher examined the relation of God to the Naturzusammenhang, and the divine activity was presented as the transcendental conditioning-principle of all created reality. He further suggested that, so far as the religious subject is concerned, neither the world nor God can be imagined apart from one another, nor can they be confused nor equated with one another, since each is encountered by means of its peculiar form of the religious self-consciousness. Since the Speeches were written as an apologetic challenge to the intelligentsia of secular culture, Schleiermacher was eager to avoid the excessive use of theological jargon—even and especially the term ‘God’. The term did, of course, occur; as Terrence Tice writes, ‘When Schleiermacher uses the term “God” here he has prepared the way either by indicating a particular theological context or by serving it up as the term people normally employ for the supreme transcendental object.’¹⁶ The focus of the phrase ‘the infinite’, therefore, was intentionally neutralised and was ascribed to the Naturzusammenhang.

This basic belief of Romanticism in the coincidence of the infinite and the finite held numerous other implications. When the Romantics extended this belief in an explicitly cosmological sense, they claimed to intuit the world as an organic and hierarchical unity:

Organic unity and totality, union and synthesis of component parts into a comprehensive whole having a firm and sure centrum: these new hypotheses give the romanticist his authoritative power. They demonstrate how finite man represented in himself the eternal and infinite in a form peculiar to none other than himself.¹⁷

The world was seen as a hierarchical organism, in which the highest order of being was humanity, since human nature is able to reflect, most faithfully, the infinite ground of everything finite. Within this hierarchical scheme, the State emerged as more than merely a means of political stability; it also was the principle of religio-cultural unity, or ‘the unity of all cultural activities’. It should not be surprising, in the light of such an exalted concept of the State, to add that many adherents of Romanticism, including Schleiermacher, were nationalistically inclined.¹⁸

The words quoted above speak also of individual uniqueness. It is stated that the new hypotheses of Romanticism ‘demonstrate how finite man represented in himself the eternal and infinite in a form peculiar to none other than himself’. Thus, the implications of the coincidentia oppositorum for the individual self must be brought into focus. One of the impelling motives of Romanticism was the yearning for harmony amid a matrix of antitheses—of finite and infinite, of time and eternity, and so on. Schleiermacher's later Christian writings made repeated reference to the several antithetical elements that were a part of this theological system—especially the pivotal antithesis of sin and grace. In this early period, each of the Romantics aspired to establish within himself a centrum, or locus, in which all antitheses were resolved and harmony was achieved. Nevertheless, in view of the aridity of much Enlightenment rationalism and because of the seriousness with which the Romantics viewed Kant's negative conclusions concerning the scope and limits of possible human knowledge, there was a widespread disillusionment with philosophy—and even more so with theology—so that some new medium had to be sought for the expression of the coincidentia oppositorum. At the base of this disillusionment was a concept of ‘irony’, which was particularly associated with the thought of Friedrich Schlegel. Here was the ‘in spite of’ element in Romanticism. In other words, the concept of irony meant for the Romantics ‘that the infinite is superior to any finite concretion and drives beyond to another concretion’.¹⁹ In spite of the inadequacy of the finite, the romantics felt driven to discover both their own individual uniqueness and the medium that would be most appropriate to its expression.

Individual creativity was appreciated and encouraged to the point of the recognition of genius and virtuosity, but what was especially significant was the vocation that now emerged for the Romantic, stemming from the disillusionment with philosophy and theology. A new medium of vocation was discovered in the area of culture that addressed most directly the affectional nature of man—the arts. Of special importance was poetry as an artistic medium:

The conception that poetry is absolute reality, that it is equal to truth, not only pointed to a philosophic conviction beyond mere things, that beyond the phenomena of the empiric world lay the true world, but actually recognized in poetry a means of grasping the absolute. Here the infinite became finite; here the absolute became experience.²⁰

The poet brought the absolute into experience, and, by virtue of his role as master of the medium of poetry, ‘the artist becomes a mediator’.

As Schleiermacher charged in the opening chapter of the Speeches, it was a foregone conclusion to the ‘cultured despisers’ of religion that traditional religion had run its course. Thus no concept of religion then known could have hoped to be acceptable to the beautiful people of the mind, as a medium for their vocation. But, if conventional religion was at its lowest ebb, the arts were about to reach their crest. Could it be, then, Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel asked each other in letters, that a new religion might be developed through some medium of the arts? The challenge seemed irresistible. Schlegel would hope, through his ‘universal poetry’, to produce an aesthetic-esoteric religion of humanity and thereby would lift the human spirit, on the wings of art, above this world to the infinite.

Schleiermacher's primary vocation, however, was not to be the reinvigoration of conventional religion, nor the creation of a new religion through the arts, but rather to recover religious vitality through the rediscovery of the sensus numinis. Once he had experienced religion in its fullest and purest intensity, he was able to break away from traditional forms and concepts of religious expression—even such basic ones as ‘God’ and ‘immortality’. In so far as these two terms were useful at all to the author of the Speeches, they were the products of the creative power of fantasy (Phantasie or Fantasie, sometimes translated as ‘imagination’) rather than the vestiges of the tradition that had weighed down the religious spirit with its ‘dead letters’. As Blackwell has shown, the Romantics persuaded Schleiermacher to reconsider fantasy—which he had previously dismissed because he had equated it with the idea of the dominance of the youthful imagination over the rational side of life—as a means of enfleshing the experiences that had come to him through the sensus numinis. In Schlegel's words, ‘Fantasy is the organ of men for the deity.’²¹ Now fantasy, in this new understanding, came to be Schleiermacher's means of achieving theological poiēsis, not by producing poetic verse but by the power of fantasy to give rise to knowledge, through the power of association that it afforded for the experiences which were conveyed to him through the sensus numinis. Thus, it was through association that fantasy was able to create (poetise) a cohesive picture of the Whole, by giving form and shape to the data contributed by the sensus numinis.

While grateful to fellow Romantics for helping him to realise the positive possibilities of fantasy, Schleiermacher was ultimately unable to share their hope that the religion which they were attempting to create would lift humanity above the empirical world to union with the infinite. His was rather, in the apt phrase of Michael Ryan, a ‘phenomenology of the finite spirit’.²² True to his grounding in the phenomenal world of Kant's first Critique, Schleiermacher was convinced that any intimations of the infinite that lay within the limits of human perception must be mediated through the finite. Anything that promised more than this would be a chimera.

With this understanding in mind, Schleiermacher wrote, from inside the ranks of the Romantics (but never uncritically so), of the cultivation of individual creativity as a way of devotion. The element that he wanted to add was that the devotion ought to be religious. Nor did he have in mind an isolated individualism. As he made clear in his Christmas Eve: Dialogue on the Incarnation, he conceived of true individuality as stemming from a social and dialogical context. The truth emerged for him through dialogical encounter. Individuals, therefore, would be able to qualify and complement each other; the contribution of each individual carried infinite worth. Thus, in the words of Walzel,

That which is individual is likewise infinite; it is the expression and reflection of infinity. Individuality in the highest sense, human individuality, springs from the union of the infinite and the finite. But in each individuality only those faculties are potential which determine the nature of humanity; hence each human being is a compendium of humanity itself. And when a man has found infinity within himself religion is achieved.²³

As Schleiermacher addressed his fellow Romantics, his peculiar aim was to make clear that the way of devotion through individual creativity could indeed be devotion to religion, as the most faithful reflection of the ground of infinity, and not merely dedication to an ideal of art or culture (as admirable and as valuable as that may be, in itself).

One of the most striking expressions of the coincidentia oppositorum was the Romantic glorification of women and the exaltation of a creative androgynous tension in both sexes:

the romantics rejected the notion that sexual difference defines individuality. Rather, they argued that as a person becomes an individual microcosm of reality, he or she becomes more and more androgynous. Someone who is only male or only female is not whole. To become whole, we must become both male and female, and to the extent that we do so we become more individual.²⁴

It was obvious to the Romantics that their society was dominated by male values and that women were, for the most part, repressed, so that the dynamic of neither sex was able to make an imprint on the other. A part of the Romantic programme of reform, then, was an attempt to redress the balance. Woman, in her putative affinity for intuition, feeling and devotion to spiritual values, was perceived to be the model for the growth toward wholeness of her more coldly objective and rationalistically determined masculine counterpart.

Here was a polemical and rhetorical resort to the power of the feminine for the purpose of resurrecting and transfiguring the human spirit (male and female), which would have been a skandalon to the dry, Enlightenment rationalists. In championing the rights of women, the young Schleiermacher was doing as he was to do so many other times in his career. he was intentionally counteracting one imbalance—in this case, the rationalism of the Enlightenment—with an emphasis from the opposite direction which, by comparison with the predominant motifs of his day, could only be characterised as ‘feminine’.

In Schleiermacher's case, the glorification of women was not merely the result of romantic idealisation but stemmed from several sources, one of which predated his entry into Romanticism. First of all, from his earliest days he had held some women in exceptionally high esteem, beginning with his admirable mother and an older sister, with whom he corresponded and counselled over a lifetime. On a later occasion he spoke of a young woman in whose home he had served as a tutor. This beautiful young woman, for whom he had held a secret love, died aged twenty-seven. Shortly after hearing this sad news he wrote, ‘My sense for womanhood was first awakened in the Dohnas' domestic circle. The credit for this Friederike has carried with her into eternity. … Only through knowledge of the feminine mind and heart have I gained a knowledge of true human worth.’²⁵ Secondly, over his entire lifetime Schleiermacher shared his most important and original ideas with women. It should be noted that, of the four persons with whom he discussed the ideas leading to the writing of the Speeches, two were women (Henriette Herz and Dorothea Veit) associated with the Romantic circle (the other two being F. S. G. Sack, his ecclesiastical superior, and Friedrich Schlegel). Schleiermacher would surely have said that his esteem for women was based on cold, empirical observation of the gifted women he saw around him every day. The most famous woman in the Romantic circle was Henriette Herz, followed closely by Dorothea Veit and Rahel Levin. In addition to her other intellectual gifts, Henriette ‘had command of eight languages and studied Sanskrit and Turkish’.²⁶ Such a woman was eminently worthy to be the intellectual partner of any man! It is only necessary to add that, in Schleiermacher's view, the intuitive nature of women made them virtually perfect vessels of the sensus numinis, and thus, ideal teachers of religious experience to men.

III RELIGION, RECEPTIVITY AND THE SENSUS NUMINIS

When Schleiermacher attempted to co-ordinate his thoughts concerning the nature of religion as an independent aspect of human experience, he reused three definitions, ‘each having exactly the same weight’. First, religion is a ‘sense and taste for the infinite’. Secondly, it is the means through which ‘the universal being of all finite things in the infinite’ grows and thrives within the believer. He pulled the two definitions together in the following way:

Now sense may be the capacity either for perception [Wahrnehmungsvermögen] or for receptiveness [Empfindungsvermögen]. In this spot it is the latter. … Whatever I perceive or receive, however, I must imagine [einbilden], and this imagining is what I call the life of the object within me. Now by the term ‘infinite’ I here mean not an indeterminate something but the infinitude of being in general. We cannot know this infinite immediately and in itself alone; we can know it only by finite means. In this way our inclination to posit a world and to inquire about it leads us from the individual details to the all, from the parts to the whole. Accordingly, the sense for the infinite is one and the same thing as the ‘immediate life’ of the finite within us as it is in the infinite.²⁷

In the first expression, he suggested, ‘add “taste” to “sense”’; in the second, ‘make “the universal being of all finite things” explicit’. From the diverse strands of Schleiermacher's discussion of these two expressions, Tice offered a composite definition of religion:

Religion is, from the viewpoint of one's imaginative reception of the infinite, what might be called ‘sense and taste for the infinite’; or, from the viewpoint of what it is that one receives, ‘the immediate life of the being of all finite things within us as it is in the infinite’.²⁸

A third definition of religion, concerning ‘the contemplation of pious men’, has already been quoted. This ‘contemplation’ was, for Schleiermacher, a total openness of vision and spirit; for him it was, ‘indeed, a life in the infinite nature of the whole, in the one and all, in God—a having and possessing of all in God and of God in all’.²⁹ He has here attempted to acknowledge a belief in God as the essential ground for the Universum, without importing into the God concept many of the traditional metaphysical and moral confusions that had undermined religion. At the end of the second speech, he redefined the concepts of God and immortality, in order to carry his new understanding of religion forward. He pointed out, among other things, that the concept of God was a result of the operations of God upon persons, in piety, and that immortality ought to be purified of the traditional interpretation, as the desire for individual survival beyond the grave, and recognised as the present reality that it is, as a person's grounding in the infinite.³⁰

We can now consider the two terms which come the closest to a description of the essence of religion for Schleiermacher. They are Anschauung (‘intuition’, or, as Tice renders it, ‘perspectivity’) and Gefühl (‘feeling’), and they were frequently conjoined in the second speech, on the essence of religion, in the original edition of 1799:

Finally, in order to fill out the general picture of religion I remind you that every perspective [Anschauung] is naturally bound together with some feeling [Gefühl]. Your organs mediate the connection between the object and yourselves. To reveal its existence to you that same influx of the object must arouse those organs in various ways and occasion a change in your inner consciousness. The resultant feeling, which you have probably often scarcely been aware of, can in some cases grow to such strength that you forget the object and even yourselves. …³¹

This experience can so completely dominate the self that it may, for the moment, impede the development of other emotional impressions. Yet his audience of cultured despisers would not, as Schleiermacher believed, simply attribute such force to the operation ‘of external objects’.

You would agree, then, that that action within you lies far beyond the power of even the strongest feeling and must therefore have quite a different source within you. So it is with religion. … If you gain perspective on [the universe], then you must necessarily be gripped by various feelings. Except that in religion it is another and firmer relation between perspectivity and feeling which obtains, so that one's perspective is never so preponderant that feeling is virtually dissolved. … So it is that the special way in which the universe presents itself to you in your gaining of perspective makes up the distinctive character of your own individual religion, and likewise the strength of the corresponding feelings determines the degree of your religiosity.³²

Anschauung and Gefühl, therefore, are bound together in an essential mutuality of operation:

Perspectivity without feeling is nothing and can have neither the right origination nor the right force. Feeling without perspectivity is also nothing. Both can only exist because and insofar as they are fundamentally one and undivided.³³

When perspectivity and feeling mutually inform and qualify each other, religion emerges as a phenomenon of human experience.

Twenty years after the appearance of the Speeches, Schleiermacher produced his magnum opus of dogmatics, The Christian Faith. In that work, the initial problem was how the sensus numinis was to determine the method and content of theology in a distinctively Christian way. In his concept of religion, now defined as ‘the consciousness of being absolutely dependent, or which is the same thing, of being in relation to God’, Schleiermacher discovered ‘the common element in all howsoever diverse expressions of piety, by which these are conjointly distinguished from all other feelings’.³⁴ The integrity of this form of consciousness, this ‘modification of feeling or of immediate self-consciousness’, was upheld in that it was said to be ‘neither a Knowing nor a Doing’, but is related to and also differentiated from both of these in a common ground that is not to be construed ‘as a co-ordinate third or fourth entity’.³⁵ In discussing feeling, Schleiermacher explained that in the rhythm of life the subject consistently alternated between a receptivity and an activity—‘between an abiding-in-self [Insichbleiben] and a passing-beyond-self [Aussichheraustreten]’.³⁶ Now, in contrast both to knowing (as epistemological process) and to doing, feeling is a receptivity, and hence an abiding-in-self: thus ‘the unity of these is not one of the two or three themselves. … The unity rather is the essence of the subject itself, which manifests itself in these severally distinct forms, and is, to give it a name, which in this particular connexion is permissible, their common foundation’. Within the experience of self-consciousness, the self is always necessarily related to an ‘Other’ in ‘reciprocity’—sometimes acting upon the latter in freedom, sometimes receiving the action of the other in dependence. But Schleiermacher regarded receptivity as always prior and ‘primary’, in order for the subject to take into itself directional orientation and stimulation from the other. Moreover, an important distinction was to be maintained between the relation of the self to the other, as reciprocity, and the relation of the self to God, as receptivity.

For, by definition, the self's feeling of absolute dependence would have to preclude the consciousness of any incompleteness on the part of God, such that the self could either initiate or contribute anything that would add to the wellbeing of the Deity. Hence, in the feeling of absolute dependence, God is not to be objectified as the Other—neither as ‘the world’ nor as ‘any single part’ thereof, but is to be recognised as the ‘Whence’ (Woher) of the subject—object relationship. This assertion meant that ‘the Whence of our receptive and active existence, as implied in this self-consciousness, is to be designated by the word “God”, and that this is for us the really original signification of that word’.³⁷ The problem of the possible content of the word ‘God’ was at once posed, to which Schleiermacher replied that beyond its primary signification as ‘that which is the codeterminant in this feeling and to which we trace our being in such a state’,³⁸ the term can have no ‘further content’ which is not ‘evolved out of this fundamental import assigned to it’.³⁹ Such a state of affairs threw dogmatics back into the one sphere in which Schleiermacher saw the possibility of a content: Glaubenslehre, or faith's exposition of its own self-consciousness.

In The Christian Faith, ‘receptivity’ is Schleiermacher's term for the divinely created disposition toward feeling, or the sensus numinis, in Christian believers, and also, in its ultimate application, the basis for the conjunction of the divine and human natures in the Incarnation of the Redeemer. This concept, therefore, is of immeasurable help in explaining the basis, within human nature, for religious experience. As Schleiermacher saw it, receptivity was the vital ‘link’ between human nature prior to the Incarnation of the Redeemer and the basis for what happens in, through and after his appearance.

we posit, on the one side, an initial divine activity which is supernatural, but at the same time a vital human receptivity [eine lebendige menschliche Empfänglichkeit] in virtue of which alone that supernatural can become a natural fact of history. This is the link which connects the corporate life before the appearance of the Redeemer with that which exists in the fellowship with the Redeemer, so as adequately to bring out the identity of human nature in both.⁴⁰

As an expression of the divine good-pleasure, the implanting of the original disposition of receptivity was an eternal act. In the resultant evolution of the sensus numinis, through the cultivation of this receptivity, the religious propensity of the human race grew, until, as a temporal act of this ascending human nature, the Redeemer appeared in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. In the Redeemer, then, the ‘supernatural [became the] natural’. The reason for the supernatural stimulus in the origin of the Redeemer was that he had to be freed from the initial corrupting influences of ‘the corporate life of sinfulness’, in which ‘sin propagates itself naturally, so that an unhindered potency of the God-consciousness in Jesus cannot be understood simply as a product of that life’. But, once the Redeemer appeared, and founded his redemptive community, the new creation which was supernaturally initiated in him ‘can become a natural fact of history’. The redemption which Christ achieved was ‘supra rational’ only in the sense that it was not ‘explicable by means of the reason which dwells equally in all other men’,⁴¹ or else they also would have been able to bring about the redemption which Christ uniquely achieved. It was the same receptivity which then gave believers the power to appropriate this redemptive power and to propagate it in the Church, by preserving the impression of the sinless perfection of the Redeemer. This vital human receptivity, then, was the basis, in human nature, for authentic religious experience, as Schleiermacher understood it.

IV IN BUT NOT OF ROMANTICISM

The question of Schleiermacher's relation to Romanticism must now be addressed. Explanations of this relation are numerous, and more often than not Schleiermacher has been caught between two extreme positions—that of the avid friends and that of the sometimes almost rabid foes of Romanticism. Friends of the Romantics might commend him for making a noble effort to be a part of this movement, but most of them would conclude that he did not go nearly far enough. Conversely, to the foes of the movement—most of whom were representatives of the traditional religion that the Romantics rejected and that Schleiermacher severely criticised—even the slightest resemblance of his thought to Romanticism, or reliance upon its language and concepts, was too much. Neither extreme properly elucidates Schleiermacher's position.

Statements of two critics are moderate and helpful assessments. For H. L. Friess, ‘two salient facts’ distinguished Schleiermacher from other Romantics:

In the first place, he was a preacher by profession, whereas most of the others inclined to identify religion, especially the church, with the old order and its cultural limitations. In the second place, he had no marked literary gift, while the essential medium of the group's activity was literary.⁴²

There is some truth in each of these judgements, although there must have been deeper roots in Schleiermacher than a sense of clerical vocation. A statement by M. Redeker is also helpful:

In the encounter with his romantic friends he participated in their cultural world and used their language. But he ultimately did not succumb to the temptations of romantic fantasy and sentimentality, of their originality and sentimentality [Empfindsamkeit], because his decisive religious and theological conceptions were not rooted in romanticism … the novelty of his piety and the systematic development of his ideas are discernible already prior to his Berlin period. … His systematic work in theology and philosophy soon led him beyond romanticism. Scholarship became for him much more than speculative play with ideas and concepts; it became the serious service on behalf of truth for the overcoming of fanaticism and empty scepticism.⁴³

Redeker acknowledged that he had been strongly influenced by the opinion of Dilthey, who wrote, ‘Like every genius he [Schleiermacher] was lonely in their midst and yet needed them. … He lived among them as a sober man among dreamers.’⁴⁴

Although more helpful, these assessments are still too general. While making no pretence of exhausting the subject, I shall draw some conclusions which I hope will shed some more light on the relation. Perhaps there was a parallel of sorts between Schleiermacher's experience within, and his later alienation from, the Moravian community. Although circumstances forced him to sever his tie with the community, we have already noted his acknowledgement that piety had been his ‘motherly womb’, and that he later came to think of himself as ‘a Herrnhutter again, only of a higher order’. His removal from the Romantic circle was neither as painful nor as complete as the severance from Moravian fellowship, yet it might be that the influence of Romanticism on the shaping of the substance of his system of Christian theology—particularly the utilisation of the pivotal antithesis of sin and grace and of the coincidentia oppositorum in his trinitarian doctrine of God—would warrant a description of him as a ‘Berlin Romantiker again, only of a higher order’.

The factor which ultimately formed the difference, I suggest, was the very same conjunction of opposing forces that had been at work in him from the age of eleven—existential doubt apprehended through the sensus numinis and responsible doubt. We have seen that in his adult years ‘he wanted in all circumstances to be a modern man as well as a Christian theologian’. These words express the form in which this dialectic grew in Schleiermacher's adult years. The two poles served as mutually conditioning factors, each restraining the other from pathological excess. Thus, critical intelligence restrained the sensus numinis from sweeping Schleiermacher into the same emotional vortex which had claimed his grandfather, while the sensus numinis pricked and quickened his rational side until he refused to settle for the arid solutions of scholasticism and the Enlightenment to the theological problems that troubled him in his day. It might be said, then, that on the basis of tensional dialectic he was ‘fully in but never fully of Romanticism’.

In closing, here are some contrasts between Schleiermacher and the Romantics. First, he was unable fully to share the disdain that the Romantics tended to feel toward religion. He could not agree that an entirely new religion needed to be created from the ground up. What was required was rather a recovery of the sensus numinis—the resuscitation of the spirit of religion which had almost been suffocated by the overlaying of the ‘dead letter’. Second, the fluid and broadly inclusive Church community for which he pleaded in the Speeches and worked so energetically in later life was a far cry, indeed, from the Roman hierarchical bureaucracy to which Schlegel was eventually converted. Third, and closely connected to the second point, Schleiermacher was unable to ground religion on the authority of the past. The basis was that in feeling God is given to the subject ‘in an original way’. Fourth, whereas the new religion to which Novalis and Schlegel had aspired was to have been aesthetic, esoteric and otherworldly, Schleiermacher's phenomenology of finite spirit utilised the sensus numinis to apprehend the infinite through the finite media of this world.

Schleiermacher's answers obviously cannot be the answers for the situation in which we live. Yet the questions which moved him the most are perennial ones, and his proposed solutions may still serve as a catalyst toward our own rediscovery of the sensus numinis, in the form that speaks most directly to us. If such should prove to be the case, then he truly will be acknowledged as ‘a prophet-citizen of a later world’!

Notes

1. H. L. Friess, Introduction to Schleiermacher's Soliloquies, tr. H. L. Friess (Chicago, 1957) p. 62.

2. K. Barth, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl, tr. B. Cozens, H. H. Hartwell and the editorial staff of the SCM Press (New York, 1959) p. 314.

3. R. Otto, Religious Essays: A Supplement to ‘The Idea of the Holy’, tr. B. Lunn (Oxford, 1931) p. 68.

4. R. F. Streetman, ‘Divination: Aesthetic and Religious Intimations of Otto's Numinous in English Language, Literature and Poetry’, in Papers of the Nineteenth-Century Theology Working Group: AAR 1982 Annual Meeting, ed. M. C. Massey and G. Green (Berkeley, Calif., 1982) p. 94.

5. M. Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought, tr. J. Wallhausser (Philadelphia, 1973) p. 8.

6. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, tr. J. Oman (New York, 1958) p. 9.

7. Schleiermacher, The Life of Schleiermacher as Unfolded in his Autobiography and Letters, tr. F. Rowan, 2 vols, (London, 1860) I, 283f.

8. A. L. Blackwell, Schleiermacher's Early Philosophy of Life: Determinism, Freedom, and Fantasy (Chico, Calif. 1982) p. 7.

9. P. Tillich, Perspectives on Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Protestant Theology, ed. C. E. Braaten (New York, 1967) pp. 11-12.

10. R. Otto, Introduction to Schleiermacher, On Religion, pp. xiv-xv.

11. R. Immerwahr, ‘The Word Romantisch and its History’, in The Romantic Period in Germany: Essays by Members of the London University Institute of Germanic Studies, ed. S. Prawer (New York, 1970) p. 34 and n. 1.

12. Tillich, Perspectives, p. 77.

13. Friedrich Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion, Kritische Ausgabe, ed. G. C. B. Pünjer (Brunswick, 1879) p. 49.

14. Schleiermacher, On Religion: Addresses in Response to its Cultured Critics, tr. T. N. Tice (Richmond, Va., 1969) p. 79.

15. Ibid., p. 159 n. 2.

16. Ibid., p. 22.

17. O. Walzel, German Romanticism, tr. A. E. Lussky (New York, 1932) p. 75.

18. See J. F. Dawson, Friedrich Schleiermacher: The Birth of a Nationalist (Austin, Texas, 1966); cf. Tillich, Perspectives, pp. 86f.

19. Ibid., p. 89; cf. Walzel, German Romanticism, pp. 41-6; and J. Forstman, A Romantic Triangle: Schleiermacher and Early German Romanticism (Missoula, Mont., 1977) chs. 1, 2.

20. Walzel, German Romanticism, pp. 28, 74.

21. F. Schlegel, Anthenaeum, in Forstman, A Romantic Triangle, p. 25; cf. Blackwell, Schleiermacher's Early Philosophy of Life, pp. 2.2-2.8.

22. J. D. Ryan, ‘Response and Discussion’, in Schleiermacher as Contemporary, ed. R. W. Funk (New York, 1970) pp. 211f.

23. Walzel, German Romanticism, p. 50.

24. Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian Thought, ed. E. Clark and H. W. Richardson (New York, 1977) p. 174.

25. Blackwell, Schleiermacher's Early Philosophy of Life, quoted from the caption under the portrait of Gräfin Friederike Dohna, Figure G, after p. 148.

26. J. King, ‘Schleiermacher's Catechism for Noble Women’, Hibbert Journal, XXVI, no. 4 (July 1928) 710.

27. Schleiermacher, On Religion, tr. Tice, p. 158 n. 2.

28. Ibid., p. 159.

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid., pp. 147-9, 154-6.

31. Ibid., p. 355 n. 46; cf. Schleiermacher, Reden über die Religion, ed. Pünjer, pp. 69-70.

32. Schleiermacher, On Religion, tr. Tice, p. 355 n. 46.

33. Ibid., p. 356 n. 46.

34. Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, tr. H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh, 1928) no. 4, p. 12.

35. Ibid., no. 3, pp. 6, 8.

36. Ibid., p. 8.

37. Ibid., p. 16.

38. Ibid., p. 17.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., p. 365.

41. Ibid., p. 64.

42. Friess, Introduction to Schleiermacher's Soliloquies, pp. xxxviii-xxxix.

43. Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought, pp. 63f.

44. W. Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, I (Berlin, 1870) 260, 439; tr. and quoted in Redeker, Schleiermacher: Life and Thought, pp. 62f.