The impulse to make open confession, to reveal the counsels of the heart, or to write spiritual autobiography seems particularly strong in religious souls, and has in all times and places left an intimate record of religious experience. Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies (Monologen) is a record of this type, although it contains nothing, as its author says, of religion in a strict and narrow sense.1 It is an inner conversation, a series of meditations, a book of self-scrutiny. It is one of the very few writings in the literature of German philosophic idealism, which imparts experiences and beliefs directly instead of through a medium of speculation and dialectic. It supplements the argued apology for religion, with which Schleiermacher’s name is pre-eminently associated, by a more immediate revelation of his own distinctive spirituality. There is no more immediate and representative a revelation than the Soliloquies of that peculiar speculative and romantic idealism which has so thoroughly permeated German thought from 1800 to the very present. The chief fruits of Schleiermacher’s life are no doubt to be found in his works on religion, especially in his noted book On Religion: Speeches addressed to its cultured despisers (1799), but what his life was in its spiritual essence, when he wrote this evangel of modernist Protestantism—and thereby much of the meaning of what he said—is more purely revealed in the Soliloquies of a year later.2
The history of Schleiermacher’s family is linked with three distinct episodes in the development of liberal Protestantism, each of which has produced a characteristic strain of thought and feeling in pursuit of a characteristic kind of liberation.3 The first strain is that common initially to the Quakers and Pietists, then to Wesleyanism, and evangelicalism generally. It is essentially bent on inner moral regeneration, often strongly tinged with elements of mystical exaltation. It is supernaturalistic at first hand or by original conviction. Its liberalism consists in its freedom from ecclesiastical forms, and its reliance upon the individual’s experience. It was evoked essentially by the ecclesiastical formalism of the seventeenth century, by sectarian strife and those last fearful struggles over the dead body of mediaeval Christendom, that raged in Central Europe from 1618 to 1648. Above the degradation and turmoil of those years there came once more to certain sensitive souls a pure vision of Christ, still beckoning to all men as a companion in a simple but adequate brotherhood of charity. For these idealists the immediate communion with Christ was the supreme reality of life. One might walk and talk with Him in the fields around Bristol or in the Rhineland, as every Pietist and Methodist hymn-book testifies.
The same century that produced the founders of evangelicalism witnessed the impressive discovery of the Newtonian system of nature. As the fact of natural law gradually permeated the minds of people, a new and very different type of liberal Protestantism developed. Its aim was to free the religious tradition of elements which might impede the development of natural knowledge. It sought to eliminate extravagant supernaturalism, and to grasp “the analogy of religion to the constitution and order of nature.” Its liberalism was that of freedom from superstition, of encouraging solid thought in the furtherance of human welfare.
For a time this humanitarian program of eighteenth century rationalism seemed to advance along simple lines. But gradually with the accumulation of knowledge and power, the constitution and order of nature were seen to be more complicated than hitherto supposed, and the elements of human welfare to be more varied. The nineteenth century produced a bewildering variety both of theoretical and of practical perspectives. It would be hard to say where the choice of reason is most difficult: whether in the field of metaphysics, beset as it is, on the side of natural philosophy, with the problems of interpreting evolution and relativity (not to mention the claim of metaphysical idealism to supplant all naturalism), or in the field of competing economic interests, or yet again in the realm of contrary cultural ideals. This new situation has given rise to another form of religious liberalism, namely modernism. The liberalism of the modernist is that of the romanticist, who feels the appeal of multifarious attractions. It is no longer the eighteenth century problem of assimilating natural law alone that besets the modernist, but rather that of absorbing a great variety of new goods and powers, of keeping abreast with the times in their giddy course. Hence the term “modernist” is appropriate. His problem is essentially to find what place and meaning his religion may claim to have amid all this welter of modern interests.