Schleiermacher’s thought is an early episode in the emergence of modernism, but the history of his forbears reflects the still earlier phases of liberal Protestantism.⁴ His paternal grandfather had been a religious radical of the evangelistic type, while his father, also a churchman, inclined toward rationalism. The grandfather, Daniel Schleiermacher, had been a leading supporter of Eller, whose mystical, apocalyptic gospel, typical of the emotional piety prevalent in his day, caused considerable stir in the Rhineland during the 1730’s and 40’s. When the Ellerian sect fell into discredit, due to the misconduct of its founder, Daniel Schleiermacher suffered not only loss of prestige, but was accused of practicing sorcery and of lèse-majesté. An order was issued for his arrest, but he escaped capture by flight to Arnheim. This was in 1749, scarcely twenty years before the birth of his illustrious grandson, Friedrich. The experience of these difficulties seems to have produced in his son, Gottlieb, a restrained critical temper and especially a suspicion of enthusiasm in matters of religion. He clung to the orthodox church, as indispensable for the moral education of the lower classes. Indeed, he became an army chaplain, but he confesses to have preached “for twelve years virtually without belief.”⁵ This attitude of accommodation to the institution of the church was as typical in his generation as Eller’s mysticism had been in the previous one, but Gottlieb Schleiermacher does not seem to have been happy in it. He wanted his children to grow up in a warmer and deeper Christian feeling, and as he and his wife had been impressed on their travels with the piety of the Moravian communities, he decided to send his son Friedrich and his daughter Charlotte to school in one of these communities at Niesky in Upper Lusatia.

Friedrich Schleiermacher was fourteen years old when he came to Niesky in 1783 and he stayed with the Moravians for four years. Thus he spent these very impressionable years of his life in an atmosphere of evangelical piety, but the result was not a return to the religion of his grandfather (nor a persistence in the rationalism of his father), but rather the emergence of a third type of liberal Protestantism, which was to become characteristic of the nineteenth century. In some respects evangelical piety took hold of him deeply. For instance, he seems very soon to have experienced a full-fledged conviction of sin. At least he took his own deficiencies very seriously, and wrote after a short time in the brotherhood: “I have experienced much, that is, much of evil on my part and much of grace on the part of heaven. On my part, I have deserved wrath! But the Lamb of the Cross cries to me: ‘I have atoned for thee!’”⁶ The experience of grace, however, did not develop as it should. And Schleiermacher had in its place imaginative moments, in which he wondered whether all the legend of Christianity, as well as all the stories he had been told of ancient history, were not purely fanciful.

These random doubts of childhood were in time suppressed, but only by the satisfaction of a growing critical faculty—not by acquiescence in tradition, but by the getting of new knowledge. There was a fellow-student in the school at Niesky named Albertini, and a teacher, named Hilmer, who aroused in Schleiermacher a greater passion for learning, in particular for classical literature, than the place could satisfy. The Moravian system showed a shrewd appreciation of worldly commonsense, but the uncommon achievements of worldly-minded genius, like natural science and classical literature, it generally neglected. Its deepest vein was other-worldly, and it found greater value in spontaneous inner lights, in dreams and unexpected revelations of the supernatural, than in learning. At the Moravian seminary in Barby, to which he was promoted after two years, Schleiermacher felt the limitations of Moravianism more sharply than at the school. No attention was paid to the renaissance in letters, in scholarship, and in philosophy that was even then raising the German mind to its highest spiritual achievements. There was an index of forbidden literature, both ancient and modern. Schleiermacher found some congenial fellow-spirits among the students with whom he formed his first real friendships, and together they smuggled some of the condemned books into the school, among them Wieland’s poems and Goethe’s Werther. Their friendship, formed under the golden spell of Greek naturalism and modern poetry, took on an ideal significance. They regarded themselves as harbingers of a better era for humanity, working in secret.⁷ But relations with the authorities of the seminary became more and more unbearable.

The great University of Halle, only a few miles away, was under these circumstances an irresistible temptation. In 1787, after two years in the seminary, Schleiermacher made the final decision to break away from the Moravian Brotherhood, and wrote to his father for permission to study at Halle. His father was deeply grieved, and for a time irate, but finally he gave his full consent. In these letters to his father Schleiermacher put certain theological doubts in the foreground as reasons for his break with the Moravians, questioning especially their naively supernatural Christology.⁸ This was an issue which his father and his father’s generation, given to rationalism and deism, would understand and would regard as crucial. But for Schleiermacher himself it was only half the story. A new world of esthetic feeling, of historic research, of social relations was opening to his imagination and to that of his young companions, a world unknown to the eighteenth century. Toward this world of the future Schleiermacher went when he left the Moravians.

But he took with him a permanent heritage of his early training. The four years spent in the Moravian Brotherhood not only associated his life and his ideals inseparably with Christian religion, but also determined in great measure the form that Christianity, and religion as a whole, thereafter took in his mind. Among the Moravians he had experienced conversion, redemption, regeneration, and other-worldliness as emotional facts, and these experiences remained a part of himself, though he left the cult and its theology. (“Religion remained with me,” he wrote later, “when God and immortality vanished before my doubting eyes.”⁹) The deep humility of the Moravians, their utter trust in Providence, left in him a permanent quality of reverence, a basic tranquility and repose, and holiness of spirit.¹⁰ He was likewise imbued with the personalism, the moral earnestness of brother in dealing with brother. These positive qualities of Moravian piety were firmly grounded in Schleiermacher, and remained in him as a permanent spiritual deposit conditioning his whole subsequent growth.

When he went to Halle, he enrolled as a theological student, thus continuing, despite his break with the Moravians, in the clerical traditions of his family. He says he could imagine no means but preaching for exerting the particular didactic influence upon the spirit of the common man, that seemed a part of his nature.¹¹ And so he clung to the plan of preaching throughout many years of groping. All through his university days, however, and for years afterward, even though he had begun to preach, he could find little joy in “theological rubbish.”¹² His favorite studies were those in ancient literature and in philosophy. At Halle he was fortunate to have teachers of an ability commensurate with his ambition in these subjects, F. A. Wolf, one of the founders of modern classical scholarship, and E. A. Eberhard, who emphasized the continuity of modern philosophical thought with the Greek tradition and criticized the Kantian revolution. Eberhard set Schleiermacher to work translating Aristotle’s Ethics.¹³ The discipline of original research under the guidance of these men gave him a critical sense for fact and a training in exact, systematic thought.

The scientific tradition to which Schleiermacher was introduced at Halle was predominantly rationalistic. Science was conceived as a development of propositions tested by their relations to each other. Experience was taken into account by the recognition that the material for the formulation of propositions is furnished by experience and by the expectation that falsifications of experience will reveal themselves in the form of conflicting propositions. In this form of rationalism the antithesis between logic and experience, which has furnished such a dilemma for the theory of knowledge, is somewhat mitigated. The network of propositions that constitute science is regarded as a network in which experience (and thereby the stuff of the world) is caught up. Schleiermacher was brought up in this view of science as an ordered whole, and he never abandoned it, even though he became clearly conscious of difficulties involved in it. He saw that, according to this view, the certainty of specific propositions depends on their relations to the whole body of truth; the fact that we do not know this whole tends to infect all our knowledge with uncertainty and to make our rationalistic systems somewhat inadequate and artificial. We are forced to be experimental, sceptical, and intuitive, in the interest of the fullness of life and being that lies beyond our organized thought. Instead of taking these freer activities into his conception of science, however, Schleiermacher prefers to think of them as belonging to the highly important, non-scientific side of life. The ideal of science itself is to be purely rational, and in his formal, scientific works of later years he shows an arduous loyalty to this ideal by casting all his demonstrations into a rigid, systematic form.¹⁴ The rationalistic ideal of science is maintained as expressing an unattainable perfection of one of man’s eternal interests. But since it is clearly recognized to be both an unattainable and a one-sided interest, there appears in Schleiermacher’s philosophy a certain antithesis or tension, very characteristic and fundamental in all German thought of recent times, between the supposed claims of order and system, on the one hand and the supposed claims of life and being, on the other. Certain underlying motives and causes of this very characteristic antithesis will appear in further tracing Schleiermacher’s development.

The interest of his teachers at Halle and of their better pupils in Greek thought marks a turning point in the development of modern philosophy. After a period of comparative neglect, a revival of classical studies made its appearance in the eighteenth century, which brought Schleiermacher and many of his contemporaries under its spell. In the same years that he was translating Aristotle at Halle, Friedrich Schlegel was studying Greek poetry at Leipzig and Dresden, Schelling Greek mythology at Tübingen, and Hegel Greek religion in Tübingen and Basel. (That these early studies of the German philosophers were not merely school-boy exercises will scarcely be questioned, yet it is interesting to quote from a letter of Hegel’s which shows plainly what was really at stake in them. Congratulating J. C. Voss on his translation of Homer’s Odyssey, Hegel writes: “Luther translated the Bible, and you have translated Homer into German; it is my work to translate philosophy into our tongue.”¹⁵) This approach to philosophy through its history, which was the approach of Schleiermacher as well as of Hegel, differentiates the spirit of these men sharply from that of their seventeenth and eighteenth century predecessors. The great pioneers of modern philosophy had largely believed with Descartes that literary and historical studies were a temptation to be avoided in favor of the more serious pursuit of mathematics. Such intellectual puritanism had its moral counterpart in the prudence with which the middle classes, amid the wantonness of arbitrary government and religious fanaticism, laid the economic foundations of their well-being. An appreciation of rational order was for them, as for the philosophers, the highest wisdom, and for a brief time in the eighteenth century religious feeling fastened on cogency and order as the supreme evidence of divinity. But the same century also witnessed a change of temper at the close. Coincident with increased prosperity and the recognized triumph of modern society over mediaevalism and feudalism, came the awakening of new desires and a general widening of interests. Security and order, once established, were no longer the ideal; variety and fullness of life took their place. People, discovered the bareness of puritan rationalism, and demanded a richer measure of thought and feeling. The revival of interest in ancient Greek culture was but one item in a romantic program of general spiritual expansion.

It is customary to contrast this new romantic temper of mind with the rationalism that preceded it, to set the philosophy of spirit which it produced over against the seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy of nature. But underlying both the ideal of rational order and the romantic ideal, as a continuous historical process, was the making of modern society with a new system of natural and civil law. The French Revolution was neither the beginning nor the end of this process, but simply inaugurated a phase of freer expansion, and it was this opportunity of freer expansion that excited the romantic temper of mind. When the ideal of civil liberty was once established as a political force, the emancipation movement, far from disappearing, became universal and polymorphous. Similarly, the idea of scientific inquiry did not disappear in romanticism, but was extended from the field of nature to other fields, and surrounded with new emotional values. Science came to be conceived as a function of Spirit, a phase in the life of reason, not merely as an inquiry into the laws of nature. It sometimes seems as if romanticism had carried us far from a rational pursuit of liberty and truth. It has made the pursuit more difficult, because it has manifolded and enriched the meaning of liberty and truth. But this very quality of manifold and enriched idealism, with all its characteristic antitheses, which is the essence of romanticism, implies a continuity with modern society in its simpler beginnings, such as would permit the gradual accumulation of many purposes. Had there been a real break with the past and a new beginning in the nineteenth century (e. g., like that involved in the rise of new peoples within the Roman Empire), the new spirit of that century could scarcely have been modern romanticism.

The gradual transition to romanticism seemed all the more like an absolute break with the past and a radically new beginning, because it coincided with a shift in philosophic leadership from Great Britain and France to Germany. The fact that romantic idealism received its most impressive philosophic statement in Germany rather than in another country, and hence that it was permeated with German characteristics, has tended to an identification or at least to the assumption of an essential connection between the German spirit and the romantic spirit. But it was the circumstances under which German philosophy was made, fully as much as the influence of German character, that caused the greatest creation of Germany in the realm of philosophy to be a romantic type of metaphysics. It was not the romantic character of all things German that caused romanticism to find its classic expression in Weimar, Jena, and Berlin. (The ingredients or elements of a work like Faust are many of them quite the opposite of romantic; it is their combination, the attempt to embrace magic and science, poetry and politics, Hellenism and Protestantism, romance and toil in the compass of a single life that is strikingly romantic and peculiar to the ambitions of modern society become conscious of its diverse riches.) It was rather the fact that all things German were being gathered up into classic syntheses at a time when the prevailing mentality was romantic. And this fact in turn can not be attributed solely to the influence of great individuals, who happened to be Germans, like Immanuel Kant and Goethe. A combination of many historic circumstances brought the making of German cultural traditions in a special measure under the influence of romanticism, and hence reciprocally the romantic movement enjoyed a larger measure of life in Germany than anywhere else, and received a strong German coloring. Germany as such was just beginning to exist, the various forces of her life were fruitfully combining with each other, when modern society reached that stage of development which provoked the romantic temper, and hence in Germany the romantic movement coincided with a great national awakening. To glorify manifold activity and differentiation at the beginning of the nineteenth century meant in Germany to participate actually in the integration and molding of a new national life. It was the force of this opportunity that made German poets and philosophers in fullest measure the interpreters of this particular moment in western civilization.

While German philosophy was still predominantly rationalistic in spirit, still under the sway of Leibniz and Wolff, eighteenth century British and French thought had gone a long way toward transforming and undermining the intellectual orthodoxy of enlightened rationalism. The emergence of romantic concepts and categories came gradually, in different ways for different minds, but the final, decisive influence for Schleiermacher and for most of his German contemporaries at least were the ideas of Immanuel Kant. While Schleiermacher was still a student at the University of Halle, the first wave of Kantianism swept over Germany, and poured through the crumbling walls of orthodox rationalism. His teacher, Eberhard, was not much impressed with this new “critical philosophy,’ but Schleiermacher was prepared to study his Kant alone. After leaving the University in 1789, he went to live with his uncle, a professor of theology well-acquainted with Sack, the court-preacher to Frederick the Great and with other élite of the Reformed Church in Germany. The library and companionship of his uncle were intended to help him prepare for the theological examinations required of all candidates for the ministry, but Schleiermacher apparently gave more attention to Kant than to theology. In 1790 he wrote to a friend “my belief in the Kantian philosophy increases daily, especially as I compare it with the Leibnizean.”¹⁶

For Leibniz the major aspects of the world were determined by the great structures of mathematical physics, Christian theology, and civil law; the business of philosophy was to understand the nature of these structures so as to assure their harmonious development. Among such definitely ordered materials rationalism was very much at home, and felt confident to sketch out a plan of the entire universe. Schleiermacher was separated from this point of view, not by his own individual thinking, but by a whole century of change which many minds had jointly produced, and which affected all his contemporaries. Through the gradual accumulation of new knowledge and new powers, the sharpening of criticism and the awakening of new interests, the structures underlying the metaphysics of rationalism were being rapidly outgrown. In England John Locke developed an empirical psychology which showed, as Berkeley pointed out, the irrelevance of mathematical physics to much of ordinary experience, while David Hume not only drove this point home, but also revealed the repugnance of theological rationalism to the progress of experimental reasoning. In France, Rousseau declared that it was not necessary in practical affairs to follow the external sanctions of legal precedent; a more rational system of legislation than the existing one could be framed by the free decision of autonomous human wills. The crucial importance of Immanuel Kant’s thought for Schleiermacher and his contemporaries lay in the fact that Kant had something like a universal grasp of these changes taking place piecemeal in many minds, and was the first to suggest a program of philosophic reconstruction appropriate to the situation as a whole. For instance, in Rousseau’s attitude toward legislation he saw the general conception of reason as an active principle progressing in the light of its own intrinsic ideals, and it was this conception which he placed at the center of his program. Do not look for reason in some external structure of the physical world or of traditional practices and beliefs, but dare to trust the inner reason active in producing these structures, which knows it can produce better ones.

There was no difficulty in Schleiermacher’s choice between Kant and Leibniz. It would have been virtually impossible for him, or for any contemporary with similar interests and education, to prefer the traditional Leibnizean system. He might possibly appreciate the true greatness of its mathematical inventions, the refined elegance of its theology, and the humane purpose of its legal erudition, but he could no longer regard these qualities as the primary requisites of philosophy. When Schleiermacher left the University of Halle, in the eventful year of 1789, although he was fundamentally interested in religion and planned to enter the ministry, he could associate many of Leibniz’s refined disquisitions with the “theological rubbish” he had left behind in the Moravian seminary. Mathematics appealed to him as a pastime. In fits of depression, he says he liked “to lose himself in resolving algebraic formulas or in geometric demonstrations.”¹⁷ How different from Leibniz, who says he found himself in mathematics!¹⁸ Equally great was the contrast in their attitudes toward the law. For Leibniz the development of jurisprudence seemed an all-important means of abolishing the social anarchy of his day, whereas Schleiermacher’s deepest interest in the growth of a freer human culture with finer and wider feeling for the varied whole of life fed chiefly upon literary and historical materials, leading him into a region of mind beyond law, where legalistic thinking of the most delicate kind seemed too inflexible and coarse.

This was the region inhabited by whatever reason was active, not only within Schleiermacher, but also in the minds of his young contemporaries, Friedrich Schlegel, Schelling, and Hegel, who were to make the German philosophy of the future. All these young men, who, in the same decade began their intellectual careers with the study of ancient Greek civilization, were essentially interested, like Schleiermacher, in the making of a richer modern culture. Naturally they welcomed the Kantian suggestion to reconstruct philosophy in the light of an active inner reason. At the same time, Kant’s ideas needed much readjustment and revision to suit their purposes.

For Kant’s conception of reason, while it looked beyond the rationalities of the past, was still largely legalistic in character. He took the physics, the theology, and the law of his time as unfinished in substance, to be sure, but nevertheless as perfect in type, and he thought of his free inner reason as conquering new fields of knowledge by casting new materials into molds of this same type. This is most clearly apparent when one examines his own ventures into the newer branches of science, for instance, in biology, in history, and also in esthetics. In history and esthetics he is strong in the making of general distinctions, in legislating a scheme of interpretation, but often weak in his specific intuitions. In biology he stuck to the hypothesis of fixed forms; in reviewing Herder’s Ideas for a Philosophy of Human History, a work of great imagination published in 1784, he speaks of evolution as “an idea from which reason shrinks back as meaningless.”¹⁹ Kant followed the trend of events assiduously, especially the progress of intellectual matters, but he could not, in a rapidly differentiating world, keep abreast of his contemporaries in everything, to say nothing of foreseeing the vast changes that were to come in the nineteenth century. Still less could he appreciate the revolution in spirit and sentiment involved by these changes, the variety of passionate idealisms which they engendered. He harbored the eighteenth century suspicion of enthusiasts. In morals he was an enlightened puritan, inasmuch as he exalted humanity and believed in freeing morality from external sanctions, whether legal or religious or even natural, but he was a puritan still, for he attributed absolute worth to nothing in man save the moral will, and relegated all other idealisms, whether esthetic, political, intellectual, or religious to a distinctly second place. His conception of right human relations was still based largely on notions of natural and civil law, ideas of contract and obligation, and he tried to sum up the essence of morality in terms of obedience to a supreme law or rigidly stated principle. His practical social ideal was the realization of a universal system of civil law, which would eliminate the reign of arbitrary force between states. His theology left the rationalistic conception of Providence and immortality virtually untouched, his reforms in this field being confined to an attempt at preventing theological concepts from encroaching on the legitimate province of natural science, by insisting that the right to religious belief is in its nature moral and not theoretic.

In brief, though Kant himself called his conception of reason revolutionary, he scarcely realized the nature and extent of the revolution in which it was implicated. Not only was the claim of physics and theology to dominate over philosophy, challenged by his ideas, but the field was thrown open for every kind of wisdom that offered to satisfy a human appeal. And since modern society had developed to a point where the life it offered seemed teeming with various appeals, this invitation to develop a richer philosophy was enthusiastically welcomed. It was not long before philosophers had written metaphysics, not only in terms of the great and universal interests of mankind, such as science, art, and religion, but also in terms of every whim, all sorts of social institutions, and the traditions of the past as well. The nineteenth century saw the birth of a new industrial world, a new chemical, biological, and historical world, the making of new nations and empires. Few people could contemplate the spectacle of these changes with a dry Kantian rationality. Romanticism was a kind of spiritual quicksilver in minds that rushed to possess all this new treasure, without being themselves thoroughly possessed by any part of it. It was inevitable that this type of mind, aflame with new truths, should be the quickest to appreciate the liberation from previous dogmatisms involved in Kantian philosophy. And so it happened that Kant’s most enthusiastic followers became his most radical transformers. For a brief period they poured their rich vision into gorgeous poetry and great imaginative syntheses of idealistic metaphysics. What Kant had intended as a new philosophy of the advancing critical spirit was thus speedily converted, by the romantic temper of the times, into a philosophy of the all-inclusive, appreciative, and creative spirit.

This tendency to welcome, but at the same time to revise Kant’s ideas, so as to include values neglected by him, makes itself manifest from the start in Schleiermacher’s relations to Kantian philosophy. There are some manuscripts dating from 1789 to 1794, the years in which, after leaving the University, he was first coming to independent grips with philosophy, and in them one may see how his thought starts from Kantian ideas and moves away from them in a direction of his own.²⁰ He agrees with Kant in rejecting hedonism, but he wants a richer morality than that summed up in obedience to the categorical imperative. Kant himself admits that such obedience may well fall short of achieving the summum bonum, and it seems unreasonable to Schleiermacher that the cardinal principle of morality should be indifferent to any of the chief goods of life. (The relation between the moral law and the summum bonum, he thinks, should be like that between an algebraic equation and the geometrical curve described in accordance with it.)²¹ In place of Kant’s idea of duty he seeks a certain ideal sense of life (eine gewisse Idealempfindung des Lebens), which shall embrace a harmonious development of all distinctively human powers, doing justice to the intellectual, volitional and emotional sides of man’s nature. In regard to religion Schleiermacher agrees with Kant in wanting to keep theological concepts out of natural science, but he feels the religious life to be something more than a belief in the tenets of Deistic Christianity for morality’s sake. As one who had been “nursed in the womb of piety,”²² he associated a strong sense of the divine presence with religion. This sense he missed in Kant’s philosophy, but found in greater measure in Spinoza. Spinoza at least did justice to religious consciousness on one side by the sublime way in which he conceived the universe as a definitely ordered and unified whole, but on the other hand, Spinoza’s system violated the sense of human personality. For in Spinozistic metaphysics to be an individual means to be limited; each individual is but a small fragment of nature, and can achieve true dignity only by transcending his individuality through intellectual comprehension of the universe. Schleiermacher’s fundamental problem is to find a world view which does justice to human personality on the one hand, and to the infinite universe that stands over against man on the other. He wants the advantages of both Kantian and Spinozistic metaphysics, of freedom and determinism.²³

The ideas of these early papers point directly to Schleiermacher’s mature works the Speeches on Religion, 1799, and the Soliloquies, 1800. In fact, when he came to review his own spiritual development in the Soliloquies, he saw fit to quote whole pages almost word for word from some of these early papers. At the same time there is a vast difference between Schleiermacher’s work in 1793, at twenty-four years of age, and his work in 1799, at thirty, a difference like that between a honeycomb when it is empty and when it is full.²⁴ In 1793 he is quick in the analysis of ideas, in stating his objections and to a certain extent his objectives abstractly; in 1799 his own point of view has been filled out with experience and self-assurance. In Schleiermacher’s case a certain abstract intellectual grasp of romantic principles preceded the actual substantial flowering of the romantic spirit itself. The first twenty years of his life were devoted almost entirely to study, and were quite restricted in their personal contacts. Of course he had a few friends, but being naturally shy and retiring he had no knowledge of the world, no taste of the satisfactions which varied and extensive society can bring. Speaking of the time from 1789 to 1791, which he spent at his uncle’s home in the little town of Drossen, he says, “In quiet solitude I watched the great ferments of the inner and the outer world” (Kantianism and the French Revolution).²⁵ His manner of life developed in him a fine critical and appreciative faculty, but he missed the spiritual support of positive experience. He was often depressed, as many of his letters show. He found it necessary “to strengthen his heart” daily by reading from the satirists, ancient and modern cynics like Lucian, Montaigne and Wieland. He was uncertain as to his vocation, drifting toward the ministry, yet feeling that “the world will remain ever as it is, nor will morals and religion accomplish anything on the whole.” In letters to his friend Brinkmann, an avowed cynic, he came to the point of discussing the merits of suicide. A slight touch of disillusionment took a permanent place in Schleiermacher’s character. Even after he attained a fresh grip on himself, and other qualities came to the fore, his friends would sometimes see in him ”den klugen Schleier” (the satirical Schleier), “and God knows what rather than the real Schleier.”²⁶

The initial forces that lifted Schleiermacher from this depression were not philosophical, but personal. In 1790, after passing the examinations which entitled him to preach, he accepted a position as tutor in the family of Count Dohna. This family had its estates at Schlobitten in East Prussia, was of the old nobility, and active in public affairs. “In a stranger’s home,” says Schleiermacher, “my sense for the beauty of human fellowship was first awakened; I saw that it takes freedom to ennoble and give right expression to the delicate intimacies of human nature.”²⁷ Here, too, he had his first experience of love, in the form of a silent passion for a younger daughter of the Count. He began to get his Idealempfindung des Lebens.

From 1793-’96 there followed upon these years at Schlobitten a valuable experience of teaching and preaching, first in Berlin at one of the large schools for orphans, and then at Landsberg, where he took up his first charge as a preacher. So successful was Schleiermacher in these posts that in 1796 he was given an appointment as chaplain for the Reformed Confession in a large Berlin hospital, the Charité.

Here in Berlin from 1796-1802 he finally came into immediate personal contact with the larger intellectual currents of the time, meeting men whose minds were working along lines similar to those in which his own thought was half-articulately moving.

For while Schleiermacher was slowly ripening in experience during these years, the romantic spirit, of which his spirit was a part, had already received immortal expression in the work of his contemporaries. As early as 1773 Goethe had published his Götz von Berlichingen, and in 1774 had spread the romantic gospel far and wide in his moving description of The Sorrows of Young Werther. The first part of Faust appeared in 1790. In the ’90’s too Fichte began to proclaim a new idealism; in 1792 his Critique of Religious Revelations appeared, in 1794 his Foundations of the Theory of Knowledge, in 1796 his System of Natural Right, in ’97 his First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge. In Goethe the consciousness of life’s varied fullness produced an infinite succession of dramatic and poetic images, in which the whole slumbering world of romanticism seemed suddenly to awake. From Fichte there came no such stream of images. In him this entire world seemed to concentrate its force in the channel of moral pressure. The Kantian revolution, as he interpreted it, meant to replace the stagnant moralities of law and convention by the infinite energizing of an inwardly moral will. In Goethe and Fichte romanticism had found its poet and its prophet.²⁸

As is usually the case, the new gospel was born in the quiet freedom of the provinces, and only gradually took possession of the great capitals where the existing order was naturally strongest. The first great works of romantic literature, fresh, strong, and honest in their feeling for a larger and more varied world than that of eighteenth century conventions, were conceived in Strassburg, Jena, and Weimar. In Strassburg, where the mediaeval spirit lingered in the vastness of its cathedral, and where the contrast of French and German character suggested distinctions other than those of law and convention; in Jena and Weimar, where the political element was in the diminutive and even the Prince not only had interest, but time for poetry and science. In the provinces Goethe’s glorification of the lawless knight in Götz and of the idle lover in Werther, and Schiller’s eulogy of The Robbers could be conceived. But in the metropolis of Berlin the spirit of law and of rationalistic enlightenment still persisted; until 1786 in fact it was enthroned in the person of the “philosopher-king” himself, Frederick the Great of Prussia. Here was the seat of orderly government, and here an active group of popular philosophers and journalists, like Nicolai, turned rationalistic thought into a praise of civic virtue. But here too, as in every large city, were splendid opportunities for a more daring sort of parlor intellectualism. Into this medium the new literature of romanticism came like an electric shock. The manner of the idle lover Werther was discussed and adopted and became a self-conscious fashion, all the more because of the contrasted commercial and political spirit of the town.²⁹

The salon Schleiermacher most frequented was that of the brilliant Madame Herz; here he met Friedrich Schlegel in 1797. Thereafter, half the day, he says, was spent in reading, chatting, and walking with Schlegel and Madame Herz, and his greatest joy would have been to spend more time this way. For, “Leisure was his gracious goddess. She teaches man to know and to confirm himself.”³⁰ Schlegel and Schleiermacher both shared the general enthusiasm for the new spirit, and in particular they met on the common ground of an interest in the Greek classics. They became close friends, and for a while roomed together. Schleiermacher was the more reserved, the more careful, critical, dependable, and persevering of the two, Schlegel the more mature, enterprising, and imaginative. Although he was little older than Schleiermacher, he had already made an impression as an author, and had an ambitious program of production. He aspired to out-Goethe Goethe and out-Fichte Fichte. He would revolutionize taste and morals by the criticism of history, by putting before the narrow, conventional public mind the whole gamut of human nature as revealed in its infinitely varied manifestations. He would add to this imaginative sketches and romances, portraying possible forms of humanity as yet unrealized. (His brother William had projected and begun translations of Cervantes, of Dante, of Shakespeare, and of Hindu classics—all admirably suited to his program.) Schlegel gathered about himself a group of young intellectuals, among them Tieck, Novalis, and Schleiermacher.³¹ Together they published The Athenaeum (from 1798-1800), a journal devoted to spreading “the real romanticism.” They looked upon the work of Goethe and Fichte as impressive and invaluable, but still as somewhat coarse-grained. Fichte’s ethics, for example, did not show enough appreciation of individual differences. In later years an English critic, having large contrasts in mind, spoke of Goethe as the great opponent of Philistinism, but in those years Novalis could say, as a member of the inner romantic circle: Goethe is impossibly bourgeois.³² When one compares the names of literary characters created by Goethe, such as Gretchen, Wilhelm Meister, Werther, with those more favored by the “real romanticists,” for instance, Julian, Florentin, Hyperion, Thalia, Evremont, Woldemar, and Hyacinth, one gets an inkling of what is meant. This latter group of characters and their authors represent the interest in variety and imagination grown fastidious, delicate, extravagant, doctrinnaire, self-conscious, refined, and volatile, saturating every atom of existence with its essence.

Two salient facts, aside from qualities of personal character, set off Schleiermacher from the rest of this romantic group, and made his position in it somewhat anomalous. 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. Schleiermacher was extremely conscious that both of these circumstances were deeply rooted in his character, and must have felt that if he was to maintain his position in the group he had to show at least that they were no obstacle. Schlegel was forever prodding him to write something, but could get nothing from him except short contributions to the Athenaeum. Finally, in 1797, on Schleiermacher’s birthday, he extracted a promise of something more ambitious.³³ The result was the beginning next year of a work On Religion: Speeches addressed to its cultured despisers. By the cultured despisers of religion were meant pre-eminently Schleiermacher’s fellow romanticists, whom he undertook to show that a true love of life’s fullness and variety would make them friendly to religion. This was followed in 1800 by the Soliloquies, meditations on the more intimate and personal question of his own inner nature and its relations to his friends. Herein he argued that even without producing works, for instance, literary works, he might still find his salvation in the romantic faith alone.

Both the Speeches and the Soliloquies are thus apologetic in motive, but by virtue of their substance they belong to that class of apologies which sum up and modify the ideas, not of single individuals merely, but of the universal mind.³⁴ The Speeches on Religion appeared first in 1799, and it was in part his enthusiasm over their successful completion that led Schleiermacher so quickly to the publication of a second work, the Soliloquies in 1800. But much of this second work was really conceived earlier than the Speeches, and in a fundamental sense presupposed by them, as an author’s life is always presupposed in his works, for the theme of the Soliloquies is that of Schleiermacher’s own spiritual development, and whole sections of the work are virtually quoted word for word from essays in manuscript and from sermons dating from the years of his philosophic awakening 1789-1793.³⁵ As a contributor to the Athenaeum Schleiermacher had long planned to develop the ideas of these early essays into something like a formal polemic against Kantian-Fichtean ethics. At the same time he was tempted by the example of his colleagues, Schlegel, Tieck and others, to try his hand at more fanciful forms of writing, and for a time played with the idea of a romantic novel embodying his ethical views.³⁶ His sensitive imagination and his strong critical bent were forever at war over the choice of a literary medium. Finally in 1799, the successful completion of his Speeches on Religion (a form of literary expression in which preaching had made him competent) gave him greater poise and self-confidence. On the evening of his birthday, a few months later, he wrote to his sister: “I wish you could share the quiet joy which possesses my soul. I rejoice over the past, and for the present, and I look with equanimity toward the future, whatever it may bring. I can say with reasonable certainty that this will be my ruling mood as long as I live, for it is grounded in my inmost self.”³⁷ In this spirit of self-possession, and of happy reminiscence, the idea of the Soliloquies seems to have suggested itself to Schleiermacher, a series of meditations dealing with the problems of his inner life, as the Speeches had just dealt with the fundamental problems underlying his public vocation as a preacher. The idea took possession of him, and he completed the Soliloquies in less than four weeks, virtually “dictating it to the printer,” he says. He was able to do this, because he took the idea of soliloquy seriously, and felt singularly free to follow his spontaneous impulses. He put in extracts from his early papers, bits of polemic against popular rationalism, against Kant and Fichte, personalia and philosophy just as the spirit moved him. He indulged his literary conceit by casting the whole into a kind of effusive rhythmic prose. The result cannot be called very happy from the point of view of construction and style, but as a revelation of his spirit and its romantic milieu it could scarcely be surpassed. To Henrietta Herz he happily spoke of the book as “a lyric extract from the diary of his abiding self.”³⁸

There are five soliloquies or meditations, and the first is on the general theme of meditation itself. Schleiermacher considers the different ways in which people introspect and take account of themselves and their lives. There are the people who sit down on New Year’s Day,³⁹ or at some other time appointed by mere convention, to review the joys and sorrows of the past, or to count up their achievements and shortcomings. Such people are slaves to circumstance, because they look at life, even their own lives, from the outside. They naturally think of the world as the primary reality, and of life as a series of temporal experiences taking place in the world. Either they try to dwell on the particular experiences which satisfy them most, while time relentlessly sweeps them on, or they set up an external ideal of perfection, a God above the world and an immortal blessedness after death. Their’s is the popular rationalism of the age, which finds reason essentially in the external facts of nature and of convention. How different from the meditations of “these children of the age” are those of the man for whom the spirit within himself and in others and in the world is the primary reality! For him circumstances are but the occasions and the materials through which the spirit manifests itself. In the consciousness of a spiritual nature, and of opportunities everywhere present for its exercise, he has an unfailing sense of his freedom, and feels himself to be in immediate contact with the Infinite and Eternal, partaking of God and immortality in every moment.

The second soliloquy leaves the empiricist behind, and treats in autobiographical terms of Schleiermacher’s own discoveries in the realm of spirit. First, the awakening of a sense of the ideal possibilities of human life is described in language suggesting that of religious conversion. The sense of exalted assurance which this awakening gives is contrasted with the pitiable squirming of the unconverted human before his conscience. Conscience is generally a distorted form of ideal consciousness, the ideal turned prison-warden of the self. This description of conscience is the first note in a new polemic now introduced against Kant and Fichte. The moral life as they picture it is life lived in the light of a universal reason, the same for every one. But, penetrating more deeply into the realm of spirit, Schleiermacher discovers a higher law of individuation. Each human being has his own unique place within the sphere of humanity, and it is only by his approaching this that he can exercise his influence in the spiritual community. This discovery leads to the theme of human variety, of Schleiermacher’s own character and its relation to that of his friends, his convictions and remaining uncertainties. He divides humanity into two large groups, according to whether the productive or the receptive impulse predominates. He places himself in the latter group, protesting to his artist friends that they should not urge him to produce works. Let them recognize that it is as truly an art to mold one’s own nature as to mold words and sounds. The problems of the receptive spirit are discussed, its requirements, and its genius for sympathetic understanding in love and friendship. But there is a note of uncertainty throughout. Schleiermacher protests too much, and later, in the fourth soliloquy, when he returns to autobiography, confesses his hankering to pour the whole essence of his nature into a novel.⁴⁰

The third soliloquy contrasts two ideals of civilization, showing how the empirical and the spiritual viewpoints lead to two different conceptions of humanity’s task on earth. For the former, progress tends to be measured in terms of man’s control over nature; human co-operation, as in the economic division of labor, is directed toward this end. At most, men help each other to be happy. But the pursuit of higher, spiritual interests, in the present state of human development, each soul must conduct alone? Where is the art of fellowship and association in these matters? “Whatever spiritual association now exists is debased in service of the earthly.”⁴¹ Friendship, marriage, and the state, when not viewed as means to individual pleasure, are ordinarily regarded with reference to some other external function, but very rarely as distinct forms of spiritual life. Just as the present dominion of man over nature was undreamed of by primitive man, so are we blind to the possibilities of spiritual society. But here and there the inner glow of a better future appears in the words and actions of some individual. As soon, however, as his precious accents and manners are recognized by others, and become current, the danger arises that they be imitated and debased by worldlings. True inwardness, true spirituality, must ever be won anew. Man belongs to the world he helps to create; and so Schleiermacher and his romantic friends are strangers to the crude present, prophet-children of a better time.

The fourth soliloquy asks for assurance as to the future, and faces the problem of destiny. The answer is that freedom hinges on self-determination of the proper kind. As long as one seeks some particular external disposition of things, the future must seem uncertain, the problems of casuistry and magic are vital. One wants to know whether the outward powers are arbitrary or providential. But as soon as one accepts the task of self-culture, and keeps the whole of its implications before the mind, all fear vanishes, for every circumstance, whatever it be, is an opportunity toward such an ideal. “The spirit can find no evil in anything that merely changes its activity from one form to another.”⁴² The theme now returns to autobiography. Schleiermacher reviews the results of the past for his own self-culture, and outlines the opportunities which remain for him in the future. But what if fate should rob him of these?—the main question is raised again. For instance, suppose he should be obliged to leave Berlin, in the midst of his scientific and cultural interests, and go to some small, unlettered province. Imagination will then supply the absent goods. He applies this solution even to his hope of marriage—if his beloved is denied him, he will live with her in imagination! “In the future as in the past I shall take possession of the whole world by virtue of inner activity.”⁴³ Here one sees clearly the interdependence in romanticist philosophy of its characteristic inwardness and its desire for a rich, varied experience. Everything attracts the romanticist; if he cannot have one thing he will fall in love with another, and what he cannot have in fact he will have in imagination. It does not much matter what particular items fall into these two classes; hence the confusion of categories, hence the indifference to the distinction between fact and fancy. The reality of the imagined, in a sophisticated, critical mind, hinges on the fact that one wants so many and such choice things, that one can have them only in imagination.

The last soliloquy is a beautiful rhapsody on the way the life of spirit should be lived. The contrast between youth and age furnishes the underlying motif. For the empiricist this is a temporal contrast; life is fresh and young at the start, and when youth is spent, then follows old age, dry and stiff, though not without its crown of virtues. For the spiritual eye, however, youth and age are two eternal principles, two deities, and in their early marriage in the human soul lies the secret of spiritual strength. The Soliloquies close with a picture of this strength: let your inmost self be ever young, tender, plastic, impressionable, forever growing and blooming, but let what you offer to the world be always sound fruit, ripened and well-seasoned in the cool deliberation of mature wisdom.

The Soliloquies reveal the tender, plastic center of Schleiermacher’s spirit, its eternal youthfulness and immaturity. But his Speeches on Religion, published a year earlier, had shown that he could produce sound fruit also.⁴⁴ In every way they are a firmer work, better-seasoned in judgment and harder in expression. Yet they are work of the same man and the same spirit, only deployed not on the tender center of his own personality, but more objectively on the segment of life in which he was most deeply interested, religion. He undertakes a defence of religion, of Christianity and the church too, which in his view have all been misunderstood and depreciated because of the prevalence of popular rationalism and externalist philosophy.

“The children of the age,” these externalists, are niggardly minds: everything must be plain to them. They believe that their conventions embrace the sphere of humanity, and that if others would only be enlightened and do as they do, no consciousness of further possibilities would be necessary. “They trim everything with their own shears, and will not suffer anything unusual, that might awaken a religious interest, to show its head. What can be seen and understood from their standpoint is all that they allow, and it is merely a small, waste land without science, without manners, without art, without love, without spirit, I might almost say without literacy; in short, lacking everything whereby one can get hold of reality. But these very people lay high claim to all these possessions. The believe they have the true reality, and that they alone see all things in their right relations… . For humanity in its present environment there are certain windows open to the Infinite, hewn-out casements, past which every man is led in order that his sensibility may find a way to the great All. The prospects from these casements, while they may not produce religious feelings of a definite character, may still awaken a general susceptibility to religion. Hence these outlets are also prudently stopped up by the worldly-wise, and some caricature of philosophy is stood up in the opening… . Birth and death are such outlets. In their presence it is impossible to forget that our own selves are completely surrounded by the Infinite. Despite their frequency, as soon as they touch us nearly, they always cause an inner pang and a holy reverence. The immeasurability of sense perception is also a hint at least of a still higher infinity. But nothing would better please those men of worldly wisdom than to be able to measure the universe. And, if the images of life and death approach them, believe me, however much they may speak of religion, they are much more concerned to use the occasion for winning their young to a cautious economy in the interest of prolonging life. This is the extreme of utilitarianism, and its punishment is to move slavishly in ancient forms of wisdom and to achieve improvements only in the lower aspects of life. It is enlightened barbarism, a fit counterpart for the old.”⁴⁵

The only religion these enlightened barbarians will allow is what they call natural or rational religion, a patchwork they have put together of pieces cut out of their metaphysics, their ethics, and their religious tradition. But the fact that they can regard their ethics and metaphysics as rational shows the superficiality of their intellectualism. And their willingness to call this artificial construction of theirs a religion proves their utter lack of religious feeling. If this is to be the religion of modern times, the truly cultured are right in abandoning it and turning to atheism. For in their atheism they show more feeling for the Infinite than popular rationalism does in its religion.⁴⁶

True religion is not a “patchwork of ethical and metaphysical crumbs,” but “a sense and taste for the Infinite.”⁴⁷ It neither begins nor ends with theology, but with a wider sense of our spiritual atmosphere, of the conditions and the possibilities with which infinite being surrounds us. Science strives for an understanding of the universe, but religion seeks to adjust the very roots of our being, our feelings and actions as well as our ideas, to the whole in which we are placed. It is the making of a universe out of the objective and the subjective, in which our whole being has its life. Two great spiritual tendencies combine in religion, the one toward individuality or uniqueness of soul and the other toward universality or fullness of soul.⁴⁸ Man is sensitive and responsive to a great variety of influences, peculiarly fitted to draw nourishment from the universe, and whatever he assimilates is thereby transformed and given a new significance; it enters a new unity, the artistic and purposeful unity of a personality. Through fullness of thought and action, and by wide receptivity to impressions of every kind the human individual gains a cosmic outlook, and at the same time enhances his individuality. By receiving the universe into his soul, he becomes, as it were, the soul of a second universe where the planets move in communion with him, and where his individuality enters into the life of all. The universe itself acquires a kind of infinity through being thus received in individual souls, as if it were reflected and reflected again in an infinite series of different mirrors.

Not to theology, which is but one aspect of religion. but to this making of worlds in which the human spirit is at home, Schleiermacher invites his romanticist friends. Here in the sphere of religion, he tells them, they will find the greatest scope for their love of individuation, variety, and fullness. Science, morals, and art all have their special functions and limitations, but religion is the domain of pure spirituality in its immediacy and totality. These other activities are responsible for the definite solution of specific problems in theory and in practice, but religion lifts her eyes from the immediate scene or the immediate work toward the ultimate beginnings and fruitions of life. It adds depth, intensity, and fullness to our otherwise thin experience. “Let no one turn from religion for the sake of his spiritual independence,” says Schleiermacher. It is not the possession of a sacred book, but an original and living understanding thereof that characterizes a truly religious spirit, not theology but theologizing. He was a more religious man who could make a Bible than he who reveres one.⁴⁹

Well might Pope Pius X, in condemning modernism, warn the faithful that this philosophy of religion opened wide the door to individual religion!⁵⁰ That it should do so was one of Schleiermacher’s most fervent wishes. The true church, he says, has ever existed as a free communion between all truly religious spirits wherever they may be. “And the visible religious society can only be brought nearer the universal freedom and majestic unity of a true church by becoming a mobile mass, having no distinct outlines, each part being now here, now there, and all peacefully mingling together… . According to the principles of the true church, the mission of the priest in the world is a private one, and the temple should also be a private chamber where he lifts up his voice to give utterance to religion. Let there be a gathering before him and not a congregation. Let him be a speaker for all who will hear, but not a shepherd for a definite flock… . Nay, finally in the development of culture, we expect a time when no other society will be required for religious teaching except a religious family life.”⁵¹

But in this future age of free religious association and development what will become of the great world religions as we know them today? One might suppose that Schleiermacher with his extreme emphasis on individual religion would have little use for the great traditions of Judaism and Christianity and Mohammedanism. But such an impression he associates with the false view of popular rationalism that individuality means isolation. On the contrary, he says, individuation is not by exclusion, but by manifold relation; it involves innumerable organic filaments, among them historic connections, which only those who do not understand it can wish to destroy. “And just as no man can reach his fulfillment as an individual without in the process finding himself placed in a world with manifold relations to other objects and to a definite order of things, so no man can attain his religious individuation without thereby finding himself in a communion, that is, in a definite form of religion.”⁵² Within the universal realm of religion there are different provinces distinguished from each other by many specific circumstances that bear an important relation to individual development. Judaism and Christianity are such provinces, distinguished among other ways by the fact that different religious emotions are dominant in each. Judaism is permeated everywhere by the desire for justification, Christianity by the desire for redemption. Such differences of emotional complex are for Schleiermacher the most crucial differentia of the religions.⁵³

The Speeches on Religion close with an appreciation of Christianity. Whoever feels with Christ that everything “finite requires a higher mediation to be in accord with the Deity, and that for man in bondage to the finite and particular, all too ready to imagine the divine itself in this form, salvation is only to be found in redemption, whoever has this sense of the divine and feels this need of redemption as the cardinal point in his religious consciousness is a Christian,” and “when he understands the whole efficacy of Christ in the religious world, he will acknowledge Him as the true founder of redemption and reconciliation.”⁵⁴ How he conceives the metaphysical status of Christ is an entirely secondary matter. As ministering to the need for redemption, Christianity will yet have a long history. But will it become universal and exist as the sole type of religion? It scorns the thought of being so restrictive and despotic. Christ never said that his religious views and feelings expressed the whole of man’s relations to the Eternal. Christianity is essentially polemic, deeply conscious that the Perfect is infinite and hence that all finite religion, including itself, is inadequate and imperfect. It is full of sorrow, and it is everlastingly warring against the world, even against its own members inasmuch as they too are of the world. “No religion is so completely filled as Christianity with the yeast of idealization, none does so take up the challenge of an everlasting war to purify the actual, a task which never can be consummated.”⁵⁵ “And hence this religion of religions longs to see the ideal forces of Humanity aspiring to infinity. From its own life it is ever sending forth new variations in the effort to express its essence still more purely and completely,” and “it willingly sees other and younger, and, if possible, stronger and more beautiful types of religion arise outside of it. It cannot find enough ways of expressing its pure devotion to all things human. And as nothing is more irreligious than to demand a general uniformity among all men, so nothing is more unchristian than to seek uniformity in religion. The deity is to be contemplated and worshipped in all ways.”⁵⁶ For the universe is infinite and its life can only be sensed through infinite individuation.

How different this romantic appreciation of the great religious traditions is from the single-minded allegiance of an undivided faith, by which the devout are admonished ever to repeat the words: “I am naught, I have naught, I desire naught, but to be in Jerusalem.”⁵⁷ By way of contrast, here is the romanticist desiring to be in Jerusalem, but everywhere else at the same time. The latter’s spirituality is the kind that generally pervades “modernism,” forward-looking, backward looking, looking to every side, upward, and perhaps sometimes downward. It is a sensitive and generous spirituality, but through lack of concentration, its direction from time to time is apt to be determined by extrinsic forces and circumstances.

This is not the place to discuss the permanent value of romantic spirituality in the world’s pantheon of religions. There will always be some who prefer another type of religious sentiment and still others who prefer none at all. But for those who are interested in romantic religion the latter half of Schleiermacher’s life, the fate of his ideas and their influence, contains some illuminating experience. For a brief while after the publication of the Speeches on Religion he and his fellow romanticists indulged the hope of founding a new religion or at least of inaugurating a new religious awakening. The circumstances of the time seemed favorable to change; there was the example of the French revolution. But almost at once these grandiose ambitions were deflected by the complications of more personal romantic longings. Schlegel and Schleiermacher both fell in love with married women; Schleiermacher refrained from forcing his lady’s hand (and several years later she finally rejected him definitely),⁵⁸ but Schlegel eloped with Dorothea Veit. Although Schleiermacher did not approve, he defended his friend against the storm of criticism that followed, thereby drawing upon himself some of its force. The strained personal relations that ensued led to the dispersal of the romantic group. Schlegel went to Jena, while the church found a position for Schleiermacher as court-preacher at Stolpe, a small town in Pommerania.⁵⁹ Here he stayed from 1802 to 1804, and during his exile turned his attention to exacting scholarship, continuing the translation of Plato’s Dialogues which he had begun with Schlegel, and writing out the Outlines of a Critique of Previous Ethical Theory which he had long contemplated. This latter work shows little trace of romantic idealism; it is a stiff piece of pure logical analysis from beginning to end. (See Appendix, pp. 132-134).⁶⁰

These scholarly labors qualified Schleiermacher for an academic post and in 1804 he accepted a professorship and chaplaincy at his former university of Halle. Here he preached and taught both philosophy and theology for about two years, at the end of which time the university had to be closed because of the French invasion of 1806. This invasion proved the weakness of the old regime in Prussia, bringing disintegration and suffering in its train, but it likewise raised new hopes of rebuilding life on a higher spiritual as well as material level. These were the days of Fichte’s Speeches to the German Nation, the days of his greatest influence as a spiritual leader. A new university was created at Berlin to which the foremost spirits of the day were to be drawn and which was to radiate its influence throughout a new society. To this university Schleiermacher was invited to come as head of the theological faculty and in 1810 he took up his post there, and outlined his program for theological study. His Kurze Darstellung des Theologischen Studiums (1811) in its essential elements has been the educational program of progressive Protestant seminaries ever since. (See Appendix, pp. 149ff.) His distinguished academic post accompanied a position of prominence in the church. In 1808 he had been called to the important pulpit of the Dreifaltigkeits Kirche.

In the pulpit, as in the academy, Schleiermacher worked with the liberals. In ecclesiastical politics he tried to secure that most difficult of all arrangements, the widest possible cooperation of all parties on a basis of free independent expression. He was bitterly opposed to legal coercion in religious matters. (“Away with every union between church and state. That remains my Cato’s utterance to the end or until I see the union actually destroyed.”)⁶¹ But in 1817 the Reformed and Lutheran Confessions were finally joined, not as Schleiermacher had hoped, by free agreement of the parties, but by pressure from the state. As the Metternich reaction intensified, Schleiermacher found himself in difficulties with the government because of his liberal views. A charge of “demagogic agitation” was issued against him and Arndt. Political reaction meant religious orthodoxy too. The growing influence of Hengstenberg, the disciplining of De Wette in 1819, meant the ascendency of everything against which Schleiermacher was contending, the rigid control of the church by the orthodox party in alliance with the reactionary state.

The times now needed a philosophy that took hold of political and social realities. The romanticists possessed considerable historical sense, but they used their knowledge of history in the service of individual rather than of social imagination, and such freely imaginative idealism, which had been the spirit of the times only a few years before, was now gradually relegated to the academy, while events took an independent course. In the philosophic works of his later years Schleiermacher, for instance, seems largely to be engaged in the academic exercise of giving his ideas a more systematic formulation. (See Appendix, pp. 130ff.) Naturally, however, he sensed the new situation, and tried also to do justice in his later theory to the problems of institutionalized spirituality.⁶² But Hegel alone of all the idealists impressed men by his profound sense of organized human life, and so Hegel succeeded the romanticists as the philosophic oracle of the hour.

Schleiermacher’s philosophy in his later years was no longer an expression of the movement of things as a whole, such as it had been for a brief while at the turn of the century. But in one department of thought he continued to reap a fine harvest from his early planting. With impressive accumulative result he developed his philosophy of religion and applied it to the interpretation of Christian history and theology. His life became more and more deeply and significantly bound up with the life of the Protestant church. The results of his exegetical and historical researches have long since been superseded in many respects, but only by the more general application of those critical methods, which he was among the first to adopt. In the realm of Christian theology, too, new ideas have become current since he published his great work on The Christian Faith (according to Evangelical Doctrine) in 1821. But the underlying principle of this work, that systems of theology are to be understood as symbolizing religious experience, has never commanded wider respect among all the various classes of men interested in the interpretation of religion than today. (See Appendix, pp. 162-165.)

The question has often been raised whether Schleiermacher’s theory of religion as developed in his later systematic works is consistent with his earlier ideas in the Speeches on Religion. There is a very fundamental difference between the two that can scarcely be described in terms of consistency or inconsistency. Considered as purely theoretical works, the earlier and later writings are on the whole harmonious, but the important point of difference is that the earlier writings were not intended as purely theoretical, like the later ones, but as something more. In them the larger purpose was active, not merely to interpret, but also to create, or at least to move men to create religion, and it is by the standard of this, his highest ambition that Schleiermacher should be judged. To interpret religion is one thing, and to create it quite another. Schleiermacher’s reputation as a philosopher of religion is good, but what of his rank as a prophet?

For a brief moment, on the threshold of the nineteenth century, he and his fellow-romanticists had been in touch with the spirit of things as a whole. They caught the thrill of the larger world into which humanity was moving, and welcomed the promise of a richly varied existence with an enthusiasm that sets them apart in the history of human thought. For mankind has usually sought security in some permanent or stable fact of life, and has rarely indulged an interest, with such complete abandon as the romanticists showed, in all the variations of experience. Since 1800 we have come to know something of the pain and difficulty involved in the differentiation and complexity of modern life, so that the emotional excitement of the romanticists may appear somewhat visionary and out of touch with reality. We are impressed with the need of understanding as well as of feeling the qualities of our culture. And yet, we should be loath to forego the opportunities for individual development or the variety of values that contemporary life affords. The ideals of romanticism are still in many respects vital, although the classic philosophies of romanticism are felt to be inadequate, especially as the lyric enthusiasm of a hundred years ago will not suffice to realize these ideals under present conditions of human existence.

But can the pursuit and appreciation of the varied goods of life ever give an absolute satisfaction akin to that sought in the great religions? Can it receive an adequate social anchorage and an adequate ideal expression? This is the fundamental question raised by the strength and weakness of the romantic movement, and the life of the modern spirit is really at stake in it. For we do not wish to give up the variety of values which we enjoy, and at the same time we know that mere wishing and appreciation will not maintain them for us, because imperious forces and circumstances play havoc with us when not understood and controlled. We cannot return to the mediaeval faith, or be satisfied with any other religious view that in the light of a wider horizon seems to set up a one-sided ideal; neither can we be content with “modernism” in the sense of a mere recognition of other values, or a romantic tasting of them. Such modernism like romanticism is too optimistic about the basis on which the life of the spirit rests. It takes for granted and accepts as a matter of course dispositions and powers that have been slowly built up by constructive effort, just as romanticism took for granted the solid foundations laid for modern life and thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Without the gradual accumulation of varied goods and powers by constructive thought and discipline, the romantic appreciation of a many-sided and rich existence would not have been possible, nor can the possibility be maintained without the transformation of appreciation from something fluidly romantic into something more organic and structural.

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Footnotes

1. See below pp. 6. ↩

2. Cf. p. 99 below and note *. When citing the German text of the Monologen I shall refer to the critical edition by F. M. Schiele and designate it Schiele. See Bibliography, p. 167. ↩

3. In Catholic Christianity, in Judaism, in all western religion there have been analogous movements, but I shall confine myself to Protestantism within which Schleiermacher’s influence has been immediate and decisive. ↩

4. For the family history, see pp. 3-11; N. E. 3-12 of Wilhelm Dilthey’s Leben Schleiermachers. This standard biography will be referred to hereafter as Dilthey. The initials N. E. precede page references to the New Edition by Herm. Mulert, 1922. ↩

5. See Schleiermacher’s Letters, v. 1, p. 84. Hereafter I shall refer to these volumes simply as Letters, or as Briefe in the case of those volumes which have not been translated into English. Volume I contains a short autobiographical sketch up to the year 1794. ↩

6. Letters, v. 1, pp. 1-45, quotation from p. 38. See also Dilthey, pp. 12-21; N. E. 13-28 for these school-days. ↩

7. Cf. the later expression of this feeling among the romanticists. See below pp. 61ff. ↩

8. Letters, v. 1, pp. 46-67ff. contains this significant series of letters between Schleiermacher and his father. ↩

9. Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (1st ed., republished by R. Otto, Göttingen, 1920), p. 10. Hereafter I cite this edition as Reden, and the English translation by John Oman, London, 1894, as On Religion. This English translation is of Schleiermacher’s revised text, and contains interesting variations. For example, the passage quoted above reads: “When the God and immortality of my childhood vanished from my doubting eyes, piety remained to me.” See p. 9, also pp. 275-284, of Oman’s translation. ↩

10. Cf. below p. 154. ↩

11. Letters, v. 1, p. 177. ↩

12. Briefe, v. 4, p. 42. ↩

13. Cf. below p. 117, note 5. Cf. Dilthey, pp. 28-36; N. E. 39-47. ↩

14. Cf. below pp. 132ff. in connection with above discussion, and also the collected edition of Schleiermacher’s works, part III, vol. 5, pp. 3-8, 24-25, and part III, vol. 4², pp. 144ff. Hereafter I shall refer to this edition as Werke, and use numerals I, II, and III to designate the theological, homiletic, and philosophical divisions respectively. See Bibliography, p. 167 below. ↩

15. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, v. xix, p. 52. See also Schleiermacher’s Letters, v. 1, p. 14. ↩

16. Briefe, v. 4, p. 45. ↩

17. Briefe, v. 4, p. 25. ↩

18. See his letter to Remond de Montmort, 1714, quoted in Ueberweg’s History of Philosophy. ↩

19. Immanuel Kant, Rezensionen von J. G. Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. Teil 1. See also E. Adickes, Kant als Naturforscher, vol. ii, pp. 433-445, §328. ↩

20. See Appendix, pp. 115-123 for a more detailed account of these early essays. Cf. also Dilthey, pp. 36-152; N. E. 48-188 in connection with pp. xxxi-xxxv of the present text. ↩

21. See below pp. 116-117. ↩

22. On Religion, p. 9. ↩

23. See below pp. 119-123. ↩

24. Ibid., pp. 123-130. ↩

25. Ibid., pp. 74-75. ↩

26. See Briefe, v. 4, pp. 27, 29, 39, 42, from which the quotations above are chosen. ↩

27. See below p. 74. ↩

28. Dilthey, pp. 155-182; N. E. 191-218. ↩

29. Dilthey, pp. 182-194; N. E. 218-230. ↩

30. See below, p. 36, Soliloquies, and cf. Letters, v. 1, p. 170, and p. 268. ↩

31. See Dilthey, pp. 194-296ff.; N. E. 230-331, in re the Berlin romanticists. ↩

32. Novalis, Schriften, v. 2, pp. 68ff. ↩

33. Letters, v. 1, p. 163. Also see Dilthey, pp. 235-236; N. E. 271-272. ↩

34. Dilthey, pp. 297-508; N. E. 331-551 for the Reden and Monologen. ↩

35. See below p. 118 and note. ↩

36. See below p. 88 and note. And also Dilthey, pp. 289-296; N. E. 323-331. ↩

37. Letters, v. 1, pp. 227-228. ↩

38. See Schiele’s introduction to the Monologen (Schiele, pp. xiv-xxxv) for these quotations and much else of interest regarding the origin of the Soliloquies. ↩

39. Schleiermacher had preached on this New Year’s Day theme in 1792, and the sermon contains many ideas later developed more fully in the Soliloquies. Cf. p. 12 and note. ↩

40. See below p. 88 and note. ↩

41. See below p. 56. ↩

42. See below p. 94. ↩

43. See below p. 82. ↩

44. Cf. pp. 98-99 below and note. ↩

45. On Religion, pp. 129-131. ↩

46. See On Religion, pp. 27ff., 214, 230ff. in re “natural religion.” ↩

47. On Religion, pp. 31, 39. ↩

48. Cf. below pp. 127-128. ↩

49. On Religion, pp. 90-91. ↩

50. See the famous encyclical, Pascendi gregis. ↩

51. On Religion, pp. 175, 178. ↩

52. On Religion, p. 230. ↩

53. On Religion, pp. 222ff., 238ff. Cf. below pp. 155-157. ↩

54. On Religion, pp. 246, 248. ↩

55. On Religion, p. 243. ↩

56. On Religion, p. 252. ↩

57. Walter Hilton, Parable of the Pilgrim. ↩

58. See below pp. 79ff. and note †. ↩

59. Dilthey, pp. 509-542 describes these Trennungen. And the New Edition by Herm. Mulert, 1922, adds a very valuable section (N. E. pp. 552-861) on Schleiermacher’s life from 1800-1807. ↩

60. The brief sketch of Schleiermacher’s life after 1800 given above is supplemented by a more detailed consideration of his later writings in the Appendix, pp. 115ff. below. See Preface, p. vi. For the second half of Schleiermacher’s life see also Dilthey’s article in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie. ↩

61. On Religion, p. 174. ↩

62. Cf. below pp. 146-149. ↩