Schleiermacher Speeches and The Christian Faith, 1-19
Over the years,
Friedrich Schleiermacher has become something like a friend. I know him only through his
writings, and a little biography, but that has been enough to feel some kindred
feeling with him. In Acts 17:28 we read, “In him we live and move and have our
being,” a quote from a Greek poet that I think summarizes quite well the sense
that Schleiermacher for religion. In this too long essay, I intend to explore On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured
Despisers (1800) and The Christian
Faith (1830), Sections 1-19. These parts of his writings are influential
and controversial.
Scholars will make
the statement that one can mark the beginning of Protestant liberal theology
with Speeches and its end with Barth
when he wrote Romans (1922). His The Christian Faith set a pattern for
modern theological reflection that continues to influence theologians today. Speeches is one of the classics in
Christian theology. Jack Forstman, in a Forward he wrote to a translation of
the book, described the setting that stimulated the writing of this book.
The Schleiermacher it (the book) gives us is the
young Schleiermacher who, as Reformed (Calvinist) Chaplain at the Charity
Hospital in Berlin, a predominately evangelical (Lutheran) city, had sufficient
free time to participate actively in the fermenting avant garde culture of that
time and place. That avant-garde movement was what scholars call early German
Romanticism, and it found its voice in the lively conversations that took place
in the salons of wealthy Jewish women. Schleiermacher was introduced to the
weekly drawing-room gatherings of Henriette Herz by the young Count Alexander
Dohna, with whom Schleiermacher had become friends when not long before he had
been tutor to the younger Dohna children at the family estate.
He fit the group. He was brilliant, witty, and
articulate; he had a gift for friendship. He also shared the group’s reaction
against enlightened rationality and detachment and against neo-classical ideals
and an emphasis on proper decorum. (Friedrich Schlegel, who became
Schleiermacher’s close friend, referred to the representatives of the
Enlightenment mode as “harmonious dullards.”) More important, Schleiermacher
shared his new friends’ sense of individuality and their appreciation of the
infinite diversity of the world. He held their view of the human situation as
one that can penetrate and understand neither infinite variety nor infinite
unity but that strives to bring both together in a way that destroys neither
pole and acknowledges the limitations of human finitude. Schleiermacher
expresses this view early in the First Speech (“Defense”). It is foundational
for the development of the Speeches, and it remained so in everything he
wrote and taught throughout his life.
His closest friends within the circle decided to
resolve the issue by insisting that he write a book. Friedrich Schlegel
contrived the plan. On the morning of Schleiermacher’s twenty-ninth birthday
(November 21, 1797) he was visited by Alexander Dohna, his brother, Henrietta
Herz, Dorothea Viet, the brilliant daughter of the Jewish philosopher Moses
Mendelssohn, who was married to a Berlin banker, and Friedrich Schlegel.1
I had some
surprise when I first read Speeches that
I liked it as much as I did. Hegel remains a favorite philosopher of mine, but
he ridiculed Schleiermacher. If he were the father of modern liberal theology,
my evangelical upbringing would not naturally gravitate toward a favorable
reception of this book. I have grown to appreciate Karl Barth so much over the
years. Yet, Barth uses Schleiermacher as a foil. Every chance he gets he
directs the reader of his Church
Dogmatics to the places where he disagrees with Schleiermacher. He can also
ridicule Schleiermacher, such as calling him the first female theologian
because he was out of touch with his manliness.[1]
Yet, Barth is relatively fair with him in his analysis. Where Schleiermacher
gives us two brief sections on the ministry of the Word, Barth devotes the
first two volumes and much fine print to an exposition of the Word.
Schleiermacher has a relatively harmless appendix on the Trinity while Barth
organizes his work around Trinitarian themes. With Hegel and Barth against you,
I am not sure how you continue to stand as a thinker.
Yet, another
theologian gives me some hope for Schleiermacher. His name is Wolfhart
Pannenberg. He often has generous things to say, especially regarding the
subject of this essay. Pannenberg is creative enough to chart his course in
theological reflection. It seems to me now that he draws from the heart of the
theology of both Barth and Schleiermacher as part of that creative theological
energy he has. He is committed in a way Schleiermacher to the revelation of God
in Jesus Christ as an event of history. He is committed in a way Barth rejected
to the apologetic task of anthropological justification for theological talk.
I am going to
defend the thesis that Schleiermacher has developed an important dimension of
the theological task that theology needs to continue today. I will grant that
Schleiermacher begins with an awareness of some uncertainty regarding the truth
claims of theology.[2]
Yet, I wonder how many great theologians began in a similar way. I might be
bold enough to say that Barth also must have had much uncertainty, given the
massive production of Church Dogmatics. Schleiermacher treads a dangerous path for
any theologian. Does The Christian Faith represent
the fall of Christianity?[3]
I can only imagine that Barth has in mind the liberal theology of his time that
agreed with Kaiser in WWI, some of which later justified the Nazi regime. Yet,
his liberal brand of Christianity also bore much fruit in the 1800s, especially
in its increased concern for ministries of compassion among the poor. The
challenge of that time in industrial expansion desperately needed such
reminders. However, I agree with Barth that Schleiermacher gave dogmatics new
relevancy to the people of his time.[4]
He takes the secular thought of his day seriously. He addresses the “cultured
despisers” of his time directly by pointing them to God as they already
experienced God, doing so in the name of God.[5]
His entire approach is apologetic[6]
in the sense that it seeks to address the concerns his time had with Christian
thought and life. He allows that thought to shape some of the way he organizes
his theology. The criticism of Barth is that he surrendered the themes of
theology to the philosophy of his time.[7]
Each reader, especially those willing to explore The Christian Faith, will have to determine whether he has done that.
If so, he went too far. Yet, he clearly wanted to explain the Protestant
confessions to his contemporaries. The spirit of his age involved a turn to the
human subject, and he embraced that turn even while seeking ways to direct his
contemporaries to life with God. Barth will accuse Schleiermacher of being
arbitrary in this beginning of his theology, claiming to see clearly from that
beginning.[8]
I would like to say that Barth offered this criticism with a smile, since
arbitrary is a charge often levelled against him. I think he was serious. In
any case, he at least begins with the common human experience of feeling, and
wants to lead us from there to reflect upon God. He takes our feelings
seriously, in many ways anticipating some of the emphases of Freud and
Heidegger. In some ways, Schleiermacher may well anticipate Bultmann in the
emphasis upon the relation of the believer to Christ today,[9]
but I do not view that as a bad thing. Yet, if I were to write a full systematic
theology, I could not follow Schleiermacher in his suppression of the
historical grounding of the Christian faith in Jesus of Nazareth and apostolic
teaching. Our faith consciousness today needs to know it has integrity with
that beginning.[10] I
will want to modify his position, but still, feeling is an important indicator
for the direction of our lives. If all he did was provide us with
self-motivated Christian self-consciousness,[11]
the aim of his theology remains unfulfilled. For all his concern for
anthropology and feeling, has he set out upon a journey that will not bring him
to the desired result?[12]
If he is indeed an apologist among the idealists of his time, his attention to
the human subject or the self will need to become a path for considering the
claim of God upon an individual life. Barth does not think this can happen,[13]
while I do. I think his pietism keeps him from disregarding a connection with
Christ, but you as a reader will have to come to your conclusion. He values his
German pietism and to some degree embraces it in a way neither Luther nor
Calvin would find comfortable. I will even grant that he will make the themes
of piety and religion central to this theology.[14]
I disagree that such an approach is a bad thing. Yet, I have also found that he
genuinely sought to communicate the Protestant teaching of the Confessions to the
people of his time. Even Barth agrees that his theology aims at being a
Christocentric one, although he commends Luther and Calvin for beginning with
Christ.[15]
Each step he takes here is a dangerous
one. Yet, I find myself in harmony with his approach.
Wayne Proudfoot
makes it clear that Schleiermacher, in this book in particular, is responsible
for the turn to religious experience, motivated by an interest in freeing
religious doctrine and practice from dependence on metaphysical beliefs and
ecclesiastical institutions and grounding it in human experience. He views this
book as the most influential statement and defense of the autonomy of religious
experience.[16] He
does not point out that this turn to experience occurred in the context of the
Kantian turn away from metaphysics. The concern of Kant for the “transcendental
illusion” led to philosophers and theologians alike to be cautious of
metaphysical statements. The turn to human experience became important as it
explored a new basis for talk about God in anthropology. Such a turn toward
experience, especially with the language of feeling for which Schleiermacher is
famous, gives the appearance that he is arguing from what people will commonly
regard as “just subjectivity.” Such a response would be wrong. First, no human
being is “just subjective.” Every idea and thought arises out of engagement
with people and the world. If one offers viewpoints or opinions, they do not
have the capacity to be “just subjective,” for they arise of experience with
the world and attempts to influence the world. Second, the appeal to experience
is always an appeal to shared experience. We can see this at several points in
his Speeches, as he asks his cultured
despisers if they can connect with the experience or feeling, of which he is
writing at various points. My point is that such an approach is not “just
subjective,” but appeals to what might be a shared feeling regarding their
experience of the one world they share. Truly subjective assertion would arise,
however, if one pointed to something objective and outside oneself and declared
that it was the “truth.” One might point to Torah, Jesus, the Bible, the Koran,
Buddha, and so on, as points outside oneself that one asserts as true. Such a
position comes far closer to being “just subjective,” paradoxically, than does
Schleiermacher, for all his discussion of feeling.
Wilfred Cantwell
Smith wrote of Speeches:
It would seem to be the first book ever
written on religion as such – not on a particular kind or instance and not incidentally,
but explicitly on religion itself as a generic something.[17]
Barth will often
criticize Schleiermacher for his anthropology. His criticism that he tries to
conquer the consciousness of the age on its own ground may go a bit too far.[18]
Barth says that no matter how profound our metaphysics of humanity, we are not
talking of God. In fact, the more profound we are, the more emphatically we say
“humanity” even when we use the word “God.” Sinful as humanity is, according to
the revelation of God, humanity is thinking it can attain to God by its
efforts. Kant writes of God, but when God is the necessary postulate of the
limit and goal of pure reason and lawgiver for practical reason, Kant is only
writing of the rational nature of humanity. Hegel writes of God, but when he
writes of the Absolute Spirit, he means the progression of the human mind.
Schleiermacher writes of God, but when he writes of that on which humanity
depends absolutely he knows how superfluous God has become. His point is that if
God “in and over the world” in only a higher degree of the movement that we
know well enough as our own, it is hard to see to what extent beyond this God
is necessarily self-motivated, and therefore to what extent there necessarily
has to be a particular idea of God.[19]
Hegel will offer a
famous form of ridicule of a central teaching of Schleiermacher. He is willing
to place the root of religion solely in the realm of feeling. In that case, he would be right in saying that
the best understanding of religion is that of absolute dependence. Further, in
that case, a dog would be the best Christian. After all, the dog carries this
feeling of dependence upon its master throughout its life. It also has feelings
of hunger that it can satisfy with a bone. However, the basic drive of humanity
is toward liberation, not dependence, of divine freedom rather than such a
notion of religion as Schleiermacher has.[20]
Proudfoot draws a
helpful distinction between the descriptive account of religious experience and
an explanatory account. What we find in Schleiermacher is an attempt to
describe what he believes is common to religious experiences. He may be wrong,
of course, but that is what this book attempts to describe. Rudolf Otto has a
different description, William James another, and Mircea Eliada another.
However, to offer an explanatory account is to open the door for varieties of
interpretation. One could have a theological interpretation, of course. One
could also attempt to explain it from a variety of philosophical perspectives.
One could also interpret from the standpoint of evolutionary science. The most
difficult aspect of a non-religious interpretation or explanation of religious
experience is whether it actually explains the force that religious experience has
in transforming human life. Eliade will make the case that religious experience
is “irreducible,” meaning that the object of religious experience is a
privilege of the tradition out of which the experience occurs. Descriptive
reductionism, however, seeks to understand religious experience by categories
other than those categories internal to the religion. An example would be
Ludwig Feuerbach, Freud, and Durkheim. Such an approach is willing to listen
skeptically to the accounts of religious experience. The issue for such
accounts, as always, is whether they adequately explain the power that
conversion can have in the life of person, or the power it can have in the
worshipping and serving community.[21]
In the first
speech, Schleiermacher offers a defense of a set of speeches to the cultured
despisers of religion. Peter Berger says that Schleiermacher is the father of
the liberal synthesis of piety and secularism,[22]
which we will notice in this first speech. For Schleiermacher, theological
reflection must take place in the context of its cultured despisers. They
determine credibility rather than the sources of theological tradition. As we
will see, Schleiermacher will risk the content of theological tradition in
order to make his appeal to the cultured despisers of religion.
As Schleiermacher
begins, he acknowledges that matters of faith have not always belonged to
everyone. Today, the cultivated people of this modern culture we have designed
lives far from religion. The only sacred things are maxims from the ancients
and the sociability they find in art and science. They have no room for the
eternal, as well as what may lie beyond this world. Having made a universe for
themselves, they have no need of thinking of the Universe that made them. They
are especially not inclined to listen to religious leaders. Yet, such
cultivated persons will appeal to experts in other fields. How is it that only
with “experts” in the religious realm will they reject what they have to say?
Yet, in spite of this, he knows of no age that has given religion a better
reception than that of the present. He admits that as a youth he sought the
unknown. He felt it as a necessity of his nature. He describes it as a divine
call. This call determines his position in the world and makes him what he is.
He acknowledges that Deity has divided the one great divine work among humanity
into many forms. He thinks that each definite thing exists by melding together
two opposite activities. He notes that the human soul has its existence in the
struggle for individuality and the fear of aloneness. Yet, persons are far from
knowledge of the whole. He refers to dull mediocrity for many human beings.
Deity sends people with the gift of interpreting divine works in that they
unite opposing forces. They seek order and connection, right and fitness. Such
persons find because they do not lose themselves. They are ambassadors of God
and mediators between limited individuals and infinite humanity. They interpret
to individuals the misunderstood voice of God, reconciling God to the earth and
to the place of God in the world. Such people are the true priests of the
highest. Such persons strive to awaken the slumbering germ of a better humanity,
to kindle love for higher things, to change common life into noble life, to
reconcile the children of earth with the Heaven that hears them, and to
counterbalance the deep attachment of the age to the baser side of humanity. Such
persons speak of the kingdom of God and are the source of visions, prophecies,
and sacred works. He wishes that such a sacred fire would burn everywhere. He
submits himself to this power. He admits that what he praises of the true work
of religion one find little in the sacred books. He does not find the utilitarian approach of
the English helpful. The French trample the holiest ordinances. Yet, his native
German land finds all that adorns humanity. His goal is to show his cultured
despisers that from which religion flows. He then offers an important
distinction between the source of religion in feeling and the external manifestation
of religion in ideas and institutions. He thinks his cultured despisers fear an
eternal being especially in providence and the expectation of a future life in
immortality. Considered from its center, religion expresses human nature. From
the outside, religion is a product of time or history. He urges his cultured
despisers not neglect this business of religion. Yet, they tend to start with
the outside of religion, that of opinions, dogmas, and usages. If so, the focus
is on the folly and superstition found in religious history. If you despise
that, you do not yet despise religion. The reason is that religion is a feeling
for the Infinite and Eternal. You will need to transport yourself into the
pious soul and seek an understanding of its inspiration. Such a soul surrenders
to the Universe. Turn away from what the cultured despisers usually consider as
religion and turn toward the inward emotion and disposition. Further, in
another important move, he refuses to appeal to how religion is the foundation
for justice and order in the world. He will not appeal to religion as a
necessary prop for morality, for to use religion as a tool in this way is to
treat it with contempt. He does not want to appeal to religion to provide a
legal constitution. If one needs to correct an evil, then do so, without the
appeal to religion. Religion did not descend from heaven in order to serve
another end, for then it becomes an accessory and unimportant. He maintains
rather that piety springs necessarily from itself. It has a province of its own
in the mind that belongs to it, in which it has unlimited sway. Religion is
worthy to animate most profoundly the noblest and best.
In reference to
the conclusion of the first speech, Pannenberg thinks Paul Ramsey is close to
the relation between perception and feeling we find in Schleiermacher in which
religions experience has a relation to the whole universe. Religion is not an
accessory, but rather, piety springs necessarily by itself. A province of its
own in the mind belongs to it, in which it has unlimited sway. This province is
worthy to animate most profoundly the noblest and best and for them to accept
and know them.[23]
Then, in his
second speech[24],
he begins by saying that one sees religion in secret by those who love it. Proudfoot
says Schleiermacher will make such personal appeals throughout the speeches. It
becomes an “edifying discourse” at that point, seeking to elicit in the reader
the experiences the author intends to communicate.[25]
He deals with the nature of religion as the common basis of many religious
phenomena. He wants to separate religion from its external form. As he wants to
show in his second speech, religion “is not accustomed to appear openly, but is
only seen in secret by those who love it.” His example is speech, which one
learns because of sociability and interaction through the love of others. As he
sees it, “one is, in operation, influenced and permeated by the ready love and
support of the others.” Religion is a way of thinking, a faith, a peculiar way
of contemplating the world. Religion is also a way of acting, a peculiar desire
and love that expresses itself in conduct and character. Religion involves this
distinction of the theoretical and practical. He wants to see the activity of
religion as both recognition of duty and as the creativity and imagination of
the artist. He admits that religion is about metaphysics, a way of relating us
to God and the world. Religion is also about ethics. In both cases, we can
identify specific disciplines in philosophy that relate to what religion will
have to say. Yet, religion may be that which fuses both, and in that case,
metaphysics and ethics have fallen into separate activities due to their
separation from religion. Yet, piety cannot be a craving from metaphysical and
ethical crumbs. If that were so, the learned would have little reason to
despise the pious, for it would be debate over the value of knowledge over
piety. He stresses that the object of his attempt to persuade, the cultured
despiser, should not fight against a shadow. Rather, it must be something quite
special to generate so much energy in opposition. What he wants to do is
separate the outward form from the inner and true nature of religion. He wants
to say that if the learned claimed God as the foundation of all knowledge and
ethics, it would not be what the pious means by God. He considers religion as
essentially contemplative. This statement leads to an important reflection.
He suggests that
his cultured despisers have a largely Kantian view of religion that would
distinguish between the theoretical and practical, and therefore, religion is a
way of thinking or acting. His objective is to separate religion from the
Kantian categories and thoughts we bring to it, and thus reproduce the world we
think we know. He wants an area of experience that transcends the Kantian categories,
thereby giving priority to the religious affections.
Schleiermacher wants
to examine religion from both theoretical and practical reason. He begins with
action. As he sees it, activity has to do with life and art. Piety, he will
stress is not an activity that brings them together. It must be an original
unity, which, he admits, would be difficult admission for a cultured despiser
to make. If piety were that original unity, then morality and genius apart
would be only fragments of the ruins of religion. The cultured despisers of his
day would often admit that one could not understand nature without God. However,
he maintains that such knowledge has nothing to with God. The quantity of
knowledge is not the same as growing in piety. One can find a glorious display
of piety in people who have little knowledge. In fact, even if the cultured
despisers could put God at the apex of all knowledge, it would not be the pious
person’s way of knowing God. For that reason, he will stress that true religion
is essentially contemplative. The perception on which he insists is that the
contemplation of the pious is the immediate consciousness of the universal
existence of all finite things, in and through the Infinite, and of all
temporal things in and through the Eternal. Religion is to seek this and find
it in all that lives and moves, in all growth and change, in all doing and
suffering. It is to have life and to know life in immediate feeling, only as
such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal.
In itself, it is affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite,
one seeing God in it and it in God. True religion is sense and taste for the
Infinite. He identifies this speech as focused on perception, feeling, and
activity. After the perception of the Infinite and Eternal, your feeling is
piety, as far as it expresses the being and life common to you and to the All.
Your feeling is piety as far as it is the result of the operation of God in you
by means of the operation of the world upon you. These feelings are exclusively
the elements of religion. In contrast, ideas and principles are all foreign to
religion. People are not pious who cannot show that they have originated in
themselves and, being the outcome of their own feeling, are peculiar to them. He
strongly commends this distinction between feeling and ideas. Religion does not
arise from the impulse to know, but the operation of the nature of things upon
the individual. The pious must be conscious that one’s religion is only part of
the whole, that there may be perceptions and feelings belonging to other
modifications of religion that one has not sensed. The whole religious life
consists of two elements, that human beings surrender themselves to the
Universe and allow themselves to be influenced by the side of it that is turned
towards them, and that they transplant this contact which is one definite
feeling, within, and take it up into the inner unity of life and being.
Hegel wanted perception
related to reflection in order to give precision to the thought of the
debatability of religious perception in the process of the religious life and
its history. If religious perceptions thematize the implicit relation of the
contents of experience to the Infinite, the question arises whether they do
justice to the full complexity of the relation. Such a question is meaningful
if the function of religious perceptions to give to the whole complex of the
relations of meaning an expression that one might call symbolic in that it
expresses one aspect of the totality of the universal, so that one may see the
Infinite in the finite. The religious perception has to be representative of
the totality from which one takes the finite.[26]
As Paul Ramsey
sees it, God is a key word to express the totality of the commitment that one
finds bound up with religious experience. One cannot derive this experience
from perception. In a similar way, Schleiermacher viewed the concept of God as
one among many possible interpretations of the experience of the All, the
connection with the infinite, which one actively experiences in religion. In Christian Faith 4.4, the word “God” is an expression for direct reflection on the
feeling of dependence, that on which we throw back our existence. God is
co-determinant in this feeling of absolute dependence. Any further content of
the idea of God must evolve from this. In this way, he wants to separate the
feeling of dependence by some previous knowledge about God. The point
Pannenberg is making, however, is that the approach to the word “God” through
religious experience, still relies upon a concept of God to interpret the
religious character of the experience. Here is how Schleiermacher puts it.
The contemplation of the pious is the
immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and
through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal.
Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth
and change, in all doing and suffering. It is to have life and to know life in
immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal. Where
this is found religion is satisfied, where it hides itself there is for her
unrest and anguish, extremity and death. Wherefore it is a life in the infinite
nature of the Whole, in the One and in the All, in God, having and possessing
all things in God, and God in all. Yet religion is not knowledge and science,
either of the world or of God. Without being knowledge, it recognizes knowledge
and science. In itself it is an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the
finite, God being seen in it and it in God.
In the midst of all the activity,
piety appears as surrender, submission as moved by the Whole that stands over
against the individual. He invites the cultured despiser to consider this
notion that one can accomplish nothing worthwhile that does not arise from the
influence of this sense of the Infinite. Without this influence, how can anyone
wish to comprehend the world in science? From where does the thirst arise? He
also argues that the sense of self arises from an awareness of the whole.
The phenomenon of your
life is just the result of its constant departure and return. It is scarcely in
time at all, so swiftly it passes; it can scarcely be described, so little does
it properly exist. Would that I could hold it fast and refer to it your
commonest as well as your highest activities.
Did I venture to
compare it, seeing I cannot describe it, I would say it is fleeting and
transparent as the vapor which the dew breathes on blossom and fruit, it is
bashful and tender as a maiden’s kiss, it is holy and fruitful as a bridal
embrace. Nor is it merely like, it is all this. It is the first contact of the
universal life with an individual. It fills no time and fashions nothing
palpable. It is the holy wedlock of the Universe with the incarnated Reason for
a creative, productive embrace. It is immediate, raised above all error and
misunderstanding. You lie directly on the bosom of the infinite world. In that
moment, you are its soul. Through one part of your nature you feel, as your
own, all its powers and its endless life. In that moment it is your body, you
pervade, as your own, its muscles and members and your thinking and forecasting
set its inmost nerves in motion.
The incoming of
existence to us, by this immediate union, at once stops as soon as it reaches
consciousness. Either the intuition displays itself more vividly and clearly,
like the figure of the vanishing mistress to the eyes of her lover; or feeling
issues from your heart and overspreads your whole being, as the blush of shame
and love over the face of the maiden. At length your consciousness is finally
determined as one or other, as intuition or feeling. Then, even though you have
not quite surrendered to this division and lost consciousness of your life as a
unity, there remains nothing but the knowledge that they were originally one,
that they issued simultaneously from the fundamental relation of your nature.
For him, religious life consists of
two elements, that people surrender themselves to the universe of meaning allow
oneself to receive the influence by the side of this universe of meaning turned
toward the individual, and then transplant this feeling into the inner unity of
one’s life. The religious life is nothing else than the constant renewal of
this proceeding. All religion rests on views and feelings of universality. If
we are to receive the life of the World-Spirit and have religion, one must
first find, in love, humanity. Humanity and religion are united. A longing for
love becomes religion. His concern is that some of his cultured despisers of
religion have come to experience life in only a fragmented way. Will they be
content with only a fragment? He thinks it will lead to narrowness. He wonders
if they do not feel the call toward wholeness. He urges them to respond to the
call of their deepest nature, and follow it.
Although
Sigmund Freud does not refer to Schleiermacher at this point, he does refer to
a letter from a friend, Romain Rolland, who had just read a transcript of Future of an Illusion. His letter said
that Freud had not properly appreciated the true source of religious
sentiments, which he identified in a peculiar feeling, which he testifies that
he always has, and finds confirmed in others and supposes is present in
millions of other people. The feeling is a sensation of eternity, a feeling of
something limitless and unbounded, an “oceanic” feeling. Freud notes that he
does not himself have such a feeling and does not find it easy for science to
deal with feelings. However, the idea of people receiving an intimation of
their connection with the world around them through such an immediate feeling
that directs one to purpose is not in line with his theory. He will therefore
seek a psychoanalytic explanation for such a feeling. He finds it in the
infantile melding of ego and world, a boundary one slowly learns to discern in
the stages of infancy. Originally, the ego includes everything and later it
separates an external world from itself. The infant feels this intimate bond
between ego and world that growth toward adulthood will end. In this way, the
oceanic feeling his friend identified is a residue of the initial phase of ego
feeling. Such a feeling is not the source of religious needs. The derivation of
religious needs from the helplessness of the infant and the longing for the
father is incontrovertible, and is his explanation for religion.[27]
Schleiermacher
continues with his exploration of piety by saying that ethics, the science of
action, is not the same as piety. Rather, the pious person, while contemplating
human action, does not do so in a way that leads to an ethical system. The
pious person seeks the action of God among human beings. Kant is right that
morality depends on the consciousness of freedom, but piety is just as
comfortable with necessity. Piety will linger with satisfaction on every action
from God. Piety will linger on what that action reveals of the Infinite and
Eternal. Yet, it will keep outside of theory and practice so that it can
maintain its character. Piety becomes an indispensable third element of our
human experience. He will contrast knowledge with piety, but he can also say, “The
true and proper opposite of knowledge is presumption of knowledge.” He makes
the relationship quite clear. “True science is complete vision; true practice
is culture and art self-produced; true religion is sense and taste for the
Infinite.” He wonders if any worthy accomplishment of humanity arises from
anything other than the influence of this sense for the Infinite. Without this
sense, would one seek the comprehensive understanding of the world
scientifically? Striving for art and culture are similar driving forces. They
seek the unity of reason and nature and therefore the universal existence of
all finite things in the Infinite.
Schleiermacher
will regularly appeal to the experience of his cultured despisers, reminding us
again of his willingness to engage in edifying discourse.
But I must direct you to your own
selves. You must apprehend a living movement. You must know how to listen to
yourselves before your own consciousness. At least you must be able to
reconstruct from your consciousness your own state. What you are to notice is
the rise of your consciousness and not to reflect upon something already there.
Your thought can only embrace what is sundered.
As he sees it, every act is an
individual fragment, but at the same time part of a whole. Individual acts
exist, but they do so as part of a link in a chain that moves toward the whole.
The movement of life is a constant departure and return, which moves so swiftly
that one can discern it. One cannot really hold it fast and refer to it the way
one might like. He appeals to the original act of fellowship that one has with
the Infinite, out of which every human act arises.
He
summarizes by saying that so far, this speech focuses on perception, feeling,
and activity. They are not identical; yet, they are inseparable. He stresses that
piety is this feeling they have, the being and life common to them and to the
All. He finds religion in the realm of feeling. As he sees it, ideas and
principles belong to knowledge different from religion. One can study religion
scientifically, but this would be knowledge about religion and not religion
itself. He will want to distinguish the false practice of religion from the
true. Thus, those who parade their religion and boast of it are unholy and
removed from divine life.
Proudfoot
points out that in trying to separate piety as feeling from knowing and doing,
it becomes a receptive mode of consciousness which is unstructured by the forms
and categories of the mind. This notion depends on the idea that the
distinctive moment in the religious consciousness is independent of concepts
and beliefs, and that the moment is a sense of the Infinite or absolute
dependence, and that religious doctrines are extensions of this sense. Each
aspect of this notion of Schleiermacher is open to dispute. Human experience is
never fully receptive, for the human mind is always actively engaged in shaping
a view of the world. Concepts and beliefs shape our notion of any experience
that we call religious. The feeling, sense, or intuition to which he
consistently appeals depends on religious doctrines. In essence, no human
experience is immediate, if by that we mean without interpretation, a notion
that relies upon Charles Stanley Pierce. He referred to it as the myth of the
given, denying intuitive cognition and immediate consciousness. The matter
before Schleiermacher is the same as that Rudolf Otto, Jonathan Edwards, and
William James. Feeling, emotion, intuition, or sense is more characteristic of
religion than some might think.[28]
He
will compare the feeling that is piety and religion to music.
Were I to compare religion in this
respect with anything it would be with music, which indeed is otherwise closely
connected with it. Music is one great whole; it is a special, a self-contained
revelation of the world. Yet the music of each people is a whole by itself,
which again is divided into different characteristic forms, till we come to the
genius and style of the individual. Each actual instance of this inner
revelation in the individual contains all these unities. Yet while nothing is
possible for a musician, except in and through the unity of the music of his
people, and the unity of music generally, he presents it in the charm of sound
with all the pleasure and joyousness of boundless caprice, according as his
life stirs in him, and the world influences him. In the same way, despite the
necessary elements in its structure, religion is, in its individual
manifestations whereby it displays itself immediately in life, from nothing
farther removed than from all semblance of compulsion or limitation. In life,
the necessary element is taken up, taken up into freedom. Each emotion appears
as the free self-determination of this very disposition, and mirrors one
passing moment of the world. It would be impious to demand here something held
in constraint, something limited and determined from without. If anything of
this kind lies in your conception of system then you must set it quite aside. A
system of perceptions and feelings you may yourselves see to be somewhat
marvelous.
Such an analogy between music and
religion is powerful. The sense, intuition, drive, or feeling of humanity to
express itself in music is similar to that which Schleiermacher is suggesting
about religion. Musical expressions shift from one culture to the next and from
one generation to the next. No one would think of trying to get humanity on to
the same page in terms of musical expression. One may not appreciate all
musical expressions, of course. One can tolerate their existence. To some
degree, the number of adherents a musical expression has will determine whether
it continues to have existence other than in a museum. The point is that
religion, understood as an expression of humanity, has its source in a
universal feeling or orientation of humanity to express itself in this way. The
expression involves ideas, rituals, interpretation of experiences, and
traditions that do not force themselves upon adherents. Rather, they provide a
context within which humanity expresses a natural orientation of it. Further,
every religion will need to have adherents if it is to be anything other than a
piece of museum history. Yet, this does not mean that the objective of human
history is come to one religion. In fact, as various musical expressions are
testimony to the multiplicity of human life, multiple religious expressions
would also provide a testimony to the ability of humanity to appreciate and
tolerate difference. In fact, we need difference in order to grow.
Religion is always good, for it expresses a common desire for
higher life, toward the Infinite and Eternal. A single form of religion cannot express
the whole of religion. In his notes, he makes this clear. He directs us to the
introduction of his book, The Christian
Faith, to show how all forms of religion, even the most imperfect, derive
from the feeling or sense of the Infinite. He also finds it Christian to seek
piety everywhere, and to acknowledge it under every form. He thinks Jesus did
so with his disciples, to which I would refer to Jesus saying that one who is
not against them is for them. He also refers to Paul and his speech in Athens
in Acts 17. Further, even religion is only part of the whole. Another form of
religion may well express this feeling toward the Infinite in a different way.
He refers to “this beautiful modesty, this friendly, attractive forbearance”
that springs from true religion. He refers to the saints as “seers of the
Infinite.”
Seers
of the Infinite have ever been quiet souls. They abide alone with themselves
and the Infinite, or if they do look around them, grudge to no one who
understands the mighty word his own peculiar way. By means of this wide vision,
this feeling of the Infinite, they are able to look beyond their own sphere.
There is in religion such a capacity for unlimited manysidedness in judgment
and in contemplation as is nowhere else to be found.
He
acknowledges that human thinking and striving will tend to draw a narrow
circle, within which one finds the highest, and outside of which appears common
and unworthy. Yet, the pious person makes everything holy, whether it adheres
to a system of thought or action, or does not do so. Religion is the natural
enemy of narrow thinking. Appealing again to music, “Uninterruptedly, like a
sacred music, the religious feelings should accompany his active life.”
He has no interest in outward disciplines, spiritual
exercises, privations, mortifications, and the rest, laying aside the Methodist
movement of his time, the desert fathers of the Orthodox Church, and the
disciplines of the monastic movement, especially those of the Franciscan and
Carmelite tradition. This statement reminds us that the source of piety is
important to him. If the source of the experience could be spiritual
disciplines, then immediate experience would not be the source of what he has
identified as piety. His statement that the greatest heroes of religion treated
them with indifference is highly debatable. He urges putting aside fear in
favor of love toward the World-Spirit. Interestingly, he does not think joy in
nature, which many praise, is not religious. He refers to world systems that
float in the air, another dig at the insufficient quality of thought and
action.
Schleiermacher keeps probing this experience of the
Infinite, the whole, the All, in contrast to experiencing life in
fragments. He will use another image,
that of the work of art.
The contemplation of the pious is the
immediate consciousness of the universal existence of all finite things, in and
through the Infinite, and of all temporal things in and through the Eternal.
Religion is to seek this and find it in all that lives and moves, in all growth
and change, in all doing and suffering. It is to have life and to know life in
immediate feeling, only as such an existence in the Infinite and Eternal.
Now religion is to take up into our lives and
to submit to be swayed by them, each of these influences and their consequent
emotions, not by themselves but as a part of the Whole, not as limited and in
opposition to other things, but as an exhibition of the Infinite in our life.
Suppose you are looking at a fragment of a
great work of art. In the separate parts of this fragment you perceive
beautiful outlines and situations, complete and fully to be understood without
anything besides. Would not the fragment then rather appear a work by itself
than a part of a greater work, and would you not judge that, if the whole was
wrought throughout in this style, it must lack breadth and boldness and all
that suggests a great spirit? If a loftier unity is to be suspected, along with
the general tendency to order and harmony, there must be here and there
situations not fully explicable. Now the world is a work of which you only see
a part.[29]
For Schleiermacher, all that is finite exists through
the determination of its limits, which one must then “cut out” from the
Infinite. Although most people think of their encounter with finite things as
ends in themselves, a higher stage of awareness helps one perceive the
dependence of finite things upon the Infinite. With the field theory in
science, one could come close to this notion of the interconnection of physical
reality.
Barth will criticize Schleiermacher at this point by
saying that his notion the “whole” is still a creature, even if it refers to
the sum of creaturely being.[30] He is a monist.[31] If the theology of
Schleiermacher ended here, I would agree. However, read within the totality of
his thought, I do not think this is fair.
In a rejection of the nominalist tradition, he makes it
clear that we can find nothing “simple,” for everything “is skilfully connected
and interwoven.”
He makes an interesting observation
about his cultured despisers. They have an interest in humanity. Yet, for all
their zeal, “you are always in difficulties with it, and divided from it.” They
have an anxious desire to improve it and educate it. When they do not
accomplish their desire, they cast humanity aside in dejection. They want to
work on humanity. Yet, humanity displeases them. He then accuses them, in a way
that I assume has the design of getting them to reflect upon their behavior in
the world, as being “far too ethical.” By this, he means they have an ideal of
an individual that corresponds to their vision of what humanity should become.
He urges them to begin with religion and change the object of their
contemplation to the Infinite. Work on individuals, of course, “but rise in
contemplation, on the wings of religion, to endless, undivided humanity. Seek
humanity in each individual.” He makes a good point in that the loss of the
Infinite can make one cling to a fragment, an isolated experience, and lose
sight of the longer vision.
In
another appeal, part of his edifying discourse to his cultured despisers, “Had
you only the religion that you could have! Were you but conscious of what you
already have!” He does not use the term “prevenient grace,” but as a United
Methodist, I think that is the nature of this appeal to his cultured despisers.
He wants them to see God as already active in their self-described secular
lives. For him, human activity has an orientation toward mastery. However, when
one becomes absorbed in this mastery, one runs the risk of its limits and
chills, and makes one one-sided and hard. Such mastery of a narrow occupation
will hinder one from participation in the world and a whole life. For a whole
life, one needs this allowance for a feeling of the Infinite, which will bring
one out of the narrow confines of that which one might gain mastery.
He
then identifies what he means by several topics that remain “hot” topics in
theological circles today.
What is a miracle? What we call miracle
is everywhere else called sign, indication. Our name, which means a wonder,
refers purely to the mental condition of the observer. It is only in so far
appropriate that a sign, especially when it is nothing besides, must be fitted
to call attention to itself and to the power in it that gives it significance.
Every finite thing, however, is a sign of the Infinite, and so these various
expressions declare the immediate relation of a phenomenon to the Infinite and
the Whole. But does that involve that every event should not have quite as
immediate a relation to the finite and to nature? Miracle is simply the
religious name for event. Every event, even the most natural and usual, becomes
a miracle, as soon as the religious view of it can be the dominant. To me all
is miracle.
He is quite right in this
assessment. He was close to the assessment of Augustine in his insight that we
are unaware of the true nature of things in our everyday dealings with them
because of the dulling effect of what is routine and because of our utilitarian
approach to reality. We see things only in their immediate context and not as a
manifestation of the universal. Religious perception sees the deeper nature of
everyday events, experiencing them as miraculous, as an expression of the
providence of God.[32]
What is revelation? Every original and
new communication of the Universe to man is a revelation, as, for example,
every such moment of conscious insight as I have just referred to.
What is inspiration? It is simply the
general expression for the feeling of true morality and freedom.
What is prophecy? Every religious
anticipation of the other half of a religious event, one half being given, is
prophecy.
What is operation of grace? Nothing
else manifestly than the common expression for revelation and inspiration, for
interchange between the entrance of the world into humanity, through intuition
and feeling, and the outgoing of humanity into the world, through action and
culture.
He
admits that people might not think he has discussed religion at all, for he has
not written of God or immortality, a reference to the Kantian system of thought
for the realm of practical reason. He would dispute the analysis, for he thinks
that he has written of God and immortality. He has presupposed both in all that
he has written. Yet, he has written in the way he has because he does think
that conceptions and doctrines regarding God and immortality are part of what
he means by religion. Thus, he has continued his sharp distinction between
ideas associated with religion and religious feeling. As he sees it, God is the
highest unity, the whole, and in fact, we could not conceive wholeness without God.
Such attention to religion that he finds in this feeling gives clarity that one
without it will not have. The world will be little more than vague, confused,
and chaotic. One who accepts this sense of the Infinite will be happier.
He
then makes it clear what he means by immortality.
This now brings me to the second point,
to immortality. I cannot conceal that in the usual manner of treating this
subject there is still more that seems to me inconsistent with the nature of
piety. I believe I have just shown you in what way each one bears in himself an
unchangeable and eternal nature. If our feeling nowhere attaches itself to the
individual, but if its content is our relation to God wherein all that is
individual and fleeting disappears, there can be nothing fleeting in it, but
all must be eternal. In the religious life then we may well say we have already
offered up and disposed of all that is mortal, and that we actually are
enjoying immortality. But the immortality that most men imagine and their longing
for it, seem to me irreligious, nay quite opposed to the spirit of piety.
Dislike to the very aim of religion is the ground of their wish to be immortal.
Recall bow religion earnestly strives to expand the sharply cut outlines of
personality. Gradually they are to be lost in the Infinite that we, becoming
conscious of the Universe, may as much as possible be one with it. But men
struggle against this aim. They are anxious about their personality, and do not
wish to overstep the accustomed limit or to be anything else but a
manifestation of it. The one opportunity that death gives them of transcending
it, they are very far from wishing to embrace. On the contrary, they are
concerned as to how they are to carry it with them beyond this life, and their
utmost endeavour is for longer sight and better limbs. But God speaks to them
as it stands written, “Whosoever loses his life for my sake, the same shall
keep it, and whosoever keeps it, the same shall lose it." The life that
they would keep is one that cannot be kept. If their concern is with the
eternity of their single person, why are they not as anxious about what it has
been as about what it is to be? What does forwards avail when they cannot go
backwards? They desire an immortality that is no immortality. They are not even
capable of comprehending it, for who can endure the effort to conceive an
endless temporal existence? Thereby they lose the immortality they could always
have, and their mortal life in addition, by thoughts that distress and torture
them in vain. Would they but attempt to surrender their lives from love to God!
Would they but strive to annihilate their personality and to live in the One
and in the All! Whosoever has learned to be more than himself, knows that he
loses little when he loses himself.
As he concludes, he makes it clear in his further notes
on the second speech that he expands and modifies his thoughts here in the
introduction to his book The Christian
Faith.
We find this emphasis on the importance of feeling
later in The Christian Faith.
The Christian faith
3.2.
When we put feeling and self-consciousness side by side as equivalent, I
do not mean that the experiences are synonymous. The term feeling has been in
the language of common lifelong current in this religious connection.
Scientific usage requires more precise definition, which is why I add
"self-consciousness." If anyone takes the word feeling in a sense so
wide as to include unconscious states, they will by the other word be reminded
that such is not the usage we maintain. To the term self-consciousness, we can
add the determining epithet immediate, lest anyone should think of a kind of
self-consciousness that is not feeling at all. For example, some give
self-consciousness the meaning of an objective consciousness, being a
representation of oneself, and thus mediated by self-contemplation. Even when
such a representation of ourselves, as we exist in a given portion of time, in
thinking or willing, moves quite close to the individual moments of the mental
state, this kind of self-consciousness does appear simply as an accompaniment
of the state itself. However, the real immediate self-consciousness is by no
means always simply an accompaniment. It may rather be presumed that in this
respect everyone has a twofold experience. In the first place, it is everyone's
experience that there are moments in which all thinking and willing retreat
behind a self-consciousness of one form or another. In the second place, at
times this same form of self-consciousness persists unaltered during a series
of diverse acts of thinking and willing, taking up no relation to these, and
thus not being in the proper sense even an accompaniment of them. Thus joy and
sorrow are genuine states of feeling, in the proper sense explained above,
whereas self-approval and self-reproach belong in themselves rather to the
objective consciousness of self, as results of an analytic contemplation.
Nowhere do the two forms stand nearer to each other than here, but just for
that reason this comparison puts the difference in the clearest light.
The exploration of feeling by Schleiermacher is a
form of anticipation of later psychological insights. Here is where I want to
modify the position of Schleiermacher. One reason Hegel would write of the
priority of the concept is that feeling is full of thought, even if reason must
explore it in order to bring it to full expression. Proudfoot says we now know
that ascriptions of emotions to ourselves and to others depend on complex sets
of beliefs and grammatical rules. This means that the feeling or sense on which
Schleiermacher relies so much as independent is in reality dependent on thought
and activity in complex ways. Feeling depends on language and thought, and
therefore a complex set of concepts and beliefs. This view depends on
Aristotle, who makes it clear that concepts actually constitute emotions, such
as shame or anger, as he discusses in his Rhetoric.
What this means is that concepts, rules, and institutions constitute emotion,
thereby implying that some emotions are accessible only within certain
cultures. This view is consistent with Wittgenstein as well.[33]
The horizon of feeling is the original familiarity within which we live our
personal lives. Feeling fills our interior lives; it will bring to our
awareness the social relations in which individuals live their lives.
Schleiermacher connected religious experience closely with the concept of
feeling. His discussion of feeling anticipated many of the insights of modern
psychology. For him, feeling of “absolute dependence” indicates that our
individual lives rely upon the totality of life.
Some psychologists isolate feeling without referring
to the totality of life. This is surely a mistake. Phenomenology and psychology
alike have verified the basic insight of Schleiermacher. With Heidegger, we can
agree that mood discloses our being as a whole, constituting our openness to
the world. Feelings are not just a chance state of the moment, but a pointing
toward the future, a way I want something to be. Feelings always occur in a
personal field, an experience of one's self as personal and an imagining of
others even if no one else is literally present. Therefore, feeling has a
regressive aspect in revealing the past and especially childhood experiences;
it also has progressive aspect. Feeling is an anticipation of some future in
either hope or dread. An additional implication of Schleiermacher is that he
opened up the religious significance of feeling within the wholeness that makes
the affective life. Their peculiar character consists in the fact that in them
the wholeness of human life that is always present in feeling as such becomes
thematic. In its reaching out to the totality of life, feeling anticipates the
distinction and correlation effected by the intellect, even though because of
its vagueness feeling depends on thinking for definition. On the other hand,
thought can never exhaustively transfer to its own sphere what is present in
feeling. Unfortunately, he understood this receptivity as dependent in contrast
to the spontaneous freedom also implicit in feeling. Because he never developed
the notion of mood, Kierkegaard set the pattern that continues to influence
discussion of this topic. Further, the passions receive no attention from him.
As Schleiermacher seems to see it, one has the whole
of life, its total meaning, only in the individual and the specific, in which
the whole manifests itself. Any intuition of meaning remains bound to a
particular viewpoint. Such a view has ramifications in other authors. One can see
that Wilhelm Dilthey highlighted the historicity of this process more strongly
than did Schleiermacher. He writes of a final meaning of individual existence
that one has at the time of death. Yet, Dilthey also appropriated the view of
Schleiermacher of the relativity of this awareness to specific experiences
within one’s own history. One has the whole only in and through fragments.
Dilthey has had significance in that wherever the question of meaning has a
relationship to the whole of life and of experienced reality, as in Tillich, in
a way that each individual meaning possess its significance only from an
all-encompassing context of meaning, the analyses of Dilthey is in the
background. Frankl also has this view of meaning. He encourages people to trust
in the meaningfulness of life through a total meaning that encompasses life as
a whole. One grasps this total meaning through the mediation of concrete
life-situations.
Schleiermacher discovered the significance of
religious feeling within the wholeness that marks affective life. In religious
feeling, the wholeness of human life, present in all feeling, becomes a theme,
although Schleiermacher obscures his insights by reference to
self-consciousness. Feeling anticipates the distinction and correlation effected
by the intellect, even though because of its vagueness feeling depends on
thinking for definition. Thought can never exhaustively transfer to its own
sphere what is present in feeling.
Schleiermacher was correct in indicating that the
heart of religious feeling was receptivity and dependence. Augustine also
placed a positive value on the affective life. Feelings have their place in
self-transcendence and in the temporal flow of life. Feeling has a relation
ecstatically to the world and the people around us. The orientation of human
beings to a fullness of life that transcends them and manifests itself
especially in the community of their fellow human beings finds expression in
the positive feelings and passions, especially in feelings of sympathy but also
in joy and hope. We participate in the forming of the future by virtue of our
capacity to conceive of and respond to new possibilities, and to bring them out
of imagination and try them in actuality. New possibilities motivate us; goals
and ideals attract and pull us toward the future, even while our past pushes
us; the present brings together the push and the attraction, the past and the
future.
The advantage of
such an anthropological approach is that that the concept of God becomes an
essential part of a proper human self-understanding, whether in relation to
human reason or to other basic fulfillments of human existence. Such reflections
do not prove the existence of God so much as refer people to an unfathomable
reality that transcends the individual and the world. To put it in general
terms, human flourishing needs to embrace this dimension of our humanity rather
than cynically deny it. One may well live a human life in a secular way, but to
find happiness, this dimension of our humanity needs to find expression in our
thinking and living.
Schleiermacher argues that religion is a feeling of
absolute dependence. Charles Taylor, in Varieties
of Religion Today (2002, 51) points out that this view arises because of
the frustration many people have with setting aside their convictions and
passions in order to pass off their study as scientific. In this view, desire
is not an obstacle to discovering truth. This feeling, similar to that of
Descartes, is that the finite has its grounding in the Infinite and the
temporal has its grounding in the Eternal. However, this feeling does not
direct a human life, for one must view the subjective feeling toward the
Infinite and Eternal in the context of reflective thought. In other words,
feeling is not enough. The greatness of this view, as Pannenberg points out, is
that religion is not additional to human life and world. In the view of
Schleiermacher, the concept that we carve out finite life out of the Infinite
suggests that religious questions are a central human concern, rather than an
unnecessary addition that humanity can lose with no loss to itself. Secular
awareness does not have this awareness, and thus, differs from religious
awareness. In this sense, religion seeks to uncover for secularity a dimension
of human life that it has lost, to its own detriment. Although Hegel made light
of this view of religion, he actually approximates it in his Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (241,
263), in which he says, “All that is true begins in its appearance.” He then
says, “First it exists as intuition, faith, feeling, as the felt flash-like
witness of the Spirit … and thus it must be developed from the interiority of
feeling into the mode of representation.” In Christian Religion (292), he goes so far as to say that philosophy
does not reject feeling. Rather, “The question is only whether the content of
feeling is the truth and can prove itself to be true in thought.” Actually, as
Robert R. Williams points out in “Hegel and Schleiermacher on Theological
Truth,” the use of feeling by Schleiermacher may be his version of what
Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty described as intentional consciousness and
the primacy of perception. The feeling involved is toward the Infinite and
Eternal. In this sense, religion is the pre-theoretical experience of that
toward which philosophy moves through reflection. For Hegel, theology is closer
to the picture thoughts of this feeling than is philosophy. For him, religion
needs the further refinement that philosophy brings in order to reach its goal.
Religion points beyond itself to speculative thought. William James[34]
also described religion as a term for the feelings, actions, and experiences of
individuals insofar as they realize that they are in relation to a divine
power. Human beings themselves, with their feelings, actions, and experiences,
are the basis of the religious search.
Against the notion
of Schleiermacher that piety is a feeling of absolute dependence, R. Otto[35]
will present a notion that has had much influence in understanding religious
phenomena. The universal or All in Schleiermacher had the advantage of not
denoting another world as opposed to everyday experience of this world. Rather,
his relating of the finite to the infinite opened up a deeper understanding of
finite reality itself, the finite being carved out of the infinite and hence
always related to it. The greatness of his view of religion is that religion
and its content were not additional to the ordinary reality of our world and us.
What he offered was a deeper and more conscious understanding of the one
reality of life. In contrast, the orientation of the concept of religion to the
holy as distinct from the profane that we find in Otto implies a dualistic
understanding that divides the religious from the nonreligious. In any case,
both thinkers focus on the experience rather than the object toward which the
experience directs one. The danger of
Otto is his contrast between the secular and the religious, in which the
secular is clearly primary. Again, the value of Schleiermacher and his view of
the universal or All is that awareness of the secular world is part of
religious awareness. The secular is what it is only by its failure to make the
religious connection with the infinite. He opens the door to a reflection on
the superficial nature of secular awareness in that it conceals the fact that
we carve out the finite out of the infinite and the totality.
Ninian Smart discusses
the experiential or emotional dimension. Certain experiences can be important
in religious history. Enlightenment, visions, conversions are important to
religion. In Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, we find mysticism and the way
ritual enhances ordinary experiences of devotion. In the secular worldview of
America, we find the emotional occasions in celebrations of patriotism and the
singing of significance songs. He will make the point that neither
Schleiermacher nor Otto have conceived of religious experience broadly enough.
He begins by thinking that one can isolate the numinous (theism), the
panenhenic (at one with the world), and the contemplative or mystical
(non-theism and experience of emptiness). He does not want to isolate the
experiential from the ritual, organization, and ethical dimensions.[36]
Of course, this
focus on experience or feeling has its problems as well.
Pannenberg warns
of the danger of pointing to such experiences of faith, conversion, and
regeneration, as the basis for certainty of the truth of Christian doctrine
prior to all discussion of the individual themes [37]
Schleiermacher[38]
viewed the articles of faith as the expression of pious Christian states in
verbal form. He sought a drastic revision in church doctrine on the basis to
differing individualized formulations of the content of faith. The criterion
for dogmatic presentation was the faith consciousness, of which church doctrine
was its expression. This means one already decides the truth question by the
subjective faith already present in consciousness. The theology of awakening,
especially in Julius Muller and the biblical theology of Martin Kahler tried to
draw the faith principle and scriptural authority closer together. The
subjective experience of faith remained basic. The same was true of the
Erlangen school and I. A. Dorner. They found in the experience of conversion
the true religious basis of certainty, from which the scientific certainty of
the truth of Christianity is to be distinguished. The advantage of this
approach is that one can validate and appropriate as true only that which our
own experience confirms. More dubious was the tendency to limit the principle
of experience to conversion. Worse was the idea that this experience can
achieve a guarantee of the truth of Christian doctrine prior to all discussion
of the individual themes. Even Barth, as much as he wanted to move away from
Schleiermacher, becomes an example of the point that as long as one thinks that
one must establish the truth of Christian doctrine in advance of all discussion
of its contents, one has little choice but to appeal the act of faith. Individual
experience can never mediate absolute, unconditional certainty. It can do no more
than clarify and confirm. The conditionality of all subjective certainty is
part of the finitude of human experience. The believing I is not the locus of
absolute truth. It becomes irrational fanaticism.
Wayne Proudfoot
has a good point when he says that Schleiermacher has a polemic or apologetic
in mind in his identification of feeling separate from thought and activity.
The continual stress he brings that feeling and thought in particular are
separate demands further reflection. As he admits, his second speech assumes
God throughout. This is right. This also means that the Jewish and Christian
notion of a monotheistic God is behind his speech. Most analysis today would
suggest that feeling arises from thought, even if the thought is not clear to
the person. Psychological practice arises precisely because people need help in
identifying the experiences and thoughts that lay behind the feeling or mood
that may dictate inappropriate behavior today. To take this a step further, the
apologetic of Schleiermacher attempts to locate religion in human nature in
such a way that he can protect religion from attack. The problem here is that
one can explain this feeling toward the Infinite, this striving toward
wholeness, in ways other than identifying it as religious. Of course, this
assumes that this feeling or sense exists. In other words, science or evolution
will have other ways of explaining it. It would appear, in other words, that
science has an obligation, if we take evolution seriously, to explain the
pervasive experience of religion throughout human history. If evolution is
true, religion must have an explanation from that perspective. The precursor of
these explanations is Feuerbach.[39]
The third and
fourth speeches have little interest for the purposes of this exploration into
the philosophy of religion. In the third speech, he does offer the opinion that
people have emotions of religion, just as they have of art, philosophy, and all
things great and beautiful. He refers to the World-Spirit appearing to
everyone, giving all people a sacred longing and love toward the Eternal.
However, the world overcomes them by focusing them on the unworthy limitation
of their lives to the world.
In the fourth
speech, he notes that religion must be social. One does not keep the creative
work of one’s mind to one’s self. One has a responsibility to express it due to
the natural experience of fellowship and mutual dependence. The spiritual
nature that we have in common with human beings brings one to express and
communicate with others.
In the end, as
Pannenberg sees it, Schleiermacher saw that the religion of reason as defined
by Kant could no longer function as a criterion for the truth of Christianity because
he had to defend the independence of religion had against morality and
metaphysics. In particular, in Speeches, the
fifth speech, he makes his case.[40]
He will make the point that Schleiermacher tacitly presupposes the basic
perception of a religion to which one may refer the contents of the experience
of its adherents. Such an observation exposes religious perceptions to the
question whether they properly fulfill their function of bringing to light the
Infinite in the finite. To this extent, religious perceptions have the
character of assertions with truth claims. At least in relation to the polemic
of Christianity against inadequate accounts of the presence of the Infinite in
the finite in other religions, Schleiermacher sees the possibility of a conflict
of truth claims.[41]
Schleiermacher
begins his fifth speech by saying that his cultured despisers rightly despise
someone engaged in the pursuit of trivial things. However, people engaged in
the religious quest as he has defined it engage the highest pursuit, openness
to the universe of meaning, seeking responsiveness from the universe and at one
with it. The cultured despiser, in fact, may look at some engaged in such a
pursuit and “the clear beam of light is reflected in its purity on you.” He
refers to religion as the indwelling of all that is sublime and godlike in our
nature. He refers to the “nobler fellowship of spirits,” in which people
surrender self-will in order to become the work of the eternal, the
all-fashioning World-Spirit.”
Schleiermacher offers
the view that the lines between denominations within Christianity ought not to
be rigid. He then argues, however, that different religions are not simply
component parts of some original divine revelation. Pannenberg points out that
at this point no religion is conceivable without content. The inalienability of
religion became a ready means to counter effectively the dissolution of the
object and contents of religion. He is far from indifferent to the content of
religion.[42] He
thinks the multiplicity of religion is due to the nature of religion. Each
religion claims to be a separate form of revealing religion, so we need to be
aware of that uniqueness they claim. He urges that his cultured despisers not
satisfy themselves with the mere general idea of religion. He moves against the
Enlightenment notion of a natural religion that one might follow without a
community. He moves toward the notion of religion resigning itself from the
Infinite and Eternal and discloses its nature in that actual practice of religion.
Religion hides in the actual practice of religion. Thus, his cultured despisers
need to acquaint themselves with the actual practice of religion. He makes it
clear that if his opponents become open to “natural religion” while rejecting
all forms of “positive (actual practice of) religion,” he would regard his
project a failure. Natural religion understands its place, while religion as
actually practiced will disturb your life. His concern now is that the cultured
despisers may acknowledge the noble nature of religion, but despise the actual
practice discovered in the religions of the world. Each religion claims to be
true, and each contains elements that lack nobility. As historical entities,
they are impure and earthly, while having heavenly beauty as well. In defense
of religion, he wants to say that much we find that lacks nobility in religion
is because people drag into some contest in the civil or political society. He
also thinks that, regardless of the corruption of a religion, one will find traces
of the divine, which he thinks of as the original fire that began each
religion. His explanation for the multiplicity of religion is that while
religion expresses the human relation to God, not everyone will apprehend this
relation the same way. Differences in time and place will explain such
multiplicity. However, he wants to go further. For example, within religion,
individuals vary as to their perceptions of what they believe and what they do
as adherents to that religion. In every religion, a quarrel exists between what
is essential and what is not. Many will not understand the religion in which
they supposedly live and for which they fight. He refers to sectarianism within
a religion as those who are “infected with this mania” and who “certainly do
not lack activity.” He grants that the study of religion may break down into
various types we observe, but such a study does not explain the multiplicity of
religion. His point in all of this is that one cannot really have a purely
individual religion. Religion has a communal form. As he sees it, religion has
definite forms so that those “who with their own religion pitch their camp in
some positive form, have any fixed abode, and any well-earned right of
citizenship in the religions world.” Such persons are advancing the general
cause of religion. He can point to the heroes and martyrs of every religion as
examples of nobility, but who are the noble among those who profess “natural
religion.” They pride themselves on moderation and reduce their religion: “The
little that their meager and attenuated religion does contain is of great
ambiguity.” He stresses that natural religion has contempt for the actual
practice of religious communities, while ignoring not showing the same contempt
for other communities that also have horrendous some horrendous outcomes. One
could think of science and politics here. He urges that his cultured despisers
remember that the forms of religion are a fellowship with the universe of
meaning, while they also regard the imperfections within which each form of
religion must grow and consider its home. He stresses that the multiplicity of
the religions has its basis in the nature of religion. An individual cannot
possess all that religions have to offer. In the same way, a single religion
cannot embody all that religion seeks to express concerning the Infinite and
Eternal. They will vary regarding their resemblance to the Universal. In fact,
the multiplicity we see regarding the religions was necessary for the complete
manifestation of religion. Yet, each religion claims to be a distinct form of
revealing religion. He urges his cultured despisers not to satisfy themselves
with a general notion of religion. They need to abandon the notion of aiming at
one religion and appreciate its multiplicity. They tend to hate “positive”
religion, meaning the actual religions encountered in history. He stresses that
religion enjoys freedom to cultivate itself as much as possible. Yet, some
religions in their historical forms withdraw such freedom and seek to impose
unnatural limits to thought. Every religion has traces of Deity, even if
remote, and even if its actual practice has led to empty custom and abstract
ideas. Yet, every religion has an element at its heart of true religion as he
sought to describe it in these speeches. They once had “the molten outpourings
of the inner fire.” Some definite forms of religion have become “a vague,
sorry, poor thought that corresponds to no reality.” He criticizes the Kantian
view of religion, a belief in a personal God and personal immortality, and
therefore has reached everything in religion by demonstration. They have a
meager and attenuated religion, such as providence, righteousness, and divine
education in general. Their religion is far too vague to have any actual
influence over how people actually live their lives. He admits that one will
always have difficulty in discovering the spirit of the religions and then
interpret them. However, as he has stressed throughout the speeches, the
fundamental intuition of a religion is of the Infinite in the finite, some
universal religion relation, which we can find at its center. One may never
perceive this center without belonging to a definite historical religion.
He also urges them
to consider the great wise teachers and poets in each religion. Yet, they
should not seek some common denominator, for no religion has achieved its
actuality, its potential presence in the world. He urges them not to pay
attention either too rigid dogmatism in the presentation of any religion or to
those who want to reduce their religion to acceptability among the irreligious.
At this point,
Schleiermacher enters a discussion of Judaism, which he considers as having an
expression of the infinite and the finite, as he would all religion. He makes
the rather bold statement that Judaism is long since dead. He seems charmed by
the childlike qualities of Judaism. He agrees that its prophecies are sublime
and its messianic hope the best. Yet, its political nature is its downfall.
Christianity came to introduce “not peace, but a sword,” making people aware of
the darkness in which they live and the light that Christ brings. In his
defense of Christianity, he mentions that it is aware that it can allow alien
elements into itself.
As Schleiermacher
continues, he says that piety will not rest with anything alien to it, so it
will keep striving to see in all things finite the Infinite. He refers to the
feeling of an unsatisfied longing directed toward the infinite. He refers to
the difference one experiences between the sacred and profane, the noble and
the common. He wonders about the mood that often overtakes human beings that
search for universal meaning everywhere. He thinks that “if ever a Christian
has allowed you to listen in the sanctuary” of his or her soul, you would
understand the longing and sadness. He then appeals to the notion of
Incarnation and Christ as mediator as carving out a special place for
Christianity among the religions.
He then
argues,
The fundamental idea of every positive
religion, being a component part of the infinite Whole in which all things must
be eternal, is in itself eternal and universal, but its whole development, its
temporal existence may not, in the same sense, be either universal or eternal.
His point is that religion appears
in a temporal and spatial setting that will move against its universal claims.
Christianity acknowledges this, and in that way is superior, for it
acknowledges a day is coming when humanity will need no church or mediator.
His
conclusion is at least intriguing as he speculates differing potential end
games of the debatable quality of the religious community. Half of the original
intuition of Christianity is the corruptible quality “of all that is great
divine in human things.” However, if a time should come humanity advances to a
point where one can no longer “directly observe the retrogression of human
affairs, I would gladly stand on the ruins of the religion I honor.” His point
appears to be that if human beings were perfectible by their efforts,
Christianity would show itself to be wrong. Yet, another Christian teaching “is
that certain brilliant and divine points are the source of every improvement in
this corruption of every new and closer union of the finite with the deity.” He
then speculates that if a time were to come when “the power that draws us to
the Highest” had equal distribution among most of humanity, he would willingly
level all that exalts itself. Further, if Christianity becomes the sole type of
religion, be aware that it scorns autocracy. It will not rule humanity alone.
Christianity would see that it must honor each element within it, producing
variety into infinity. It would respect that which is noble but came from
outside of Christianity. It would still be aware of its corruptibility within
“its own often sad history,” expecting “redemption from the imperfection that
now oppresses it.” It may even see “other and younger … and stronger, and more
beautiful types of religion arise outside of this corruption.” He then forms an
interesting proposition.
It could see them arise close beside
it, and issue from all points even from such as appear to it the utmost and
most doubtful limits of religion. The religion of religions cannot collect
material enough for its pure interest in all things human. As nothing is more irreligious than to demand general uniformity in
humanity, so nothing is more unchristian than to seek uniformity in religion.
[Emphasis is mine.]
As a reminder, the
past few paragraphs have dealt with the way Schleiermacher has sought to say
that Christianity carves out a special place among the religions. Although he
says much in a commendable way, Pannenberg rightly makes the point that we see
now the attempt of Schleiermacher to carve out a special place for Christianity
was illogical. His problem was that he still needed a general concept of
religion as a norm. Yet, was not the general concept more philosophical than
religious in nature? If so, it would go against his notion that religion was
independent. He defines Christianity as the perfect realization of the general
concept of religion, as did Hegel.[43]
In his epilogue,
Schleiermacher offers an interesting observation and a question based on it.
But to me mankind is not everything,
but an infinitely small part, a fleeting form of the Universe. There may be
many beings above humanity, but every race and individual is subordinated to
the Universe. Can God in this sense then be anything for me but one type of
intuition?
He adds in a comment on the first
edition:
To have religion is to have an
intuition of the Universe, and while this idea of God suits every intuition, a
religion without God might still be better than another with God.
Schleiermacher
changes his argument in Christian Faith.[44]
He begins with what he calls his philosophy of religion. He discusses the
notion that religious communities have a relation to each other in two
different ways. One is that they are in different stages of development and the
other is that they are of different kinds. The household worship or tribal
deity forms of religion is in contrast to a religion that must connect in civil
society. For him, they require differing maturity of intellectual power. Each
individual communion is capable of development within the character of its kind
or genus. Such stages imply a direction or end game. In relation to others,
religious communions will co-ordinate will and in others will be subordinate,
and in still others superior. His position tacitly presupposes the possibility
that forms of piety will be similar to that of Christianity, although he wants
to be clear that this does not remove the superior quality of Christianity. His
position omits the possibility that other religions are simply false. He
accepts the maxim that error never exists in and for itself, but always along
with some truth. He points to Romans 1:21ff and Acts 17:27-30 for support.
Next,
Schleiermacher discusses the idea that forms of piety express the dependence of
everything finite upon one supreme and infinite Being, which is the highest
form of religion, that of monotheism. His point is that polytheism, while
incorporating various gods and idols, found an incapacity in itself by adding
such figures. It was not able to arrive at completeness. The sense of totality
has not yet developed. His point is that these different representations depend
on different states of self-consciousness. The one worships an idol is in a
confused state of self-consciousness, and the same is true with polytheism.
Belief in one God is an elevation of self-consciousness in that we have taken
up the world into our self-consciousness. Conscious of self as finite,
dependent on an infinite Being that embraces the world, we experience a
connection to the entire world. His point is that self-consciousness in idol
worship and polytheism is a connection only to an aspect of nature, a human
quality, or a social relationship. Monotheism is by its nature a missionary
religion, wanting to spread belief in this one God over all. At this point, he
discusses Judaism, which limited the love of God to the race of Abraham. Islam
has a passionate character, has strongly sensuous content of its ideas, and
betrays the influence of the sensible we find in polytheism. For him, of
course, Christianity stands at a higher stage of development. He does not
consider here that both Jews and Muslims would deny that Christianity is
monotheistic. He then asserts that Christianity is the most perfect of the most
highly developed forms of religion. He notes that his view would disagree with
those who think of no real piety existing at all outside of Christianity. They
would suggest that lower levels show only superstition rooted in fear. The
honor of Christianity does not demand such an assertion. His point is that in
the earliest stages of religion, any fear that may motivate also has impulses
of love. We must not deny the homogeneity of all these products of the human
spirit.
Next,
Schleiermacher discusses the idea that the widest diversity between forms of
piety that subordinate the natural in human conditions to the moral. The
passive state of absolute dependence in our consciousness provides the context
for our action in the world, and thus arises out of consciousness of God. He
wants to call this a teleological religion, in which the moral is the end game,
and thus the advancement of the reign of God. If one retreats into oneself, the
mental state is a subduing one. The aesthetic religion is one that focuses on
the passive side and its feeling of absolute dependence. He sees Judaism, with
its focus on a commanding will, primarily on the active and teleological side. Islam
with its fatalistic character is on the passive or aesthetic side.
Next,
Schleiermacher wants to propose that religious communities have an outward
unity in history and an inner unity as a modification that occurs over time.
Each religion is “positive” in that the individual content of all the moments
of the religious life within one religious communion exists as a coherent
historical phenomenon. This leads to a discussion of revelation. The idea of
revelation signifies the originality of the fact that lies at the foundation of
a religious communion. However, such a revelation is essentially doctrine or a
system of propositions. In fact, doctrine is a system, and thus cannot depend
upon anything supernatural. Such original moments are parts of another whole.
The original fact will always be the appearing of such a being, and the
original working will always be upon the self-consciousness of those whose
circle he enters. It implies doctrine, of course. For him, it would be
difficult to draw a line between what God reveals and what becomes known
through inspiration in a natural way. One can regard no particular thing as
divine revelation. If one faith wishes to establish the validity of its own
application of the idea as against the others, it cannot accomplish this by the
assertion that its own divine communication is pure and entire truth, while the
others contain falsehood. For complete truth would mean that humanity came to
know God in a complete way. However, such a truth could not proceed outwardly
from any fact. Even if it did in some way come to a human soul, the person
could not apprehend it and retain it as a thought. If it could not be in any
way perceived and retained, it could not become operative. Any proclamation of
God that is to be operative upon and within us can only express God in a
relation to us, a limit arising out of natural human limitations in relation to
God.
Schleiermacher
continues with what he calls his apologetics. He begins by identifying
Christianity as a monotheistic and teleological faith, distinguished from other
such faiths by that fact that it relates everything to the redemption
accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth. He admits that the development of doctrine
historically and the variations of time and place, present difficulties.
Christians believed differing things at differing times and places. Yet, if one
tries to free oneself from all partiality and perceive an essence of Christianity,
one is in danger of reaching a result far scantier and colorless. Yet, he
thinks it better to begin with something scanty. For him, this means focusing
on the notion that Christians trace back to Christ the communion to which they
belong. They find redemption in Christ, signifying a passage from an evil
condition that is represented s a state of captivity or constraint, into a
better condition and signifying help given in that process by others. The lost
condition is one of God-forgetfulness. One could feel the lack of a thing that
lay outside of one’s nature as an evil condition, and one would need to
recreate it to make good this lack. The possibility of kindling the
God-consciousness remains in reserve even where one paints the evil condition
of that consciousness in the darkest colors. For Christianity, this lost and
redeemed quality is the focus of attention, and Christ has accomplished
redemption. Through Christianity, redemption has become the major theme. The
founder of this religious communion is Jesus. The influence of Christ is what
unites the various Christian communions. The relation to the founder of the
communion separates Christianity from other religious communions.
Schleiermacher
then considers a special historical connection with Judaism, yet, it also has a
relationship with heathenism. By this, he means that the transition from either
to Christianity would be the transition to another religion. He admits the leap
is greater when one starts with heathenism, but both require a leap. As he sees
it, Christianity is not simply a remodeled, renewed, or continuation of,
Judaism. For him, the Old Testament is useful to Christians, but “whatever is
most definitely Jewish has least value.” [I will let the statement stand in
this context, but I would suggest that scholarship has moved on from this
position, thankfully. Much that is worthy in Christianity is also in Judaism.]
Schleiermacher
then discusses revelation as supernatural and natural, supra-rational and
rational. The appearing of a spiritual life is the result of the power of
development that resides in human nature and expresses itself in particular
people at particular points according to laws that, if hidden from us, are
nevertheless of divine arrangement, in order through these people to help the
others forward. He thinks all founders of religious communities have this
endowment. However, and this is important for him, if we apply the principle to
Christ, in comparison with him, everything that one could regard as revelation
loses its character. Every other revelation had its time and place, but the
destiny of Christ is to “gradually quicken the whole human race into higher
life.” As he sees it, no one who does not take Christ in this universal way as
divine revelation desires that Christianity should be an enduring phenomenon.
Yet, this means that his appearing as the Son is a natural fact. His point here
is that human nature is capable of taking up into itself the restorative divine
element. Even if the possibility of this resides in human nature, he grants
that one must regard its appearance in one particular Person as an action of
human nature, grounded in its original constitution and prepared for by all its
history. Without this notion, it becomes an arbitrary divine act. Regarding the
supra-rational, he notes that one must accept an element of this in Christ, or
else every human being would have the same capacity as Christ. Yet, one must
not make too great of a difference between the supra-rational and human
rationality. The highest goal that is set for the working of redemption is
always a human state that not only would obtain the fullest recognition from
common human reason, but in which also it is impossible always to distinguish
between what is effected by the divine Spirit and what is effected by human
reason. Human reason contains that which divine Spirit produces. He concludes
this portion by saying that supra-rationality implies that a true appropriation
of Christian teaching is not simply a science, and thus, is outside the realm
of reason. One can only appropriate Christian teaching through each person
willing to have the experience for oneself. Love can only apprehend one that
wills to perceive it. One way of saying this is that some truths reveal
themselves when we open ourselves in faith, commitment, and love to them.
He concludes his
apologetics by saying that one participates in the Christian community through
faith in Jesus as the redeemer. This means the facility and constancy of
religious emotions, which means the cultivation of absolute dependence as
conditioned by a Being placed outside of us. The religious community is to
elicit this inward experience in others. For him, this is the essence of Christian
preaching. It must always take the form of testimony as to the experience one
has had, which shall arouse in others the desire to have the same experience.
He has no desire to demonstrate the necessity of redemption. After all, one who
is capable of being satisfied with oneself as one is will always manage to find
a way out of the argument. In fact, even if one is aware of the need for
redemption, the fact that many had this need in the time of Jesus and did not
turn to him shows that one need not turn to Christ. He specifically rejects the
notion that miracle, prophecy, or inspiration can demonstrate faith in Christ,
for each presupposes faith. His point here is that the continuation of the
Christian fellowship relies upon testimony to the effects of the development
and cultivation of absolute dependence, but one cannot prove to others their
need for this step.
To conclude, the
greatness of Schleiermacher’s view of religion is that religion and its content
were not additional to the ordinary reality human beings experience in the
world. He offered a deeper and more conscious understanding of the one reality
of life. His view does not presuppose the dualism of secular and sacred spheres
that eventually depends upon the prior awareness of secularity and later moving
toward the holy. In contrast, Schleiermacher proposes the constitutive
condition of the awareness of finite objects and therefore of awareness of the
secular of the world. Religious awareness stands in opposition to secular
awareness only because the latter is not aware of the fact that finite objects
are conditioned by their being carved out of the infinite and defined by it.
Here, the antithesis of the sacred and the profane finds a place in
Schleiermacher’s concept, but it is a derived and subordinate element. His
theory can explain why one can view the holy in religious awareness as
constitutive for our secular reality. It brings to light the truth of the
finite itself that the superficial orientation of a secular awareness conceals
by treating finite things merely as objects to control and use. The truth is
that the finite is not self-grounded, but is carved out of the infinite and the
totality. Pannenberg will often make the connection with Descartes. Our
inexpressible awareness of the infinite as the condition of all understanding
of the finite was the decisive argument in the third meditation of Descartes as
he sought to prove that we have an innate knowledge of God. One can claim the
intuition of the infinite that precedes all the other contents of the
consciousness as knowledge of God only secondarily based on an express
awareness of God in monotheistic religion. However, inasmuch as this is not an
express theme, we do not yet have in it an awareness of God or an explicitly
religious awareness. Only the form that is distinct from the finite medium but
encountered in it is the concrete religious subject that modern studies have
described very generally as power.
Such a definition
of religion by Schleiermacher detaches it from the concept of God, which he
deals with only in an appendix. In this case, God was simply one religious view
among others. This idea was consistent with the objective of formulating the
concept of religion as a universal concept that would describe common factors
of both in all religions. Even today, detachment from the concept of God has
been the final reason why there have been so many attempts at definition. For
that reason, they also seem unsatisfactory.
In
support of the idea of separating God from the concept of religion are the
arguments of F. Ferre, and E. Durkheim.[45]
The result has been a purely anthropological definition of religion as a
dimension of human life, perhaps its ultimate dimension as an expression of
total commitment, or of comprehensive and most intensive evaluation. One could
appeal to the thesis in Paul Tillich.[46]
F. J. Streng[47]
develops this notion into the thesis that religion is a means of ultimate
transformation. He recognizes that some theologians will ask whether religion
is a creative element of the human spirit or a gift of divine revelation. For
the latter position, the point would be that the meaning of religion is that
humanity receives something that does not come from humanity. It remains a gift
to stand against humanity. For such persons, revelation is not a human
possibility. Religion, far from being a creation of the human spirit, is a gift
of the divine Spirit. Such theologians will appeal to Paul, Augustine, Thomas,
Luther, and Calvin. From a secular perspective, one could ask whether religion
is a lasting quality of the human spirit instead of an effect of changing
psychological and sociological conditions. Such thinkers might go back to Comte
and suggest that religion has no place in the scientific age. Religion is a
creation of the human spirit, but not an essential quality of it. Tillich,
however, wants to argue against both by saying that religion is an aspect of
the human spirit. The human spirit presents itself as religious. Religion is
the dimension of the depths of the human spirit. In a sense, religion is not at
home anywhere in the human spirit in that it does not have a function. One
cannot limit it to ethics, to a religious sense, to the artistic, or to
feeling. His point is that religion is at home everywhere, in the depth of the
human spirit. Religion points to the ultimate, infinite, and unconditional in
the human spirit. If religion is present in all functions of the spiritual
life, why has humanity developed religion as a special sphere among others,
whether in myth or in religious communities? For Tillich, the answer is that
the tragic estrangement of human spiritual life arises from the ground or depth
of each of us. Religion opens up the depth of human spiritual life. Usually, the
dust of our daily life and the noise of our secular work cover up its depth. It gives us the experience of the Holy, of
something that is untouchable, awe-inspiring, an ultimate meaning, and the
source of ultimate courage. This is the glory of religion. However, beside its
glory is its shame. It makes itself the ultimate and despises the secular
realm. It makes its myths and doctrines, it rites and laws, into ultimates and
persecutes those who do not subject themselves to it. It forgets that its own
existence is a result of human tragic estrangement from its true being. It
forgets its own emergency character. This is the reason for the passionate
reaction of the secular world against religion, a reaction that has tragic
consequences for the secular realm. Neither of them should be in separation
from the other, and both should realize that their very existence as separated
is an emergency, that both of them are rooted in religion in the sense of an
experience of ultimate concern.
The value of such
definitions is that they describe human positions and experiences that have
religious content. The same is true of functional definitions that look at the
function of religion in uniting society or culture and view it as a mastering
of contingency. In some cases, the function of religion is as a source of
self-awareness. In other cases, as we find in Durkheim, and H. Lubbe[48]
the function is to bring awareness of meaning that embraces the world and
society. Religion does have all these functions. Yet, such a functional
definition cannot produce the effect desired. This weakness leads people like
Peter Berger[49]
to demand that we need a material or substantial definition of the nature of
religion, as well as a functional description.
In reality, says
Pannenberg, Schleiermacher sought to validate what the confessions said in the
conditions of his time. His proposal may be open to criticism. However, this
criticism is convincing only if it sets itself the same task as he attempted to
perform. The task is how theology can make the primacy of God and divine
revelation in Jesus Christ intelligible, and validate its truth claim, in an age
that reduces to subjectivity all talk about God. What Schleiermacher has
attempted to do is provide religion an independent basis in anthropology with
its claim to a separate province in the mind. The concept of God became a
product of religion. It therefore did not belong necessarily to it. In Christian Faith, the feeling of absolute
dependence stands on its own, rather than as an effect of faith in God.
However, feeling does not give us the concept of God and does not have a close
bond with it. In the feeling, it brings
awareness of the implied “whence” of dependence. Nevertheless, the mature
reflections of Schleiermacher suggest that awareness of God is an expression of
religion or piety, not a consequence of the knowledge of God. At the close of
Protestant liberal dominance, with the rise of Karl Barth, we will find a
protest against the entire procedure. He wants to begin with the primacy of
divine reality and its self-declaration over all human worship of God. The
deity of God stands or falls with the primacy of divine reality and divine
revelation over religion. Yet, as Pannenberg sees it, theologians cannot
advance this primacy directly. It will have the character of mere assertion and
even fanaticism if the theologian tries. The theologian needs the mediation of
reasoning. The theologian needs to engage in a discussion of the problem that
from the time of the Enlightenment has led to the domination of the concept of
religion as a foundation for dogmatics. Barth acknowledged the primacy of
anthropology, fought against it, but he could not change the situation.[50]
The theologian
today will need to augment the reflections of Schleiermacher from the analysis
provided in psychology and existentialism as to the role of feeling and mood as
they indicate our nature as human beings. Theology can rightly made use of such
insights in order to find some common ground with life as the modern person
experiences it. Yet, the theologian has an additional concern that involves
being a faithful witness to Jesus Christ as the revelation of God. This will
mean paying far more attention to the God of Israel and the Jewish faith. It will
mean faithfulness to the apostolic witness concerning Jesus. It will mean
faithfulness to the individual and corporate life that embodies continuing a
loving relationship with Jesus, other believers, and the world. It will mean
faithfulness to the hope of the renewal of creation in the image of the Son.
On a personal
note, Schleiermacher remains a friend in theological development. For Barth,
Schleiermacher was a foil. He thought he needed to do the opposite of
everything Schleiermacher accomplished. A better path is to view him as someone
upon whom we can build a better theology for our time. If Barth was right in
saying that he renewed theology for his time, maybe he can inspire theology
today to renew the theological task for our time.
Let it be so!
[1] Barth,
CD III.4, 155.
[2] Barth,
CD, III.2, 21.
[3] Barth,
CD IV.1, 656.
[4] Barth,
CD I.2, 785.
[5] Barth,
CD I.2, 324.
[6] Barth,
CD, II.2, 520.
[7] Barth,
CD, I.1, 276.
[8] Barth,
CD III.3, 345.
[9] Barth,
CD III.2, 446.
[10] Pannenberg,
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume 2, 281.
[11] Barth,
CD II.1, 270.
[12] Barth,
CD, I.2, 9.
[13] Barth,
CD, II.2, 541.
[14] Barth,
CD III.2, 79.
[15] Barth,
CD I.2, 123, 351.
[16] Proudfoot,
Religious Experience (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985), xiii. In addition, Barth, CD, I.1, 92.
[17] The Meaning and End of Religion (New
York: Mentor, 1964), 64.
[18] Barth,
Church Dogmatics, I.1, 127-8.
[19] (Church
Dogmatics, II.1, 28.1, p. 269-270)
[20] Hegel,
preface to Hinrich, Religion, 1822.
[21] Proudfoot,
Religious Experience, 190-227.
[22] Berger,
Sacred Canopy (1967)
[23] Speeches (ibid, First Speech, 21, 36,
39)
[24] (ibid,
36, 45-58).
[25] Proudfoot,
Religious Experience, xiv.
[26] Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology Volume 1, 167.
[27] Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 1930,
Chapter 1.
[28] Proudfoot,
Religious Experience, 31, 61, 76.
[30] Barth,
CD III.3, 172.
[31] Barth,
CD III.3, 312.
[32]Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology Volume 2, 46.
[33] Proudfoot,
Religious Experience, xvii, 87.
[34] Varieties of Religious Experience (1902,
31)
[35] (The Idea of the Holy, 1923).
[36] Smart, Dimensions of the Sacred (1996)
[37]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, Volume
I, 40-48.
[38] Schleiermacher,
The Christian Faith, 15.
[39] Proudfoot,
Religious Experience (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1985.
[40] Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology Volume 2, 130.
[41] Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology Volume 1, 167.
[42] Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology Volume 1, 155.
[43] Pannenberg,
Systematic Theology Volume 1, 130.
[44] (I.II,
7-14, 8.4)
[45]Basic Modern Philosophy of Religion, 1968
and The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life, 1915.
[46] Tillich,
“Religion as a Dimension in Man’s Spiritual Life,” in Theology of Culture.
[47] Streng (Understanding Religious Life, 1969).
[48] (Religion nach der Aufklarung, 1986).
[49] Berger (The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a
Sociological Theory of Religion, 1967, 175ff).
[50]
Pannenberg, Systematic Theology Volume
1, 125-8.
George, I appreciated this blog, especially as I do not have time this month to read along with you. Von Balthasaar argues that Barth is not trying to do the opposite of Schleiermacher, so much as he is trying to steer a course between the idealism and pietism of Schleiermacher on the one hand and the rationalism and foundationalism of Roman Catholicism on the other (perhaps two extremes of the same flaw in emphasizing human infallibility and natural revelation). I think that is probably a reading of Barth with a Catholic bias, but my point is that Balthasar is helping me to see how much Barth affirms of Schleiermacher, while trying to correct him. Of course, there are many hilarious jabs that Barth takes at Schleiermacher (such as being a "female" theologian for not being sufficiently in touch with his own masculinity) and these were enjoyable to be reminded of as I read your essay here.
ReplyDeleteFor me, the enduring nature of the work you are reading is obvious. It is also troubling. Schleiermacher's approach ultimately is too hopelessly subjective to serve as much more than one form or another of a theology of psychological projection. Nonetheless, the attempt Schleiermacher makes (and Proudfoot and many others too) attempts to maintain a veneer of objectivity. A thoroughly Christian faith must reject experience as the primary epistemological foundation precisely because Christian belief does not historically demonstrate a confidence in the subjectivity of human beings. The Light coming into the world is within all, but it is not our light. Thus there is an objective revelation which is beyond our subjective apprehension and remains apart from even humanity's best attempts at theology.
Schleiermacher's love, conviction and intellect are all undoubtedly to be admired. He gives a brilliant attempt at creating a theology for his time and a theology that still speaks to ours. I am looking forward to reading your other posts.
I hope you have time to read the next posts. They will not be as long as this one! Thank you for reading. I will be pointing out the places where Barth appears to deliberately look at what Schleiermacher did to structure his theology and structure his theology in an opposite direction. I would, with all due respect, disagree with von Balthasar that he is simply trying to correct Schleiermacher. However, I am looking forward to read him soon on Barth. I think Pannenberg is trying to correct Schleiermacher, but I will point that out in future essays. Of course, Pannenberg is also trying to correct the weaknesses he sees in Barth as well. Yes, his subjectivity throughout will be an issue. I hope you will comment on the essays as you have time.
Delete