Lecture Nine -- Kant, Romanticism, and Pietism
Scope:
Kant's revolution in epistemology, moral theory, and religious thought was extremely influential — and remains so today — but it raised many questions for 19'"-century religious thinkers. In particular, many were dissatisfied by the idea of God as "postulate." The Romantics and the Pietists argued that God could be experienced directly. Romanticism was a philosophical, literary, and artistic movement that looked to overcome what it perceived as the sterility and abstractness of the Enlightenment focus on rationality. It stressed the feeling, creative subject and the lived experience of religious faith. In a more theological vein, Pietist thinkers emphasized the spiritual and moral regeneration that came from the experience of Jesus Christ.
Outline
I. To understand developments in religious thought in the 19 century, it is necessary to keep in mind Kant's main ideas and the questions and problems these presented to those who came
after him.
A. Kant's basic ideas are the following:
1. All knowledge of the world is based in sense impressions, as organized by the operations of reason in applying the intuitions of space and time; the categories of cause, substance, and so on; and the ideas of God, world, and self.
2. For Kant, pure reason confronts itself with questions about first causes and postulates the idea of God as a first cause.
3. With respect to practical reason, although we can formulate the moral law for ourselves, in doing so, we must grapple with the problem of happiness and, thus, must also postulate a God who guarantees that in the fullness of time, happiness and virtue will converge.
4. For moral progress to be possible, believers must organize themselves into a church.
B. A major question Kant leaves us with is why it is rational to postulate a God from whom we have no empirical evidence.
C. We can identify three other positions that Kant's successors will challenge.
1. Kant precludes the possibility of immediate or raw experience of the world as it is in itself, but is it possible that we have some sort of more immediate access to either the world or to a realm beyond sense experience?
2. One of the major criticisms of Kant and the Enlightenment more generally is that they were too rationalistic and formalistic and that, consequently, they emphasize the universal, not the particular, aspects of human subjectivity.
3. Kant's emphasis on rational faith downplays the importance of religious experience such that we have no immediate consciousness of God, no dramatic religious experiences or feelings, and for many Christians, no personal experience of Jesus.
II. Two cultural and religious movements—Pietism and Romanticism—shaped Western religious thought after Kant. In both, we see criticism of the abstract rational universalism of the Enlightenment and an emphasis on personal experience.
A. Like the Enlightenment, Pietism also had its beginnings in the early modern period and the response to the religious conflict of the post-Reformation era.
1. But where Enlightenment thinkers focused on reason as the answer to these conflicts and raised the question of the rationality of religion, the Pietists saw one of the main sources of conflict as rigid adherence to doctrine and believed that too much attention to doctrine led to both conflict and the withering of the religious impulse more generally.
2. Consequently, the Pietists turned to religious experience and the "religion of the heart."
3. The main question for Enlightenment thinkers was: How can I show that reason and religion are compatible? But for Pietists, the primary question was: How do I know I am saved?
4. They found the answer to this question in the experience of Jesus Christ and the moral regeneration that follows from accepting Christ as the savior.
5. Pietism played a major role in German Lutheranism, in the Methodism of John Wesley, and in the "Great Awakening" in the American colonies in the early 18'" century.
B. Where the Pietistic movement was clearly a religious movement that brought a new perspective to the lives of everyday Christians, Romanticism was a movement of the leading artists, literary figures, and philosophers of the early 19th century with only tenuous connections to established religious traditions.
1. Romantics saw themselves as bringing life to what they perceived as the sterility of Enlightenment thought.
2. They emphasized the spontaneous, emotional, and creative side of human life; the concrete and the fragmentary over the abstract and systematic; and immediate connections with the world of living nature.
3. Some Romantics dismissed religion, but many others saw "real" religion in an artistic contemplative connection with the world and in the idea that the divine works through our creative imagination.
4. Enlightenment thinkers tended to stress the rational self and, therefore, the abstract, formal, universal aspect of the self. In contrast, Romantic thinkers placed a stronger value on the individual as a concrete, living, expressive being, with a particular place in the cosmos and, therefore, a particular expression of the energy or life of the world-soul or nature.
5. In the Romantics Rousseau and Coleridge, we find appeals to "conscience" and "imagination," respectively that serve as points of contact, even mystical union, with the divine.
Suggested Reading:
Livingston, Modern Christian Thought Volume l.
Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
Questions to Consider:
1. What are the main differences between Enlightenment and Pietist approaches to religion?
2. How would Romantic thinkers respond to Kant's views of the relation between religion and reason?
Lecture Nine — Transcript
Kant, Romanticism, and Pietism
In the last lecture we looked at the enormously influential philosophy of Kant. We packed a lot in, so I want to return to a couple of main points, with an eye to considering how Kant established the context for the post-Enlightenment era of the early 19th century. Following a brief review of Kant, I will devote the remainder of the lecture to two intellectual, religious, and cultural movements: Romanticism and Christian Pietism that also helped set the stage for religious thought in the 19 century. I've focused on three topics in Kant: his epistemology, his arguments defending rational belief in God, the argument from pure reason and the argument from practical reason; and, finally, his vision for the universal moral community of the Church. Since Kant's idea of rational faith is particularly important for thinking about faith and suspicion, I want to review this second point. Because Kant argues that for something to be considered an object of knowledge it must be grounded in sense-impression, and because he holds that we have no sense-impression of God, he claims that we do not know God. But he also argues that reason finds it necessary to employ the concept of God as an idea of reason, a regulative idea, in order to organize experience at the most comprehensive level.
By its very nature and not out of any flight of fancy, theoretical reason, according to Kant, the reason by which we come to know the world confronts itself with questions about first, causes and infinity. Kant argues it is only by positing God that reason can satisfy itself, and so maintain the stability and coherence necessary for it to function. Therefore, it is reasonable, he says, to believe that there is an unlimited God who set everything in motion. Further, and more importantly for Kant, in his moral theory he argues that although reason, without any reference to God or religion, formulates and gives itself the moral law — in doing so, however, it also presents itself with the demand of endless progress towards virtue and with the desire for happiness. Kant thus argues that moral reason must postulate God and immortality. We see, then, that in his epistemological and religious views, Kant turns against the early Enlightenment tendency to try to use reason to prove the existence of God. You can't do that, according to Kant. But he does follow through on the Enlightenment effort to show that religious belief can be rational. So, as we move out of the Enlightenment and into the 19 century in this lecture, we might summarize the question of faith and suspicion to this point like this. First, with respect to faith, we can distinguish at least three types — in Descartes, we can prove the existence of God; in Locke, we not only can agree with Descartes that reason can get us to God, but reason also can assent to things that reason itself cannot prove, but that come to us from revelation as long as reason confirms that something is, indeed, revelation; finally, with Kant, who does not believe that reason can prove God, and who rejects revelation. He does think that there is such a thing as rational faith, as we've just reviewed.
With respect to suspicion, Hume with his skepticism and Diderot with his materialism suggest that reason can only take us in the direction of a naturalistic understanding of religion and reality. I do want to spend a couple of more minutes on Kant's idea of rational faith and ask perhaps a question that many of you are asking: Why does he think that it is rational to postulate a God? Why do we need to do that? Consider his arguments about morality. Might we not argue that it is just as rational to assume that, in fact, the universe does not care about our morality — that there is nothing in the nature of things to guarantee that our virtue and our happiness wi converge? To act morally, do we really need to postulate an all powerful God who will make everything right in the end? Couldn't we hold a more tragic view of human life and reality and still commit ourselves to the moral law? That is, isn't it just as rational, given everything we know about the universe and our lives in it, to believe that whether we are immortal or not the universe just doesn't care about our happiness — that some of us, no matter how good, no matter how virtuous, will live and die without being happy, and perhaps that's all there is to it? If we believe that, does it necessarily follow that moral reasoning and a sense of responsibility for others goes out the window as Kant seems to think — that we must agree with Dostoevsky when he says that without God, all is permitted'? It certainly is possible to take this more tragic position, and many have — and have argued for it quite persuasively.
Even many who follow Kant's epistemology and his moral theory argue that we can forget about what he says about God and still retain his claims about practical reason. I'd note, though, and without trying to argue that Kant is right and they are wrong, I'd note that we might think about his conception of rational faith not simply in terms of belief, narrowly conceived, but in terms of something like hope, or duty, or even worship. It's perhaps too easy to see Kant's argument as giving in to a desire for intellectual neatness, or to wishful thinking — that is, to see it either as a concession to the desire for a system where everything fits, so we need to "believe" in God in the simple sense of assenting to a proposition — God exists, and that makes everything fit nicely. It's perhaps tempting to see it as a psychological fix that allows us to persuade ourselves that ultimate reality is good and hospitable. But I also think it's possible to see what Kant is doing in a more challenging way — where rational faith is less a comfort than a task. We have to keep in mind that Kant's moral theory is a theory of freedom, where freedom is not doing anything you happen to want — for Kant, that is just to be enslaved to our desires — but where freedom is autonomy, giving one's self the law. Indeed, in The Critique of Practical Reason he says that freedom is the keystone of the whole architecture of his thinking.
Recall that for Kant, implicit in the absoluteness of our moral consciousness is respect for the moral law. If we put freedom on the one hand and respect on the other together, we might say that respect for the moral law is also respect for ourselves in our freedom and as beings capable of freedom. This respect is not just for ourselves as individuals, but for ourselves as human. It's respect, Kant says, for each person as human — which is why, then, the moral law insists that we treat each human being as an end in him or herself. On the one hand, Kant sees all of this as following rationally — reason tells us that it is so. On the other hand, he is well aware that there are aspects of human beings that resist this. It makes sense, then, to see his "respect" not just as an intellectual respect that we simply have or don't have, but as something we must cultivate — that must be the object of spiritual discipline. It becomes incumbent upon us to cultivate practices and attitudes that will allow us not just to know that we should respect the moral law — but to actually do it.
In this sense, I think his respect comes close to the love that' s counseled by Jesus in the great commandment: Love your God and your neighbor as yourself. It's important to keep in mind that this is not primarily an emotional or sentimental love — it's not a feeling for others, and for one's self, and for God — but, in fact, it's a difficult moral practice. Kant knows that we are torn between the natural selfinterest and a self-transcending sense of duty and right. His vision of rational faith is a vision of a life committed to the idea that this tension is not the ultimate state of things. So, rational faith, from this perspective, would not be a matter of wishful thinking. Kant's postulates would be more a matter of practice than of pretext — that is, it would be a practical commitment to a vision of reality. On this view, worshipping God, loving God, would be an integral part o loving one's fellow human beings. As I've said, Kant's influence on the philosophical and religious thought of the 19th and 20th centuries is enormous.
In many respects, his epistemological revolution still forms the basis of much Western thought, even as it has undergone a variety of significant modifications. His moral and religious thought also have continued to be influential, and we will see their echoes in a number of the thinkers and ideas we explore in our remaining lectures. I want to point us toward the 19'" century by considering three problems that Kant left for those who followed him — and that were taken up, in different ways, in the decades after his death in 1804. Looking at these will help us set the stage for the next few lectures. The first problem is the status of the Kantian idea of what he calls "the noumenal world" — that is, the world as it is apart from the way it appears to us. Remember, for Kant, we know the world as it appears to us but not as it is in itself; we do not know this noumenal world, as he called it.
We have seen that Kant argues that we do not have immediate or raw experience of the world — we only experience the world through the synthesizing activity of the mind. All experience and knowledge, in other words, is mediated. It is mediated by the categories of the understanding, by intuition, by the regulative ideas of reason. So, one question that has continued to trouble thinkers is whether he was right with his strong claims about mediation: Do we have some sort of more immediate access to either the world or to a realm beyond sense experience?
We will see that this is a burning question, especially for those immediately following Kant: the Romantics, and Schleiermacher, and Hegel, A second problem is the problem of the human subject. One of the major criticisms of Kant and the Enlightenment more generally is that they were too rationalistic and too formalistic, When we say that Kant's ethics is formal, we mean that for him morality involves responding to concrete situations by applying a general law. Another way to put this is that to act morally, for Kant, is to act from the perspective of universality, rather than particularity — that to act autonomously is to transcend any particular desires or personal history in order to act as reason, which is universal, commands. Thus, interestingly for Kant, I am most free — I am most fully human — when I act not as this particular person with a particular set of relationships and commitments or particular history, but when I act as a generic human being acting according to universal reason. This is because from the perspective of rationality, each person is the same — we all have the same reason, and so everyone in a given situation should do exactly the same thing.
But then where is my uniqueness, my individuality? Is it morally irrelevant? More specifically, if my relationship to God is a function of moral reason and as a moral being I must take the universal perspective, is my individuality irrelevant to my religious life? We can see this question being raised in different ways by Romantics, and then a bit later by Seren Kierkegaard.
There are some other questions we can ask about Kant and religion as well. Kant and many other Enlightenment thinkers exalt a natural, moral religion purified of historical trappings. Although unlike so defenders of natural religion, Kant does not posit an original, purely rational religion that has been corrupted in history, but he does posit a purified, universal, rational, and moral religion of the future. Both versions of natural religion can be criticized on a number of grounds. First, they downplay religious experience: There's no immediate consciousness of God, no dramatic religious experiences or feelings and no personal experience of Jesus. Second, they claim to be superior to historically based, positive religions, but, in fact, so the criticism goes, they are too abstract and so cannot command real commitment and faith. Third, Kant in some ways makes God secondary to human reason and human reality because he claims that we can only get to God as a need of human reason and human morality. As we move into the 19th century in the rest of this lecture and in following lectures, we will see each of these problems taken up and addressed in various ways.
Before turning to some of the major theological and philosophical figures of the first half of the 19th century, I want to devote the rest of this lecture to two movements that, with the Enlightenment, will help us establish the context for religious thought in the 19th century. These movements are Christian Pietism and European Romanticism.
I will begin with the Pietists. We've spent the last few lectures discussing the Enlightenment, which, from the perspective of modern philosophy and a very important strand of modern religious thought, has to be considered the dominant intellectual movement in the West of the 17th and 18th centuries. As we've seen, for Enlightenment thinkers the primary question about religion that needed to be addressed was the question of reason: Is religion rational? One of the main reasons this question was so important for the Enlightenment was that they saw reason as a way out of the kinds of religious conflicts that had wreaked havoc on Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.
With reason as the new cultural authority, it was hoped human beings could avoid these kinds of conflicts. But Enlightenment philosophy was not the only major force shaping and reshaping religion during the 17th and 18th centuries. We also have to consider the impact of the Pietist Movement of Protestant Christianity, and we' ll also see in a future lecture the Pietist Movement in Judaism. The term "Pietist" is derived from the word "piety," which, in my Webster's New World Dictionary, is defined as "devotion to religious duties and practices," and it often carries a connotation of intensely passionate devotion. To put it briefly, we can say that the Enlightenment thinkers stressed the reasonableness of religion, Pietism sought a renewal of religion in religious fee ing an in a regenerated moral and religious life.
Like Enlightenment thinkers, however, Pietists were also responding to problems emerging from post-Reformation religious conflict. They believed that one of the main sources of conflict, and more generally one of the main sources of animus towards religion and the withering of the religious impulse, was rigid adherence to doctrine. Thus, Pietists, though for different reasons, shared with Enlightenment thinkers a modern suspicion of Church authority and superstition, Their approach to these issues was their own, however, because for them, when it came to religion, too much reason was part of the problem. So, rather than installing reason as the ultimate authority, they turned to what has been called "religion of the heart." Rather than conceptualizing a universal natural religion, they asked how they could reform Christianity to revitalize this religion of the heart. So where the dominant philosophical question for Enlightenment thinkers was: How can I show that reason an religion are compatible? — so, for instance: How can I show that it is rational to believe in God? — the Pietist question was: How do I know I am saved?
The basic Pietist answer to this question is two-fold. First, we know that we are saved through certain kinds of experiences, most importantly the experience of the presence of Jesus Christ in our hearts — an experience that takes hold of us and grants us a rebirth. Second, we know that we are saved because in and through our experience and then our relationship with Jesus Christ we turn our lives around and become more virtuous and pious human beings. So, for Pietists, religion is not primarily a matter of doctrine or rational examination of religion, but is a living, breathing experience and relationship, In this way, the Pietists remained true to a central aspect of the Reformation for, like Luther and Calvin, they emphasized faith as an individual relationship with God and an effort to move away from what they saw as the dead letter of tradition and scholasticism. But for many Pietists, Protestant traditions of the late 16'" and 17'" centuries had fallen into this scholasticism after Luther and Calvin. They had fallen into their own kind of stultifying intellectualism and moral indifference by focusing too much on the elaboration and defense of doctrine, and not enough on the individual relationship with God. So, the 17th-century Lutheran, Jakob Spener, was one of a number of religious leaders who advocated a return to apostolic simplicity and a faith expressed not in doctrine and articles of belief — but in the active engagement in biblical study and the cultivation of the inner religious life. Another major Pietist was the British founder of Methodism, John Wesley.
Wesley was influenced by the German Moravian Brotherhood, and we' ll see in the next lecture that Brotherhood was also formative for Friedrich Schleiermacher. Wesley's Methodism was not as allergic to doctrine as certain forms of German Pietism, and he was particularly interested in emphasizing the doctrines of Fall, Atonement, and Grace. But crucial for him was that these doctrines had to be translated into living experience by the direct inner testimony of the Holy Spirit. For him, we have to feel and live our sense of the Fall, of our sinfulness, and only in and through an acute consciousness of this sinfulness could we experience in our inmost being the sense of salvation. In the American colonies, British movements such as Wesleyanism exerted a strong influence through the work of traveling preachers, such as George Whitfield, but also had its roots in Puritanism that stressed the need for individual conversion experiences.
As I'll discuss in a future lecture, this led to a particular form of Pietism sweeping across the American colonies in the early 18th century in an event called the "Great Awakening," which laid the groundwork for what would later be called "Evangelical Christianity." I want to emphasize four central characteristics of Pietism, and here I am following the very useful work of the historian of religion, Claude Welch. Christian Pietism, as I have just noted, places a strong emphasis on ideas of sin and regeneration — on the corruption of humankind as a result of the Fall and the need for a strong sense of one's own depravity, which then leads one to seek the inner experience of Grace. Second, Pietism tends to stress Jesus Christ, even at times more so than God, as the focal point of salvation and devotion. Pietist religious experience centers on the experience and the relationship to Jesus.
Third, the Pietist sense of salvation is not just a matter of an inner experience and assurance that one is saved, but insists that the saved person manifests his or her salvation in leading a moral and holy life — a regenerated life. This regeneration that comes with salvation, for Pietists, is also called "sanctification" — the continuing growth in living a life of Christianity and moral virtue. As a corollary to this, Pietism also emphasizes the importance of religious fellowship — not only in the form of Church community, but also in voluntary associations devoted to cultivating new life and new character in Christ.
In each of these first three aspects of Pietism we see a common thread existing between Pietists and Enlightenment thought: the emphasis on morality. But whereas Enlightenment figures, culminating in Kant, tended to stress the connections between reason and morality, Pietests tended to stress the feeling of love. Finally, even though I have stressed the Pietist emphasis on feeling, Pietism was not devoid of intellectual content. Of particular importance here is the close attention many Pietist thinkers paid to the analysis of religious emotions and attitudes.
Preeminent among these thinkers was the American theologian Jonathan Edwards. Edwards and others were influenced by empiricist philosophies in their careful analysis of religious experience in an effort to guide Christians in their understanding of their own religious lives and religious experiences. Now let me turn to another important intellectual and cultural movement, one that swept across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th century and continues to reverberate today: Romanticism. Where the Pietistic Movement was a religious movement that brought new life to the lives of everyday Christians, Romanticism was a more general cultural movement with only some tenuous connections with established religious traditions, and it was largely confined to intellectuals, writers, and artists. But in the wake of the Enlightenment, it had a huge impact on Western culture, especially on the arts and literature as well as philosophy and theology particularly in Germany, England, France, and then later in the United States.
Romanticism can be understood as a response to the rationalism and the formalism of the Enlightenment. With some simplification, we can say that where the Enlightenment saw reason as the definitive characteristic of the human, Romanticists stress creativity as that which makes us human. Romantics saw themselves as bringing life to the sterility of an Enlightenment thought that the composer Franz Schubert compared to an ugly skeleton without flesh or blood. Accordingly, they emphasized the spontaneous, emotional, and creative side of human life — the concrete and the fragmentary over the abstract and the systematic. They attempted to re-forge immediate connections with the world of living nature that had been deemphasized by the scientific and skeptical consciousness of previous centuries. This is evident, for example, in the odes to nature that we find in poets such as Wordsworth — or later in the tortured passions of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights.It is also evident in the massive landscapes painted at the time, in which human beings are dwarfed by a sublime nature.
From these examples, it is not hard to understand that Romantic thinkers viewed human subjectivity very differently than did their Enlightenment counterparts. Where Enlightenment thinkers tended to stress the rational self and, therefore, the abstract, formal, universal aspects of the self, Romantic thinkers placed a stronger value on the individual as a concrete, living, expressive being — with a particular place in the cosmos and, therefore, a particular expression of the energy or life of the world-soul or of nature, The virtuous subject remains important, but Romantics put a much greater emphasis on the role of the imaginative and expressive subject — and on the freedom found in this creative expression. Further, given the Romantic valorization of human creativity, they placed a very strong emphasis on an artistic, contemplative connection with the world and — in some at least — the idea that the divine works through us in our creation.
For poets like William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the imagination of the artist was God at work in the mind. Although many Romantics, especially early on, dismissed or at least were very suspicious of institutionalized religion, they — like the Pietists — had no love for what they saw as the sterile, over-intellectualized natural religion of the Enlightenment. We might say that many Romantics in their devotion to nature practiced a religion of nature, rather than a natural religion. Interestingly, though, some leading Romantics, such as Friedrich Schlegel, later converted to Catholicism. Many have seen this as a reflection of some of the inherently conservative aspects of Romanticism, such as its tendency to value the organic unity of human society, their rootedness in nature and tradition, and so — to some extent — to downplay the freedom of the individual.
There is no doubt something to this idea. But we might also see it as a recognition of the importance of the full bodily, sensual, and aesthetic character of Catholic liturgy and the rich sense of tradition that informs the Catholic Church. Like Pietism, Catholicism tends to be much more experiential than certain forms of Protestantism, and certainly more so than Enlightenment natural religion. One of the central influences on 19'"-century Romanticism, and particularly on Romantic religious thought, was the French thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who, unlike most of his contemporaries, was very suspicious of Enlightenment philosophy and argued that all true knowledge comes from doing, not just thinking, and that true religious faith must be grounded in personal experience. Moreover, Rousseau argued that the heart of religion resides not in the certainty achieved by rational reflection, but in a kind of inner sense — what he called "the voice of conscience." Here's a passage from Rousseau: "Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like God!"
If we move to the Romantic generation proper, another important figure is the British philosopher and writer Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge is best known today for his poetry, especially for poems such as Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. But he also was an accomplished philosopher who exerted a strong influence on Romantic thought and was especially important for the American Transcendentalism of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. One of his most important contributions took the form of supplementing the epistemology of Kant with an emphasis on what he called "the principle of imagination."
Where for Kant the regulative ideas of reason — God, world, self were creations of the mind that reason employed in order to make sense of the world, Coleridge argued that the faculty of imagination made possible the intuitive apprehension of reality beyond experience. We've seen that Kant says we don't have any direct access to reality, but many Romantic thinkers believed that creativity and art did make such contact possible. So, for Coleridge, when the heart and the head are properly in tune with one another, reason and imagination together intuitively apprehend reality in an immediate way. This capacity, for Coleridge, is grounded in God — that is, when reason and imagination are working together in this way, they are grounded in the divine mind and participate with it. "Faith," Coleridge writes, "must be a light originating in the Logos, or the substantial reason, which is coeternal and one with the Holy Will, and which light is at the same time the life of men." In both Rousseau and Coleridge, then, we see a kind of immediacy — even something we might call a mystical union with God, For Rousseau, the human conscience is an immortal voice from heaven. For Coleridge, faith — a light originating in Logos, which for Christians is Christ — is our life. For Kant, God is a postulate, the object of a rational faith. For these Romantic thinkers, in a way not too dissimilar from the Pietists, God is in us, working through us.
In the next two lectures, we'll be discussing two of the major religious thinkers of the early 19th century, Schleiermacher and Hegel. Both, though in very different ways, will follow the Pietists and the Romantics in arguing for a connection between God and human that Kant and other Enlightenment thinkers could not offer. Schleiermacher will follow the Pietists and the Romantics most closely in his emphasis on religious experience. Hegel, by contrast after the Romantics, the Pietists, and Schleiermacher — will reassert the power of philosophy, offering a radical, even grandiose, vision of human reason — unlike Enlightenment conceptions of reason — that participates with divine reason, and so makes possible a kind of contact with God that Kant's conception of reason could not allow.
