Lecture Ten -- Schleiermacher — Religion and Experience
Scope:
Friedrich Schleiermacher is often called the father of modern theology. Deeply influenced both by Kant's philosophical revolution and by Romantic and Pietist views of religious experience, Schleiermacher provided a new way of defending religion against its modern critics: He argued that religion was not primarily a matter of our knowledge about the world or of our ethical relation to others but was grounded in a "sense," "intuition," or "feeling" of the whole of the universe. In other words, religion is fundamentally a matter of "piety" — the basic sense or experience of our relation to the whole of piety reality and our receptiveness to it. Particular religions take shape in history as people develop different ways of interpreting, expressing, and living this piety. For Christians, this sense becomes concrete as a sense of "absolute dependence" on God.
Outline
I. Friedrich Schleiermacher challenged the Enlightenment emphasis on natural religion and contributed to the development of the generic conception of religion.
A. He argued that religion is a separate, irreducible sphere of human life, neither primarily a function of our knowledge about the world nor derived from our moral sensibility.
B. Schleiermacher's groundbreaking 1799 book,On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, was influenced by his Pietist background and aimed at his friends who were leading figures in the Romantic circles of Germany.
1. The first speech, "Apology," is an effort to explain to the cultured despisers, on their own terms, why religion is not something to be despised but, rather, is at the heart of a vibrant, thoughtful, and creative life.
2. To make this point, Schleiermacher agrees with the despisers that the orthodoxies and traditions of existing religions, as well as the over-rationalistic Enlightenment philosophy, are only faint shadows of real, living, experiential religion.
3. He urges the despisers to look to their own experience to find the essence of religion. The essence of religion is "the sense and taste for the infinite."
C. By talking about "sense and taste," rather than about reason, Schleiermacher aligns his view of religion with the Romantic emphasis on feeling and experience.
1. He agrees with much of Kant's philosophy but argues that religion is something distinct from pure reason — knowing and practical reason — acting.
2. Both knowing and practical reason look at the relationship to the universe from the perspective of the human, where the human is the center of the universe and human beings grasp' and act on the universe. In contrast, religion is concerned with the way the universe acts on us and our intuition of that action.
3. Religion for Schleiermacher is rooted in a fundamental experience of being related to the universe as a part within a larger whole, as a particular being in the midst of and part of infinity.
4. He wants to show to the cultured despisers, however and here he departs from his Pietist forebears that this experience of the infinite is not reserved for the elect, but something that is part and parcel of every human experience.
5. For Schleiermacher, being religious is, at the most fundamental level, being aware of this fleeting sense of oneness and cultivating this awareness so that it can then inform all aspects of our lives.
B. The experience Schleiermacher claims as the basis of all religion can be summarized in four points:
1. Schleiermacher describes the experience using nature imagery and the imagery of union and marriage.
2. But these are not just images; there is something mystical about this experience for Schleiermacher because in it, he says, self and universe become one.
3. It is an experience that certain refined and sensitive people — like, Schleiermacher suggests, the cultured despisers — can mediate to others.
4. Unlike defenders of natural religion, Scheliermacher claims that all genuine religion is positive religion.
III. Most scholars generally agree that, along with John Calvin's Institutes from the 16th century and Karl Barth’s Dogmatics from the 20th, Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith, first published in 1821, is one of the great works in Protestant systematic theology.
Suggested Reading:
Schleiermacher, On Religion. Welch, Protestant Thought in the Nineteenth Century.
Questions to Consider:
1. What are the primary differences between Enlightenment approaches to religion and Schleiermacher's?
2. How is Schleiermacher related to the Pietist tradition of Christianity?
Lecture Ten — Transcript
Schleiermacher — Religion and Experience
In the last lecture, we started moving out of the Enlightenment period by discussing Pietism and Romanticism — two European religious and cultural movements that challenged Enlightenment views of human beings and the world. Both movements — as well as a good amount of Enlightenment thought, particularly Kant's — came together in the figure we will explore today: the German theologian and university professor, Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, who is generally considered to be the most important Christian theologian between the post-Reformation period and the 20th century.
Schleiermacher is important not only for his Christian theology, but for articulating a general concept of religion, especially early in his career, that continues to influence and be debated by philosophers and theorists of religion. I've already spoken about how one of the marks of modernity is the development of the generic concept of religion—Schleiermacher plays an absolutely central role in this development.
As philosophers and theologians considered the relation of reason and tradition in Christianity, the question naturally arose as to what constituted "real" Christianity, but when this project was connected to other types of questions, such as the relation of Christianity to Judaism, Islam, and other traditions; or the relation of Christianity to politics and to science in the early modern period; or, finally, to the question of religious truth and conflict that resulted from the religious wars — when these questions were being asked, the concept of religion crystallized for many thinkers and came to be a topic much debated.
To this day, scholars of religion still debate the definition of religion but more and more they've come to see that since the concept is a product of human culture, it might be more productive to think about why the concept emerged at a particular point in the history of the West. What does it allow those who used it to think and do? What impact has the concept had on how we understand and live in the world? As I've noted, one of the major Enlightenment answers to this question of religion was natural religion, a religion of reason and morality. Religion, from this perspective, is primarily a matter of reason, belief, and morality — our experience of the world attested to the existence of a God — and it was reasonable to believe that this was a creator God who punished and rewarded human beings on the basis of their behavior. We find the most sophisticated articulation of a natural religion in Kant.
As we saw in the last lecture, however, for many writing at the beginning of the 19th century, Enlightenment thought was too abstract and too focused on rationality. For many, like the Pietists and the Romantics, the idea of a natural religion did not capture the power and the feeling that they saw as central to the religious life. One of the things that makes Schleiermacher so important is that he develops a way of defining religion that offers an important alternative to Enlightenment approaches. For now, I will put it simply by making two quick points, which I will develop in this lecture. First, Schleiermacher argued that religion is a separate, irreducible sphere of human life — meaning that it is not primarily a function of our knowledge about the world, as Kant said when he examined his theoretical reason, nor is it derived from our moral sensibility, which was Kant's argument with respect to practical reason. Second, Schleiermacher argues that religion is fundamentally a matter of a particular kind of experience of the world and of the whole of reality. It informs our reason. It informs our morality, but in the end it is based in our experience of ourselves in relation to the whole — or to the infinite, as Schleiermacher put it. In fact, in his most famous formulation of this, Schleiermacher said that religion is "the sense and the taste for the infinite." My primary focus here will be Schleiermacher 's first major book, published in 1799, on the cusp of the 19th century, and it was entitled On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. In this book we find an original and brilliant effort at synthesizing the three trajectories that have been the focus of the last few lectures: Kantian philosophy, Pietism, and Romanticism—all of which played significant roles in Schleiermacher's intellectual and religious life. Schleiermacher grew up in a religious family in Prussia. His father was an army chaplain, and he was educated in schools run by the Moravian Brotherhood — I mentioned them in the previous lecture, one of the influential Pietist groups in Germany at the time.
But in addition to his religious background and the deep piety that he absorbed from that background, he was also an intellectual trained in philosophical and theological contexts, in which the epistemological and ethical revolutions of Kantian thought were very much present. Looking back on this upbringing and education in 1802, Schleiermacher stated that in the midst of his theological and philosophical training — and particularly in his engagement with skepticism, when he himself began to have some doubts — it was this Moravian background, this Pietist background, and even the faith and what he called the "mystic tendency" that it instilled in him that made it possible for him to hold onto his religion.
In an interesting formulation, he writes: "[Religion] remained with me when God and immortality disappeared before my doubting eyes." As a young adult, Schleiermacher also was associated with many of the leading Romantics of the period — such as the brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel, the philosopher Schelling, and the poet Novalis. It's not surprising, then, that when we look at his first book, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, we find a strong emphasis on feeling and intuition, a well-developed aesthetic sensibility and a plethora of organic metaphors — all of which were marks of Romantic writing at the time. But because of his religious background and commitments, because he was a minister and a theologian, Schleiermacher was a bit of an oddball among his Romantic friends — most of whom at that point had turned their backs on traditional, organized religions.
These Romantics — these thinkers, and artists, and poets on the cutting edge of German intellectual life at the turn of the century — were Schleiermacher's cultured despisers. These were his friends and his colleagues — for whom, as is clear in the book, he has a deep admiration. It was to them that he felt it necessary to show that they were mistaken in turning their backs on religion. I want to mention three things about this book and about the approach to the question of religion that Schleiermacher takes in it.
First, consider the title of the first of the five speeches contained in a book. This first speech is called, simply, "Apology." In the Christian tradition, "Apologetics" is a particular theological genre one that was especially prominent in the theology of early Christianity, as Christian thinkers tried to show pagan philosophers of the Roman Empire that Christianity was intellectually and culturally respectable. Apologetics — unlike other theological genres, such as "Dogmatics" — is not so much a kind of self-reflection on Christian identity and doctrine, as it is an effort to explain Christian thought and practice to the broader culture. In doing so, Apologists often adopt and adapt reigning cultural categories, bring them into their theological thinking. In the early Christian period, Christianity — a religion that had emerged from the Jewish context of the Hebrew Bible — adapted itself to the intellectual culture dominated by Greek philosophy. This shaped later Christianity — and especially Christian theology — in essential ways.
One of the commonalities between the early Christian era and Schleiermacher's time is that in both cases Christianity was being challenged by powerful cultural forces: In early Christianity, as I mentioned,itis the pagan culture of the Roman Empire in Schleiermacher's case, it is the intellectual culture of the Enlightenment. Really, it was the first time since that early period that Christian theologians had had to face what Schleiermacher is calling "cultured despisers." But what we see in Schleiermacher is that he found it necessary, at least at first, not to apologize specifically for Christianity — but for religion more generally. He is writing in a context in which the generic idea of religion has come to play an important role, and where Christianity is seen as one of many religions. Schleiermacher is trying to explain to the cultured despisers, on their own terms, that religion is not something to be despised — but rather is something that, if they only looked at it from the right perspective, they would see as at the heart of a vibrant, thoughtful, and creative life. By apologizing for religion rather than Christianity, Schleiermacher can appeal to the despisers' own Romantic instincts regarding nature and beauty, without having to defend specific Christian doctrines.
Second point to make here about the book: Schleiermacher even uses the despisers' suspicion of Christianity — and especially of traditional doctrine — in a particularly clever and rhetorical effort to enlist them in his cause. That is, he defines religion in such a way that dismisses as not real religion both the orthodoxies and traditions of Christian theology that finds the truth of religion in the Bible or in the authority of tradition. These are, he writes, "nothing but the habitations and nurseries of the dead letter." In this sense, we might say, Schleiermacher comes off himself as something of a despiser not of religion or Christianity per se, but of moribund, dead religion, which he despises more than the atheism of the cultured despisers. So that Schleiermacher himself, if we think about him this way as a kind of despiser, to introduce a term that I will explore in much more detail in later lectures, expresses his own suspicion of religion — or at least of a dominant religious sensibility. This brings me to the third point In attempting to show the desplsers that all that they dismiss as religion is not real religion, and that real religion is something they should value, he argues that they can find the essence of religion in themselves. What does this mean?
Let's consider one of Schleiermacher's definitions for religion: Religion, he says, is "the sense and taste for the infinite." Immediately, then, we see Schleiermacher distinguishing himself from Kant and stressing his reliance on Romantic ideas. By talking aboutsenseandtaste—rather than about reason—Schleiermacher aligns his view of religion with the Romantic emphasis, and the Pietist emphasis as well, on feeling and experience. I've mentioned that philosophically, Schleiermacher is very much indebted to Kant — and, indeed, he thought that when it comes to understanding how theoretical reason works and how morality works, Kant basically had it right. At the same time, though, he rejects Kant's view of the link between theoretical reason and religion and morality and religion.
So, he assures the despisers that religion "does not wish to determine and explain the universe according to its nature as does metaphysics; it does not desire to continue the universe's development and perfect it by the power of freedom and the divine free choice of a human being as does morals." Religion, in other words, is its own thing and for Schleiermacher, it should be seen along with reason and morality as one of three distinct and fundamental spheres of human life. The first: theoretical reason or science — knowing for short — the second: morality and human action — or doing — and the third: religion. Each of these spheres of human life, for Schleiermacher, have in common a concern with what he describes as the "universe and the relationship of humanity within it." However, where knowing and doing look at the relationship to the universe from the perspective of the human — where the human is the center of the universe, and human beings grasp and act on the universe —religion is different.
Religion, that is, is concerned with the way the universe acts on us. In his Speeches, Schleiermacher paints a picture for us of the religious human being standing before the universe in awe and wonder, in what he calls a "childlike passivity" — totally receptive to the universe as it acts on us. So, Schleiermacher continues from the passage above, where he says that religion is not a knowing or a doing, not metaphysics or morals, by writing the following:
Religion's essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe, wishes devoutly to overhear the universe's own manifestations and actions, longs to be grasped and filled by the universe's immediate influences in childlike passivity.
More specifically, religion, for Schleiermacher, is rooted in a fundamental experience of being related to the universe as a part within a larger whole — as a particular being in the midst of, and part of, infinity. Clearly, Schleiermacher here gestures to a classic vision of the Jewish and Christian biblical traditions, in which human beings, in their relation to God, experience themselves in terms of their limitedness, their finitude — that is, their "creaturelyness." Later, when he is writing his Christian theology, Schleiermacher will describe religion as a feeling of "absolute dependence" on God.
So Schleiermacher, like the Pietists, focuses not on reason or morality, but on feeling and experience. At the same time, though, Schleiermacher departs from the Pietists in making a crucial move a move that was extremely significant. He tries to show to the cultured despisers that this experience of the infinite is not a special experience reserved for the elect, but something that is part and parcel of every human experience. It is a kind of fundamental, to use his terms, "intuition of the universe," and it is one that accompanies every act of consciousness. Religion, in this sense, is a part of human nature.
So, what Schleiermacher does in the Speeches is to try, through his arguments, but also, significantly, through his rhetoric, through the way he writes, the metaphors he uses, and the images, and his exhortations — he tries to lead the despisers to this "sense and intuition" of which he writes, to make it possible for them to find this experience in themselves.
Schleiermacher wants the despisers to focus on their own experience in such a way that they will come to see that at the root of all experience is a fleeting moment in which the self and the universe come into a kind of immediate contact in which they are not completely separated from one another. Schleiermacher writes:
I wish to lead you to the innermost depths from which religion first addresses the mind. I wish to show you from what capacity of humanity religion proceeds and how it belongs to what is for you the highest and the dearest. [That is what for you, you despisers, what you think is the highest and dearest] ... Therefore I can call only you to me, you who are capable of raising yourselves above the common standpoint of humanity, [he's flattering the despisers] you who do not shrink from the burdensome way into the depths of human nature in order to find the ground of its action and thought.
So, if they would do so, Schleiermacher claims they — the cultured despisers — will find that at every moment the universe is acting on each person. Schleiermacher, then, is trying to communicate, even provoke, an experience rather than simply articulate a concept — so he works rhetorically by appealing to the despisers' sense of culture and intelligence, their heightened awareness and sensibility, their gifts for language and communication, and trying to suggest to them that they themselves might be the kind of people who cannot only find this experience in themselves — but also help communicate, mediate, it to others, and thus mediate genuine religion to others. This, for Schleiermacher, as he puts it in this first speech, is what genuine prophets and priests do — that is, not those people who define and propagate doctrine, but those who are able to bring this feeling of the union with the universe alive for others. So, the irony here is that Schleiermacher is treating the cultured despisers as priests and prophets.
So, let's think a little bit more about this experience that Schleiermacher identifies as the essence of religion. The first thing we can say about it is that we can see the importance of Romantic thought in his descriptions of the experience.
[The first mysterious moment that occurs in every sensory perception] is as fleeting and transparent as the first scent with which the dew gently caresses the waking flowers, as modest and delicate as a maiden's kiss, as holy and fruitful as a nuptial embrace; indeed, not like these, but it is itself all of these.
Schleiermacher uses nature imagery and the image of union and marriage to describe the way the self and the universe come together in this moment. The idea of the marriage of self and universe is a key motif in the Romantic poetry of figures such as Novalis, or Holderlin, or Wordsworth. But, of course, it's much older than that. It's also central to Jewish and Christian mystical traditions, especially those that find inspiration and imagery in the Bible's Song of Songs. But a second point to make about this experience is that we are not just talking poetry and metaphor here — for, as Schleiermacher says in the passage I just read, it is not like a "maiden's kiss" or the "nuptial embrace," but is itself these. What does that mean? As he develops his treatment of this first mysterious moment in the passage I just read, Schleiermacher claims that "an image of the universe" accompanies the moment, and that also he writes:
My soul flees toward it; I embrace it, not as a shadow, but as the holy essence itself. I lie on the bosom of the infinite world. At this moment I am its soul, for I feel all its powers and its infinite life as my own; at this moment it is my body, for I penetrate its muscles and its limbs as my own, and its innermost nerves move according to my sense and my presentiment as my own.
This is mystical writing. It's portraying a union of self and universe in which body and soul become one. Of course, it has philosophical ramifications, as I've already suggested, because it is here that we see vividly presented an alternative to the Kantian distinction between the world as it appears to us and the world as it is in itself. Schleiermacher is not claiming here that we know, in the Kantian sense of the word, the world in itself, but he is saying that we have an experiential union with it. This brings me to another point about this experience. In our lives of knowing and acting, we generally are not aware of this basic moment, according to Schleiermacher, but he also claims that if we carefully enough attend to our experience, we can connect with that instant — at the dawn of each experience of knowing and doing at which we and the universe are one. Again, in each experience, he wants to say there is this initial fleeting moment of this union. This moment of union with the universe almost immediately resolves itself into its component parts. So, basically, there is this fleeting moment of union, but almost immediately I start to experience myself as an individual standing over against and experiencing the world as separate from me.
The object and subject relation that is so central to Enlightenment thought resolves itself almost immediately from this initial union. So, being religious, for Schleiermacher, at the most fundamental level is being aware of this fleeting sense of the oneness before the separation of subject and object — and cultivating this awareness so that it can then inform all aspects of our lives. One more point about this experience, and I want to talk about this one in a little more detail, because it is here that we can see an especially sharp distinction from the Enlightenment idea of natural religion — and before we do that, we do need to acknowledge the most important parallel between Schleiermacher's view of religion and natural religion. For both, religion is rooted in something fundamental about being human — and even further, it is based not in receiving some kind of supernatural voice from on high, revelation in the traditional sense, but in what we might call our natural, if not always recognized, interaction with the world around us.
Where theorists of natural religion were emphasizing reason and getting to religion through the use of our rational capacities, Schleiermacher argues that we get at it through feeling and experience. But there's another significant difference. Although de enders of natural religion recognize that many different ways of being religious have developed historically, they argue that there is a pure form of religion — and that the more we use our heads in being religious, the more we will be able to get back to the pure form and strip historical positive religions of their superstitions and historical particularities. In Schleiermacher, however, we see much more appreciation for the particularities of positive religions, and so what amounts to an early defense of what today we call "religious pluralism.” The point is this: The basic feeling or experience he identifies as the essence of religion, this fleeting moment, is not something that he wants to try to isolate and live in its pure form — it is the essence of religion, but it is not the whole of religion. Thus, he says this to the cultured despisers:
If you do not want to have only a general concept of religion, and it would indeed be unworthy if you wished to be content with such an incomplete knowledge; if you also want to understand it in its reality and in its manifestations ... then you must abandon your vain and futile wish that there might e only one religion. Lay aside your loathing of its plurality, and, as impartially as possible, approach all those that have already developed out of the eternally rich womb of the universe in the changing forms during the course of humanity.
So, we can be aware of the basic religious feeling to some degree, but we never really experience it by itself. Rather, as I have said, it informs all aspects of our lives, and so it — the particular form this feeling takes in our lives — will be shaped by the particular kind of life we lead, the particular society of which we are a part, the particular point in history in which we live. Moreover, and here we see Schleiermacher being influenced by the Romantic emphasis on particularity, because it is a matter of the way the universe presents itself to me in the whole of my being — not just in my universal reason, but me as an individual with this particular history and this particular set of social relationships and these particular capacities — I will receive the universe differently than someone with a different history and a different set of relationships and capacities.
Thus, for Schleiermacher, the only way to really be religious is to have particular intuitions and feelings that are generated out of this initial moment. He says that there are an infinity of genuine religious intuitions. A religion, for Schleiermacher, is thus a tradition of certain kinds of historically grounded religious intuitions and experiences. Since this is not by any means a radical individualism, since Schleiermacher has much appreciation for the ways that each one of us is formed as a self in historical and social contexts, it makes perfect sense to him that the way each one of us relates to the infinite will be informed and shaped by those historical and social connections. So, for Schleiermacher, what Enlightenment thinkers called "positive religion" is to be valued, and natural religion is to be dismissed. As he writes to the despisers: "Turn back from these enlightened religions to the despised positive religions where everything real, powerful and determinate appears, where every particular intuition has its specific content and its own relationship to the rest."
Finally, in On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Schleiermacher revolutionized Western views of religion by defining it in terms of feeling and experience. The Pietist roots of his work are clear in the emphasis on experience, but Schleiermacher was the first major figure to write about religion as a generic category that did not focus on the question of the existence of God and our knowledge of the world — and insisted that there was no such thing as natural religion. Schleiermacher's revolution has had an enormous impact on the field of religious studies, for his definition of religion as fundamentally an experiential matter — where religious ideas and religious practices are expressions of basic religious experiences and feelings — can be seen to be at work in some of the 20th century's most significant theorists of religion, such as Mircea Eliade.
Although this paradigm for thinking about what religion is no longer dominates the field like it did in the middle of the 20th century, it remains important and, to many people, persuasive. But Schleiermacher did not see himself primarily as a theorist of religion, but as a Christian theologian, and in this he also was enormously influential. It is, in fact, generally agreed that with John Calvin's Institutes from the 16 century and Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics from the 20th, Schleiermacher's The Christian Faith, which he published in 1821, is one of the great works in Protestant systematic theology. Schleiermacher's theoretical and theological contributions are, not surprisingly, closely connected. Because, unlike theologians before him, Schleiermacher is interested in and defines religion generically and is not just focused on Christianity, is theological elucidation and construction of Christian doctrine is framed by his views on religion.
One consequence of this, then, is that Schleiermacher starts his theological thinking not with God or with Jesus and their revelation to humankind, but with the idea of religion as a human capacity. In The Christian Faith, he goes about this in a slightly different way than he did in On Religion, but the basic idea remains the same. Here, his focus is on the feeling of what he calls "piety," which he defines as "The consciousness of being absolutely dependent or which is the same thing, of being in relation with God."
Schleiermacher mentions God here, but his emphasis is on the human feeling of dependence, for he defines God in reference to the feeling of dependence by claiming that we call God that which we experience ourselves as dependent on — and this then is a kind of generic God, not necessarily the Christian God.
This approach to doing theology will be strongly criticized by theologians, such as Karl Barth, in the 20th century — as we' ll see but in the post-Enlightenment context, this made a lot of sense to many thinkers, for even though the influence of Romanticism was strong, the Enlightenment focus on the human and religion as human universals remained influential, and it allows Schleiermacher to present theology as grounded in a kind of science of religion. Thus, he devotes the first 100 or so pages of The Christian Faith to his definition of religion, and to categorizing Christianity in terms of the different types of religion he identifies. Christianity is, he determines, "a monotheistic faith, belonging to the teleological type of religion, and is essentially distinguished from other such faiths by the fact that in it everything is related to the redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth."
From here, Schleiermacher sees that his task as a theologian is to elucidate as clearly as possible these Christian feelings and experiences in conceptual terms — and with this, he initiates a paradigm of Christian theology that comes to be called "liberal theology" a form of theology hugely influential in the 19th century, as we' ll see, and to a lesser but still significant degree in the 20th century. This is theology that sees no real conflict between modernity and Christianity — that seeks to demonstrate that Christian theological thinking is philosophically and scientifically in step with the standards of the day — that can make sense of religion from a human perspective. This approach has a hugh impact on the modernist theologies of the 19th century.
