The Veiled God (Studies in Systematic Theology, 19) 9004397817, 9789004397811

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The Veiled God

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Studies in Systematic Theology Edited by Jim Fodor (St. Bonaventure University, NY, usa) Susannah Ticciati (King’s College London, UK) Editorial Board Trond Skard Dokka (University of Oslo, Norway) Junius Johnson (Baylor University, usa) Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen (Fuller Theological Seminary, usa) Rachel Muers (University of Leeds, UK) Eugene Rogers (The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, usa) Katherine Sonderegger (Virginia Theological Seminary, usa)

VOLUME 19

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sist

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The Veiled God Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Theology of Finitude By

Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft

leiden | boston

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Cover illustration: Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851). Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis. Printed with kind permission by Tate Images. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jackson Ravenscroft, Ruth, author. Title: The veiled God : Friedrich Schleiermacher’s theology of finitude / by Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2019. | Series: Studies in systematic theology, issn 1876-1518 ; volume 19 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2019007582 (print) | lccn 2019011475 (ebook) | isbn 9789004397828 (Ebook) | isbn 9789004397811 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 1768-1834. Classification: lcc B3097 (ebook) | lcc B3097 .R38 2019 (print) | ddc 230/.044092--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2019007582

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1876-1518 ISBN 978-90-04-39781-1 (paperback) ISBN 978-90-04-39782-8 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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For Brenda Jackson and Irma Taylor

⸪

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I pray that we could come to this darkness so far above light pseudo dionysius

...

[without negative theology], worship is idolatry, for it gives to an image that which belongs only to truth itself nicholas of cusa

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Naught is loved, save what is known st augustine of hippo

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The paradox of the Christian tradition is that it precludes its own descriptions from grasping the truth; that is, the Christian notion of fallenness of human creatures does not permit even Christian descriptions to be true. This is so, because, for Christians, Jesus Christ is the truth and the reality of Jesus Christ always already rests outside any particular Christian description. cornel west

∵

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Contents Preface  Xi Acknowledgements  xv Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works  xvii Introduction  1

Part 1 Freedom and Particularity in Schleiermacher’s Early Ethical Anthropology Introduction to Part 1  31 Delineating the Ethical and the Theological  34 1 Disciplinary Boundaries  34 2 A Godless Europe  42 Schleiermacher’s Religious Doubt  47 1 From Barby to Halle  47 2 ‘To Cecilie’  53 Quarrels with Kant on Freedom  62 1 Necessity, Freedom, and Human Identity  62 2 Schleiermacher’s Kant and the Otherworldly Subject  65 3 Schleiermacher’s Quarrel with Kant on Freedom  70 4 Temporality, Dialogue and Human Identity  73 5 On Desire and Moral Motivation  77 Conclusion  91

Part 2 Human Formation and Literary Form in Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies (1800) Introduction to Part 2  95

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Contents

Freedom and Formation Anew  98 1 Beyond the Moral Law, and the Idea of Universal Reason  98 2 Freedom and Rationality  105 3 The Role of Language in the Ethical Life  108 4 A New Approach to Freedom  111 Schleiermacher’s Commitment to Bildung  114 1 Bildung in Berlin  114 2 The Meaning of Bildung  117 3 The Self Negotiated in Society  121 4 Schleiermacher, Bildung, and the Question of Gender  124 5 Schleiermacher’s Project on the Colony in “New Holland”  132 The Soliloquies  149 1 An Idealistic Performance  149 2 Imagination and Individualism  152 3 Individuality and Immeasurability  159 Conclusion  167

Part 3 Dialogue and Incarnation Introduction to Part 3  171 Schleiermacher’s Dialogic Vision  175 1 A Household at Christmas  175 2 A Platonic Scheme?  179 3 Authorial Passivity  183 4 A Review from Kierkegaard  187 Seeking the Infinite in the Midst of the Finite  192 1 Schleiermacher’s Speeches On Religion  192 2 Interreligious Dialogue in Berlin  205

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A Theology of Finitude  221 1 Barth’s Critique of the Christmas Dialogue  221 2 Music and the Transcendent  237 Conclusion  253 Epilogue  257 Bibliography  263 Index  283

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Preface

Maker of Veils Der nackten Wahrheit Schleier machen Ist kluger Theologen Amt, Und Schleiermacher sind bei so bewandten Sachen Die Meister der Dogmatik ingesamt A. W. Schlegel1

...

Life is a vision shadowy of Truth; And vice, and anguish, and the wormy grave Shapes of a dream! The veiling clouds retire, And lo! the Throne of the redeeming God Forth flashing unimaginable day Wraps in one blaze earth, heaven, and deepest hell. Samuel Taylor Coleridge2

∵ What is in a name? The title of the present work is a play on “Schleiermacher”, which, when rendered literally in English becomes “veil-maker”. But the deliciously theological overtones at work in this name mean I am hardly the first such Wortspielerin, and I will certainly not be the last. For in making this reference to a “veiled God” in my title, my contention is that this imagery actually communicates something about Schleiermacher’s own religious epistemology. Let us consider a veil as a covering which obfuscates, disguises and conceals, although not absolutely. Schleiermacher, who is not only our “veil-maker” but also a theologian who envisaged himself in the same intellectual lineage as ­Augustine and Anselm, articulates the view that there are real limits to the knowledge humans can have of God. And yet, these epistemological limits do not resemble a kind of absolute boundary line, or a severance between the present creaturely moment and the fulness of divine reality. If ­Schleiermacher’s 1 August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämmtliche Werke, Vol 11,ed. E. Böcking (Leipzig, 1846/4), 233. 2 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, Vol 1, 124.

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God is “veiled” from humanity, then this is not because God is (to express it in crude spatial terms) far away from the world, or absent or blocked off from it in some way. Indeed, as I shall stress in the very first chapter of the present book, Schleiermacher was instead convinced of the reality of God as that eternal Whence upon whom the whole of creation depends absolutely for its very being. In faith, that is, Schleiermacher recognised God as the unconditioned ground and source of every single conditioned “thing”. To be completely Augustinian about it, we might say that Schleiermacher believed God, who is absolutely transcendent, to be nevertheless more intimate to creation than any one created human might be to itself. In this light, to say that Schleiermacher’s theology offers us a “veiled” God, is simply to point to his conviction that as finite and particular beings, humans do not have the capacity to know the brilliant reality of God in Godself. God is no object of perception for humanity, God cannot be grasped, remembered, or seen. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas would write that “there is nothing to stop a thing that is objectively more certain by its nature from being subjectively less certain to us because of the incapacity of minds, which, as Aristotle notes, blink at the most evident things like bats in the sunshine”.3 In the early nineteenth century, Schleiermacher would say that such is the condition of our finitude—such is our composition in community, over time and in place—that we cannot “know” God “without” the world.4 Schleiermacher’s attention to human beings as finite creatures did not debilitate him in his theology, however. To focus on finitude is not simply to contend with lack and limitation. Rather, Schleiermacher’s realisation that God gives himself to humans “with” the world fed his fervent interest in hermeneutics and language. It was a motor for his acknowledgement that language about God is never enough—that language can never express God’s reality perfectly, should never be treated as final, and must continually be purged. But if Schleiermacher believed that the self’s relationship with the Infinite is one established beyond thought and language, in the sphere of intuition and feeling, he also understood this self-Infinite relationship to ground and permeate all of the interactions that the self has within the world. Apophasis meets cataphasis here then, as Schleiermacher thereby also declares every word that we speak, every human communication, to have its final source and end in

3 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiciae, Ia. I, 4., trans. Thomas Gilby OP (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 19. 4 KGA II/10.1, 143: “‘We know only about the being of God in us and things. We know nothing whatever about a being of God outside the world or in himself”.

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­creative ­divinity.5 Indeed, in a letter to the philosopher Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi that he penned in 1818, Schleiermacher expressed the following: …within the domain of philosophy, I maintain that one expression is as good and as imperfect as another, that we cannot form any real conception of the highest Being; but that philosophy properly consists in the perception that this inexpressible reality of the highest Being underlies all our thinking and our feeling; and the development of this knowledge is, according to my conviction, what Plato understood by dialectics. But further than this, I believe, we cannot get.6 In the same letter, Schleiermacher would also argue adamantly that it is impossible to finally separate religious feeling from philosophical understanding in the life of the individual. Jacobi had in previous correspondence described himself as being “a thorough heathen as to the understanding, but in point of feeling entirely a Christian.” This comment had rendered Schleiermacher incredulous, and, eager to issue a correction out of his own experience (for doesn’t this mean a splitting of the self and its loyalties?), he presented the task of philosophy on the one hand and religious feeling on the other as “touching each other”, so as to “form a galvanic pile”. The dynamic relationship between philosophy—which concerns the operations of reason—on the one hand, and faith on the other, is here something that Schleiermacher was keen to qualify further. He wrote that: In point of understanding I am a philosopher; for to be such is to exercise the original and independent activity of the understanding, and in point of feeling I am religious and a Christian… . When, therefore, my Christian feeling is conscious of a divine spirit indwelling in me, which is distinct from my reason, I will never give up seeking for this spirit in the deepest depths of the soul’s nature. And when my Christian feeling becomes conscious of a Son of God, who differs from us in another way than merely being the best of us, I will never cease to search for the genesis of this Son of God in the deepest depths of nature, and to say to myself, that I shall most likely learn to understand the second Adam just as soon as the first 5 KGA 1/13 (1), 231: “It is also possible to say … that the world itself, viewed as having come into being through speaking, is that which has been spoken by God”. Here, Schleiermacher is referencing Luther’s commentary On Genesis (1535), and in particular his passage on Gen. 1:5 in 1 §51: “[…] was ist die ganze Kreatur anders, denn ein Wort Gottes von Gott gesagt und ausgesprochen, … daß also Gott das Schaffen nicht schwerer ankommt, denn uns das Nennen”. 6 Letter to Jacobi from Schleiermacher, March 1818. Life 2, 283.

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Adam, or Adams, whose coming into existence I must also admit without being able to understand.7 The final lines in this passage, which return us to the matter of that which is veiled from the knowing mind, surely point us in the direction of Anselm. Schleiermacher admits what is mysterious, without being unable to understand it. And so as to indicate that this evocation is no accident on Schleiermacher’s part, we note that in 1830, Schleiermacher would go on choose those words from Anselm’s Proslogion as the epigram on the title page of his dogmatics (second edition): “For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand”.

7 Letter to Jacobi from Schleiermacher, March 1818. Life 2, 281.

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Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Faculty of Divinity and to Corpus Christi College for providing the funds which made a great deal of the research behind this book possible. I am indebted to Janet Soskice, who was my PhD supervisor and remains a mentor, colleague, and friend. Janet’s intellectual generosity has profoundly shaped my thinking and writing. She helped me to find my voice as a theologian. I must also thank at the outset Catherine Pickstock and Andrew Davison, who have taught me so much and encouraged me since I first met them during my graduate studies. In 2015 I became a post-doctoral researcher at CRASSH, Cambridge, on the ERC-funded project “Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth Century Culture”. The manuscript for this book inevitably grew while I was challenged to think about the interfaces between classical and biblical inheritances not only in Schleiermacher’s work, but in German Romanticism and Enlightenment more broadly. It was a gift to have the conversation of all of my interdisciplinary “Biblant” colleagues. I am especially grateful to Simon Goldhill, who is an excellent and inspiring mentor. And at Sidney Sussex College, where I am currently Research Fellow in Theology, I am glad to be surrounded by splendid fellows and friends, including Ira Katznelson,who very kindly read and commented on the manuscript’s introduction. It has been delightful to work with Susannah Ticciati, Jim Fodor, and Ingrid Heijckers-Velt at Brill. I am grateful to Douglas Hedley and Nicholas Adams for feedback on the manuscript at its nascent stage, and to attendees of the “Religious Diversity and the Secular University’ Summer School at CRASSH in 2018, with whom I workshopped my introduction. Jeremy Fogel provided me with some important guidance on Moses Mendelssohn, and Silvianne Aspray has been an enormous help along the way with translation work. I would like to thank members of The Breakfast Club for their sororal love, The Whichcote Society and The Merleau-Ponty Reading Group for their intellectual camaraderie, and the community of Little St Mary’s Church, Cambridge, for their fellowship. Simone Kotva is a marvel; over the years we have done much theological wayfaring together. The book is richer, too, for conversations had with Raphael Cadenhead, Jon Mackenzie, Christian Coppa, Hanna Weibye, Laura McCormick Kilbride, Mary-Ann Middelkoop, Nicki Wilkes, Elizabeth Powell, Orion Edgar, Darren Sarisky, Philip McCosker, Ragnar Misje Bergem, Amy Daughton, Alex Hampton, Graham Ward, Charles Mathewes, Giles Waller, Tim Jenkins, Christopher Burlinson, Andrew McKenzie McHarg, Paul Kerry, Mike Sonenscher, and Oliver Soskice. John Hughes was a brilliant theologian and a brilliant friend. All of us miss him and owe him much. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Simon Ravenscroft, my co-conspirator in life, has been there to think with me, to challenge me, to help me recognise good things when I see them, and to push me to the finish line. He is wonderful and he did not deserve this much nineteenth-century theology. In Ian and Jane Jackson I have by grace the most particularly excellent parents a person could wish for. I am so grateful to them for their love and for all of their support. The book is dedicated to my gorgeous grandmothers, Irma Taylor and Brenda Jackson.

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Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works Full references for the following texts can be found in the bibliography. Where I cite a passage from Schleiermacher in the book, a reference to the original German is given, followed by the reference for an established English translation. Unless otherwise stipulated, I have used existing English translations when quoting Schleiermacher. All references to On Religion are to the text’s first edition of 1799 (trans. Richard Crouter, 1988), and all references to Christian Faith are to the second edition published 1830–1831 (trans. Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler, 2016).



Friedrich Schleiermacher

KGA Briefe Dialektik 1811 Dialektik 1822 Herm. Pla Reden Wei



Kritische Gesamtausgabe Aus Schleiermachers Leben in Briefen Dialektik. Aus Schleiermachers handschriftlichem Nachlasse Friedrich Schleiermachers Dialektik. (Ed. Odebrecht) Hermeneutik: Nach den Handschriften Über die Philosophie Platons Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern Die Weihnachtsfeier: Ein Gespräch

Friedrich Schleiermacher in English Translation

Anth Review of Immanuel Kant’s Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View Brou Brouillon Zur Ethik (1805/1806) Ca Schleiermacher’s Catechism for Noble Women CF The Christian Faith Cec To Cecilie Chr Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Incarnation Cri Hermeneutics and Criticism Dialectic Dialectic or The Art of Doing Philosophy; A Study Edition of the 1811 Notes Her. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts IP Introduction to the Dialogues of Plato Letters Letters on the Occasion of the Political-Theological Task and the Open Letter of Jewish Householders

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Abbreviations of Frequently Cited Works

Life The Life of Schleiermacher as Unfolded in His Autobiography and Letters. 2 vols. Lücke On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr Lücke Notes Notes on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason OR On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (trans. Richard Crouter). OF On Freedom S Soliloquies Soc Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct Tran On the Different Methods of Translating

DTS TTS TaC

GS CPu CPr

Karl Barth Die Theologie Schleiermachers 1923/4 The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen Theology and Church: Shorter Writings 1920–1928

Immanuel Kant Gesammelte Schriften Critique of Pure Reason Critique of Practical Reason

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Introduction … My way of thinking really has no other ground than my own singular character, my inborn mysticism, and my cultivation, which proceeds ­outward from within.1

∵ 1

Illiberal Theology?

In Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), we have an example of a modern churchman, civil servant, and scholar, whose commitment to the cultural and moral formation [Bildung] of German citizens saw him take on an impressive number of interlinking institutional roles and affiliations. In his late twenties, while in Berlin and chaplain of its Charité Hospital, he became a celebrated member of the city’s literary salon culture. It was here that alongside his friend Friedrich Schlegel, he became a central voice in what we now know as early German Romanticism. And yet Schleiermacher can also rightly be said to ­belong to the Prussian Enlightenment project, since he was an advocate for the critical power of reason, a defender of personal liberty, and was in his mature career a supporter and instigator of institutional reform. In his capacity as a scholar and university lecturer, Schleiermacher’s influential work in theology, ethics, translation theory and hermeneutics helped to redefine these fields and their central questions for the modern academy. And through his proposals for educational reform, Schleiermacher helped shape the University of Berlin at its foundation in 1810. He was a passionate theological educator, dedicated to his ministry in the Reformed Protestant church, and famous throughout the Protestant community in Berlin for his lively and rhetorically masterful preaching. He was also politically engaged. An innovator in early German nationalism during the upheavals of the Napoleonic wars, he was one of a few voices who articulated a vision of a German nation-state as a potential solution to the problems of the Napoleonic era. And already in 1799—the year he published his first great work, On Religion—he entered a public discussion 1 “Sie [meine Denkungsart] hat in der That keinen andern [Grund], als meinen ­eigenthümlichen Character, meine angeborene Mystik, meine von innen ausgegangene Bildung”. Letter from Schleiermacher to Sack (1801). kga v. 5 (Briefwechsel 1801–1802), 133.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_002 Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft

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Introduction

about the citizenship rights of Jews in Berlin.2 Schleiermacher, who argued for the separation of church and state, contended that citizenship should not be made contingent upon religion or religious belief. To come thus far in a growing list of Schleiermacher’s institutional involvements is surely to admit that he was a thinker invested in the ­ development of public bodies and communities. His ideas, whether expressed on the page, in the pulpit, or in intimate dialogue with his salonière friends, were framed by the question of how he and his fellow Germans could and should live together. What is it to belong to a flourishing society? What do I myself need, if I am to enjoy social and political freedom? In his book The Persistence of Subjectivity, Robert Pippin underscores how and why a philosophy of freedom was at the heart of the philosophy written and pursued in Western Europe at the turn of the nineteenth century.3 And to say as much about Schleiermacher’s thought—that he too proceeds from what is a specifically bürgerlich concern regarding the place of the individual within the whole of society, and that his thought cannot be abstracted from these institutional concerns, is to venture a pair of simple and perhaps unsurprising points. Nevertheless, these are the important considerations with which we must begin, since a major agenda of this book is to reassert the intertwining of Schleiermacher’s ethical theory and his social concern with his theology—his understanding of the religious life. In order to frame Schleiermacher’s corpus as well as the interpretation of it in this work properly, however, we cannot stop at his preoccupation with the issue of human flourishing. Nor can we stop at his promotion of those structures, whether epistemological or political, which in his view supported these Romantic tasks of human cultivation and self-realisation. For across his thought, including his philosophy of language and his hermeneutical theory, Schleiermacher’s concern for Bildung is crowned and directed by an explicitly Christian vision of reality and human knowledge. It is true that S­ chleiermacher made a firm disciplinary division in his work between discourse on the one hand which is ethical—which deals simply with the human and the historical—and on the other religious, which frames human behaviour as the work of finite creatures who develop in relation to the Infinite. Nevertheless, in On Religion, Schleiermacher contended that the religious life is the only life able to properly promote and sustain human flourishing. This is because such fulfilment cannot 2 See David Friedländer, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Abraham Teller, A Debate on Jewish Emancipation and Christian Theology in Old Berlin, eds. Richard Crouter and Julie ­Klassen (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004). 3 Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

Introduction

3

be self-wrought but is gifted by God—the Infinite Whence of all being,4 who transcends all human living and knowing and so cannot be known in Godself, apart from the stuff of the world,5 but can only be accessed through faith [Glaube]. Schleiermacher may well discuss human affairs in many of his writings according to the boundaries of “ethical” discourse. But finally, for him, the telos of Bildung and indeed the end of all life and language is necessarily theological. Again, there is little contention or surprise in the claim that a Christian thinker like Schleiermacher should organise his thoughts in view of such a fulsome and holistic theological vision. However, I wish to stress this second hermeneutical point at the outset, (and in the following study shall ­demonstrate its purchase in his work), because it is the case that in the contemporary academy, and outside the discipline of theology, Schleiermacher’s philosophical or ethical work is often treated as if it were indeed theologically neutral. To put it another way: this work is regularly assessed separately from his religious writings, his religious ends occluded or passed over. Of course, where scholars are not interested in Schleiermacher’s religious theory, such a practice is understandable, and there is disciplinary and methodological warrant for such bracketing. Nevertheless, it is worth considering what might be at stake, when in such cases Schleiermacher’s religious perspective is reduced to a merely personal and private affair, assumed to be eminently detachable from his contributions to the various other human sciences. In the late twentieth century up until the present day, such e­ xtra-theological interest in Schleiermacher, as well as this habit of detaching certain of his ideas and writings from his theology, has been commonplace both in Schleiermacher’s native Germany and in the Anglo-American context, where widespread interest in Schleiermacher’s work occurred only long after his death.6 Indeed, citing Schleiermacher’s influence on the modern continental philosophical tradition in Germany—perpetuated in a line stretching via Dilthey through to Heidegger and Gadamer—Douglas Hedley has suggested that there is a real case for identifying the theologian Schleiermacher as the “font if not the father

4 kga i.13/1, §4 (39); CF §4.3 (24). 5 Schleiermacher, Ausarbeitung zur Dialektik (1814/15), in kga ii/10.1, 143: “We know only about the being of God in us and things. We know nothing whatever about a being of God outside the world or in himself”. 6 For some context and bibliography on the reception of nineteenth-century German theology and biblical criticism in Victorian Britain, see David Lincicum’s excellent article, “Fighting Germans with Germans: Victorian Theological Translations between Anxiety and Influence”, Journal for the History of Modern Theology/Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte 24, no. 2 (2017): 153–201. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Introduction

of modern German philosophy, in its explicit opposition to Hegel”.7 One wonders what takes place in Schleiermacher’s thought as it is smuggled over this particular (theology-philosophy) disciplinary boundary line. Is it possible to disavow or dispatch the theological content of his work? And if one aimed to do so, in such a philosophical inheritance, then what of the original thought would remain, exactly? Particularly potent examples of this tendency to inherit and transmit a somewhat secularised Schleiermacher exist within the sub-fields of philosophical hermeneutics and translation theory (where of course the lineage of receiving Schleiermacher through Dilthey to Gadamer and Heidegger looms large).8 All of the lecture courses that Schleiermacher offered on “general” Hermeneutics—from his earliest at the theology faculty at Halle in 1805, through to his final series in Berlin in 1832/33—were always followed by or taught in conjunction with a course which focussed specifically on the New Testament. Only once did Schleiermacher teach hermeneutics in the philosophy rather than the theology faculty. Despite the context for their original delivery, however, we note that Manfred Frank’s significant 1977 edition of Schleiermacher’s lectures Hermeneutik und Kritik, which brought Schleiermacher out from the shadow of Gadamerian critique, excluded a majority of those passages which refer specifically to the New Testament.9 And in his English translation of Schleiermacher’s lectures on Hermeneutics and Criticism (1998), Andrew Bowie—himself influenced by Frank, and following “to some extent” Frank’s “procedure and his choice of passages to omit”—also frames 7 Hedley, “Was Schleiermacher a Christian Platonist?”, Dionysius 17 (December 1999): 1­ 49–168. Hedley also issues the twin claim that although Schleiermacher is firmly established as the father of modern systematic theology, not least through his great work of Protestant dogmatics, Der Christliche Glaube, it is actually the philosopher Hegel who has exerted the most powerful influence upon German theology in the nineteenth century. It is Hegel, he claims, that we associate with “the biblical criticism of the Tübingen school, the relationship of myth to reason, Christianity’s relation to classical antiquity”, and so forth. 8 In Richard E. Palmer’s Hermeneutics (Northwestern University Press, 1969), published in the late sixties, the author explains that “The several recent books explaining the New Hermeneutic tend to treat hermeneutics largely in a theological context. The appearance of Gadamer’s book in English will do much to broaden the current conception of hermeneutics… . hermeneutics must be seen as more than a logic of philological validation, and as more than a vital new movement within contemporary theology. It is a comprehensive field focussed on the event of textual understanding in all its ramifications” (p.71). 9 Manfred Frank’s controversial work Das Individuelle-Allgemeine. Textstrukturierung und Textinterpretation nach Schleiermacher (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977) drew lines of comparison and connection between Schleiermacher (and the early German Romantics by extension) to post-structuralism, and indeed thrust Schleiermacher anew into contemporary philosophical debate in Germany.

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the lectures predominantly in terms of their significance for philosophical debate.10 It is true that in his lectures on “Allgemeine Hermeneutik”, and following a burgeoning trend among contemporary German Biblical scholars in the ­development of higher criticism, Schleiermacher proposes to deal with scripture using the same “general” interpretive principles as he applies to other texts. This hermeneutical homogenisation compounds Schleiermacher’s liberal reputation. But as the present book seeks to demonstrate over the course of its chapters, Schleiermacher’s understanding of the nature and purpose of language is riven through with assumptions concerning the theological origins and final referent of human communication. In his Christian dogmatics, he tells us after all that “the world itself, viewed as having come into being through speaking, is that which has been spoken by God”.11 To miss this basic point about the religious orientation of all Schleiermacher’s thought—his sense that Bildung is a task which is completed in religion, and that no gap or boundary can pertain between “literature” and “theology”—is surely, I suggest, to misinterpret and to risk misapplying his writings. This issue of the resolutely theological character of Schleiermacher’s thought, against the excision of its Christian structure by a significant number of his inheritors, is also one that comes into view when we consider ­Schleiermacher’s role as a foundational thinker for the disciplines of religious studies and comparative religion. Recent research into the political history of the term “religion” in modernity has illuminated the specific and ultimately pernicious role that numerous Christian theologians and philosophers played in constructing this category. We might speak here of a history of (Christian) theological assumptions being imported into these social-scientific fields of study, which has not only had disturbingly harmful consequences for the treatment and perception of certain religious groups but has also compromised the scientific quality of the methodology used in the field. In her study How Judaism became a Religion, for instance, Leora Batnitzky states that prior to modernity, Judaism “was not a religion, and Jewishness was not a matter of culture or nationality”. Rather, she argues, “Judaism and 10

Andrew Bowie, “Note on the text and the translation”, in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) xxxvii–xxxviii. 11 Schleiermacher, Der Christliche Glaube, in Kritische Gesamtausgabe [kga] 1/13 (1), p.231. Here, Schleiermacher is referencing Luther, On Genesis (1535), and Luther’s passage on Gen. 1:5 in 1 §51: “[…] was ist die ganze Kreatur anders, denn ein Wort Gottes von Gott gesagt und ausgesprochen, … daß also Gott das Schaffen nicht schwerer ankommt, denn uns das Nennen”.

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Jewishness were all these at once: religion, culture and nationality”. Judaism became a “religion” only when such human spheres—the spiritual, national and cultural—were distinguished and separated in modernity.12 Batnitzky’s study also points to Schleiermacher’s influence in particular in the creation and theorisation of “religion” as a modern category to be applied across numerous different “positive” traditions. Furthermore, Tomoko Mazusawa has studied the emergence of “world religions” discourse over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and has detailed how a number of disparate thinkers including Frederick Denison Maurice, James Freeman Clarke, Max Müller and Ernst Troeltsch contributed to the generation of this terminology via a process of categorising and theorising non-Western religions.13 In this process, and against the background of European colonialist expansion projects, some traditions—like Islam—were especially denigrated. Theodore Vial reaches even further back than Mazusawa in his book Modern Race Modern Religion, and delves into post-enlightenment German thought (especially Herder, Kant and Schleiermacher), to consider the emer­ gence of those twin terms “religion” and “race” as conceptual categories in the modern world.14 Schleiermacher, for his own part, developed a general definition of “religion” which he applied to all particular religious traditions, each in their own way—each historical “religion” being a community assembled around a different intuition of the Infinite in the finite. But in doing so, both in his Speeches and in his dogmatic theology, Schleiermacher delineated a fixed ­order of historical religious traditions.15 This was an order which privileged his own tradition of protestant Christianity and failed to honour the particular characteristics of other religious communities. We can return to a point I mentioned earlier to demonstrate the extent to this tendency in Schleiermacher’s thinking, namely his involvement in the debate over Jewish citizenship in Berlin, and his conviction that civil rights should not be made contingent religious belief.16 For as much as 12

Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 2. 13 Tomoko Mazusawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 14 Theodore Vial, Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 15 See the fifth speech of Über die Religion, and kga 1.13/1, §9–12 ; CF §9–12. 16 See kga i.2, 335: “Die Vernunft fordert, daß Alle Bürger sein sollen, aber sie weiß nichts davon, daß Alle Christen sein müßen”. Translated in Schleiermacher, “Letters on the Occasion of the Political-Theological Task and the Open Letter of Jewish Householders”, in Friedländer, Schleiermacher and Teller, A Debate on Jewish Emancipation and Christian Theology in Old Berlin, 85: “Reason demands that all should be citizens, but it does not require that all must be Christians…”.

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Schleiermacher maintained that Jews and Christians alike are capable of being good German citizens—indicating a liberal separation of the political from the religious—he nevertheless failed to properly uphold the religious freedoms of Jewish people. His view was that both a commitment to Jewish ceremonial law and hope for a messiah were incompatible with a true recognition of Germany as one’s motherland, or a wholehearted participation in German culture. In a series of rhetorical letters, published anonymously in 1799 and composed as if they were from a “preacher outside of Berlin”, Schleiermacher thus suggested that Jews wishing to become German citizens should subordinate ceremonial law to the laws of the state (so that they would find no cause for conflict with their civil duties), and should “officially and publicly renounce the hope for a messiah”.17 Moreover, Schleiermacher would elsewhere display a severely disparaging view of Judaism, one which saw him paint it as a “long dead religion”—an “undecaying mummy”.18 What he meant by this claim is that Judaism has been corrupted, so that no spirit, no true religious quality is left in it. What remains is simply a body of laws, texts and rituals. To give a significant bit of background to Schleiermacher’s uninformed and prejudicial description of Judaism as a “dead” religion, and to understand where it will have gathered some of its shape and direction, it is worthwhile noting that among Schleiermacher’s emancipated Jewish friends—indeed the relatively few acculturated Jews in this period, who frequented and ran salons in Berlin—it was possible to find individuals for whom Helakhic Jewish practice and observances could not, as Richard Crouter puts it, “be reconciled with modernity”.19 Indeed, Crouter continues, a section of Berlin’s moneyed and well-educated Jewish community at this time, who have since come to be associated with the movement of Haskalah, “wished to shake off the shackles

17 18 19

Schleiermacher, “Letters on the Occasion of the Political-Theological Task and the Open Letter of Jewish Householders”, 103. kga i.2, 314. Crouter’s account of Berlin’s Jews in this period mentions Moses Mendelssohn in passing, as a paradigm example of thorough acculturation, however it is important to stress that Menselssohn himself was clear that Jews in modernity remain fully and absolutely committed to ceremonial law. See for instance Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: or, On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 134–135: “Even if one of us converts to the Christian religion, I fail to see how it is possible for him to believe that he thereby frees his conscience and rids himself of the yoke of the law”. For an appraisal of the “Germanification” of Mendelssohn’s legacy, and his treatment as Aufklärer at the expense of attending to his Hebrew works, see David Sorkin, “The Mendelssohn Myth and Its Method”, New German Critique, no. 77 (Spring-Summer 1999): 7–28.

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of rigid religious tradition, and ensure the possibility of cultural and political life for themselves and their children”.20 And yet, Schleiermacher’s well-educated and affluent friends were but a small subsection of the Jewish population as a whole in Prussia.21 When ­Schleiermacher names and describes “Judaism” in his work, then, he will speak in disturbingly abstract terms, which define Judaism according to the concept of religion that he himself has developed. He will also speak in terms which ignore the reality facing the vast majority of the contemporary Prussian Jewish community. For between 1780 and 1847, Jews made up a good fraction of those who were poverty stricken in rural Germany. As Stefi Jersch-Wenzel observes, these Jews “were disproportionately poor, as were most of the peasantry, survival being the principle object of their economic activities”.22 It is in light of these biases in Schleiermacher’s work—his explicit­prior­ itisation of the Christian religion over and against other traditions in his conceptualisation of “religion” in general, as well as his ignorant and harmful portrait of Judaism, which implicates him in the perniciously wider problem of social and institutional anti-Judaism in nineteenth-century Prussia—that Theodore Vial sees Schleiermacher’s great historical influence on the discipline of religious studies as cause for concern for the future of the subject. For these problems endemic to Schleiermacher’s project continue, Vial asserts, to be reinscribed in the discipline in the present day. It is not the aim of this book to contribute a solution to this religious studies crisis in which Vial, the author of a genealogy of these modern terms “race” and “religion” implicates Schleiermacher. Nevertheless, it is clear that we must take Schleiermacher’s definition of “religion” to be one which cannot stand ­equally for all. This definition was one wrought by a Prussian Reformed Christian thinker, is shaped as such, and carries Christian assumptions about the nature of “faith” and of what “religion” actually entails. It is not fit to serve in general as a social-scientifically valid basis for the practice of comparative religion or the study of religion. Moreover—and this is important to stress— where Schleiermacher’s theory of religion leads him to describe Judaism in 20 21

22

Crouter’s introduction to Friedländer, Schleiermacher and Teller, A Debate on Jewish Emancipation and Christian Theology in Old Berlin, 9–10. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, around 90% of the Jews in German-speaking lands were part of the poorest parts of the German population. See Jacob Lestschinsky, ‚Das wirtschaftliche Schicksal des deutschen Judentums’, Schriften der Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der Deutschen Juden 7 (Berlin, 1932), 92. Stefi Jersch-Wenzel, “Population Shifts and Occupational Structure”, in Paul MendesFlohr et al., German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Vol 2, Emancipation and Acculturation: 1780–1871 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 71.

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pernicious terms, he goes beyond what is essential to Christianity. He involves himself in institutional anti-Judaism, as well as an unwillingness to understand or respect the traditions of others. The following, then, is a theological study, and one which not only seeks to contribute to scholarship on Schleiermacher’s ethical and religious thought, but in its proposals about Schleiermacher opens to address a much broader issue, which is: how are we to speak about religion, belief and the religious life in the modern context? My intention is to offer a constructive reappraisal of Schleiermacher as a thinker convinced that knowledge is social, and that piety is communal. I shall be interpreting a series of texts, drawing out features of their literary ­composition, and considering them in their historical context. I do not intend my method to be primarily historical, however. Rather, my consideration and elucidation of the conceptual structure that undergirds these texts will be done with a view to coming to some judgments about the body—the individual, the person—behind them. Throughout, I will be concerned with the how to conduct a responsible reading of a figure like Schleiermacher; a reading which pays attention to literary form, and to the particular ways in which Schleiermacher expresses himself. 2

Project Overview

The book begins by examining a selection of Schleiermacher’s early ethical texts, written between 1789 and 1800. I argue that in these texts—some of which he left unfinished and are lesser-known among theologians and ­scholars of religion—Schleiermacher develops an account of the character of human life which supports and bears fruit for his understanding of the religious life in particular, as he elaborates this by 1806, in his dialogic novella about Christmas Eve. This early account of human nature, or character, as I will demonstrate, develops Romantic and Herderian influences so as to emphasise human ­existence as particular and reciprocal. Schleiermacher depicts individuals as irreducibly unique agents, whose characters are formed through the passage of time and in relation to their distinctive place and circumstances in the world. Yet such human uniqueness does not, he thinks, render the views and beliefs of individual human beings as achievements isolated from the world, or from ideas, imaginings and thoughts belonging to other contemporary individuals. Instead, it will become clear how the young Schleiermacher understood human beings to be inherently and essentially social creatures, whose individuality is

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formed precisely within community, each person developing as a distinctive part to a greater whole. A central aspect to my analysis of Schleiermacher’s texts is that I shall ­attend to the different literary forms with which Schleiermacher experiments while writing them. These forms include the soliloquy, the dialogue, the epistolary novella, and the ironical fragment. I shall argue that these distinct literary forms are not incidental to Schleiermacher’s work. Rather, they help to dramatise the points he wishes to make about human identity and its social, temporal and particular nature. Having argued this about Schleiermacher’s early ethical anthropology and underscored his view of human existence as particular and placed, I  shall put it in touch with his theological vision. I shall suggest that here too, in ­Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion and the religious life, he was ­attentive to the way in which humans become through time and are formed through language and communion with one another. Indeed, I shall draw out how Schleiermacher understood religion to be a search for the Infinite—to be a longing for the unconditioned Whence of the world, which however is not the world itself, nor any single part of it. And yet, I shall also show how for him religion is an inherently social phenomenon, incarnated in discrete historical communities, and expressed and shared through language. One of S­ chleiermacher’s key contentions, which he offered in On Religion, is that the Infinite must be sought precisely in the midst of the finite. And with this, I  ­venture, he proposed a theology which upheld divine transcendence and stressed the placed nature of human knowledge. In Schleiermacher’s view, ­human life is bound to the world and worldly relationships, and one could call this—as I have done in my subtitle—a theology of finitude. By using this term, however, I do not mean to indicate a negative quality to human life, or to ­suggest that it is defined by lack and limitation. Instead, “finitude” is a term that reflects Schleiermacher’s conviction that God reveals himself to his ­creatures through the world, and in their very particularity, so that seeking him cannot mean eschewing language or retreating from society. In this book, I turn first to Schleiermacher’s early ethical writings, because here—at the very start of his scholarly career—he depicts the character of ­human life in such a way that a flight from the world, from language, from cultural ideas and from human society would be impossible for a particular human agent, and even within the religious life. By beginning with these ethical texts, I will underscore how Schleiermacher stressed the bonds that human beings have with the world, and that he understood human character, inclinations and habits to be formed through time, and in particular places and communities. In these terms, I contend, Schleiermacher’s view was that

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religion too was inherently social. To seek God and to exalt God as the source of all life and its meaning did not, Schleiermacher thought, mean denying the created order value, or ceasing to love it. The work is divided into three parts, each designed to build on the last. This is so that when we reach the culminating chapter, which articulates ­Schleiermacher’s “theology of finitude”, this chapter serves to collect and show the interconnection between the different layers contributing to Schleiermacher’s thought that I have already discussed, including his socialcultural context, the philosophical influences acting upon him, contemporary perspectives on human identity and contemporary discussions of concerning religious difference. Part 1 begins with a short chapter which harks back to my opening s­ tatement about Schleiermacher’s conception of the telos of Bildung and indeed the end of all life and language as necessarily theological. It introduces Schleiermacher’s mature theological vision and explains how he understood his “ethical” work in relation to this vision. Here I define his concepts of feeling and intuition, and thus provide a backdrop to the interpretive work of the book as a whole. In the second chapter, I then turn to look at a very early period in Schleiermacher’s career—1789–90, when he had just finished his undergraduate training at the University of Halle. Here, in reference to his unfinished epistolary novella To Cecilie, I examine Schleiermacher’s early rejection of religious enthusiasm, and with it the idea of an internalised religious life, cloistered from society. Chapter three also focusses on this period, and studies Schleiermacher’s critique of Kant’s theory of transcendental freedom. I find this in his essay On Freedom, and his notes on Kant’s second critique. I contend that in response to this theory, Schleiermacher began to emphasise the notion that an individual’s actions are informed by their character, as this emerges over the passage of time, shaped by their actions and judgments. In Part 2 we will find Schleiermacher voicing a wish to distance himself from his early attachment to Kant, as I turn to consider some of his ethical writings from the year 1800. Chapter four examines Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies (1800), which, by his own admission, is a strange little book. Here he attests that ­human knowledge is mediated through language, and though exchange and encounter with other people. Chapter five will then concentrate on Schleiermacher’s commitment to Bildung—human formation, or self-cultivation—and will expound his view that human individuals are irreducibly unique agents. In reference to his ironical fragment Idea for a Reasonable Catechism for Noble Women, and his unfinished project on the British penal colony in “New Holland” (present-day Australia), it will become clear that Schleiermacher understood human identity to emerge, through time, in the process of negotiation

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in and through community. And with clear debts to the emphasis placed on individual liberty by the Enlightenment project and by Romanticism respectively, Schleiermacher also articulated the concern that individual particularity can be hindered by institutional structures and cultural norms. In light of this assessment, I will return to the Soliloquies in Chapter six. My contention is that the literary form Schleiermacher engaged for this piece enabled him to resist projecting a solipsistic account of human personality. He asserts here that each human being is a microcosm of humanity as a whole. In Part 3, I proceed to use these insights from Schleiermacher’s early e­ thical writings as a platform to analyse both On Religion and his aforementioned dialogue on Christmas Eve. Schleiermacher wrote the Christmas Dialogue at the age of thirty-seven, having taken up a post as University preacher at the University of Halle in 1803. Wilhelm Dilthey described this little book as “the best introduction to the study of his dogmatics”,23 and certainly, the continuity it displays with Schleiermacher’s mature theological thinking is evidenced by the latter’s decision to reissue it in 1826, with only a “few and insignificant amendments”.24 Richard R. Niebuhr and Karl Barth both treat the text as “one of the most significant accounts of Schleiermacher’s christology”.25 In my final chapter, I will argue that it is significant that Schleiermacher chose to write a dialogue about a Christian festival. For this literary form, I suggest, helps him to stress the specificity of all human views and experiences, while also demonstrating that such specificity is dependent upon a greater and deeper unity between humans. My claim here is that Schleiermacher retained his acute awareness of human particularity in his account of the religious life. We find that his concern and methodological emphasis is on articulating the present moment—what is true “now”, and for “me” as an individual subject. With this emphasis, Schleiermacher eschews in important ways the tendency to want to make essential or universal claims about human existence. Yet what it also the case, I argue, is that Schleiermacher upholds this emphasis on the present and on human particularity in such a way that he did not collapse everything into finitude. In his Christmas Dialogue, Schleiermacher depicts the Incarnation as a cosmic event with universal significance. He portrays divine

23 24 25

Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, 2nd ed., ed. H. Mulert (Berlin/Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1922) 775. Cited in tts, 57. Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‚Vorerrinnerung zur zweiter Ausgabe’, in Die Weihnachtsfeier: Ein Gespräch, Berlin: George Reimer, 1826, iii; Chr 25. The words are Barth’s. See tts, 50. Niehbuhr’s assessment of the dialogue can be found in his Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion: A New Introduction (New York: Charles ­Scribner’s Sons, 1964).

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action as mediated through the intricacies of human history and society. He points at the difference and multiplicity inherent in the religious life. And yet, before we reach this final chapter, I also engage aspects to ­Schleiermacher’s theological and political thinking in this period which highlight the very real limitations to Schleiermacher’s conception of the religious life. Indeed, in Chapter eight, I will examine how Schleiermacher’s interventions in the debate over Jewish citizenship in Berlin (July 1799) saw him fail to properly defend or recognise the religious freedoms of his Jewish contemporaries. Despite his move to delineate Judaism and Christianity as distinct traditions, both of which he understood as “eternally necessary” and independent from one another, Schleiermacher displayed a disturbing lack of an ability to envisage that the Jewish approach to the relationship between “religion” and “politics” might well differ from his own Christian assumptions. Rather than prove himself able to properly dwell alongside difference here then, we find a disturbing failure at the centre of Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion and the religions. This failure gives us a firm sense of the links between Schleiermacher’s theology on the one hand and his wider political and ethical vision on the other. 3

Outward Signs, Inward Grace

This introduction began with the assertion that Schleiermacher was a thinker whose work was embedded in series of social and institutional contexts. Part of my intention here was of course to introduce my own judgment: that it is wise to include such social and institutional commitments in an appraisal of his theology. Schleiermacher worked out his understanding of religion in the midst of a series of overlapping human spheres—not least the public, the d­ omestic, the religious and the intellectual, the salon, the family, the church, and the university. Moreover, Schleiermacher’s writings issue from a holistic and explicitly Christian vision of reality and human knowledge. We must therefore pause, I contend, before assuming that his “religion” is separable from the rest of his thought, or that his theology can be peeled away from his hermeneutical theory, anthropology, or his philosophy. With all of this in mind, the constructive reappraisal of Schleiermacher undertaken in this book will offer an alternative to the still all too common received view of him as an individualist theologian who internalises religion, reducing it merely to a function of human self-consciousness. This reading, which charges Schleiermacher with insulating theology and religion from

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the world, reason, and language, has been given especial prominence in the ­English-speaking academy. It has been driven by Schleiermacher’s decision to describe the essence of religion as intuition [Anschauung] and feeling [Gefühl], and to distinguish this from “Denken und Handeln”.26 He famously did so in his 1799 speeches On Religion, before proceeding in his mature dogmatic project Christian Faith to articulate piety as a “feeling of absolute dependence” [das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl]—the consciousness, that is, of “being in relation with God”.27 That this reading of Schleiermacher as subjectivist is almost ubiquitous,28 but that work should be done to challenge it, is a case that a good number of scholars have brought forward. In 1977, the theologian Edward Farley stated that “the almost standard interpretation of Schleiermacher” was to read him “as a psychological reductionist, a theologian who would derive Christian beliefs and their contents from the religious feelings of believers”. This interpretation, Farley added, amounts to caricature and even “heresy”.29 In the decades since, Farley’s assessment has been restated and expanded by a growing number of Anglo-American Schleiermacher specialists, including Julia Lamm in 1994, Christine Helmer in 2003, Andrew Dole in 2010, Geoff Dumbreck in 2012, and Theodore Vial in 2016.30 As I join these scholars in seeking to dislodge that still-prevalent reading of Schleiermacher which regards him as a theologian of inwardness, for whom religiosity develops deep in the human self, it is worth noting a couple of the key proponents and formulations of this view in its broadest sense. The brief survey of influential critics which follows is not

26 27 28

29 30

kga i.2, 211 ; OR 22–23. kga i.13/1, §4 (32) ; CF §4 (18). We note that in his book Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press 2001), Russell McCutcheon argues that the “dominant stance” of academics belonging to the American Academy of Religion can be traced to Schleiermacher. And in McCutcheon’s reading, Schleiermacher perceived religion to be “a non-quantifiable individual experience, a deep feeling, or an immediate consciousness”. (p. 4). Edward Farley, “Is Schleiermacher Passé?”, Christian Faith Seeking Historical Understanding: Essays in Honor of Jack Forstman, eds., James Duke and Anthony Dunnavant (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 1977), 10. Julia A. Lamm, “The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefühl, 1788–1794”. Harvard Theological Review 87, no. 1 (1994): 67–105; Christine Helmer, “Mysticism and Metaphysics: Schleiermacher and a Historical-Theological Trajectory”, The Journal of Religion 83, no 4. (October 2003): 517–538, Andrew Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), Geoff Dumbreck, Schleiermacher and Religious Feeling (Leuven/Paris/Walpole MA: Peeters, 2012) Vial, Modern Religion, Modern Race (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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exhaustive but is simply meant to represent and gesture towards a much wider convention.31 Let us turn first here to Emil Brunner and Karl Barth—figures widelyrecognised as having a formative influence on the reception of Schleiermacher’s work in the Anglo-American academy. Indeed, as Richard R. Niehbuhr stated in 1964—“there is rarely any documentation or independent assessment of the tradition [of interpreting Schleiermacher] so firmly proclaimed by Emil Brunner and Karl Barth long ago”… “history has selected Barth to be the most audible voice in our times through which the theology of Schleiermacher ­continues to speak”.32 A figure whose work became significant for both of these theologians, as they articulated their concerns about Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion, was Ludwig Feuerbach. For in his 1841 book Das Wesen des Christentums, Feuerbach had argued that to describe religion as feeling was to render God as an expression or projection of human sentiment. He stated the following: If, for example, feeling is the essential organ of religion, the nature of God is nothing else than an expression of the nature of feeling … But the o­ bject of religious feeling is become a matter of indifference, only because when once feeling has been pronounced to be the subjective essence of religion, it in fact is also the objective essence of religion … feeling is pronounced to be religious, simply because it is feeling.33 In his own assessment of Schleiermacher’s theology, Brunner incorporated Feuerbach’s indictment of a religion of feeling. We can see this reflected in the following passage from his book Wahrheit als Begegnung (the title for English audiences became The Divine-Human Encounter). Here, Brunner presses that Schleiermacher has evacuated theology of its true and proper content, since he locates its centre in the inner emotional life of the individual believer. B ­ runner explains: 31 32 33

For a detailed literature review see Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order, 10–30, and Vial, Modern Religion, Modern Race, Chapter two (55–92). Richard R. Niehbuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion (London: scm Press, 1964), 8; 10. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), 9–10. Also cited by Julia Lamm, “The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefühl, 1788–1794”, 67–105. Robert Williams argues that Feuerbach’s reduction of theology to anthropology cannot be applied to Schleiermacher’s religion of Gefühl. See “Schleiermacher and Feuerbach on the Intentionality of Religious Consciousness”, Journal of Religion 53, no. 4 (Oct., 1973): 424–455.

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[Schleiermacher’s] subjective interpretation of the faith of the Church, when closely examined, tends to empty it of content completely … This great thinker who understood how to bring together Pietism, the ­Enlightenment, and Idealism into a most impressive unity, pointed the way to a distinctive feature of the nineteenth century—the subjective dissolution of theology.34 Christine Helmer, who has reconstructed the history and intellectual context of Brunner’s charge against our nineteenth-century theologian, explains that he accused Schleiermacher of grounding his theology in a mystical philosophy of identity. And because he read him to be doing this—anchoring his appeals to the divine in the immediate “religious” experience of the individual ­believer—Brunner argued that Schleiermacher denied the sovereignty of God and eclipsed the objective divine Word of the Gospel.35 In parallel fashion, Barth’s response to Schleiermacher’s theology—which I engage in the third part of the book—was to suggest that its emphasis on human experience and feeling meant that it was unable to uphold the ­sovereignty of God. Instead, Barth argued, Schleiermacher’s statements were not in fact theological ones at all but were anthropological both in tone and in reach. In his view, Schleiermacher ended up speaking of God “simply by speaking of man in a loud voice”.36 Aside from what Julia Lamm has dubbed as the “Feuerbachian” line of ­interpretation, exemplified by Barthian and Brunnerian critique, another strand to the broader charge of individualism or subjectivism which has been levelled at Schleiermacher, is that he internalises religion, and thereby renders everything which is “external” in the religious life—including doctrines, the sacraments, and places of worship—merely peripheral and nonessential to the religious life. Whereas the “Feuerbachian” line on Schleiermacher critiques him for reducing theology to anthropology, this latter direction in Schleiermacher interpretation tends instead, therefore, to protest that he creates a division between (internal, ineffable) faith and the (external, intelligible) world. Among present-day theologians and philosophers of religion, George Lindbeck’s position on Schleiermacher is well-known and can be counted as an influential example of this line of interpretation. In his 34 35 36

Emil Brunner, The Divine-Human Encounter, trans. Amendus W. Loos (London, s.c.m. Press, 1944), 24–25. Emil Brunner, Die Mystik und das Wort. Christine Helmer, “Mysticism and Metaphysics: Schleiermacher and a Historical-Theological Trajectory”, 517. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, trans. Douglas Horton (New York and Evansion: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1957), 195f.

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The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (1982), Lindbeck argues that Schleiermacher belongs to an “experiential-expressivist tradition” of religious thinking, the members of which, he writes: all locate ultimately significant contact with whatever is finally ­important to religion in the prereflexive experiential depths of the self and regard the public or outer features of religion as expressive and evocative objectifications (ie., non-discursive symbols) of internal experience.37 In Lindbeck’s view, according to the proponents of such an “experiential-­ expressive” approach, agreement and disagreement within religious traditions will come down merely to “underlying feelings, attitudes, existential orientations and practices”. The point here is that he judges Schleiermacher and the others he places in this category to have evacuated cultural, linguistic, or concrete epistemic content from the essence of religion. There is, he suggests, “thus at least the logical possibility that a Buddhist and a Christian might have basically the same faith, although expressed very differently”.38 Since its publication in the 1980s Lindbeck’s line on Schleiermacher has been influential in the teaching and transmission of Schleiermacher’s thought in the Anglo-American theological academy.39 However Lindbeck was by no means the first to come to this judgment about Schleiermacher’s u ­ nderstanding and portrayal of religion. In Schleiermacher’s own day, and just three years after the publication of On Religion, Hegel (now in his early thirties) had already categorised Schleiermacher as a theologian of the inward and subjective, while maintaining that such a tendency towards denying the world and seeking religion “outside” of it was usual for Protestantism in general. Here, Schleiermacher’s thought becomes for Hegel a particularly potent expression of the intellectual condition of the age. Indeed, in a chapter on Jacobian philosophy in his 1802 essay Glauben und Wissen [Faith and Knowledge], which was published in The Critical Journal of Philosophy that he edited with Friedrich Schelling, Hegel critiques and then rejects Protestantism. He maintains that Protestantism’s habit is to denounce and renounce the world; it is characterised by an “other worldly” yearning, and writes: 37

George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age (London: spck, 1984), 21. 38 Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 17. 39 Brian Gerrish’s review of Lindbeck’s The Nature of Doctrine, which is featured in Journal of Religion 68, no. 1 (1988): 87–92, gives an excellent critique of Lindbeck’s portrayal of religious epistemology in Schleiermacher.

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Protestantism does not admit a communion [Umgang] with God and a consciousness of the divine that consists in the saturating objectivity of a cult and in which this nature and this universe are enjoyed in the ­present and seen in a light that is in itself clear. Instead it makes communion with God and consciousness of the divine into something inward that maintains its fixed form of inwardness; it makes them into a yearning for a beyond and a future.40 As a whole, Hegel’s essay is concerned with analysing the philosophical ­methods of Kant, Fichte and Jacobi, and critiquing all three for their failure to match the highest end of philosophy, which for Hegel means demonstrating the necessary unity and connectedness of human experience.41 In this particular passage, we find him rejecting Protestantism for its individualistic projections beyond the world. Elsewhere, Hegel will reject what is in certain senses Protestantism’s opposite—Enlightenment rationalism—as equally philosophically emaciated, due to its mechanical characterisation of reason and the purely empirical limits to its enquiry. Kant, Fichte and Jacobi all flounder, for Hegel, because they take on these assumptions belonging to Protestantism and Enlightenment, treat finitude as absolute, and thereby end up opposing and alienating the finite from the Infinite: The fundamental principle common to the philosophies of Kant, Jacobi and Fichte, is, then, the absoluteness of finitude, and, resulting from it, the absolute antithesis of finitude and infinity, reality and ideality, the sensuous and the supersensuous, and the beyondness of what is truly real and absolute.42 And it is according to this line of interpretation, too, that Hegel proceeds to claim that this “protestant principle”, one of subjective yearning, inwardness, and 40

G.W.F. Hegel, Jenaer Kritische Schriften, eds. Hartmut Buchner and Otto Pöggeler, ­Gesammelte Werke, Vol 4. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1968), 384. Translated in G.W.F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. Walter Cerf and H.S. Harris (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977), 72. 41 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 56. My summary comments here draw from Robert Solomon, In the Spirit of Hegel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 148–151. For further ­commentary on Hegel’s critique of Schleiermacher see Richard Crouter, “Hegel and Schleiermacher at Berlin: A Many-Sided Debate”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48: 19–43, and Kipton E. Jensen, “The Principle of Protestantism: On Hegel’s (Mis) Reading of Schleiermacher’s ‘Speeches’”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 2 (June 2003): 405–422. 42 Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, 62.

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thus also of non-communality, reaches its “highest level” in ­Schleiermacher’s portrayal of religion in On Religion.43 A final thinker I would like to reference here, as a proponent of the view that Schleiermacher’s religion meant a retreat inward, sequestering faith from ­society, community, and from “external” concerns, is the American philosopher of religion Wayne Proudfoot. In his 1985 book Religious Experience, Proudfoot stated that the “explicit aim” of Schleiermacher’s On Religion was “freeing religious doctrine and practice from dependence on metaphysical beliefs and ecclesiastical institutions and grounding it in human experience”. This, Proudfoot continues, made the book “the most influential statement and defence of the autonomy of religious experience”.44 Proudfoot’s thesis on Schleiermacher, which he elaborates over the course of his first chapter, is that Schleiermacher inaugurated a tradition of apologetics, whereby defining religion as a matter of feeling and intuition shielded it from rational analysis or moral critique. Schleiermacher’s religion, Proudfoot explains, “remains unscathed by Kant’s contention that our experience is structured by the categories and thoughts we bring to it”.45 He clarifies this in the following statement: For Schleiermacher and the tradition that derived from him, descriptive accuracy is to be obtained and reductionism to be avoided by insisting on the immediacy of religious experience, and on its radical independence from beliefs and practices. It is a moment in human experience which ­remains unstructured by, though it is expressed in, thoughts and actions.46 As I explained above, I include this brief survey of prominent critics in order to signal the much wider convention within the disciplines of theology, religious studies and philosophy of religion, of interpreting Schleiermacher as a ­theologian of inwardness. As Vial has put it—“the complaint today’s theorists 43

We must not forget that Hegel was a great influence in this regard on Karl Barth’s thought. Note that Barth begins his essay on Hegel in his collection Die protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert, by asking “why did Hegel not become for the Protestant world something similar to what Thomas Aquinas was for Roman Catholicism? …. Was not Hegel he who should come as the fulfiller of every promise, and was it worth waiting for another after he had come?” See Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 370–371. 44 Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), xiii. 45 Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 2. 46 Proudfoot, Religious Experience, 2.

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of religion make against him”, is that Schleiermacher “removes religion from history and society and places it securely within the ineffable world of the individual’s inner life”, and in so doing, keeps “religion safe from the critical analyses of the modern sciences”.47 Again, in the present work, while I dispute this line of interpretation by way of offering an alternative perspective, my issue is not of course with the ­specific analytic judgment that Schleiermacher understood religion as the realm of intuition and feeling. This is, of course, correct per se. To redefine religion in terms of these pre-reflexive categories was indeed the central Schleiermacherian contribution to religious thought in the West, and one he repeated in all of his religious writings.48 In the following, my preoccupation will be instead with demonstrating that Schleiermacher’s emphasis on feeling was not at the expense of rationality and did not drive a rift in his thought between individual and community, or self and world. From Schleiermacher’s perspective, I contend, the religious life is the highest mode of inhabiting the world, and it is a life that cannot be grounded in rational principles, established through systematic argumentation, or articulated fully by way of reference to social, political or even ethical categories. It means accepting the notion that individual human beings are not the authors of their own fulfilment, and that human flourishing cannot be managed by particular political structures or through the acquisition and control of worldly goods. Nevertheless, it was clear to Schleiermacher that human life has an inherently religious telos. There can be, for him, no final or total separation between the “inner life”, and what is “outward”. Pace Hegel’s reading of the contemporary philosophical and theological milieu in his Glauben und Wissen, then, I shall maintain that Schleiermacher did not absolutise finitude, or seek to preach religiosity simply as a retreat therefrom.49 For as he wrote in the third edition (1821) of his speeches On Religion: … the goal and character of a religious life is not immortality … [if we understand such] immortality to be beyond time and behind time, or 47 Vial, Modern Religion, Modern Race, 126. 48 Geoff Dumbreck offers a subtle analysis of this categorisation in Schleiermacher and ­Religious Feeling (Leuven: Peeters, 2012). 49 Kevin Vander Schel has argued this point in relation to Schleiermacher’s Christian ­dogmatics—that he develops a subtle understanding of the doctrine of revelation and Incarnation via his language of the “supernatural-becoming-natural”. This phrase, Vander Schel contends, shows Schleiermacher’s attempt at a way between Rationalism and Supernaturalism, which doesn’t render the Infinite and the finite irreconcilably divided. See Embedded Grace: Christ, History, and the Reign of God in Schleiermacher’s Dogmatics (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013).

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rather, after this time but still in time. Instead, it is the immortality that we can already have directly in this temporal life, and it is a task in whose resolution we are continually embroiled [und die eine Aufgabe ist, in deren Lösung wir immerfort begriffen sind]. Becoming one with the Infinite in the midst of finitude, and being eternally present in every moment—that is the immortality of religion.50

…

The epigraph which heads this introduction is taken from a letter that Schleiermacher wrote in 1801 to his old friend and mentor F.S.G. Sack—a chaplain who, when Schleiermacher was in his early twenties, had sought to guide him towards ministerial training. In the letter, Schleiermacher defends himself against a series of charges that the disappointed and rankled Sack had made against On Religion, having perceived it to be an apology for pantheism and a text which articulated Spinozism.51 It is by way of asserting the freedom of his own thought from the differing philosophical approaches available to him in the period, and in urging his old friend that religion itself is independent from “every metaphysics”, that Schleiermacher pens those words that I have chosen to lead this opening section. “My way of thinking”, Schleiermacher states, “really has no other ground than my own singular character, my inborn mysticism, and my cultivation, which proceeds outward from within”.52 These appeals that Schleiermacher makes to his mysticism, as well as his innate powers of expression, which pour forth from his unique centre, therefore come in the context of pushing the line that he is his own master. He knows his own mind and is not corrupted in his preaching by philosophies which betray the faith that he claims. Sack might find pantheism in his work, but this is eisegesis, Schleiermacher maintains—it an overestimation of what a few lines on Spinozistic philosophy means for the whole text. It is the mistake of isolating but one example of religiosity (Spinoza!), freely given, and treating this example as the universal statement of Schleiermacher on religion. “There is no living being upon whom I am dependent”, Schleiermacher’s protest runs, “and I pride myself on being as free as anyone on earth”.53 50 51 52 53

kga i.12, 128. Translation my own. I return to Sack’s spirited charges later in the book. Schleiermacher was 32 at the time, Sack 62. kga v. 5 (Briefwechsel 1801–1802), 133. English translation in Albert L. Blackwell’s article “The Antagonistic Correspondence of 1801 between Chaplain Sack and His Protégé Schleiermacher”, The Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 1 (1981), 120. (For the original, see kga v. 5, 132–133).

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To say this much is of course to advocate addressing discrete quotations as part of their broader contexts. If we were simply to stop with Schleiermacher’s attestations of his “inborn” mysticism, and his statement that he grounds his thought through strength of character, we might quite rightly conclude that he was a radical subjectivist. Let us not, however, be so quick to settle on this ­judgment. For as we shall see in the following, Schleiermacher’s commitment to the early Romantic philosophical vision meant that he conceived human life as constantly fluctuating between two poles, in the sense that human experience and human knowing were under the play of opposing forces, and that humans themselves were active and passive in their knowing and their being.54 To find Schleiermacher stressing the uniqueness and individuality of finite creatures then, should not mean that we interpret him to stop there, placing the self over against the world, admitting of no worldly influence on personal thought or belief. And whereas here Schleiermacher speaks of his self-realisation as something proceeding outwards, from within, in the first pages of his Soliloquies he will speak of the need to withdraw from the world and return inward, to collect himself. My contention is that we should not see such movements to be at odds with one another. Indeed, for Schleiermacher, who understood the world to be flooded with the glory of God, there is no bit of creation that is exempted from this glory. Being rational, playful, and perceptive creatures, capable of ordering their own wills and desires, and discerning discrete purposes in things and events—humans stand out in the world as unique among creatures in their capacity for religion. Nevertheless, to be human is still to be a little part of creation, and it is in this way that we find Schleiermacher concluding the following in On Religion: The true essence of religion is neither [immortality] nor any other ­concept, but the immediate consciousness of the deity, as we find the deity just as much in ourselves, as we do in the world.55 4

The Contribution and Scope of the Present Work

The early ethical writings I engage with in this book have not had much a­ ttention from scholars in the Anglo-American academy.56 In his work Schleiermacher’s 54 55

For a representative passage see kga i.2, 191 ; OR 5. “Das wahre Wesen der Religion aber ist weder dieser noch ein anderer Begriff, sondern das unmittelbare Bewußtsein der Gottheit, wie wir sie finden, eben so sehr in uns selbst als in der Welt”. Emphasis my own. kga i.12, 128. 56 Indeed, certain texts, like Schleiermacher’s project on the Penal Colony, remain ­untranslated into English. Brent Sockness provides a detailed exposition as to why Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Early Philosophy of Life, Albert Blackwell provides a rich appraisal of this period, placing a number of Schleiermacher’s philosophical, ethical and religious writings in their biographical context, and interpreting them in conjunction with his letters. Yet it is not Blackwell’s concern to analyse the early ethical works in terms of their impact on Schleiermacher’s theological perspective, and he does not venture past 1804 in his analysis. My own purpose is closer to Jacqueline Mariña’s, in her book ­Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Framing her work as a corrective to the scholarly “neglect”57 of Schleiermacher’s ethical theory, Mariña proposes to put Schleiermacher’s ethical writings into touch with his mature theology and philosophy of religion. Mariña’s approach, however, is to chart the development of Schleiermacher’s ethical theory by analysing Schleiermacher’s work in relation to a number of different philosophical systems—those belonging to Kant, Spinoza, Leibniz, Fichte, and Jacobi. This differs from my own method, since I am not simply interested in what Mariña refers to consistently as ethical “theory”. Indeed, it is also prudent to make clear at this stage that my purpose is not to appraise the work of thinkers or philosophers other than Schleiermacher himself in detail. Rather, my primary concern is with Schleiermacher’s texts themselves, as vehicles for him to express and test his ideas regarding the nature of the human self. And one of my priorities will be to attest to the way in which Schleiermacher negotiated his understanding of the self actually in community and in social interaction.58 This is why I have included texts like To Cecilie, which narrates his encounter with religious enthusiasm, a piece on the aspirations and duties of his female companions in the Berlin salons (his Idea for a Reasonable Catechism for Noble Women), and his unfinished project on the British penal colony in “New Holland”. These texts are not abstract and philosophical, but actually dramatise the point that I wish to draw out concerning Schleiermacher’s ethical perspective, namely that he understands the self to develop in society and through language and encounter.59 Schleiermacher’s work on ethics has been neglected in his essay “The Forgotten Moralist: Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Science of Spirit”. Harvard Theological Review 96, no. 3 (July 2013): 317–348. 57 Mariña, Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Oxford: ­Oxford University Press: 2008, 14. 58 Brent Sockness has expressed this conviction in his analysis of the Soliloquies. He writes that since this text is “more the unfolding of an insight—viz., the author’s ‘highest ­intuition’ into the irreducible individuality of human being and doing—than the defence of a moral system, I have been careful throughout to speak of the ‘moral vision’ of the work rather than its ethical theory”. See “Schleiermacher and the Ethics of Authenticity: The ‘Monologen’ of 1800”, Journal of Religious Ethics 32 (2004), 514. 59 In this point, I take much from Thandeka, who has also argued that Schleiermacher ­understands the self as a unified, temporal and corporate whole. Her book The Embodied Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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It is for this reason that I also depart from the approach that German author Peter Grove takes to Schleiermacher’s work in his deft and encyclopaedic study Deutungen des Subjekts. Schleiermachers Philosophie der Religion. Here, Grove analyses texts from all stages of Schleiermacher’s career, drawing out their significance for the latter’s theory of subjectivity. At the outset of his book, he also acknowledges that in Schleiermacher’s view, religions are always social. They form themselves in communities. And yet despite this, Grove explains that he himself will not pursue this “intersubjective” dimension to Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion.60 He will not explore its character as historical and incarnated in particular communities. What I seek to show, however, is that to omit this is to eclipse an essential dimension to Schleiermacher’s theological vision. A final book-length study from the Anglo-American context which deals with Schleiermacher’s early ethical writings is Andrew Dole’s 2012 work ­Religion and the Natural Order, which I alluded to above. Dole’s leading conviction is that it is crucial to recognise the social dimension to Schleiermacher’s thinking—a dimension he also argues is not well enough recognised in Anglophone scholarship.61 Where my own work differs from Dole’s, however, is firstly that he is not interested in the theological implications of Schleiermacher’s understanding of the religious life. Instead, he proceeds from a religious studies perspective, his aim being to “present a reconstruction of Schleiermacher’s account of religion”, and “to focus on Schleiermacher’s description of religion as a natural phenomenon—as a collection of human conditions, practices, and artefacts that can be understood as constituting a coherent whole”.62 Secondly however, I also disagree fundamentally with Dole’s central thesis, namely that Schleiermacher is a “religious naturalist”. Indeed, Dole’s claim is that according to Schleiermacher’s perspective:

60 61

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Self: Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Solution to Kant’s Problem of the Empirical Self (State Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995) takes a different stage of Schleiermacher’s career as its focus however, since it studies Schleiermacher’s lectures on Dialektik. Schleiermacher delivered these lectures in Berlin between 1811–1831. Thandeka also puts Schleiermacher’s theory of human self-consciousness into debate with the work of Kant, Fichte and Hegel. Peter Grove, Deutungen des Subjekts: Schleiermachers Philosophie der Religion (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2004), 4. Dole notes that sentiments akin to Bernd Oberdorfer’s, that Schleiermacher is “one of the first and at the same time one of the most subtle theorists of modern society”, are not shared in English scholarship. See Bernd Oberdorfer, Geselligkeit und Realisierung von Sittlichkeit: Die Theorieentwicklung Friedrich Schleiermachers bis 1799 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), 522. Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order, 6–7.

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religion could be understood without the benefit of clergy—that is, without the magisterial guidance of religious authorities—and, more radically, without ‘conversion’ or confessional and/or metaphysical commitments about its causes different from the assumptions one might use to understand and explain other realms of culture.63 Dole affirms the social dimension of Schleiermacher’s thinking on religion then, and argues that it is wrong to claim that he is a subjectivist thinker who reduced religion to a function of individuated human self-consciousness. Nevertheless, Dole’s thesis suggests that Schleiermacher reduced theology to anthropology, albeit the case that this judgment isn’t conceptually linked to the latter’s emphasis on feeling. Schleiermacher “fairly clearly qualifies as a religious naturalist”, Dole clarifies, in the sense that in his view, “religion is a product of human nature”.64 What Dole’s thesis presses upon us, I venture, is the question as to whether Schleiermacher’s horizontal emphasis on the human and the particular, and the self’s embeddedness in the world, means that he is left without words or gestures towards the transcendent. In contrast to Dole however, the present analysis of Schleiermacher’s ethical texts will suggest that his stress on human specificity and sociality does not lead him to build a closed-off anthropological system, within which the subject is a prisoner of their own finitude. Schleiermacher respected the limits that Kant placed upon reason and rational enquiry, and agreed with Kant that it is not possible to demonstrate God’s existence as the “cause”—to use Dole’s terminology—of the religious life. It is only in and through faith that a person can find God. Nevertheless, and since he eschews systems and embraces particular literary forms, I will suggest that Schleiermacher’s account of human finitude opens out to invoke the transcendent as the heart and ground of the everyday.

…

I have proposed that a distinctive contribution the present work makes to scholarship is that it attends to the different literary forms that Schleiermacher employs in his early writings. As a member of the Early German Romantic Circle—famous for their experiments with literary form—Schleiermacher 63 Dole, Religion and the Natural Order, 8. Dole is citing his approval here of J. Samuel Preus’s definition of religious naturalism. He is quoting from Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996), x. 64 Dole, Religion and the Natural Order, 8.

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was of course plunged into intimate friendship and “symphilosophical”65 dialogue with thinkers and theorists for whom considerations about language and methods of communication were integral to the task of philosophy.66 What I will explore here, however, is how Schleiermacher’s own experiments with form began even before he joined the Romantics in Berlin. And by examining a selection of his early writings, I shall show how his use of these different forms made a substantive contribution to the way in which he depicted the self and the nature of human knowledge. We gather from Schleiermacher’s various modes of expressing himself that he was acutely aware of the interconnection between form and content in the generation of speech and text. Due not least to his own inheritance of the Platonic tradition, Schleiermacher was also convinced that we can helpfully engage images, analogies, impressions—mythos—in order to signal the most supreme philosophical truths. And as Richard Crouter has contended,“the task of finding the rhetorical form that best connects with a particular audience preoccupied him much of his life”.67 What is more, the issue of form also offers us, I think, a way into answering the following question: what relevance does Schleiermacher’s work have for the 21st century theologian? Or—how do or should we use him now? What is Schleiermacher’s legacy for theology in the 21st century? As Batnitzky, Vial, and others have already underscored, Schleiermacher participated in the creation of modern European categories—race and religion—which in their academic application have served to distort and denigrate traditions including Judaism and Islam. As such, reading Schleiermacher means 65

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In an Athenaeum Fragment published in 1798, Friedrich Schlegel used the term (alongside “Sympoesie”) to describe the ideal communal conditions for scholarly activity in the arts and sciences: “Vielleicht würde eine ganz neue Epoche der Wissenschaften und Künste beginnen, wenn die Symphilosophie und Sympoesie so allgemein und so innig würde, daß es nichts Seltnes mehr wäre, wenn mehre sich gegenseitig ergänzende Naturen gemeinschaftliche Werke bildeten”. See Friedrich Schlegel, ‚Die Athenäums-Fragmente’, in Hans Eichner, ed., Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, Band 2, i. (München, Paderborn u. Wien, 1967), 185. For analysis see Kurt Röttgers, “Symphilosophieren”, Philosophisches Jahrbuch 88 (1981): 90–119. This point is stressed by Richard Crouter, both in his translator’s introduction to the 1799 edition of Schleiermacher’s On Religion (OR vxiii–xix), and in his article on Schleiermacher’s influence on Søren Kierkegaard. In the latter piece, he writes: “As Plato scholar, Schleiermacher is, after all, the emulator of dialogical thinking”. See Crouter, “Schleiermacher’s not so hidden debt to Kierkegaard”, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Richard Crouter, “Introduction”, On Religion, xix.

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subjecting his work to a critique, and refusing to take his philosophy, his ethics and his theological thought in isolation from his failure to properly recognise and affirm the freedoms of those whose bodies, practices, rituals, culture, and ways of seeing differ from his own.68 But the reason I think the form of Schleiermacher’s work is significant at this point, however, is that he writes and communicates in such a way that avoids crystallisation into concrete systems or universal principles. His thought resists readings which would appropriate it and render it static and dogmatic. He is, I shall seek to demonstrate, a writer who builds logics of multiplicity and flexibility into the very structure of his theology and his philosophy. In key ways, as this study will make clear, it is possible to use the implications of Schleiermacher’s own thought to critique his inability to properly account for human difference, human particularity. And it is for this reason, I argue, that Schleiermacher remains a thinker with whom theologians in the present can fruitfully think, with whom they should dialogue. It is true that in his theology, Schleiermacher universalises an aspect of the human condition, and argues that this one characteristic belongs to all people— every single human creature without exception. Indeed, Schleiermacher also claims that this trait is characteristic of all aspects of worldly existence— every rock, bone, leaf, tree and animal that graces the earth. And yet this universalising tendency in Schleiermacher does not in itself amount to a hegemonising move, capable of collapsing difference. For this thing which Schleiermacher happily universalises is finitude. It is the condition of being bounded and limited, to be subject to change and decay, to be the recipient of one’s existence rather than the author of it. Although the respect and defence of human freedom took a strong place in Schleiermacher’s theology then, it was human dependence and our awareness of it that he established as the font and focus of the religious life. This stress on human dependence, on finitude, issues in a theological epistemology which recognises the limitations of the individual human ­ perspective. It should mean recognising that when I look out onto the world, I cannot see everything that is there. My gaze is not exhaustive, and nor do I see what the woman, man, child next to me sees. Where Schleiermacher himself does not honour this humble beginning that he affords his theology, 68

My thinking here has been influenced by Michael Mack’s 2003 study of anti-semitic content in German Idealist philosophy. Mack begins by observing that “one simply cannot appraise a body of work, disregarding its prejudicial content”. See Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1.

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and where his legacy has contributed to the silencing of other voices and religious groups, those theologians in the present who are the inheritors of his legacy are invited to hold him to account, to think with him, and to challenge him. It is the aim of the present study to contribute to such work, to enter into this conversation.

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Part 1 Freedom and Particularity in Schleiermacher’s Early Ethical Anthropology

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Introduction to Part 1 The first part of the book will examine three of Schleiermacher’s earliest ethi­ cal texts: an unfinished essay on the nature of human freedom, a bundle of notes on Immanuel Kant’s newly published Critique of Practical Reason, and an epistolary novella, To Cecilie, which discusses the fate of a religious enthusiast. These works were all conceived when Schleiermacher was in his early twen­ ties, in the few years following the end of his studies at the University of Halle in 1789.1 They indicate the preoccupation he had at that time with Kant’s criti­ cal philosophy, and his proclivity therewith to define his ethics in terms of a conviction that there exist universal and necessary moral laws, to which all hu­ mans are bound. This particular echo of Kant’s system2 is not so perceptible in Schleiermacher’s later work, and these early texts we have our eye on here are therefore records of positions that Schleiermacher would later discard. And yet it is precisely in virtue of this fact and not despite it, however, that these early texts are useful to the end of dismantling any notion that Schleiermacher detrimentally prioritises the subjective—what is inward and private—at the expense of the reciprocal, intersubjective and ethical elements to human life in the world. For in these unfinished and rough pieces, we witness the young Halle gradu­ ate in the process of negotiating, working through, and experimenting— trying to find his philosophical footing on questions about moral accountabil­ ity, freedom, and human desire. And as he does this, he considers and rejects two ideas that are significant for our final purpose in this book of elaborating Schleiermacher’s theological thought. The first of these, which we encounter in To Cecilie, is the idea that the religious life demands a withdrawal from the world, and a diminished role for practical reason in decision-making and ac­ tion. Indeed, while contemplating his own experiences as a member of the Moravian Christian community in Upper Lusatia, Schleiermacher articulated his distrust for a religion which emphasises immediate, personal feeling to the detriment of engaging in the world and contributing to society. The second significant idea with which Schleiermacher engaged with and then ultimately dismissed in this period is Kant’s postulation of transcenden­ tal freedom. We find Schleiermacher engaging with this idea in his essay On Freedom, as well as in his notes on Kant’s second critique. The reason why this 1 For Meckenstock’s appraisal of the historical context of these numerous pieces, see kga i.1, xv–xxxii. 2 See KPu 680 (A811/B839).

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rejection is interesting, is because it stems from Schleiermacher’s conviction that ethical choices are anchored in previous judgments and impressions, as these are grounded in a person’s situation in the world. Schleiermacher reject­ ed Kantian freedom—the ability to do otherwise, postulated as transcenden­ tal, outside of time—because this did not match his own attentiveness to the situated, social, and historical nature of human beings. The provisional, working nature of these early and obscure texts therefore forms part of my interest in them. And with this, I must also clarify that as well as being juvenile pieces which do not match the conclusions of Schlei­ ermacher’s later thought, these texts also do not constitute a systematic or well-developed anthropology. On this point I follow the position reached by Schleiermacher’s editor Gunter Meckenstock, as well as by Brent Sock­ ness.3 As both have suggested, it is prudent to regard these pieces instead as fragments—as shards of writing that Schleiermacher “threw out” in the very literal sense of that German word Entwurf.4 Occasional pieces, these texts differ greatly in form, purpose, and subject matter, such that it would be a miscon­ ception to analyse them as if they were discrete parts of a systematic and uni­ fied approach. Indeed, what is perhaps most striking about Schleiermacher’s work in this period is the scale of his ambition and the diverse nature of his interests. Our three texts comprise only a few of the many experiments in liter­ ary form and ethical enquiry that he composed at this time. For in a move that prompted Wilhelm Dilthey to speak of his “uncommon precocity”,5 Schleierm­ acher planned to work on a formidable number of projects in his mid-twenties, which celebrated the fruits of his university education in theology, philosophy (both ancient and modern), philology, classics, and modern languages. Among Schleiermacher’s designs were treatises on the principles of morality and on Plato’s idea of human nature, as well as essays on Socratic irony, on child de­ velopment, and on the question of whether a deist could, in good conscience, submit to a life as a practicing minister and preacher. By 1790, Schleiermacher had thus begun his lifelong habit of experiment­ ing with different literary forms. In later chapters, this point about form will become increasingly important. At this early stage in Schleiermacher’s career, 3 See Sockness, “Was Schleiermacher a Virtue Ethicist?”, 10. 4 See kga i.1, xv–xxxii, including Meckenstock’s comments about Dilthey’s notes on the text. Brent Sockness calls them a “conceptual mélange”, since they draw upon a number of differ­ ent, even conflicting, schools of thought. See Sockness, “The Forgotten Moralist: Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Science of Spirit”. Harvard Theological Review 96, no. 3 (July 2013), 338. 5 Wilhelm Dilthey, ‚Denkmale der inneren Entwicklung Schleiermachers’,in Vol i of Leben Schleiermachers (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1870), 5.

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however, we will suggest that his epistolary novel foreshadows his later nu­ anced theological emphasis on finitude, since it draws the reader’s attention to the social dimension of human knowledge, and its dependency on reciprocity and exchange. Before we examine Schleiermacher’s quarrel with Kant (chapter three) in this part and explore his critique of “enthusiastic” [schwärmerisch] piety—a critique issuing from his own religious doubts (chapter two)—in my open­ ing chapter I shall proceed by outlining the mature Schleiermacher’s theologi­ cal vision. I offer this in order to provide a framework and reference point for my argument, to develop some of the hermeneutical claims offered in my in­ troduction, and to anticipate the overall aim of the book, which is to present Schleiermacher’s developing ethical anthropology in relation to his mature theological perspective.

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Chapter 1

Delineating the Ethical and the Theological ‘No poetry, no reality. Just as there is, despite all the senses, no external world without imagination, so too there is no spiritual world without feeling, no matter how much sense there is. Whoever only has sense can perceive no human being, but only what is human: all things disclose themselves to the magic wand of feeling alone. It fixes people and seizes them; like the eye, it looks on, without being conscious of its own ­mathematical operation’.1

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Disciplinary Boundaries

The purpose of this opening chapter is to situate Schleiermacher’s early ethical writings (1789–1793) against the greater context of his mature theological vision. He began to articulate this in 1799 as the author of On Religion,2 and had established it by 1821, when he published the first volume of his dogmatic project, Christian Faith. I shall also use this space to clarify the nature of the academic boundaries that Schleiermacher initiated in his twenties and ­employed throughout his life, between ethics on the one hand and religion or theology on the other. In the prologue to the third edition of his Soliloquies—a text I discuss in more detail in the second part of the book—Schleiermacher explained to his readers that the material they were about to read constituted a “purely ethical” study, so that “what is in a more narrow sense religious, should 1 Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Athenaeum Fragment 350”, in Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 216. 2 Schleiermacher published three further editions of his speeches On Religion—in 1806, 1821 (the same year his dogmatics came out), and 1831. In 1806 and 1821 he made numerous revisions, and in the third edition even attached a series of explanations for such amendments at the close of each speech. His fourth edition included only a few changes. In his preface to the 1821 edition, he attests to the continuity in his thinking, and explains he is not inclined to deny or denounce the 1799 piece. As Richard Crouter explains: “He never renounced the youthful work. Rather he continually sought to relate his evolving ideas to his original ­understanding of religion” (OR, xliv). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_004 Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft

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nowhere be prominent therein”.3 Contained in this little note is confirmation that S­ chleiermacher understood the ethical to comprise a discrete and firmly-bounded discourse, which doesn’t preoccupy itself with religious ­ themes, nor invoke the transcendent as it considers the meaning or value of goods and actions. As such, he understands the ethical realm as that which deals with the human and the historical. It is according to the horizon of the ethical realm that we understand the individual in terms of the totality of relationships that they enjoy in the world. A little later in his career, having established himself as a university ­academic, Schleiermacher delivered a series of lecture courses that treated ethical themes more comprehensively and systematically. Both in the lectures on ethics that he delivered at Halle, in 1805/1806, and in the lectures on philosophical ethics that he later gave in Berlin (1812/13 and 1816/17), Schleiermacher described the way in which humans worked on the world as rational “organs”, establishing responsible patterns of behaviour through institutions like the family, the state and the church. In his earliest work however, his “ethical” enquiries were more occasional in character and tended also to proceed from the narrower perspective of contemplating the behaviours and ethical responsibilities of the rational and individual self. It is through this prism of the life of the particular individual, that his essays like On Freedom (and later the Soliloquies) inspect what it means to be free, to live the good life, and to search for the highest good. Nevertheless, the boundaries remain the same. In “ethics” we deal not with God, but only with what can be intelligibly shared between humans and perceived via the senses—the organic nexus of the world, within which “acting and being acted upon ceaselessly alternate between the same limited matter and the mind”.4 In contrast to this, Schleiermacher understands the realm of religion to ­attend, of course, to the nature of the relationship between God and the world. To deal with religious issues and concerns means framing human behaviour in terms of their being finite creatures in relation to the Infinite. This “religious” relationship is not one that Schleiermacher believes can be constructed, grasped or judged by the human intellect, however. Instead, in his introduction to Christian Faith, he famously explains that this relationship is one that humans recognise first in passive receptivity—being acted upon—through the “feeling of absolute dependence” [das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl]. Crucially, with this word Gefühl, Schleiermacher does not signal that religious faith has its origin and wellspring within the internal structure of human consciousness. Piety does not simply amount to a series of sensations which are registered 3 kga i.12, 326–327; S 6. 4 kga i.2, 216; OR 27. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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in the human mind. For this feeling of absolute dependence has a referent, Schleiermacher explains. Its origin lies outside of the believer, because it is a response to God, who in faith we recognise as the “Whence of our receptive and active existence”. And as this Whence, God “is not the world”, Schleiermacher continues, “in the sense of the totality of temporal being”, and still less is God “any one part of that totality”.5 Instead, in religion we recognise God as the unconditioned ground and source of absolutely everything finite. In religion, that is, we learn that the finite self cannot ground itself, but that together with the totality of temporal reality, the self is utterly dependent on the Whence.6 To qualify what Schleiermacher means by religious feeling a little further, it’s worth referencing a lengthy passage from Christian Faith. Here, he confirms that whereas all worldly existence is finite, absolutely dependent for its ­existence on that which is not the world, it is only humans who are able to reflect on the reality of their being absolutely dependent. To put it in scientific terminology, he ventures, we might thus describe religious feeling as a “consciousness of God” [das Gottesbewusstsein]. For as the human response to God, who Christians identify in faith as the unconditioned ground of all finite existence, it is the case that religious feeling is always particular to the person experiencing it. Schleiermacher writes: Suppose … that one were to speak of an “original revelation of God” [von einer ursprünglichen Offenbarung Gottes] to human beings or in human beings. Then precisely the following meaning would always be intended by it: that what is given to human beings, along with the absolute ­dependence inherent in all finite being no less than in oneself, is also the immediate self-consciousness [unmittelbare Selbstbewußtsein] of that absolute dependence arising to the point of being God-consciousness. Now, in whatever measure this combined sense really arises during the temporal course of one’s personal existence [Persönlichkeit], we ascribe piety to that individual to the same degree. On the other hand, any sort of givenness of God’s being remains completely excluded. This is so, because everything that is externally given must also always be given as an object to which some counteraction is directed, to whatever small degree that may occur.7 5 kga i.13/1, §4 (39); CF §4.4 (25). 6 See kga i.13/1, §4 (38–39); CF §4.4 (24): “No feeling of absolute freedom can have its locus in any temporal being”. 7 kga i.13/1, §4.4 (40); CF §4.4 (26–27). In a letter to Eleonore Grunow in 1802, Schleiermacher clarifies his understanding that religious feeling is complex, cultivated over time, and an effort of the whole self, fed by an active imagination: True feeling is the highest attribute of man; for, according to my views, it is nothing else but the constant and as it were omnipresent Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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We learn here that religious feeling develops in a person over the passage of time and becomes specific to their character and their place in the world. ­Indeed, in one sense, Schleiermacher continues, “feeling oneself to be absolutely dependent, and being conscious of oneself as in relation with God, are one and the same thing. This is so, because absolute dependence is the fundamental relation that all other relations must include within themselves”.8 Faith, we find, is thus something Schleiermacher believes to be refracted through all diverse areas of our lives. It inflects all of the bonds that we form with other creatures. Unlike the perspective we would associate with modern liberalism, he does not confine faith or religiosity to one private sphere of life, but assumes it to accompany and shape the whole. This passage also demonstrates the care that Schleiermacher takes to u ­ p­hold divine transcendence and aseity. In piety, “any sort of givenness of God’s being remains completely excluded”, he writes. God, who is Infinite and Absolute is immediately present to the religious mind, but God cannot, nevertheless, be known or processed or seen by the mind. Unlike worldly objects, God, the highest principle of reality, is not some “thing” that can be represented or grasped in thought. And yet, while God in Godself is simple and eternal, admitting no corruptibility, the human response to God’s ungraspable and untameable “revelation” will nevertheless itself be a temporal one—enacted in time, responding to the fulness of eternity given over in every moment. Piety, Schleiermacher implies, is something tested through time. Bruce McCormack has elegantly summarised this point in the following way: The feeling of absolute dependence is the result of a divine act of relating to the human in time; a divine act that is eternal and, therefore, at most encounters the human in the depth dimensions of his or her being but in no way becomes fixed and stabilized. It is a dandum and not a datum; something that is given at every moment by means of a unitary, supra-temporal divine action and not something that is simply in us as a capacity is in us.9 activity of certain ideas. Now of such feeling children are incapable, and that which in them is called feeling is only utterances of instinct, whereby, however, they themselves, as well as others, are led erroneously to believe that they possess real feeling. Understanding and selfwill [Eigensinn], on the contrary, are, in my eyes, forerunners of reason [Vernunft] and selfdependence [Selbständigkeit], and with the growth of imagination [Phantasie] we may then hope that feeling also will come, if care be taken that the imagination be not crushed. (kga v.6, 86; Life 1, 306–307). 8 kga i.13/1, §4.4 (40); CF §4.4 (26). Emphasis my own. 9 Bruce L. McCormack, “What Has Basel to Do with Berlin? Continuities in the Theologies of Barth and Schleiermacher”, The Princeton Seminary Bulletin 23 (2002), 159. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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As the “consciousness” of being-in-relation-with-God, afforded to the indiv­ idual from without, yet responded to by that individual in and through time, we can also differentiate “feeling” in Schleiermacher’s view here from what he calls Anschauung, another important concept in his early philosophy of reli­gion, and a term which has been translated into English and French as “intuition”. For Schleiermacher, religious Anschauung differs from feeling because it does not indicate this same sense of something which abides, which accompanies a particular self, and is included in all of the various relationships that person has with worldly objects and subjects. Instead, by using this term Anschauung, which evokes metaphors of sight and visibility, and implies the presence of an object which confronts the receiving, “intuiting” subject, Schleiermacher is ­indicating a much more basic movement or capacity belonging to human agents. In 1806, in his lectures on ethics, Schleiermacher proposed that Anschauung has no “content” to speak of, experiential or intellectual or otherwise. Intuition does not involve any necessary empirical element(s) to mediate it. And as a capacity of human nature, it does not differ from person to person. He writes: What we posit as intuition [Anschauung], we posit as a uniform relation to communal subjectivity, to human nature. What we posit as feeling ­[Gefühl] we posit, in contrast, as personal, individual, local, temporal subjectivity. We consider intuition to be everywhere and unconditionally the same in everyone; about feeling we are convinced that in no one else is it completely the same as it is in us.10 In Schleiermacher’s own usage then,11 intuition seems to amount to the ­universal human ability to open oneself up to influence from outside, as it 10 11

Brou 102. Emphasis my own. Immanuel Kant used this term “Anschauung” to refer to a state of receptivity in the knowing subject. In Kant’s view, again, intuition meant a form of receptivity that could not be described as “thought” or thinking, since forms of intuition (space and time) are given immediately [unmittelbar] in experience. Intuitions are not conclusions or inferences drawn from experiential data. Rather, they are objects of direct perception. As Kant himself explained, “an intuition is a representation of the sort which would depend immediately on the present of an object”. See Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysic, ed. and trans. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 33. For relevant discussion on this topic see Lorne Falkenstein, “Kant’s Account of Intuition”, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21, no. 2 (June 1991): 165–183; Houston Smit, “Kant on Marks and the Immediacy of Intuition”. The Philosophical Review 109, no. 2 (2000): 235–266; Clinton Tolley, “The Non-Conceptuality of the Content of Intuitions: A New Approach”. Kantian Review 18 no. 1, (2013): 107–136.

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were. We are dealing with a capacity which on balance is passive rather than active—characterised by receptivity and longing. In 1799, when Schleiermacher introduced “intuition of the universe” as the “highest and most universal formula for religion”, he qualified this further by saying that religion begins in the finite individual when they encounter the Infinite in “immediate perception” [die unmittelbare Wahrnehmung].12 Schleiermacher thus defines the “religious” relationship between the self and God as one that is not available to human reason or analysis. God, for Schleiermacher, is no object among worldly objects, no “thing” to be sensed or touched or taken up as material for chewing over. And intuition, thereby, does not take us as far as speculation or enquiry.13 Nevertheless, and as Christof Ellsiepen has argued, we would also be wrong to envisage intuition in Schleiermacher’s rendering as an absolutely passive capacity in humanity, containing no active principle.14 Indeed, in a way which gets at the unavoidably visual overtones of Anschauung, Kurt Novak describes it as “intuitus”. It is, he writes, “the immediate apprehension of an intelligible whole, in the multiplicity of its phenomena”.15 Let us now return to the point that Schleiermacher draws a clear ­methodological distinction between what we can refer to in speech as the realm of the “ethical”, on the one hand, and of the “religious” on the other. Since he delineates such disciplinary boundaries early on, and continues to use them throughout his academic career, Schleiermacher’s approach may therefore seem to be a dualistic one, according to which discussions that invoke divine causality or the transcendent must belong to different fora to those where “purely” cultural, social, or scientific issues are considered. It is important, however, to resist this dualistic impression of Schleiermacher’s scheme. For despite the fact that he draws up such methodological boundaries, and 12 13

14 15

kga i.2, 211–215; OR 22–26. In his dictionary of philosophical concepts from 1904, Rudolf Eisler defines Anschauung in the following manner: “Anschauung ist die unmittelbare (nicht durch Begriffe und Schlüsse vermittelte Erfassung eines concret gegebenen Objektes in dessen ­räumlich-zeitlicher) Bestimmtheit. Das ‘Anschauen’ besteht in der ruhigen Betrachtung des Objects, in der Umspannung der Merkmale des Objects durch die Einheit der Apperception”. See Rudolf Eisler, Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (Berlin: E.S. Mittler & Sohn, 1904), Vol 1, 41. Eisler also traces the word to Thomas Aquinas’s rendering of the Artistotelian term phantasma, which in the latin is rendered intuitus. In the eighteenth century, Baumgarten and Kant would proceed to replace intuitus with Anschauung. See Christof Ellsiepen, Anschauung des Universums und Scientia Intuitiva. Die spinozistischen Grundlagen von Schleiermachers früher Religionstheorie (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012). Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher: Leben, Werk und Wirkung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht 2002), 103.

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exacerbates them in essays like On Freedom where he offers a deist construal of religion, it is also the case that undergirding Schleiermacher’s prescriptions about the respective objects or spheres of ethical and religious language was a thoroughly holistic vision of both reality and human knowledge. After all, in On Religion, Schleiermacher’s proposal is that the religious life is the only life able to properly promote and most fully sustain human flourishing. Moreover, Schleiermacher’s proposal concerning the inherently religious telos to human self-formation was premised on his view that an individual’s longing for the Infinite does not require her to withdraw from the natural and the material. Searching for the divine unavoidably takes place through the ­finite world. In the notes he made for his lectures on Dialektik in 1811, Schleier­ macher includes the following pithy line: “Our knowledge of God is first completed with our worldview/Unser Wissen um Gott ist also erst vollendet mit der Weltanschauung”.16 Analysing this statement alongside the line of argumentation that Schleiermacher develops in On Religion, Novak has claimed that from Schleiermacher’s perspective, “a conception of God that is world-less [weltlose] is not possible”.17 Furthermore, as Schleiermacher would later confirm in his dogmatics— to affirm absolute divine otherness does not mean evacuating the world of ­divine “presence”, divesting the earth of meaning, or rendering it ­unworthy of ­attention. To suppose that such an evacuation or divestment is symptomatic of divine transcendence is to misconstrue the divine nature, it is to speak of God as if the divine nature were shackled to the logic of material and ­earthly existence, where to be there is to not be here. Again, “feeling oneself to be ­absolutely dependent and being conscious of oneself as in relation with God are one and the same thing”, Schleiermacher wrote, “because absolute dependence is the fundamental relation [die Grundbeziehung] that all other relations must include within themselves”.18 With this formulation, ­Schleiermacher ­celebrates the belief that the Creator God gives himself to humans with the world, such that his creatures cannot “know” him without it. And in the same move, Schleiermacher ultimately rendered his proposed academic divisions relative rather than absolute, so that talk about the ethical realm might spill over into the religious, and so that a religious perspective is in a position to 16

17 18

The notes are for the 18th hour of lectures. No date is given, but Schleiermacher notes that the 19th hour took place on 17th June 1811. In kga ii.10/1, 38. Schleiermacher c­ ontinues here to state that “true atheism exists only in conjunction with positive skepticism”, and every other kind of atheism is directed only against untenable and mythical views of divinity. Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher: Leben, Werk und Wirkung, 290. kga i.13/1, §4 (40); CF §4.4 (26).

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transform an ethical one.19 Writing in 1829, on the analogous issue of the relationship between religion and philosophy, he was emphatic: Philosophy does not need to raise itself above Christ, and, you ­understand, I mean here the real, historical Christ, as though piety were only immature philosophy and all philosophy were the first coming to consciousness of piety. Rather, a true philosopher can be and remain a true believer, and, likewise, one can be a pious with all one’s heart and still have and exercise the courage to delve into the very depths of speculation.20 I shall return to discuss Schleiermacher’s theological vision directly and at length in part three of the book, beginning with an analysis of his 1806 ­Christmas Dialogue. By the time that he wrote this text, Schleiermacher had rejected Kant’s subsumption of religion under morality and was elaborating a vision of religion not as founded on rational principles or intellection, but as a pre-reflective intuition of the universe. The rationale for introducing Schleiermacher’s religious vision in this opening chapter however, is so it might function as a backdrop to the discussion over parts one and two, putting 19

20

It is well-established among scholars that in the actual ferment of human experience and practice, Schleiermacher found it impossible to properly separate these two genres of the ethical and the religious. Prefiguring the stance that Jacqueline Mariña takes in her Transformation of the self in the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher, Horace Leyland Friess is confident that the Soliloquies concern both genres “in a fundamental sense” (S, 6, n*). John Wallhauser speaks of Schleiermacher’s switching between the two disciplines in terms of a shift in perspective, the implication being that in the fulness of everyday human e­ xperience, a clear distinction between the two spheres cannot be managed: “Whereas in On Religion it is the universe that acts upon humans; in the lectures on ethics “world” is fashioned by the activity of reason on nature—it is, as we might say today, a social construct”. (“Editor’s Introduction”, Brou, 11). Of course, Schleiermacher also establishes working disciplinary boundaries between philosophy and theology. B.A. Gerrish navigates these divisions in an instructive way in his essay “Friedrich Schleiermacher”, Nineteenth Century Religious Thought in the West, ed. Ninian Smart et al., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Vol 1, 123–156. The consensus among scholars is that the concepts Schleiermacher developed both in his lectures on dialectic (epistemology and metaphysics), and more famously in his introduction to Christian Faith, helped him to frame, define, and organise his theological ideas. For a detailed investigation of the philosophical core to a number of Schleiermacher’s writings, as well as his philosophical methodology, see Andreas Arndt, Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2013). Hans-Joachim Birkner outlines the difficulties that scholars have historically faced in the attempt to delineate the theological from the philosophical in Schleiermacher’s thought, in Theologie und Philosophie: Einführung in Probleme der Schleiermacher-Interpretation (München: Chr Kaiser Verlag, 1974), 157–192. Lücke, 86.

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us in a good position to see the interplay between Schleiermacher’s developing ethical anthropology and what I am calling his theology of finitude. 2

A Godless Europe

It is possible to further clarify the distinctive quality of Schleiermacher’s ­theological vision, by setting it against a competing religious perspective emergent in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, namely the consciousness of what Friedrich von Schiller pointedly attested to as a “godless”— or literally “de-deified”—nature [die entgötterte Natur], in his 1788 poem Die Götter Griechenlandes.21 This poem, which is regularly cited for the apparent link its author draws between Protestant Christianity and scientific materialism, adulates ancient Greek mythology for its attestation of a unity between divinity and nature. Such was their theological imagination, Schiller’s poem suggests, that these Greeks understood “abundant life” to “flow throughout creation” [Durch die Schöpfung floß da Lebensfülle], and that to the “initiated eyes” among them, it was manifest that everything worldly revealed a trace of God [Alles wies den eingeweihten Blicken, | Alles eines Gottes Spur]. This veneration of Greece in the poem is also inflected by mourning over its loss, however, as Schiller’s imagery suggests how through the culture inculcated by the dual forces of modern scientific rationalism on the one hand, and the hyper-transcendent images of divinity afforded by monotheism on the other, this beautiful Götterwelt has passed away. As the divine recedes from the earth, Schiller writes, nature and natural objects are rendered cold and ossified. They become merely the submissive servant of gravity [dient sie knechtisch dem Gesetz der Schwere], rather than the glorious theatre through which the gods, rejoicing in life, love, and beauty, make themselves manifest. In contrast to the polytheistic cosmology elaborated by ancient poets and sages, then, Schiller suggests the modern European imagination sees nature in terms of a nexus of wholly immanent, scientifically verifiable and observable causal processes, which it is possible to explain through human words and scientific categories. Nature, understood in these terms, has died a theological death in modernity, and it is of course this image of an entgötterte earth that later became important for the German sociologist Max Weber, who extended it in his own thesis about the disenchantment [die Entzauberung] of the world. The seed of this

21

Friedrich von Schiller, “Die Götter Griechenlands”, Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen and Friedrich Beißner (Weimar, 1943), Vol i, 190–195.

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disenchantment, Weber argued, lay within the early development of Jewish monotheism, and was catalysed by the ascetic Protestantism of central Europe. Schiller’s poem can act as a kind of evocative shorthand for expressing the tensions and pressures surrounding the perception of nature towards the end of the eighteenth century.22 Indeed, to modern audiences, the poem signals that by the time Schleiermacher was starting out as a young scholar ­theologian, Christian theology—and particularly its crystallisation in the modern Protestant tradition—had ceased in the mind of many of its educated critics to provide a popular or accessible narrative for life’s meaning, where such meaning gave proper due to the vitality of nature and of natural forces. Christian theology, to put it another way, was perceived as a tradition which froze the divine out of nature, shut God out of the natural world, and also made God inaccessible to humans, who are but creatures within that natural world. Yet what Schiller’s poem also serves to represent, is that a distrust of Christianity was also prevalent among Prussian intellectuals, artists, and writers in this period, and among successive schools of thought, the major representatives of which are well known. Following figures like Schiller and Goethe23—representing Weimar Classicism—for instance, the Schlegel brothers and the poet Novalis—representing Early German Romanticism, or Frühromantik (c. 1795–180)24—also became public critics of the established Church 22 See David Pugh, Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics (Montreal: ­McGill-Queens University Press, 1997), 195, and James Elkins and David Morgan eds., ­Re-Enchantment, (London: Routledge, 2011), 6–9. Charles Taylor refers to Schiller’s The Gods of Greece in his 1975 book Hegel, and names it “one of the best known statements” of a “longing nostalgia” for the mode of life common to ancient Greece, in which “the highest in man, his aspiration to form and expression and clarity was at one with his nature and with all of nature”. See Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 26. In his later work A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press: 2007), Taylor also offers us offers us a neat appraisal of that “modern” disjunct which Schiller defines between the realm of the mystical on the one hand, and realm of the rationally-decipherable on the other: “The great invention of the West was that of an immanent order in Nature, whose working could be systematically understood and explained on its own terms, leaving open the question whether this whole order had a deeper significance, and whether the “immanent” involved denying—or at least isolating and problematizing—any form of interpenetration between the things of Nature, on one hand, and “the supernatural” on the other, be this understood in terms of the one transcendent God, or gods or spirits, or magic forces, or whatever”. 23 Goethe’s 1797 poem Die Braut von Korinth also painted a negative picture of Christianity, as the cold and ascetically-minded bride intended for a warm and impassioned Hellenism. 24 The movement referred to as “German Romanticism” is notoriously difficult to define. Friederik Beiser has divided it into three periods with the following rough boundaries: Frühromantik (c. 1795–1802), Hochromantik (c. 1802–1815) and Spätromantik (c. 1815–1830).

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in their progressive Athenaeum journal (1798–1800), to which I shall return in Part 2. Far from rejecting the category of religion altogether, the response of these Frühromantiker to Enlightenment ideals, scientific materialism, and the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, was to try to preserve it by reinterpreting “religion” in conversation with Greek philosophy and the category of myth, and through their own contributions to aesthetic theory.25 The irreverent attitude that the Frühromantiker had towards Christianity as a historical tradition was thus one they developed as they articulated their own form of devotion to the Absolute: an aesthetic religion of art and poetry.26 As we can glimpse in the following fragment from Friedrich Schlegel, this was a religion that had no place for priests, pulpits, liturgical spaces, or indeed for the good news about the Incarnation—a singular divine Redeemer. The religion of these Early German Romantics, that is, was not shaped by the conviction that humans are mired

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(Friederick Beiser, “Early Romanticism and the Aufklärung”, in What is Enlightenment?, ed. Schmidt, 318). The nouns Romantik and Romantiker were inventions of the poet Novalis in 1978–9, as René Wellek explains in his article “The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History”, Comparative Literature 1 (Winter 1949): 1–23. Where I refer to the “Romantics” here and throughout the thesis, I do so with regard to the early phase of German Romanticism, to which Schleiermacher belonged. For a survey of the history and development of this particular group, with which we shall engage with further in parts two and three, see Ernst Behler, Frühromantik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1992), and Theodore Ziolkowski, Das Wunderjahr in Jena: Geist und Gesellschaft 1794/95 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998). For a appraisal of the group as a literary movement, see Oskar Walzel German Romanticism, trans. Alma Elsie Lussky (New York: Capricorn Books, 1966), and for the group’s important contribution to contemporary philosophy, see the collection of essays edited by Dalia Nassar: The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), including Manfred Frank’s contribution “What is Early German Romantic Philosophy?” (15–29). Richard Crouter has themed a collection of essays around his vision of Schleiermacher as a thinker “culturally located” between Enlightenment and Romanticism. See Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See Bernard Reardon’s study Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). We must qualify this point about the Romantics’ relationship to historical religious traditions by noting that that a number of the Early Romantics—including the Schlegels, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Ludwig Tieck—converted to Catholicism later in life. And indeed, even as young scholars they were impressed by the Catholic aesthetic, even if, as Siegmar Hellerich argues, they did not take on orthodox Catholic dogma. See Siegmar Hellerich, Religionizing, Romanizing Romantics: The Catholico-Christian Camouflage of the Early German Romantics: Wackenroder, Tieck, Novalis, Friedrich & August Wilhelm Schlegel (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1995); Thomas O’Meara, Romantic Idealism and Roman Catholicism: Schelling and the Theologians (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982); Alan Vincelette, Recent Catholic Philosophy: The Nineteenth Century (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2009).

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in a state of sin, alienated from God, and in need of redemption. And equally, the Romantics did not think that “access” to God in this life depended upon the work of a mediating figure like Jesus Christ, or indeed upon the work of the Church, conceived as a body that is bound to Christ as Mediator.27 Instead, and indicative of what Ernst Behler calls “a youthful revolutionary pantheism of humanity”,28 Schlegel indicates in the passage below that the reconciliation of Infinite and finite occurs when the finite realm itself—all aspects of temporal reality—mediates the eternal to human consciousness. In short, he writes: It’s only prejudice and presumption that maintains there is only a single mediator between God and man. For the perfect Christian—whom in this respect Spinoza29 probably resembles most—everything would ­really have to be a mediator.30 For his own part, however, Schiller clarified that he had not sought to attack the God of Protestantism specifically in Die Götter Griechenlandes. In response to complaints from his Pietist contemporaries, who were angry over what they took to be a misrepresentation of their faith,31 he suggested that that the dialectical progression he had depicted from nature as divine under Hellenism, to nature as dead in modernity, was better understood as an artistic 27

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See Ruth Richardson, “The Berlin Circle of Contributors to ‘Athenaeum’: Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, and Friedrich Schleiermacher” in 200 Jahre “Reden über die Religion’”. Akten des 1. Internationalen Kongresses der Schleiermacher-Gesellschaft Halle 14.-17. März 1999, ed. Ulrich Barth and Claus-Dieter Osthövener (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 838: “The goal of the religious life [for Schlegel] is to achieve the original state of wholeness that existed before the universe’s differentiation and bifurcation into dualities occurred”. Ernst Behler, “Origins of Romantic Aesthetics in Friedrich Schlegel”, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 7, no. 1, (Winter 1980), 48. As Frederick Beiser explains, lying behind Schlegel’s comment here is an idiosyncratic reading of Spinoza: “the Romantics profoundly reinterpreted Spinoza”, he writes, “and indeed in ways that would have made Benedictus turn in his grave”. For the Romantics, Beiser writes, “[r]ather than an atheist, Spinoza was “der Gott betrunkener Mensch” because he saw everything as a mode of the divine. This identification of the divine with nature seemed to be the only way to keep religion alive in an age of science”. See Beiser, The Romantic Imperative: The Concept of Early German Romanticism (Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 142. Fragment 243, in Friedrich Schlegel (trans. Peter Firchow), Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 194. See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 67. Wolfgang Frühwald analyses the debate generated by the poem, in “Die Auseinandersetzung um Schillers Gedicht ‘Die Götter Griechenlandes’”, Jahrbuch der Deutschen Schillergesellschaft 13 (1969): 251–271.

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manoeuvre than as a philosophical one.32 Despite Schiller’s protestations however, since his poem carries no mention of the Incarnation, or of liturgy, sacrament, or social teaching, it remains the case that his depiction of modern ­religion here—albeit a playful and poetic one—was also an emaciated one. It does not explore the very aspects of Christianity that Schleiermacher himself went on to emphasise. Again, I will come back to this last point in Part 3, when we return to study On Religion in more detail. For here, in his fifth speech, Schleiermacher offers a defence of the world’s historical religious traditions as the only proper and legitimate place for a religious believer to “dwell”, if she is to seek the Infinite through the finite. Schleiermacher too wanted to distance his Christianity from “Deism”. At this stage however, it is enough to stress that the position Schleiermacher had adopted by 1799 and would continue to develop into­ maturity, was that in Protestant Christianity fruitfully understood, it is possible to retain the ontological gap between transcendent God and finite humanity without also alienating God from the world and without deadening nature.33 In the next chapter, as we recommence our study of the young scholar, we shall also see how Schleiermacher’s autobiographical novella, To Cecilie, is a crucial source for us in this regard.

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In the Winter following the poem’s publication, Schiller explained to a friend: “The God that I placed into the shadow in ‘Die Götter Griechenlandes’ is not the god of the philosophers, nor the benevolent vision of the multitude [das wohltätige Traumbild des großen Haufens], but is a monstrosity, coalesced from many frail and lopsided notions. The gods of the Greeks, who I put into the light, are only the charming properties of Greek mythology compounded into one conception”. Friedrich Schiller to Christian Gottfried Körner, 25th December 1788. In Eberhard Haufe, ed. Schillers Werke. Nationalausgabe, Vol. 25 (Weimar: 1979), 167. Translation my own. Moreover in her Love and Death in Goethe: One and Double (NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2004), Ellis Dye likewise argues that Goethe’s Die Braut von Korinth should not be reduced to a simple anti-Christian polemic. (143). It is worth noting that Schleiermacher also denied that modern science was a driver for a “disenchanted world”. “Shall the tangle of history so unravel”, he complained, “that Christianity becomes identified with barbarism and science with unbelief?” (Lücke 61).

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Chapter 2

Schleiermacher’s Religious Doubt The totality of understanding is always a collective work.1

∵ 1

From Barby to Halle

To use the terms adopted by Schleiermacher’s editor, the Halle ­graduate ­suffered a “Krisis des religiösen Bewußtseins” during the late 1780s.2 This ­“crisis” began privately and internally, as Schleiermacher became i­ncreasingly ­dissatisfied with his life as a student of the Moravian seminary in Barby. ­Happy there in friendship, community, and in the lifestyle that full-time study ­afforded, he nevertheless found himself “striving in vain for supernatural ­experiences, and for that which in the phraseology of the Brethren was termed intercourse with Jesus”.3 Along with a friend, Schleiermacher managed to get hold of modern philosophical and literary works that were banned in the ­seminary c­ lassroom—texts from authors including Goethe, Wieland, Kant, and ­Herder—and would study these covertly, to make up for what he saw as deficiencies in the seminary’s own academic provision.4 Within two years of arriving, Schleiermacher found that his outlook differed so greatly from that of his teachers, that he could not in good conscience stand to remain a member of the community. He had lost his faith. In the Spring of 1787 he thus wrote a 1 Cri, 307. 2 Günter Meckenstock, Deterministische Ethik und kritische Theologie: Die Auseinandersetzung des frühen Schleiermacher mit Kant und Spinoza (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1988), 132–147. The biographical details I introduce in this section are derived from Meckenstock’s more detailed account of the period, as well as from Schleiermacher’s letters. 3 These words are taken from an autobiographical piece that Schleiermacher wrote for the ecclesiastical authorities, in advance of his ordination. See Life, Vol 1, 11. 4 In a letter to his father dated 1786, Schleiermacher wrote: “Except what we see in the scientific periodicals, we learn nothing about the objections, arguments, and discussions raised in the present day in regard to exegesis and d­ ogmatics. Even in the lectures delivered to us sufficient mention is not made of these matters, and yet knowledge of them is absolutely necessary for a future theologian. The fact that they fear to lay them before us, awakens in many minds a suspicion that the objections of the innovators must approve themselves to the intellect and be difficult to refute”. Life Vol. 1, 44. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_005 Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft

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difficult letter to his father, asking both for permission to leave the seminary and for the financial support to attend the University of Halle instead. “I c­ annot believe that He who called Himself the Son of man was the true, eternal God”, Schleiermacher wrote, before proceeding to deny the Moravian formulation of the doctrine of redemption: “I cannot believe that His death was a vicarious atonement, because He never expressly said so Himself; and I cannot believe it to have been necessary, because God, who evidently did not create men for perfection, but for the pursuit of it, cannot possibly intend to punish them eternally, because they have not attained it”.5 Remarkably, by the close of July 1790, Schleiermacher had successfully passed the examinations qualifying him to become a minister in the Prussian Reformed Church. Yet this success did not indicate a resolved faith, or that he had worked through his doubt. During the Winter of 1789–90, Schleiermacher went to live with his uncle in the quiet town of Drossen (now Ośno Lubuskie, in Poland). Removed from the stimulating environment of a large academic institution, and also from the company of friends, he became melancholic. At this time he wrote to his friend Carl Gustaf von Brinkmann, explaining that he had become fatigued and listless from studying “theological rubbish”. The ­examinations he was preparing for weighed on his mind, he wrote, as a “disgusting prospect”. They left him feeling ambivalent about his future in the Church.6 It was at some point during this period of doubt and disillusionment—­ either in late 1789 or 1790 (the manuscript itself carries no date)—that ­Schleiermacher worked on To Cecilie, a short roman à clef that he would never finish.7 Conceived as a series of letters written from one friend to another, this obscure little book carries only one voice, and in its linear, academic mode it reads more like an essay than a story. Indeed, whoever “Cecilie” is the reader never really finds out, for she features merely as the addressee of the unnamed protagonist’s thoughts. Through the latter’s letters, we learn of her distress and her need for consolation, in light of the fact that a poet friend of hers has ­recently lost his faith. Occasioned by her questions, and by a “rhapsody” on the subject by Selmar, the poet in question,8 Cecilie’s friend writes at length and in 5 Schleiermacher’s letter to his father, Jan 21, 1787, Briefe i, 42–43. Cited in Albert Blackwell, Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life, 7–8. 6 A letter to Brinkmann, Dec. 9., 1789. Briefe iv, 42. 7 It remained unpublished until 1984, when it was included in the first volume of the new ­critical edition of Schleiermacher’s works. 8 Schleiermacher’s translator Edwina Lawler notes (Cec 11, n.1) that his poet character was ­inspired by his close friend Carl Gustaf von Brinkmann (1764–1847). We mentioned ­Brinkmann above, as the recipient of one of Schleiermacher’s doleful letters. Later a famous poet, and in 1787 the author of a collection entitled Gedichte von Selmar, Brinkmann not only attended the Barby seminary with Schleiermacher but also left prematurely, as did S­ chleiermacher, to study Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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abstract terms on the subject of why and how a fanatical religious enthusiast [ein schwärmerischer Religionsenthusiast], who so willingly and rapturously displays his or her religious sentiment, might one day entirely abandon it.9 It is clear from these details that Schleiermacher drew deeply on his own experiences as a Herrnhuter to write this piece. We can, I venture, regard it as a useful indicator of his attitudes towards religion and the religious life at this stage.10 Yet I would also like to add a qualification about the text’s particular form here, because this form indicates that we should not take it as a definitive or sincere statement of Schleiermacher’s position on religion. For although the book is linear and essay-like, it is still the case that Schleiermacher elects not to write an academic treatise here—a form which by its very arrangement and convention signals that its author means to present a set of views that he is willing to defend and forward as his own. In contrast, Schleiermacher’s ­decision to produce an epistolary novella is an explicit move to suspend his own views—or to or put distance between the text and his opinions—since he develops a fictional persona to discuss the religious enthusiast. He develops a character, that is, who has a voice other to his own.11 Moreover, the form that Schleiermacher deploys here means that the views of his letter-writing protagonist are staged so that they represent a particular ­social context. What I mean by this, is that since its main character is located in 9

10

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literature and philosophy at Halle. See E.R. Meyer, Schleiermachers und C.G. von Brinkmanns Gang durch die Brüdergemeine (Leipzig: Friedrich Jansa, 1905). This term Schwärmerei (enthusiasm, or zealotry) was widely used at the turn of the ­nineteenth century and had negative and even vulgar connotations. In his Critique of ­Judgment, Kant ­depicts it as the direct opposite to rational reflection, describing it as a kind of delusion, whereby a person thinks they are “able to see something beyond all bounds of sensibility, i.e. to dream in accordance with principles (to rave with Reason) [mit Vernunft rasen]” (Critique of the P­ ower of Judgment, 156). As Anne Conrad explains: “Gemeint war mir ­“Schwärmerei” all das, was “wahrer Aufklärung” entgegensteht: sämtliche irrationalen religiösen ­Vorstellung, aber auch allgemein der “Hang zu dunkeln Begriffen” und die B ­ ereitschaft, der s­ ubjektive ­Empfindung Vorrang vor der nüchternen Vernunft zu geben”. (Rationalismus und ­Schwärmerei: Studien zur Religiosität und Sinndeutung in der Spätaufklärung, Hamburg: dobu Verlag, 2008, 8). Despite this function, the text very rarely appears in secondary literature. Tenzan Eaghll, for instance, has argued that scholarship has yet to adequately engage with the q­ uestion of how Pietism impacted Schleiermacher’s theology. Yet in the article Eaghll himself writes to address this question, he does not deal with To Cecilie. See “From Pietism to ­Romanticism: The Early Life of Friedrich Schleiermacher”. In The Pietist Impulse in ­Christianity, edited by William G. Carlson, Christopher Gehrz, Christian T. Collins Winn, and Eric Holst (Cambridge: James Clark & Co. Publishers, 2012), 107–119. By emphasising the role of form, I differ from Günter Meckenstock’s overview of the text (Deterministische Ethik, 132–147). Meckenstock describes the letter-writer’s critical ­development as “largely” Schleiermacher’s own development and is interested foremost in the text for its content, seemingly treating it as if it were a straightforward essay. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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the midst of a conversation, the content of To Cecilie has an occasionality and ­specificity to it. The writer’s words may address a general issue, but they are prompted by the concerns of a friend. They respond to the specific ­conditions of his local environment. Far from devaluing the piece, however, this ­conversational form is significant when it is taken together with the content, because the two ­combine in order to signal Schleiermacher’s sense that human knowledge itself is p ­ articular—that it is dependent upon conversation and reciprocal exchange. Before we return to look at the text of the novella itself, it is also worth ­considering the type of academic environment that Schleiermacher faced at Halle, and the differing influences that were operating on him at this stage. In the early years of the eighteenth century, the university had ­become a ­centre for Pietism, with its emphasis upon personal religious experience and its ­proclivity towards subverting appeals to traditional theological a­ uthorities. Yet  at this time Halle was also home to the mathematician and natural p ­ hilosopher ­Christian Wolff (1679–1754), whose understanding of a “­natural religion”12 which could be ­elaborated through reason was inspired by the ­rationalist ­philosophy of ­Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Unsurprisingly, this ­combination of Pietism and “Wolffianism” at Halle did not exist without ­tension. As ­Frederick Beiser notes, it was felt by the Pietists that “Leibniz’s and Wolff’s p ­ hilosophy, with its i­nsistence on strict demonstrative method, was little more than a ­halfway house on the fatal road to Spinozism”, Spinozism ­being s­ ynonymous at this time with atheism and fatalism. Opposition to Wolff’s brand of ­philosophy and theology, and his conviction that moral and religious truths can be ­discerned through reason aside from revelation and authority, came from H ­ alle ­theologian-philosophers including Joachim Lange (1670–1744) and August Hermann Franke (1663–1727). These men ­contended that the sole way to avoid its atheistic and d­ eterministic ­consequences was “to r­ ecognize the s­ overeignty of faith over reason, or revelation over demonstration”.13 The ­escalating ­academic drama came to a head in 1723, when Wolff’s detractors convinced King Frederick William i to ban Wollfian philosophy by royal ­decree, and to expel the man himself from his professorial chair, giving him twenty-four hours to leave Halle, and forty-eight to exit the Kingdom of Prussia.14

12 13 14

We note that in 1799, Schleiermacher explicitly rejected the idea of such a “natural” r­ eligion, referring to it in his speeches as “an indefinite, insufficient, and paltry idea that can never really exist by itself” (kga i.2, 298–299; OR 100). Friederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, 1987), 49. The tale is related in detail in Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), Chapter 29.

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Wolff would return as professor to Halle in 1740—and was received with much acclaim by colleagues and students, after his philosophy had been re-legitimated by the latter’s successor, King Frederick the Great. This ­ ­episode certainly brought Wolff himself “infamy before fame”.15 But what is ­noteworthy for our purposes, is that the unlikely combination of Wolffianism alongside ­Pietism at Halle from here on helped to engender, in the latter part of the c­ entury, the view among certain of its theologians that revelation and ­reason were compatible, that theological truth would not be contradicted by ­knowledge gained in the natural or philosophical sciences, and that divine ­existence is a rationally demonstrable truth.16 This shift towards ­rationalism in the late 1700s was helped along by the contribution of Sigmund Jacob ­Baumgarten, whose l­ectures reached a number of those students who would later become a­ cademics linked with theological rationalism and N ­ eology.17 As Thomas H ­ oward has noted, this latter term—Neology—was a loose ­label applied in a largely ­undefined and often polemical fashion.18 But the group of thinkers it was used to describe in the late eighteenth century were ­characterised, broadly, by their intention to highlight the harmony between ­revealed Christian teachings and natural human reason. They had a critical and reforming attitude to church doctrine, approached the study of biblical texts from a rigorously historical and scientific perspective, and also held the moral teachings espoused by the church (as opposed to the “accidental truths” one can find in scripture) to be the central plank of Christian faith. Johann Salomo Semler, a rationalist who taught biblical hermeneutics and church ­history at Halle from 1753 until his death in 1791, was one such thinker often ­associated with the Neologians.19 A student at Halle when Semler was still 15

Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern University (­ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 96. I am indebted to Howard’s excellent book for my description of Halle in these pages. 16 Wolff’s own definitions regarding the scope of theology and philosophy can be found in his Preliminary Discourse On Philosophy in General, trans. Richard J. Blackwell (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963). For analysis see Charles A. Corr, “The Existence of God, ­Natural ­Theology and Christian Wolff”, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4, no.2 (1973): 105–118. 17 A detailed appraisal of Baumgarten’s theological career in context can be found in ­Martin Schloemann, Sigmund Jacob Baumgarten: System und Geschichte der Theologie des ­Überganges zum Neuprotestantismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1974). 18 Howard, Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern University, 98. 19 For an introduction to Neologism and Pietism, then Rationalism and Supernaturalism as diverging theological movements and as the context for Schleiermacher’s own ­theological development, see also Chapters one and two of Vander Schal, Embedded Grace: Christ, History, and the Reign of God in Schleiermacher’s Dogmatics.

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teaching there, S­ chleiermacher would have encountered the former’s historical-critical a­ pproach to the i­nterpretation of scripture, and would have been exposed to his vision of academic theology as directed to the teaching of future pastors and theological educators, as o­ pposed to the cultivation of personal piety.20 By the time that the undergraduate Schleiermacher arrived at Halle, ­however, its philosophers and theologians were also deep in debate with the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The latter’s Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1781, and his Critique of Practical Reason followed in 1788. Kant had famously challenged the metaphysical dogmatism of the rationalists and had prompted the need to rethink the methodological lines of theological enquiry. That Schleiermacher as a precocious young student did not align himself ­directly with either Kant or with the rationalism of the Leibnizian-­Wolffian school but made some attempt to approach both as an outside critic, is ­evidenced by the comments he makes at the beginning of his essay On ­Freedom. Here, he depicts them as warring philosophical parties, both of whom claim to have found their own “universally-valid solution” to the problem of moral choice, free will, and obligation.21 Accordingly, there is scholarly consensus that the young Schleiermacher was able to retain many of the insights of the older scholastic tradition in thinking philosophically and ethically, at the same time as he recognised the epistemological ramifications of Kant’s ­critical ­philosophical project.22 A further figure influencing Schleiermacher at this point, and one who also helped him to navigate Kant’s philosophy and to arrive at this position between the old and the new, was his teacher Johann Augustus Eberhard—a rationalist philosopher who advanced a notoriously antagonistic interpretation of Kant’s work.23 Although, as Peter Grove has recently argued convincingly, it would be a mistake to suppose that Eberhard’s influence on 20 21 22 23

See Gottfried Hornig, Johann Salomo Semler (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996). kga i.1, 219; OF 3. See Meckenstock, kga i.1, xlvii, and Albert Blackwell’s introduction to On Freedom, trans. Albert L. Blackwell (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). v. Eilert Herms offers a thorough analysis of Eberhard’s impact upon Schleiermacher in his Herkunft, Entfaltung und erste Gestalt des Systems der Wissenschaften bei Schleiermacher (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1974). For an analysis of the quarrel between Eberhard and Kant, see Henry E. Allison, The Kant-Eberhard Controversy (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1973), which includes a translation of Kant’s polemical essay, directed at Eberhard, entitled On a Discovery According to which Any New Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One (1790). See also Immanuel Kant, Der Streit mit Johann August Eberhard, ed. Marion Lauschke, Manfred Zahn (Hamburg: Meiner, 1998); Manfred Gawlina, Das Medusenhaupt der Kritik. Die Kontroverse zwischen Immanuel Kant und Johann August Eberhard (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1996); Frederick Beiser,

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Schleiermacher would have negated or even neutralised the effect of Kant’s thought on the latter.24 Eberhard’s issue with Kant was that he took the latter’s work to be d­ erivative rather than innovative. He saw Leibniz as the original critic and careful ­examiner of reason’s limitations, even if Leibniz did not give r­ eason ­boundaries as strict as Kant did. Indeed, Eberhard was dissatisfied with Kant’s dictum that it is ­impossible for humans to know worldly objects in t­ hemselves, so that they are known only as they appear to the human mind. To ­Eberhard—as it has done for numerous critics and commentators since—this stance ­represented an ­extreme subjectivism, or a kind of anti-realism. Most ­importantly for our interest in Schleiermacher’s intellectual ­ ­ development however, Eberhard stressed the role of experience in the task of philosophy, and argued that the passions, h ­ uman affections, and bodily appetites are all c­onstitutive parts of knowledge acquisition. Part of what brought him to this position was his ­immersion in the work of British Moralist philosophers Anthony ­Ashley Cooper, the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), and Francis Hutcheson ­ ­(1694–1796). In contrast to Shaftesbury and his British c­ ontemporaries h ­ owever, Eberhard, ­following Wolff, was nonetheless adamant that the human soul is a unity, so that the passions are not merely ordered by human rationality, but are ­decipherable by, and operate in tune with reason.25 As we shall see below, this point, and Eberhard’s assertion that the practical task of observing human behaviour should be central to our questions about morality and religion, are echoed in the young Schleiermacher’s novella. 2

‘To Cecilie’

Cecilie’s friend (who I shall henceforth refer to as “Schleiermacher-writer”26) depicts the human soul as a unity of reason and feeling—as an undivided The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987). 24 Grove, Deutungen des Subjekts, 32. 25 Eberhard’s essay Allgemeine Theorie des Denkens und Empfindens (Berlin: C.F. Voss, 1776) is the key text on this issue. For an analysis, see Ben Crowe, “Fichte, Eberhard, and the Psychology of Religion”, Harvard Theological Review 104, no. 1 (2011): 93–110. 26 In light of Schleiermacher’s decision to write an epistolary novel rather than an ­academic treatise or essay, I want to underscore the distance that Schleiermacher himself has staged here between his own views as author, and those of the unnamed protagonist who is ­writing to Cecilie’s friend. To avoid cumbersome formulations, I have chosen the ­construction “Schleiermacher-writer”.

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f­ erment of active cognition and passive reception. In every individual p ­ erson, he ­explains, the respective quantity of these elements and the way they are ­arranged is of course different, so that depending on a person’s p ­ articular ­character or ­personality, varying levels of sentient power will be bonded ­together in their soul with varying degrees of thinking power. Consistent with the teachings of the ancient philosophical schools, he contends that if a soul is to achieve the unity for which it strives by its very nature, then this unity can only be achieved through the light of reason, since the heart is unstable, and feeling “can n ­ either rule nor judge itself”.27 And yet to allot the soul this h ­ ierarchy does not, for Schleiermacher-writer, mean devaluing feelings so as to render them base or sub-human. In order to flourish—that is, to be open to the prospect that there exists a “higher destiny” for the human spirit, ­whereby its purpose is ­understood in relation to the greater wholes of virtue and ­religion28—the h ­ uman heart must be given voice and listened to, as a seeker of beauty, love, joy.29 Schleiermacher-writer’s conviction about the soul’s unity, and the “hand” of reason the feelings must accept in order to maintain this unity,30 is ­fundamental to his critique of what he refers to as der schwärmerischer ­Religionsenthusiasmus. Plotting out for Cecilie’s benefit the likely journey of a religious enthusiast—one that will end in skepticism and ­disillusionment— he explains that the sort of person likely to suffer such a journey will have a soul that is capable of both of great love and of great contemplation. A soul, he ­explains, which unites a “high degree of receptivity in feeling, with a high ­degree of consciousness of the rational principle”. Having suggested that ­humans in general do not begin their lives as fully rational agents but are ­increasingly able to reflect and to understand themselves as they emerge out from an original, “animal” level of engagement with the world,31 he claims that in youth, as soon as they are capable of individual expression, this kind of soul will be dominated by their feelings. And without the guiding light of reason, at this young age they will work up “a great love for strong impressions”.32 In

27 28 29 30 31 32

kga i.1, 209–211; Cec 28–29. kga i.1, 195; Cec 15: “You, my dear, will not fail to recognise the two points from which alone the whole of the human soul can be surveyed and ordered: the eternal and sublime ideas of virtue and religion”. The protagonist uses the terms “heart” [Herz] and “feeling” [Gefühl interchangeably. kga i.1, 209; Cec 28. kga i.1, 194; Cec 14: Schleiermacher refers to “the first passage beyond the limits of animal life into the world of understanding”. kga i.1, 201; Cec 20.

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search for purpose and meaning, the prospect of submitting themselves to the religious life thus becomes irresistible, given that in religion, he writes: one sees a purpose to one’s existence and its interconnectedness with the entire world. Here one sees a guideline for all one’s actions and all the activities of one’s knowing and of one’s sensibility. Here, furthermore, one sees their connection, which must not be be sought deep within its ultimate grounds but offers itself easily and of itself to understanding. This comprises everything one was seeking. Thus it is not surprising if one clings to religion with the complete enthusiasm [Begeisterung] of a heart finally finding satisfaction [Befriedigung].33 The image Schleiermacher-writer generates here of enthusiastic religious belief, is that it germinates through strong feeling and through the force of one’s own will, and becomes simple and all-consuming. Formed on the level of the individual, such a faith, we gather, is private and inward-focussed. It does not rely upon mediating institutions, structures, practices or priests, and cannot be bolstered by external “evidence” which can be formally assessed or analysed. The perception the enthusiast has of his “interconnectedness” with the world is thus in this case superficial. These are connections he has plotted and constructed through his own individual gaze. Directed from heaven, his heart is fully consumed by heaven, and this keeps him from living in the world, and from participating in human dialogue, or being confronted by human e­ ncounter. Spirituality is conceived and defined here as a personal vocation; one which overlooks human bonds and devalues shared labour. Indeed, in order to take up such a life and such a perspective, we read: One now dedicates all one’s actions to religion; at each ventured step one looks at religion with fond timidity; and with constantly increasing renunciation one offers up to religion, on its incense altars, every single joy of life that religion itself does not immediately proffer.34 The suggestion here, in sum, is that a dualistic and even sectarian impulse is integral to the life of a religious Schwärmer who, chasing religion as a set

33 34

kga i.1, 196; Cec 16. kga i.1, 196; Cec 16.

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of high ideals attached to “noble social and aesthetic feelings”,35 gives up ­mediating material pleasures, and looks immediately to heaven in order to find God. The religious enthusiast is therefore cast as an extreme figure in To ­Cecilie.36 It is this dwelling at the extremes which in Schleiermacher-writer’s e­ stimation will precipitate a loss of faith in those like the poet Selmar, whose gift for ­rational investigation is just as great and as quick as his capacity to feel. I­ ndeed, Schleiermacher-writer indicates that if such a person’s religious faith is to be sustainable, and if it is to function as an integrative narrative for their whole life, then it cannot be sundered from rational enquiry, or sequestered from human culture and society. For when religion ignores reason, and when it ­eschews the great totality of human and natural relations within which the individual is involved, then it builds itself up upon wholly individualistic and idealistic grounds, excepting itself from the realm of that which can be shared, debated and incarnated. This is why faith begins to falter. As the enthusiast interrogates his framework for understanding divine action in the world, and as he reflects on the nature of his own relationship with the divine, he discerns a series of conflicts and contradictions among the teachings he has taken on in haste. In the end, Schleiermacher-writer explains: The process comes so far that that total collection [Sammlung] of ­opinions and doctrines that consisted of such dissimilar parts and that hitherto had directed all judgments, had determined all sensations, and as much as was possible had underlain all actions will be robbed of its sacred position and delivered to the strict examination [Besichtigung] of secular reason … what formerly bonded all its feelings together is sundered, and without support this large whole collapses into nothing but scattered, insignificant parts [zerstreute unansehnliche Theile] none of

35 36

kga i.1 200–201; Cec 20. It’s significant that this extreme figure matches the sort of Christian that Hegel imagined Schleiermacher to be depicting in his mature work, Christian Faith. Faced with Schleiermacher’s description of piety as a “feeling of absolute dependence”, Hegel’s caustic proposal in 1822 was that “a dog would be the best Christian, for it possesses this in the highest degree and lives mainly in this feeling”. He added that “The dog also has feelings of redemption when its hunger is appeased by a bone”. G.W.F. Hegel, “Vorrede zu Hinrichs Religionsphilosophie”, Sämmtliche Werke, ed., H. Glockner (Stuttgart, 1930), xx, 19. Cited in Frederick G. Weiss, ed., Beyond Epistemology: New Studies in the Philosophy of Hegel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 238.

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which can any longer achieve the effect [Wirkung] it was capable of engendering in its previous connection.37 What Schleiermacher-writer portrays here is no simple and inevitable ­triumph of secular scientific reason over religion, however. As he narrates the ­continued plight of the enthusiast-turned-doubter, he explains that for such a ­character, whose soul unites a great capacity for feeling with a great capacity for ­contemplation, “religion must ever remain the most important object of one’s reflections and of one’s self-gratification”. Only the way that such a person thinks and feels concerning religion must change, he adds. It’s at this point in his ­correspondence that Schleiermacher-writer evokes Kantian moral philosophy. He explains that having abandoned enthusiasm and having r­ecognised the ­errors and contradictions in his judgment, the doubter will turn to ­consider the very structures of his knowledge, and to “anticipate all its corruption ­[Verderbniß] in its initial grounding”. And as he does so, he will “naturally” ­proceed to embrace that which both his reason and his heart honour, namely the universal moral laws which bind and shape his existence—“the necessity of which is as ­obvious to such a person as it could but ever be”. Behind these moral laws, Schleiermacher-writer explains, and undergirding them as “two immovable rocks”, are the “sublime ideas” of God and eternal life.38 And so emerging from enthusiasm, and into the “more beautiful area of philosophy”,39 the doubter now comes to understand religion within a moral framework, which is bound and grounded in the presuppositions of the intellect. Here, pure reason postulates a Supreme Being—God becomes a regulative category for the moral laws, and a kind of ­Divine Guarantor for human flourishing. And the heart also acquiesces to this ruling of reason, Schleiermacher-writer continues, since it: gives one to feel that even if the binding force attached to virtue were grounded solely in the nature of reason independent of everything else, this arrangement would remain only a fault in nature and a sad necessity 37 38

39

kga i.1, 206–207; Cec 25. kga i.1, 211; Cec 29–30. This passage echoes Kant’s section “On the Ideal of the H ­ ighest Good as a Ground for the Determination of the Ultimate End of Pure Reason”, in CPu, 680. (A811/B839): “Only in the ideal of the highest original good can pure reason find the ground of the practically necessary connection of both elements of the highest ­derived good, namely of an intelligible, i.e. moral world…Thus God and a future life are two ­presuppositions that are not to be separated from the obligation that pure reason ­imposes on us in accordance with principles of that very same reason”. kga i.1, 212; Cec, 31.

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if there were no higher destiny for the human spirit and if the existence of a Supreme Being did not guarantee us the wisdom and concealed harmony of this constitution of our nature.40 Schleiermacher-writer thus describes how an intelligent former Schwärmer is likely to respond to his past by adopting a religion of morality. A type of ­“religion”, that is, which Schleiermacher himself would proceed to condemn in 1799 as both deistic and anthropocentric.41 And yet the above passage, which explains how such a person’s heart would still aspire to a “higher” destiny for the human spirit, signals that this moral standpoint is not the final destination for the doubting character laid out so carefully by Schleiermacher-writer. Indeed, describing him as a “pious pilgrim”, Schleiermacher-writer explains to Cecilie that this character has merely found in philosophy “a lovely field…. [which] refreshes and reinvigorates [him] and strengthens [him] for new wanderings and new hardships”.42 This religion of morals is only a “temporary resting point”, he presses, before challenging Cecilie to judge for herself what this pilgrim’s continued path will be. To Cecilie’s account of a lapsed religious enthusiast, including his journey and destination, is thus open-ended. The text highlights the ­precariousness of judgment, stresses the role of feeling in a person’s life path, suggests that knowledge is social, and that perspectives are built up over time. It does this by subverting the idea that morals, grounded in the work of ­independent ­reason, can provide a person with their religion or with a ­coherent and good portrait of God. But it also enables these points through its e­ pistolary form, since Schleiermacher-writer’s final gesture is to offer Cecilie the power of judgment over the narrative that he has spun. In addition to these points about openness and sociability however, Schleiermacher-writer also makes a series of specific qualifications about the formation of sound and ­sustainable religious faith, which deserve attention insofar as they suggest human character is something defined through time and informed by past decisions and actions. Having d­ ismantled religious enthusiasm, he explains that a kind of practical ­judgment which interrogates the soul and its spiritual impulses, and which thus also helps the soul find a fruitful path to follow, is integral to the religious life. In the following passage, Schleiermacher-writer argues

40 kga i.1, 211; Cec 30. 41 See kga i.2, 211–212; OR 23. We shall return to discuss this in Part 3. 42 kga i.1, 212; Cec 31.

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that truth-seeking cannot merely involve the entirely passive reception of ­teachings from a tradition or body. Unless doctrines are considered and grappled with as ­interconnected and consistent statements, he ventures— unless they are rightly treated, we suppose, as the summit consensus ­arising from long debate—then there will be nothing to bind the individual to those things that he claims to believe. R ­ eligious enthusiasm, which “clings to religion”, renders doctrines merely as a total system of thought that is external to a believer, and a system that she might drop as swiftly as she took it up. We read: [C]onsider the person who had accepted a certain system of ­doctrinal ­opinions [Lehrmeinungen] not as coordinated inferences ­[gemeinschaftliche Folgen] from simple principles, but as a collection of individual propositions, independent but assembled under certain ­common titles. After rejecting the system because these individual ­propositions no longer appear to be in accord, this person can easily come to the thought that it is impossible to find a few simple viewpoints for so many objects and that there may well be truths, but no truth.43 Schleiermacher-writer thus describes the formation of religious belief as a ­process which is intimately tied to a person’s intellectual development and their patterns of thinking and living. Moreover, the idea that an individual is formed and redirected through practical reasoning—the process of reflecting and building on one’s actions and experiences—is compounded elsewhere in the text, as he refers to the process of “healing” [die Heilung]44 that must take place in the soul, after a person has submitted, with fervour and in haste, to a series of external rules or guidelines that they have since come to reject. What is emerging here then, is the simple notion that if a person’s faith is to be strong and well supported, then it cannot be abstracted from that person’s ever-developing rational and cultural identity. Humans, we suppose, are bound to their place in the world, and to the confines of our particular relationships, but such bonds need not be shed if one is to be close to God. And whereas 43

44

kga i.1, 209, Cec 28. See also kga i.1, 204, Cec 22–23: “reason is concerned not simply about coordinating its pieces of information but especially about showing their connection to sensations and actions. Therefore, any knowledge that is merely theoretical is, as a rule, considered inferior to practical knowledge and to knowledge more closely connected with that”. kga i.1, 206, Cec 25.

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this last point is not stressed in the text’s content, with its deistic rendition of religion (and a deism, indeed, that appears particularly emaciated, when juxtaposed with the theology of immanence later found in On Religion) it is nonetheless gestured to by the text’s epistolatory form. Again, we can only talk about the beginnings of a point being made here, because the work does not properly represent a dialogic exchange. After all, the eponymous “Cecilie” is not given a voice, much less an opinion of her own to share. And yet, the form does enough here to indicate that questions about God, about the worth of religion, and about life’s meaning cannot be asked and answered fruitfully at the level of the individual alone. In other words, this very early piece of Schleiermacher’s conveys the idea that no fruitful kind of religious belief is fostered solely in the pure confines of individual consciousness, because what one knows and feels, as well as what one needs for knowing and feeling, emerge through time, and are given from outside, in exchange with the world and its creatures. The literary form Schleiermacher adopts here, with which he incorporates an openness and precariousness into the text, gestures to the ­unpredictability of human life. It gestures to the need for humans—being inherently social creatures, passive as well as active—to leave themselves open to surprise. And it is with this point that we can further qualify the “crisis of religious consciousness” that Schleiermacher suffered in this period. For the young Schleiermacher’s doubt, as well as the doubt experienced by the poet Selmar as this is depicted in To Cecilie, was not a methodological doubt like that of Cartesian design. For Descartes, that is, the ability to doubt is a mechanism through which the mind seeks epistemic certainty. The tool of an abstract, theoretical reason, doubt serves him as a means of purification—a procedure through which the philosopher can establish precisely that which cannot be questioned. Just as To Cecilie ends with an impasse, however, where we are invited to consider where the “pious pilgrim” will wander next “after suffering long on thorny detours” with no certain destination,45 Schleiermacher’s own doubt, as he explained it in his correspondence and his autobiographical notes, is no such purificatory exercise. It is better understood as a state of mind and behaviour, indicating his unease with the religious framework that the Moravians had offered him for perceiving and inhabiting the world. As he searched for an answer to his questions on religion, Schleiermacher did not seek a scientific foundation for his belief—an absolute certainty or proof from which he could build “upwards”. Instead, as he grappled with and critiqued religious enthusiasm, and 45

kga i.1, 212; Cec 30.

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became disillusioned with the piety of the Moravians, he became convinced of the temporal, historical and social nature of human development. Schleiermacher’s treatment of religion and rationality leave the reader with the impression that if religion is to flourish, then it must not isolate itself from reason or rational enquiry, nor sunder the self from the world, in one’s devotion to the divine. In other words, Schleiermacher’s early writings here resist the idea that religion is internalised and private.

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Chapter 3

Quarrels with Kant on Freedom 1

Necessity, Freedom, and Human Identity

In this chapter I will focus on Schleiermacher’s essay1 On Freedom ­(1790–1792)— an early ethical text which like To Cecilie he did not publish or even finish. Without title, it remained out of circulation until 1870, when Wilhelm ­Dilthey featured an abridged version of it in his Leben Schleiermachers. In what ­follows I will discuss Schleiermacher’s portrayal of human identity in this ­essay; a ­portrait which emerges through his treatment of human freedom, ethical ­responsibility, and the nature of human desiring.2 I will demonstrate that Schleiermacher criticises images of the self which cast it as a static, ­bounded, unit of conscious activity over against the world, and that he proposes ­instead that human personality emerges over the course of time. A person’s actions and decisions are anchored in previous judgments and impressions, ­Schleiermacher argues—they are grounded in the thoughts, conceptions, “representation” or “imaginings” [die Vorstellungen] that a person has available to them in the present moment through “the state and interrelations of all of the soul’s faculties [die Seelenvermögen]”.3 Schleiermacher refers to this standpoint—his conviction that human ­action is grounded in complex chains of reasoning and desiring—as his ­“doctrine of necessity” [Notwendigkeit]. This is slippery terminology, as too is the ­description offered by a number of commentators, that Schleiermacher holds to a type of “psychological determinism”.4 My own contention is that we can 1 Schleiermacher refers to this piece as a “philosophical rhapsody” [philosophischer Rhapsodie], and the first of a “collection” of three such rhapsodies. kga i.1, 219; OF 3. The remaining ones, which he also failed to publish, dealt with the subjects of the Highest Good and the Worth of Life. 2 For a careful analysis of On Freedom, which analyses Schleiermacher’s views about moral ­accountability, see Jeffrey C. Kinlaw, “Freedom and Moral Agency in the Young ­Schleiermacher”, The Review of Metaphysics 58, no. 4 (Jun., 2005): 843–869. Jacqueline Mariña has produced the most recent and thorough analysis of Schleiermacher’s early critique of Kant in A ­ nglophone literature, in her Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher. In Chapter one, she identifies the technical differences between the theories of freedom proposed by the two philosophers. See also Albert Blackwell’s account in his Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life, 21–46. 3 kga i.1, 237–238; OF 22. 4 See, for example, Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order, 42–48, and Otto Pfleiderer, The Development of Rational Theology in Germany Since Kant: And Its Progress in Great Britain Since 1825 (Oxford/New York: Routledge, 2014), 45. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_006 Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft

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most helpfully describe Schleiermacher’s position in this piece as a ­rejection of the notion that human actions can ever be carte blanche ­responses to a given situation, actions generated, that is, by immediate or absolutely new ideas or ­impressions. For although Schleiermacher does not in p ­ rinciple d­ ispute this label of “determinism”, and although he even concedes the l­ikelihood that his readers will apply it to him, he stipulates nevertheless that it is too broad and vague a classification.5 He also requests that attention be paid to the specific content of his views, which may not match those of other so-called “determinists”. The qualifications that Schleiermacher attaches to this term are significant. Together with the rest of his text, they indicate his aversion to the ­determinism that he himself associated with Enlightenment rationalists of the early eighteenth century, like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and his disciple Christian Wolff (1679–1754)—who, we remember, was dismissed from his Halle chair in 1723 under charges of atheism and fatalism.6 The assumption behind such deterministic philosophy, which Schleiermacher encountered at Halle, is that human behaviour can be mapped from an “objective” standpoint, and that it follows traceable patterns which flow necessarily, according to natural laws. Kant’s critical philosophy—famous for its assault on eighteenth-century objectivism, and the limits it put upon rational enquiry—played a vital role in helping Schleiermacher to form his own response to this type of determinism.7 Yet Schleiermacher also sought to establish a critical distance from Kant in this particular essay. As we have seen, he claims in the text’s ­introduction that both the “deterministic solution of the Leibniz-Wolff school” and the “newer ­solution contained in the Critique of Pure Reason” fail to provide ­universally-valid resolutions to the issue of whether and to what extent ­humans are free agents.8 Since he teaches in On Freedom that human ­character is ­established through the careful cultivation of habits and discipline, and

5 kga i.1, 244; OF 29. 6 The events are described in Thomas Saine, “Who’s afraid of Christian Wolff?”, in Anticipations of the Enlightenment, eds. A.C. Kors and P. Korshin (Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 1987) 102–133. 7 For a neat assessment of how Schleiermacher understood his perspective to differ from Enlightenment”rationalist philosophers, see Tim Clancy, “Schleiermacher’s Practical Determinism”, Schleiermacher’s “To Cecilie”, and Other Writings By and About Schleiermacher, ed. Ruth Drucilla Richardson, A Publication of New Atheneum/Neues Athenaeum 6 (Lewiston/ Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 135–141. Henry E. Allison analyses Kant’s critique of the compatibilist views of Leibniz and Hume in the second chapter of his Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 8 kga i.1, 219; OF 3. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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a­ rgues too that being ­ethically responsible requires a person to reflect on the objects and ordering of their desires, it becomes clear—as Jeffrey Kinlaw and Brent Sockness have already remarked9—that Schleiermacher’s account of moral accountability and human agency is indebted to the ancient tradition of virtue ethics, with its attention to the development of personal character. In sum, and negotiating these different philosophical strands, we can ­determine that the position Schleiermacher carves out for himself in this text is a kind of compatibilist one. Schleiermacher does not refer to himself in this way, which means I am reluctant to continue to employ the term or to use it systematically in my own analysis. Here, however, it functions as an expedient to reflect Schleiermacher’s view that when describing human behaviour, we need not choose absolutely between these terms “freedom” and “determinism”. For both terms must be kept in view, he thinks, if we are to maintain a coherent moral philosophical framework. Being accountable for my actions does not only mean that I have the ability to choose and deliberate—that I am a “free” agent. It also means that the quality of my action says something about my character, as this emerges through time, and that my actions are in a significant sense determined or shaped by what has gone before. It is Schleiermacher’s conviction about the compatibility of freedom and determinism as categories applied to human action, which precipitates his specific quarrel with Kant’s definition of transcendental freedom, as the ­latter develops this in his critical philosophy. As I will explain below, Schleiermacher’s concern was that Kant’s notion of transcendental freedom encourages images of human identity whereby a person is split apart and sundered from the world, and the intellect splintered away from the feelings and the senses. In his response to Kant, as well as his account of the relationship between human desire and human action, Schleiermacher stresses 9 Jeffery C. Kinlaw reads Schleiermacher’s understanding of the determining grounds for ­human action in terms of Aristotle’s habitus, and claims that “Aristotle clearly seems to be the inspiration for Schleiermacher’s account [of how to assess moral worth]. See “Freedom and Moral Agency in the Young Schleiermacher”, 860. In his article “Was Schleiermacher a Virtue Ethicist? Tugend and Bildung in the Early Ethical Writings”, Brent Sockness expounds On Freedom alongside Schleiermacher’s other “rhapsodies” On the Value of Life, and On the Highest Good, to argue that these pieces demonstrate his attention to virtue rather than duty and law as the foundation of his moral philosophy. He claims that Schleiermacher’s “early writings are consistently agent-focussed… they develop an elaborate moral ­psychology to explain human deliberation, choice, and agency… the substantive conception of the human agent that results is an integrated and cumulative, even predictable, self moved by desire…” See Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte/Journal for the History of Modern Theology 8 (2001): 30.

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the unity of the human soul. Moreover, he begins—although it must be stressed that this is only an early and tentative beginning—to articulate an ethical anthropology that roots a person in language, time, and place. 2

Schleiermacher’s Kant and the Otherworldly Subject

My object here is not to assess the quality or correctness of Schleiermacher’s understanding of Kant per se. This is especially because in On Freedom, ­Schleiermacher gives a narrow view of Kant’s theory of freedom, since he deals merely with selected passages from his first critique, neglecting to trace out Kant’s reasoning at length. And indeed, in their analyses of his early work, commentators including Jessica N. Berry, Albert Blackwell, and Jacqueline Mariña have attested that the young Schleiermacher does not do justice to the complexity of Kant’s transcendental philosophy.10 My primary concern in this section of the chapter, then, is rather to assess what Schleiermacher’s response to Kant (however justified) reveals about Schleiermacher’s own perspective on human identity. Given the narrowness of the material that Schleiermacher assesses in On Freedom, I want to flesh out our understanding of how he treats Kant by ­turning to a brief set of notes that he made on the Critique of ­Practical ­Reason. These notes, which scholars date to the first months of 1789,11 amount merely to a couple of sides of blunt prose and aphorisms, and were intended only for the author’s own use.12 Their preliminary nature does not, ­however, devalue them as a source for gauging Schleiermacher’s ­priorities and ­preoccupations, since Schleiermacher writes candidly about Kant’s s­econd critique and offers immediate comment on a few specific ­passages. We see this much in his opening note, for instance, the tone of which ­suggests blank incredulity:

10

11 12

See for instance Jessica N. Berry, “The Burden of Antiquity”, The Oxford Handbook of G ­ erman Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century, 764; Jacqueline Mariña, “A Critical-Interpretive Analysis of Some Early Writings by Schleiermacher on Kant’s Views of Human Nature and Freedom (1789–1799)”, New Athenaeum/Neues Athenaeum 5,1998: 22; Albert Blackwell’s introduction to his translation of On Freedom (1992). kga i.1, xlii. That Julia Lamm refers to these brief notes as an “essay” (“The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefühl, 1788–1794”, 78) attests the lack of attention given to the form of Schleiermacher’s work.

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Transcendental freedom: Apparently a power of causality having no ­necessary connection with what precedes. Thus, I have certainly not misunderstood him.13 As Jacqueline Mariña has already explained in her introduction to these notes,14 Schleiermacher’s dubiety here heralds his concern that Kant’s d­ epiction of moral agents as transcendentally free—‘free’ in the sense that they can choose otherwise, they can initiate a state of affairs without being bound by their previous thoughts, ideas, chains of reasoning or acting—simply does not cohere with the experience human agents have of themselves as phenomena in the midst of the world, subject to the demands and conditions of their worldly environment.15 The context in which Kant postulates such transcendental freedom as an enabling concept within his moral philosophy is well known. In his ­second critique, and in his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant ­posits ­transcendental freedom in tandem with his notion of the categorical ­imperative [der kategorischer Imperativ], the all-embracing command which he establishes as the rationally-discernible and universal source of moral duty. According to what Kant describes as its “universal formula”, the c­ ategorical ­imperative not only holds every adult human individual accountable as a ­rational, d­ iscerning moral subject. It also binds all people to a general and ­uncompromising d­ emand that there exist a series of moral principles which are ends in t­ hemselves, and which must therefore be obeyed on all occasions and in all situations. The categorical imperative, Kant explains, calls every p ­ erson to “act on the maxim which can at the same time be made a universal law”.16 13

kga i.1, 129; Notes 25: “[T]ranscendentale Freiheit. Also offenbar ein Vermögen der ­Causalität ohne nothwendigen Zusammenhang mit dem vorhergehenden. Ich habe ihn also gewiß nicht mißverstanden”. 14 Jacqueline Mariña, “Schleiermacher’s Notes on Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason”, ­Schleiermacher on Workings of the Knowing Mind, New Translations, Resources, and Understandings, ed. Ruth Drucilla Richardson, A Publication of New Atheneum/Neues Atheneum, Vol 5 (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998), 20–24. 15 Although Schleiermacher does not draw attention to this either in his Notes, or in On ­Freedom, Kant’s description of how humans come to know things gave priority to experience [Erfahrung], and to sensory apprehension of objects. Indeed in 1783, Kant claimed that he understood his own critical idealism to be “governed and determined throughout” by the following basic principle: “all knowledge of things, from the bare pure understanding, or pure reason, is nothing but sheer illusion, and truth is only in experience”. See Kant, Prolegomena zu einen jeden Künftige Metaphysik, ed. Karl Vorländer (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1920), 151. 16 Kant, The Moral Law, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H.J Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 116. For a comprehensive list of the numerous, different ways in which

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As such, those maxims deemed necessary under the categorical i­ mperative— such as “do not lie”, or “do not commit fraud”—do not shift or change according to who is fulfilling them, or where they are fulfilled. These maxims are not modified by an individual’s particular cultural, socio-economic and political environment, and nor do they address a person according to his or her discrete personality traits, habits, or characteristics. They are universal and absolute. This then, in brief and crude retelling, is the context within which Kant is prompted to posit transcendental freedom. For in the course of ­describing what is required of humans in order that they are to be morally responsible agents, able to fulfil the demands of this universal moral law, Kant ­reasons that the agent’s will to act—and the way in which they are impelled to do that which is morally right—cannot be contingent upon any external, s­ patio-temporally given factors or conditions.17 If the will is to be morally r­ esponsible, it ­cannot be bound by appetite, or by materially-determined d­ esire. As such, Kant states that freedom in this absolute sense must be the condition of moral law. The autonomy of the will, he asserts in his Groundwork, is the “supreme ­principle of morality”. In this context however, Kant does not simply define freedom a­ ccording to this “negative” sense, according to which the will enjoys an ­absence of constraint. He also understands the will to be free in a ­“positive” sense, in that it is the author and legislator of its own law.18 What this means is that in Kant’s view, the very obligation resting on rational agents to obey the moral law is grounded in the capacity that these same rational agents have to govern themselves. Moral persons, in Kant’s rendering, impose the laws of r­eason on their actions. They legislate the moral law itself. In his second ­critique, Kant will admit that transcendental freedom is an idea whose reality in ­objective terms cannot be proven or assured through speculative r­ eason. It is also ­impossible to explain in practice how such freedom works, or to ­establish it in human existence. And yet, he contends that its reality is ­nevertheless “proved by an apodictic law of practical reason”.19 At this stage in his career (as was evidenced in our discussion of To ­Cecilie) Schleiermacher emulates Kant’s understanding of moral o­ bligation i­nsofar

17 18 19

Kant expresses this formula across his corpus, see Roger J. Sullivan, Immanuel Kant’s ­Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 346. “A rule is objectively and universally valid only when it holds without the contingent subjective conditions that distinguish one rational being from another”. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (5:21). For a detailed analysis and exposition of Kant’s understanding of autonomy as a ­legislative capacity, see Andrews Reath, Agency and Autonomy in Kant’s Moral Theory: ­Selected ­Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 173–195. GS v, 3–4; CPr 3–4.

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as he imagines this in terms of a subject’s relation to moral laws—in r­ elation to a series, that is, of rationally discernible maxims, which are ­exterior prompts and guidelines for human agents. It is nevertheless ­unclear from his texts what Schleiermacher understands the precise content or nature of these laws to be. Nor does he clarify how he conceives of the relation ­between reason and moral law. Indeed, he neglects to speak ­constructively or ­systematically on this ­issue either in these notes on the second c­ritique or in On Freedom.20 With the disbelief and puzzlement that he expresses in the above statement about transcendental freedom, h ­ owever, ­Schleiermacher begins to articulate his dispute with Kant.21 As Julia Lamm has summarised: This terse statement captures the central thrust of Schleiermacher’s ­criticism of Kant: by essentially removing freedom and will from the sphere of our practical experience (that is to say, from the sphere of the natural causal connection) and assigning it to some noumenal realm, Kant both violated his own critical philosophy and failed to explain the motivating ground of morality. In the next section of these jottings, Schleiermacher becomes more ­explicit about his unwillingness not only to regard transcendental freedom as a ­requirement for fulfilling the demands of the moral law, but also to posit it as a condition which enables humans to have this law in their sights as w ­ illing and desiring agents. Schleiermacher draws attention here to a m ­ oment at the beginning of the second critique, where Kant concedes the following ­objection to his practical philosophy: that it involves the “paradoxical demand to ­regard one’s self, as subject to freedom, as noumenon, and yet from the point of view of nature to think of one’s self as a phenomenon in one’s own empirical consciousness”.22 To put it another way, Kant concedes that it is ­philosophically problematic to treat the human will as an initiating causality, or unconditioned first cause, when in other respects he stresses that humans

20 In On Freedom Schleiermacher makes the following enigmatic statement: “Since ­obligation presupposes only a certain relation of the subject, thought of as active, to the law, what matters is not that all agree on the content of the law but only that all agree on the idea of the law” (kga i.1, 228–229; OF 13–14). 21 Julia Lamm, “The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefühl, 1788–1794”, 78. See also J­ effrey C. Kinlaw, “Schleiermacher found transcendental freedom to be an indefensible exception to causation and to our interconnectedness with the natural world”. (‘Freedom and Moral Agency in the Young Schleiermacher’, 843.). 22 GS v, 6; CPr, 6.

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should be treated as agents which fully participate in, and are subject to, the push and pull of their natural and material environment.23 Schleiermacher does not comment further on this moment in Kant’s work, or his own charge against Kant, except to say that he would like to know “what more definite concept of freedom” Kant would put forward in order to make his theory more plausible.24 Indeed, for the remainder of his notes ­Schleiermacher is more preoccupied with an issue subordinate to this p ­ erceived split in Kant’s philosophy between the phenomenal and the n ­ oumenal, namely the q­ uestion of how the moral law is able to motivate the human will, given that the l­ atter is conditioned through the senses. It is at this juncture that Schleiermacher makes another blunt aside, and one which confirms his overall ­impression of Kant’s moral philosophy. “The concept of [transcendental] freedom of ­speculative reason”, he writes, “is indispensable only for an otherworldly subject”.25 The indictment is thus served: in Schleiermacher’s view, Kantian morality does not successfully refer or relate to an actual living breathing h ­ uman self. It fails to situate a person in the reality of her situation within the world and its ­communities or to take proper account of her being as ­passionate as much as she is rational. Schleiermacher’s notes on Kant’s second critique, which criticise the latter for premising moral fortitude on transcendental freedom26—a liberty that ­discounts a person’s previous deeds and circumstances and is unconditioned by the shape of their heart and soul—thus support the view that Schleiermacher anchors human identity in place, in society, and in what has gone before. And in his own conception of freedom, we also see Schleiermacher seeking to incorporate rather than overcome this teaching about human particularity. 23

24 25 26

See also KPu 486, (B476): “The transcendental idea of freedom is far from constituting the whole content of the psychological concept of that name, which is for the most part empirical, but constitutes only that of the absolute spontaneity of an action, as the real ground of its imputability; but this idea is nevertheless the real stumbling block for ­philosophy, which finds insuperable difficulties in admitting this kind of unconditioned causality”. kga i.1, 129; Notes 25. kga i.1, 129; Notes 25: “Unentbehrlich ist der Begrif der Freiheit (transcendental) der ­spekulativen Vernunft nur für ein außerweltliches Subjekt”. There is a continuity across Schleiermacher’s career in terms of his critique of Kant’s moral philosophy, and in the next chapter I shall demonstrate this through my ­analysis of his Monologen (1800). As George N. Boyd has argued, while analysing an address ­Schleiermacher gave to the Berlin Academy in 1825, it is “characteristic” of ­Schleiermacher to argue that “the categorical imperative is a sterile concept, abstracted from the reality of moral experience”. See “Über den Unterschied zwischen Naturgesetz und Sittengesetz”, The Journal of Religious Ethics 17, no. 2, (1989): 42.

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Schleiermacher’s Quarrel with Kant on Freedom

We are now in a position to assess Schleiermacher’s “philosophical rhapsody” On Freedom. The anthropology that emerges in this piece through his t­ reatment of freedom and desire will be our focus in the remainder of the chapter, and we shall also see how aspects to this emergent anthropology resonate with his experiments in literary form. Unlike his fragmented jottings on Kant’s second critique, where he offers direct responses to a set of specific passages from the work, in this piece On Freedom Schleiermacher proposes a much more general investigation into the themes of moral obligation and human freedom. Indeed, it is only as one strand to this more general enquiry, albeit an important one, that ­Schleiermacher promises an illumination [eine Beleuchtung] of Kant’s theory of freedom. The significance of this is that Schleiermacher treats Kant’s work here more as an instrument or point of comparison for his own purposes, r­ ather than as the central object of his enquiry. This becomes clear towards the end of the piece, where he announces his aim to establish his own ­definition of freedom. His ­purpose, he explains, is to present a “generic concept” [ein ­Gattungsbegriff ] of freedom, one whose meaning is basic to all underst­andings of the word, and which would thus relate meaningfully to human action as this is e­ xperienced and conceived on a public and popular level. In order to c­onstruct this ­definition he lifts a passage from the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant ­describes t­ ranscendental freedom as “the faculty of initiating a ­series of events from itself”,27 and uses this as the departure point for c­ onstructing his own formula. Consistent with those passages Schleiermacher sampled in his notes on Kant’s second critique, this description of transcendental freedom qualifies human agency—insofar as people are subject to such freedom, as noumena— as agents working over against a world of cause and effect.28 The language 27 See kga i.1, 337, OF 122. Schleiermacher is quoting from CPu 486, (B476). 28 That Kant himself knew his theory of freedom to be contentious is evident from the ­following passage: “The transcendental idea of freedom is far from constituting the whole content of the psychological concept of that name, which is for the most part empirical, but constitutes only that of the absolute spontaneity of an action, as the real ground of its imputability; but this idea is nevertheless the real stumbling block for philosophy, which finds insuperable difficulties in admitting this kind of unconditioned causality. Hence that in the question of the freedom of the will which has always put speculative reason into such embarrassment is really only transcendental, and it concerns only whether a faculty of beginning a series of successive things or states from itself [von selbst] is to be assumed”. See CPu 486, (B476). Emphasis my own. Jacqueline Mariña focusses on this passage from Kant, and highlights the shortcomings in Schleiermacher’s critique of

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Kant uses to speak of “free” human agency here is that of the unconditioned, of ­absolute beginning, and of the ability to initiate a state of affairs w ­ ithout hindrance from causes or constraints external to the knowing mind. In o­ ther words, Kant depicts the willed activity of rational moral agents as that which is initiated and created over against the world, rather than that which p ­ articipates or ­receives within it.29 Given what I have already noted about Schleiermacher’s critique of such imagery, it is unsurprising that he demurs to adopt Kant’s definition of f­reedom as his own, in the form that he receives it—that is, freedom as “the faculty of initiating a series of events from itself”.30 What Schleiermacher does instead in his essay is to list it as a “special kind of freedom”; as merely one theory among many drawn up over the ages “by almost every author of p ­ opular philosophy”.31 And as such, he states that it is an unsuitable formula for the ­Gattungsbegriff of freedom that he himself is seeking. “Nothing is c­ onceivably more general” than what Kant proposes here,32 Schleiermacher tells us, namely “the case where freedom is predicated of something purely insofar as it happens, ­without any regard for its distinctive character [seine ­eigentümliche ­Beschaffenheit], or its relationships”.33 In Schleiermacher’s view then, Kant’s version of ­transcendental freedom absolutises the preliminary n ­ otion that “freedom” ­denotes an absence of constraint. Insofar as they p ­ ossess such a f­ aculty, “free” subjects are thus represented as pure, unconditioned causality, unblemished by influence from factors both external and internal. They appear as atemporal beings, unbounded from the great chains within the universal causal nexus, and capable of bringing some thing or situation about without prompt from outside. Only a deity, Schleiermacher concludes, is the “true object for this kind of freedom”.34 t­ ranscendental freedom, in her article “Schleiermacher on the Philosopher’s Stone: The Shaping of Schleiermacher’s Early Ethics by the Kantian Legacy”. The Journal of Religion 79, no. 2 (1999): 193–215. 29 As the 20th-century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty would put it, the ­conclusion Kant drew from his critical philosophy is that “I am a consciousness which embraces and constitutes the world, and this reflection caused him to overlook the ­phenomenon of the body and that of the thing” Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 353. 30 See kga i.1, 337, OF 122. Schleiermacher is quoting here from KPu 486, (B476). 31 kga i.1, 333; OF i.1, 117. 32 Cf. Kant’s own proposal that the term “transcendental” itself denotes a type of cognition which “is occupied not so much with objects but rather with our a priori concepts of ­objects in general”. CPu 133. 33 kga i.1, 335; OF 119. 34 kga i.1, 344; OF 129.

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It is true that Schleiermacher’s treatment of human consciousness in On Freedom as a whole, including his assertions about the unity of the ­human soul which I shall address shortly, indicates his agreement with Kant ­insofar as he thinks consciousness cannot be reduced to a series of purely ­phenomenal characteristics or scientifically-verifiable conditions.35 ­Nevertheless, ­Schleiermacher’s treatment of transcendental freedom here is once again ­rooted in his assumptions concerning the way that human agents and objects interact within the world. The position he adopts, which denies what he sees as the extreme abstraction and generality of Kant’s formula, is that the very identity of temporal subjects and objects is anchored inextricably in the many and various relationships in which they participate.36 Indeed, if we are going to “join the concept of freedom with some object”,37 Schleiermacher urges, then it is imperative that we attend not merely to the subjects themselves, but a­ lways to the concrete situations of which they are but one part. S­ chleiermacher writes: “if I consider something purely as effective [wirkend] and affected [gewirkt] in time, then I regard it in its relationship to the ­universal causal ­interconnection [allgemeinen Causalzusammenhange38] in which, together with its causes a parte ante and its effects a parte post, it constitutes a series [eine Reihe]”.39 Having stressed that temporal creatures are defined by the external and ­internal “constraints” upon them in the world, Schleiermacher’s c­ onclusion is that “the generic concept of freedom must always include relation to a ­[causal] series”.40 In other words, Schleiermacher contends that when we define f­reedom, we must not suspend our experience of reality, which is that human actions belong to chains of causality that are greater than the will or 35 36

37 38 39 40

Mariña’s excellent evaluation in Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher is particularly instructive in this regard. In other words, unlike Kant’s transcendental aesthetic, Schleiermacher’s “general” ­concept of freedom resists portraying the human “I” as a purely formal unity of apperception, which has no concrete character—as a noumenon with no observable attributes, as these are defined in relation to the world of forces and objects. Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, 31: “Kant’s “subject” of morality can only be defined negatively, as a subject that is not the subject of knowledge… as a subject without mathēsis, even of itself. It is indeed posited as freedom, and freedom is the locus of “self-consciousness”. But this does not imply that there is any cognition—or even consciousness of freedom, for freedom in turn is posited only as a ratio essendi of the moral law within us, which, because it is only a fact… can provide only a ratio cognoscendi of freedom, which produces no cognition”. kga i.1, 338; OF 122. This root word “Zusammenhang” is difficult to translate into English. Literally, it ­communicates a “hangingtogetherness”. kga i.1, 336; OF 120. kga i.1, 337; OF 122.

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causal power of the originating agent. Alongside this refusal to dichotomise freedom and constraint, however, Schleiermacher nevertheless admits that a quality which must always remain basic to the concept of freedom is that it indicates an original beginning. Freedom means a willed and brought about shift in an existing state of affairs. “It is almost self-evident”, he comments, “that the issue [of freedom] cannot be mere existence within the [causal] series, but is rather that of a beginning in a series”.41 With all of this in mind, the “generic” definition of freedom on which Schleiermacher finally settles is a modified version of the formula that he took from Kant. By removing the qualifying phrase “from itself” [von selbst]—the phrase which establishes the dignity of the subject as an unconditioned, pure causal power—Schleiermacher renders freedom s­ imply as the “the faculty of initiating a series of events”. 4

Temporality, Dialogue and Human Identity

Schleiermacher’s analysis of Kant’s theory of freedom thus reveals his ­perspective that human agency is anchored in existing chains of reasoning and action—that it is rooted in what has gone before. From the section of On Freedom I have just examined, as well as what I have noted about his “compatibilist” perspective, we gather that in Schleiermacher’s view human “freedom” is dependent on rather than opposed to the bonds and “constraints” operative on people in the world. This is because it is such worldly bonds and relationships that define an individual, inform their character, and therefore shape the “free” decisions that they will make in the future. Schleiermacher’s tendency to treat human identity as an emerging t­ emporal whole, gathered up through exchange and interaction, is something which is also demonstrated in the opening passages of On Freedom, where he discusses the nature of human desire and the way that desires influence an i­ ndividual’s ability to fulfil the demands of the moral law. I shall turn to these interrelated themes of desire and moral accountability in the final section of this chapter. Before I do so however, I want to argue here that—as was the case with To ­Cecilie—the meaning and impact of Schleiermacher’s text should not be ­reduced merely to the substance of its propositional content. We can point to a couple of instances, for example, where his anthropological perspective ­suggests itself through his use of imagery and literary form. We note, for instance, that Schleiermacher includes a short dialogue in his piece. This dialogue, which interrupts the rhapsody about a third of the way into 41

kga i.1, 337; OF 121. Emphasis my own.

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the manuscript, and runs for ten pages, is a conversation ­Schleiermacher stages between himself and his friend “Kleon”. The pair discuss the ­subject of d­ ivine justice, as well as how Schleiermacher’s claims about moral ­accountability relate to the claims of religious communities about divine p ­ unishment. For ­commentators like Schleiermacher’s editor Günter Meckenstock, and his translator Albert Blackwell, this dialogue is interesting because of its potential ­relation to a trio of longer dialogues that Schleiermacher composed in 1789, which were also on the subject of freedom and the nature of moral ­actions. Only the third of these Freiheitsgespräche still exists; manuscripts for the first two have been lost to history. Meckenstock’s thesis, however, which he ­receives from Dilthey and with which Blackwell concurs, is that the content of S­ chleiermacher’s short dialogue in On Freedom was lifted from the second of these dialogues, meaning that at least some of it has been preserved for us.42 Meckenstock refers to the dialogue section in On Freedom as “a ­stylistic foundling in the great treatise”.43 There is an abrupt switch in tone and ­direction at this point in the text, and indeed Schleiermacher introduces the section amusingly clumsily. “Here various incidents caused a lengthy ­interruption in my sketching of ideas on this subject”, he writes, “… my friend Kleon came in and caused me new disturbance”.44 There ensues a contrived conversation b­ etween the two. Given that such an abrupt shift occurs in the material here, it is plausible that Schleiermacher’s dialogic excursus is the result of his inserting pre-prepared material into a text that it must stretch and strain in order to (not quite) fit. But even if the dialogue makes a cumbersome entrance into the text, this does not prevent us from considering what sort of contribution it makes, and why Schleiermacher might have leant on this particular literary form. For there are ways, I suggest, in which Schleiermacher’s ­adoption of dialogue here functions to extend or undergird his points about the ­interconnected and reciprocally causal nature of human life in the world.45 Indeed, since they concern conversations portrayed in real-time, dialogues are capable of signalling how an individual’s own perspective is a finite­one, gained through time, and dependent on one’s place.46 And significantly, 42 See OF, xiv., and kga i.1, xlv–vi. 43 kga, i.1, xlvii. See also OF xiv. 44 kga i.1, 271; OF 56. 45 As part of her overall thesis in The Transformation of the Self in the Thought of ­Friedrich Schleiermacher, Jacqueline Mariña asserts that for Schleiermacher, “the ­construction of knowledge is first and foremost an inter-subjective exercise that occurs through dialogue (4). 46 See Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall ­(Chicago: Continuum, 2004), 379: “To reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely

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­ leon’s opening question to Schleiermacher concerns the very origin of h K ­ uman ­character. Is the moral aptitude of a soul fixed, and given in ­advance by God, ­Kleon asks—as if souls were a deck of pre-sorted cards to be dealt—or does a soul develop its virtue in regard to its place in the world? This ­question, out of kilter with the philosophical territory otherwise covered by On ­Freedom, ­reopens the issue Schleiermacher dealt with in To Cecilie ­concerning the ­relation of human development and moral reasoning to religious beliefs and doctrine. Schleiermacher leaves the topic open here, by neglecting to answer this question directly. However the inconclusive answer that he does give— “let our moral characteristics always depend on the world, and let God thus be their originator”47—suggests the placed and temporal nature of human ­character (dependent on the world), and is appropriately matched by his choice of l­iterary form. For although Schleiermacher’s conversational extract only involves two voices, of which his own appears as the dominant one, ­Schleiermacher offsets the suggestion that this scene with Kleon is a u ­ nilateral transmission of information rather than an actual exchange of ideas, as he speaks of the pair “calculating together”,48 and of the “resistance” that Kleon offers to his arguments.49 In Part 3, where I shall turn to examine a dialogic text Schleiermacher wrote fifteen years later, on the theme of Christmas Eve, we will see how he came to develop a richer understanding of dialogue and the role this form could play in the communication of ideas. Yet even at this early stage, where we are dealing with an experimental and much less refined ­dialogic passage, the particular form of this section of On Freedom ­nevertheless functions to indicate that human reasoning and development involves the ­individual ­being open to information from without. To be in dialogue signals that a person’s views are drawn out, over the passage of time, in reciprocal ­engagement with other rational and sentient agents. In Schleiermacher’s aforementioned discussion of what a generic definition of “freedom” might look like, we find a further indication that he presumes ­human knowledge to develop through reciprocity and exchange. For since Schleiermacher explains that such a generic definition must not only relate

47 48 49

a matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were”. My appreciation of Schleiermacher’s use of dialogue both here and in Chapter three is also indebted to Mikhail Bakhtin’s work on Dostoevsky, and his appreciation of the latter’s novels as “polyphonic” in character. See Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). kga i.1, 273; OF 58. kga i.1, 278; OF 63. kga i.1, 279; OF 64.

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to the formulas drawn up by academics and philosophers, but also to the term as it is used on a public and popular level, the imagery he uses to describe the concept in the fulness of its functionality is that of an unfathomably complex linguistic web. The term “freedom”, he explains, receives its various flavours and aspects as it appears within a nexus of dialogue and exchange. It enjoys a varied use across particular social groupings and disciplinary boundaries, ­according to the interconnected verbal patterns and semantic chains that form in these communities over time. And in the following passage, emphasising this interconnection, Schleiermacher suggests that it would be impossible to construct an “objective” account of how the word “freedom” has developed: [this word ‘freedom’] is in everyone’s mouth. It has had its meaning ­chiseled and daubed by almost every author of popular philosophy. Also, in that it has passed over into the most ordinary usage of popular life, it suffers under the arbitrary train of thoughts in everyone’s ­fantasy ­[Fantasie], and must daily allow itself to be joined with wholly alien ­matters and to be translated into widely distant spheres.50 Schleiermacher’s depiction of language as a historical51 living whole, in the ­development of which all embodied humans participate, serves here to ­re-iterate his suggestion that human freedom cannot indicate an absence of all constraint from worldly interconnection. Once more he portrays ­humans as creatures whose development depends upon the processes, objects and relationships that make up the world around them, whilst maintaining ­ that these creatures are nevertheless able to act upon this world to express ­themselves in unique, and in this way “free”, ways. Indeed, at the same time as Schleiermacher portrays humans here as inheritors of linguistic meaning, so that their ability to express themselves is shaped by previous discussions and happenings, as well as by the availability of established words for their use, 50 51

kga i.1, 333; OF 117. Schleiermacher’s treatment of language here as historical in nature was not original. By the 1770s both Johan Georg Hamann and his student Johann Gottfried von Herder had explored this idea, and had also stressed—in response to the philosophy of Kant—the centrality of language to the task of philosophy. For Hamann, indeed, “the entire a­ bility to think rests on language”. See Larry Vaughan, Johann Georg Hamann: ­Metaphysics of ­Language and Vision of History, American University Studies, Series i, Germanic ­Languages and Literatur, Vol 60 (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1989), Helene M. Kastinger Riley, “Some German Theories of the Origin of Language from Herder to Wagner”, The Modern Languages Review 74 (1979): 617–632, and Eva Fiesel, Die Sprachphilosophie der deutschen Romantik (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1927).

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he also portrays them as capable of developing new meanings. Humans, he ­gestures, are free to change and add to the language that they grow up speaking. 5

On Desire and Moral Motivation

Schleiermacher begins On Freedom with an analysis of the concept of a faculty of desire [das Begehrungsvermögen] . He states that his purpose is to­ investigate how humans as sentient, sensing creatures, are incentivised to fulfil the demands of the universal moral law. In other words, he is preoccupied with the question of how a particular agent, influenced by particular experiences, is compelled or determined by universal maxims discerned through rational enquiry.52 As he proceeds however—and as Brent Sockness has already demonstrated53—it is evident that the way Schleiermacher understands morality hangs more on the imagery of cultivating virtue and improving character, than it does upon the notion that humans are bound to a universal law, and thereby to the performance of dutiful acts. Schleiermacher begins here by distinguishing his own position from Kant’s. He explains that the latter defines the faculty of desire as “the faculty of becoming through its representations a cause actualising the objects of those representations [Vorstellungen]”.54 What this means, is that Kant thinks that the mechanism through which a person represents a particular situation to themselves, or envisages a particular object, is also the mechanism which helps to bring about that situation so represented. According to Kant’s terminology, desire is thus not merely a “representative” faculty, through which a person processes, perceives, and comes to know about an object, but it is also an active causal faculty. It both influences the way in which a person perceives the world around them, and directly determines their way of behaving.55 52 53 54

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See discussion in kga i.1, 222–227; OF 6–11. See Sockness, “Was Schleiermacher a Virtue Ethicist? Tugend and Bildung in the Early Ethical Writings”. kga i.1, 222; OF 6. This is a paraphrase of Kant’s analysis in Critique of Practical Reason that “the faculty of desire is a being’s faculty to be by means of its representations the cause of the reality of the objects of these representations”. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 7. For the original German, see GS i/5, 16. See also Kant’s “Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion” (1817) for a ­similar definition: “a faculty of desire is the causality of the faculty of representation with respect to the actuality of its objects”. Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology, eds. Allen W. Wood, George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 396. Schleiermacher is referring here to what Henry Allison has termed as Kant’s “­Incorporation Thesis”. This thesis holds that a person must “incorporate” his or her desires (or i­ ncentives)

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Schleiermacher accepts some aspects of Kant’s argument here. He agrees that human desires are incorporated into human actions, and that the two processes of desiring and acting are inextricably linked. However, S­ chleiermacher also wants to retain the priority that desiring has before and underneath human action, as it were. In Schleiermacher’s view, the activity of the faculty of desire consists of an unfathomably deep range of processes, relations, and transactions that are on-going between people and the world around them. He therefore thinks that to imagine human desiring as necessitating an action is to oversimplify and eclipse a much more complex series of interactions. Pace Kant, then, his proposal is that a definition of desire can be found, “in which the activity of the soul alone is purely manifested, without necessarily including what we properly call action”.56 Schleiermacher denies that he is referring here merely to the notion of a “wish” [Wunsch]. For when we wish, he argues, we are cognisant of our ­inability to carry out in physical and actual terms the object for which we wish. Instead, Schleiermacher suggests that a “still higher concept” for describing human desiring exists—that of a “drive”, or an “impulse” [Trieb].57 For such impulses are prior to action, he explains: In general terms, by impulse [Trieb] I understand the representing subject’s activity [Thätigkeit], grounded in the subject’s nature [Natur], of bringing forth representations … The faculty of determining impulse in general for an object of a particular impulse in some moment of e­ xistence is called the faculty of desire. It seems to me evident that in this definition acting proper is not yet co-posited. Acting would be only the application of the physical faculty of my causality to objects in conformity with this determination of impulse.58 In this passage, Schleiermacher confirms that impulses—flowing as they do at such a deep level within the human self—do not necessarily provoke the self to act. He also stipulates that a person’s impulses are determined by their ­faculty of desire. This means that each person’s impulses will be particular to them, because they are grounded by previous choices, as these are rooted in their circumstances. As such, retained here is the thrust of his response to

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into their maxims, if they are going to act on these maxims. See Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5. kga i.1, 223; OF 7. Albert Blackwell, whose English translation I am referencing, prefers to translate Trieb as “impulse”. kga i.1, 223; OF 8.

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Kant’s concept of transcendental freedom: since impulses are not spontaneous, and do not come about of themselves, we do not need to imagine human agency as something over against the world. Rather, humans are rooted in the world as its very respondents and participants. Furthermore, since he makes desire so basic to the human condition, and to the nature of human action in the world, Schleiermacher also avoids portraying human desiring in terms of a reaction to a kind of lack in the self, which the individual hopes to plug by pursuing a particular end or object. Instead, in On Freedom, Schleiermacher construes desire more simply as about the way a person interacts with their environment and grows in relation to it. This terminology of “representation” or “imagining” [Vorstellung] that Schleiermacher employs here is worth further discussion. Nowhere in On ­Freedom does Schleiermacher specify exactly what he means by this term.59 Yet his use of it does mimic Kant’s own, in so far as it functions to indicate an object as this has been formed in the mind of a rational subject. And like Kant, furthermore, Schleiermacher deploys “representation” as a term which can ­refer to concepts, ideas, and intuitions about objects. In the context of the present discussion on moral accountability and desire, for instance, he speaks of representations that “arise as motivating grounds [Bewegungsgründe] ­within the faculty of desire”.60 Indeed, the basic epistemological framework that Schleiermacher adopts in On Freedom supposes an “inner” ­representing faculty, which is the mechanism through which a person filters, forms, or ­constitutes the outer world. It is in such a way that this language of representation, and this imagery of a rational self “buffered” from its environment—to borrow that now well-worn 59

60

It is notable that in an aside, Schleiermacher states his agreement with the Austrian ­ hilosopher Karl Leonhard Reinhold (1757–1853) that “a subject’s faculty of representation p must not be confused with a subject’s power [Kraft]”. (kga i.1, 223, OF 7). What this ­suggests is that like Reinhold, Schleiermacher distinguishes the “faculty of r­ epresentation” on the one hand—“through which [the] subject must be thought of as the ground of the pure possibility of representation”—from “representational power” on the other hand, “through which the subject is the ground of the actual representation”. See Reinhold’s ­“Essay towards a New Theory of the Faculty of Representation” (Versuch einer neuen ­Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens, Prague/Jena, 1789), 560, which ­Meckenstock cites in kga 1.1, 223, and Albert Blackwell in OF 7, n.17. For an ­account of ­Reinhold’s c­ ritique of Kant’s theory of the faculty of representation, see Frederick C . Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge, MA: H ­ arvard ­University Press, 1987) 226–265, and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert’s book Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of ­Romantic Philosophy (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007). ­Millán-Zaibert sets Reinhold’s critique in the context of the d­ evelopment of Early ­German Romantic philosophy. kga i.1, 260; OF 45.

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term coined by Charles Taylor61—tempers the claims that I have made about Schleiermacher’s own critique of Kantian freedom, which he disputes for this same tendency to isolate a thinking person from the world they ­inhabit. For arguably, Schleiermacher’s representational imagery, which travels right down into his basic notion of an “impulse” (the activity of “bringing forth ­representations”) works against the points that I have been stressing about his conception of human knowledge as inherently social—as emergent through dialogue and exchange rather than “constructed” within the individual mind.62 That is—this reliance on the language of representation seemingly presents a barrier to Schleiermacher, as he attempts to embed the human self in its environment, to imagine the self as rooted in its context, and dependent upon that which has gone before. If the reader will allow me a brief digression at this juncture, I think it is worthwhile outlining something of the basic structure of Kant’s epistemology, as this is relevant to the present discussion. Doing so will underscore ­important aspects of Schleiermacher’s own philosophical inheritance, before I attempt to mount a defence of the latter’s use of “representational” terminology in the face of his conception of human identity more broadly. In his critical philosophy, Kant describes human knowing in such terms that it would not make sense to speak of an “external” world of appearances. A world, that is, which is separate in its composition, structure, and 61 62

Taylor establishes the language of a “buffered” self in his A Secular Age (see pp.37–41), where he uses this to indicate the idea that “the self can see itself as invulnerable, as ­master of the meanings of things for it” (38). I say this in light of the work done by twentieth-century phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger, who condemned epistemologies premised around a faculty of representation, because these seem to deny the immersion of the subject in their environment, and to rely instead on the conception that there is a boundary ­condition between the “inner” life of the perceiver, and the “outer” reality of the world they perceive around them. See Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, xi: “If the reality of perception were based solely on the intrinsic coherence of ‘representations’, it ought to be forever hesitant and, being wrapped up in my conjectures on probabilities, I ought to be ceaselessly taking apart misleading syntheses and reinstating in reality stray phenomena which I had excluded in the first place. But this does not happen. The real is a closely woven fabric…” And later, (xviii–xix): “The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible”. See also Martin Heidegger’s treatment of representational epistemology in Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 2008). The nature of perception, Heidegger writes, should not be seen “as a ‘procedure’ by which a subject provides itself with representations [Vorstellungen] of something which remain stored up ‘inside’ as having been thus appropriated, and with regard to which the question of how they ‘agree’ with reality can occasionally arise”. (89).

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reality, from the knowing mind. This is because the way he envisages the relationship between the self and the world depends upon a mechanism of intellectual mediation,63 in the sense that he understands human knowledge acquisition to take place through categories which are held in the transcendentally-free human mind. According to the Transcendental Aesthetic that Kant elaborates in his first critique, external objects and worldly bodies—which cannot be known “in themselves”—appear and are known to the rational a­ pprehending individual only as they are given to cognition through the pure subjective forms of sensible intuition: time and space. What this means is that in Kant’s view, time and space are not themselves qualities or aspects to reality, or properties or measurements of objects. Nor, furthermore, does Kant think it correct to envisage space and time as dimensions which can be measured separately from the objects of experience that they “contain”, as it were. Instead, Kant understands space and time as forms of intuition through which we think [denken] objects of experience. In his description of how we come to know things, Kant aims to give ­priority to human experience [Erfahrung] and the sensory apprehension of objects. It is in this way that he understands himself able to distance himself from what he calls the dogmatic idealism of Bishop Berkeley, which he ­summarises as a position whereby knowledge gained through the senses is deemed to be ­illusory, whilst truth comes only in “the ideas of pure understanding and reason” [den Ideen des reinen Verstandes und Vernunft].64 Moreover, Kant’s ­conclusions in this respect also push him to separate himself from the ­“scepticism of Descartes”,65 according to which, he claims, the self does not need a world to know itself or to manifest itself as a human. In the face of both of these schools, Kant—writing in 1783—avers that what he refers to as his critical idealism is “governed and determined throughout” by the following basic principle: all knowledge of things, from the bare pure understanding, or pure ­reason, is nothing but sheer illusion, and truth is only in experience.66 63

Cf Charles Taylor, “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture”, The Cambridge ­Companion to Merleau-Ponty, eds Taylor Carman and Mark B.N. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26–49. Here, Taylor summarises the achievements of Merleau-Ponty and other twentieth-century phenomenologists, in their critique of “mediational epistemologies”, which isolate the self from the world by positing a mediating intellect. 64 See the appendix of Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena zu einen jeden Künftige Metaphysik, ed. Karl Vorländer, (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1920), 151. 65 Kant, Prolegomena zu einen jeden Künftige Metaphysik, 153. 66 Kant, Prolegomena zu einen jeden Künftige Metaphysik, 151.

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This maxim, which necessarily grounds the individual in and among a world of objects which impacts her senses, contributes to a purported summary of the argument that Kant presents in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). Here, he states that there are two “parts” [zwei Stücke] to the business of “knowing” [erkennen] something. It is firstly the case that we think an object, and we think it “through” a category of the mind, but what we must also hold to, is that we are given the object as it confronts us from its place in the world. Certainly, Kant asserts, the object is given over to the knowing and experiencing self in sensory intuition [Anschauung]: To think [denken] an object and to cognise [erkennen] an object are thus not the same. For two components belong to cognition: first, the concept, through which an object is thought at all (the category), and second, the intuition [Anschauung], through which it is given.67 For European phenomenologists of the twentieth century like Edmund ­Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Immanuel Kant was a hinge figure as significant as Descartes in that modern western tradition of thinking about the human self and its relation to the world. These phenomenologists understood Kant’s contribution to lie in his rejection of the naïve objectivism held to by a number of his contemporaries from both e­ mpiricist and r­ ationalist schools. It was in contrast to this that Kant presupposed a f­undamental ­integration of self and world, whereby a person’s own “inner” ­cognitive or ­reflective insights are possible only against the background of their being ­rooted in a phenomenal environment.68 Cognition begins with e­ xperience. And since it departs from the principle that the self cannot be isolated from the world, Kant’s scheme also deems it impossible for a person to have a view of the world and its inhabitants “from nowhere”. The ­framework Kant offers for thinking about the self in the world thus suggests that a­ ttempting a neutral and detached explanation of worldly casual processes like this—in which the thinking I builds up an “objective” picture from individual percepts, or bytes of sensory data—is an insupportable sort of task.69 67 Kant, CPu, 254. 68 “Kant agrees with Locke that we have no innate knowledge, that is, no knowledge of any particular propositions implanted in us by God, or nature prior to the commencement of out individual experience”. See Paul Guyer and Allen Wood, “Introduction”, in Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6. 69 See also Charles Taylor, “Merleau-Ponty and the Epistemological Picture”, The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B.N. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 36.

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Taking all of this into account about the Kantian epistemological ­ icture, and thus gaining a more developed idea of Schleiermacher’s own p ­philosophical inheritance, let us now return to consider Schleiermacher’s use of the l­anguage of Vorstellungen in his account of human knowledge ­aquisition and ­moral ­responsibility. What is at stake here, is the question as to whether such l­anguage signals a tendency in Schleiermacher to emphasise the role of the representing intellect in moral accountability, while giving too little attention to the e­ mbodied nature of human existence, or to the role of the senses in desiring. My own view is that it is possible to mount a defence for ­Schleiermacher’s approach here, and to attest the coherence of his claims— which he himself distances from Kant’s theory of freedom—about the unity of the human ­personality and the identity of the self as embedded in rather than isolated from the phenomenal world. For what is significant about Schleiermacher’s constructive response to Kant’s definition of desire, is that he depicts deliberate human actions (that is, actions we can give reasons for, and which appear to us as chosen, or purposed) as supervenient on a more basic mode of engagement with the world. Indeed, Schleiermacher emphasises the idea that there are a number of ­intricate life processes which influence and enable our judgments and actions, but which nevertheless take place below the level of conscious activity and are impossible to chart as isolated chunks of psychological data. In addition to his notion of an impulse, or drive, Schleiermacher also identifies what he calls two other “modifications of the faculty of desire”: “instinct” [der Instinkt], where an impulse is determined by a single object, and the power of “choice” [die Willkühr], where several objects are compared.70 As he explains these terms, Schleiermacher points out that when we speak about the influence of the ­faculty of desire on our actions, we are not confined merely to speaking about the task of pursuing fully worked out goals or objects. In other words, when we talk about behaving according to our desires (right down to these more basic “drives”, and “instincts”) we cannot assume that it will be possible to develop a coherent or accurate narrative concerning our motivations for acting in this way or that. He confirms: With most instinctive actions [Instinkthandlungen] we cannot p ­ resuppose in the acting subject any clear consciousness [Bewustseyn] of the way [Art] the action to which this tendency leads corresponds to the object toward which the impulse is directed. The case is similar ­regarding all our actions that are stimulated by sensations of the vital senses w ­ ithout 70

kga i.1, 224; OF 8.

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our being clearly aware of how they correlate with the stimulating sensations.71 The example that Schleiermacher adopts in order to delineate this point is a creaturely one: that of a mole acting on instinct by digging a tunnel. We ­remember that Schleiermacher defines instinct as an impulse to some particular activity—one which is “determined by a single object alone”. Accordingly, he claims that the instinct of a mole is not so complex as to be directed by a desire to create something new, or a desire to possess an object that as yet exists only as a possibility. Rather, the mole will begin to dig simply when it is put into contact with the earth. And it will do this, he continues, because it is determined to do so by its form, and by the distinctive tools, attributes and inclinations that it has according to its nature. The mole “does not desire the tunnel as something to have”, Schleiermacher summarises, “but only desires to build it, and as it employs its physical faculty to do this, something results that was not its proper goal”.72 Having delivered this example of the instinctive mole however, Schleiermacher explains that it is in the nature of humans as representing s­ ubjects that they will not act purely upon instinct in this fashion.73 Belonging to a different order of being, humans are not hard-wired or mechanically d­ riven towards particular ends in the same way that animals are. Their complexity does not lend itself to such simple direction. Schleiermacher maintains that such are the mechanical impulses of animals, that so long as their (unrecognised) d­ etermining object persists, they will go on acting, even if the task they are ­engaged in is already completed. As soon as the object ceases, however, their ­action also ceases—even if the animal’s work would still be of profit.74 It is again in c­ ontrast with this that Schleiermacher carves out the teleological behaviour of human ­beings. For written right down into the way that people interact with and p ­ erceive the world around them, Schleiermacher urges, is an ability to s­ elect, ­prioritise, and relativise the objects they have before them.75 And on a secondary level— at a greater cognitive distance from the world—this is matched by their capacity to envisage, imagine, and speculate. These abilities, seemingly b­ elonging 71 72 73

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kga i.1, 225; OF 9. kga i.1, 225; OF 9. Emphasis my own. kga i.1, 224; OF 8. “I am happy to admit that we know no representing subject whose faculty of desire would be pure instinct. I could even admit that we can never assert with certainty that any particular action of some being has become actual through instinct alone”. kga i.1, 224–225; OF 9. “As soon as we have to think of the impulse’s determination as incomplete, wavering or relative, we no longer represent instinct as its source”. kga i.1, 225; OF 9.

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to the very heart of their natures, and through which they are able to abstract t­hemselves from their close bodily and worldly environment, enable human selves to be ­discerning moral agents. Indeed, it is due to such ­envisaging, imagining and speculation that humans are of course not contained by the shape of their b­ odies or the reaches of their vision, or absorbed merely by those objects in front of them. Instead, through their rationality their proclivity is to envisage themselves as unique parts, which contribute and take from a greater whole. As Julia Lamm has suggested, however, as part of her work on ­Schleiermacher’s concept of Gefühl, it is not the case that what Schleiermacher teaches about the representing individual’s capacity to abstract themselves from a particular situation, and to imagine possible courses of action and their merits, necessarily negates or frustrates his attempt to hold the human together as a rational as well as feeling subject.76 Indeed, what Lamm contends is that Schleiermacher’s essay On Freedom “avoided the dualistic tendencies of Kant, because these two fundamental faculties of representation and desire are continually joined by Gefühl”. Following Lamm then, yet without her singular interest in this category of feeling, we might say the following about Schleiermacher’s ability to hold the human person together, as a unity of thinking, acting and desiring: it may be precisely in the nature of narrating, judging, and assessing, that these activities place a rational individual at a reflective distance from their environment—a distance which enables them to carry a sense of responsibility for that which is other to them, or that which they have done. Yet readers of On Freedom can also gauge that for the young Schleiermacher, the reflective processes involved in moral choosing take place as part of a fuller and unfathomably complex set of fundamental exchanges that one has with one’s environment—exchanges which also necessarily incorporate the senses and the feelings. Schleiermacher’s 76

See Lamm, “The Early Philosophical Roots of Schleiermacher’s Notion of Gefühl, 1­ 788–1794”, 91. Since feeling is not a major concept in Schleiermacher’s account of desire in On Freedom, I have omitted to focus on it in my own study. However, it is worth highlighting the resonances between Schleiermacher’s depiction of the relationship between desire and rationality in On Freedom, and the points that Schleiermacher’s protagonist makes in To Cecilie, about the basic nature of humans as beings who are both sentient and rational, but whose rational faculties develop against the background of a more basic level of engagement with the world, which is had through the feelings. In To Cecilie, we find the following evocative passage, which testifies to such a development: “From the first passage beyond the limits of animal life into the world of understanding, the normal person, my beautiful friend, finds oneself in the most comfortable condition. One finds it convenient to remain living under the tree under which one was planted and one is satisfied to revel in the sight of things marching past without further concern”. (kga i.1, 194, Cec 14). Lamm does not refer to To Cecilie in her own account.

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aim here is to embed the self in her environment, and to narrate human beings as embodied participants in the causally-interconnected world of nature and culture. This is the context for his proposal that the impulses and instincts which help to determine human action undergird and run deeper than the choices we make as rational moral subjects. Humans are not abstracted from their bodies as they begin to speculate and to ask questions of their environment. In the following passage, Schleiermacher confirms this view as he describes how moral agents enjoy a “multifarious” engagement with the world known to them through the senses, the intellect, and the imagination: The activities of the faculty of desire change as richly and as rapidly as the flux of external things [der Fluß der äußeren Dinge] can ever do. In every moment it is filled not simply with life but with superabundant [überschwengliches] life, multifariously active. The senses, fantasy, ­understanding, and reason allow it no rest. It craves, selects, decides, and acts in every moment of its existence [seines Daseyns].77 The above passage portrays a subject who is always already active and o­ ccupied in the world, and ever-receptive to it. But another qualification we must add to Schleiermacher’s position here is the stress he puts on time or temporal becoming as a facet of the moral life. We see this in his proposals c­ oncerning how we are to judge the moral goodness of a particular person. Turning to Kant’s practical philosophy, he finds a proclivity there to judge moral value in relation to the nature of a person’s acts, and to treat these acts atomistically, as if each were separable from the rest and can be judged as such. In response to this, Schleiermacher stresses the importance of attending to a person as a whole—as a creature who is becoming. He writes: Merely judging the ethical nature of an action gives us a very precisely denoted, very prompt feeling, it is true, and yet not a very strong or vital one. It is a momentary product of practical judgment [praktischen ­Urteilskraft], arising of itself, without preparation and without any exertion [Anstrengung] on the part of the soul. In contrast, judgment of the person, which requires close observation of all that a given action presupposes in the soul, must impart a high degree of vitality [Lebhaftigkeit] to the sentiment it engenders toward the person.78

77 78

kga i.1, 238; OF 23. kga i.1, 261; OF 46.

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With his emphasis on assessing character in order to come to a judgement about a person’s moral virtue, we infer that in Schleiermacher’s view, the task of fulfilling the moral law is a continuing one, which cannot be achieved at any one moment by way of an immediate impulse or singular decision. Nor is it down to individual will power or intellect alone. “The task of practical reason is everlasting”, Schleiermacher avers. “It must be active without respite in ­every action of an ethical person”.79 Assuming the challenge of trying to behave in an ethically responsible manner means cultivating good habits, it means recognising the bond between one’s actions on the one hand and one’s soul on the other, while also acknowledging that one’s current behaviour can influence events and opportunities far into the future. “The intensive and extensive degree of a person’s obedience to the law cannot be known from any one circumstance”, Schleiermacher states, “but only from all circumstances together”.80 Indeed, for the purposes of assessing whether a person is and has been acting in a morally fruitful way, Schleiermacher’s recommendation is that “we must compose a living image of this soul”.81 We can therefore see how the young Schleiermacher understood the ­reflective and processing activity of the faculty of representations to belong to an even greater web of activity, constituting the full scope of a human agent’s engagement with the world. Some of this activity, indeed—our drives and our instincts—is qualitatively similar to that which belongs to animals, and also to other creatures who do not possess a representing faculty. Schleiermacher states that “it is pointless to divide human beings. All is joined in us; all is one”.82 And with his recommendation that judging a person’s adherence to the moral law means drawing up “a living image of their soul”,83 he resists— even if he cannot at this stage overturn—the mechanical account of human decision making and perception that might otherwise be implied by his use of the term “representation”, and his investment in the idea of a “representing faculty”. Albert Blackwell has already drawn attention to this aspect of Schleiermacher’s moral anthropology. Describing the way that Schleiermacher’s account of human desiring resists such a mechanical picture, Blackwell contends that:

79 See kga i, 1, 228; OF 12. 80 kga i.1, 250; OF 35–36. 81 kga i.1, 260; OF 45. 82 kga i.1, 241; OF 27. 83 kga i.1, 260; OF 45.

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If human intentions are to be accounted for on the mechanical analogy of myriad different inclinations of various intensities, uniting as a sort of vector sum to determine choice… then the emphasis must be on myriad and different and various.84 As I have already indicated, Schleiermacher developed his theory of m ­ oral ­accountability not only in response to Kant’s first two critiques, but he was also indebted to a broad and well-established tradition in both ­rationalist and empiricist circles during the eighteenth-century, of holding the view that human subjects are to a greater or lesser extent determined by the ­conditions of their environment. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a towering figure of the ­rationalist tradition, famously proposed that there must be ­“sufficient reason” for a person’s actions, the roots of which subsist in the prior psychological states of that agent. And for the Scottish philosopher David Hume—the empiricist Kant himself credited as a central prompt for his critical philosophical project—a crucial question for the moral theorist was the nature of the relationship which holds between a person’s deeds and their character. In his An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, for instance, Hume wrote: Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to his honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil.85 The proposal Hume makes here is of interest to us, because it is one that Schleiermacher himself mirrors in On Freedom as he defends his own ­“doctrine of necessity”—his view that an individual’s agency is rooted in their previous judgments, impressions and “representations” [die Vorstellungen].86 We find the apex of this defence towards the close of the text, in the critique that Schleiermacher offers of the doctrine of “indifferentism”. This is the notion that a person’s actions have no necessary ground in a previous condition, and Schleiermacher explains that its proponents hold the to the following position: 84 85 86

Albert Blackwell, Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life: Determinism, Freedom, and Phantasy, 80. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Other Writings, ed. Stephen­Buckle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 87. kga i.1, 237–238; OF 22.

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in the moment of a certain act or resolution I could decide in any ­conceivable way, and nowhere in the preceding course of the world is there a necessitating ground sufficient to have determined this way to the exclusion of every other.87 In other words, indifferentism is the obverse to Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason. It teaches the separation of the self’s ability to act from any and all defining causes which surround her. It segregates the self from determining factors—causes which push her this way or that in an inevitable or u­ navoidable sense. Schleiermacher’s response to this perspective, however (which also neatly summarises his attitude towards Kant’s definition of transcendental freedom, with its diremption of the subject from antecedent conditions), is that it rests on a fallacious assumption about the nature of ethical responsibility. Indeed, “the indifferentists may say that actions spring immediately from our will”,88 he writes, but in suggesting this, they fail to understand how functioning responsibly in the world means attending to the patterns of behaviour that we have previously adopted, the content of those relationships we have so far cultivated with others, and the practical knowledge and experience that we might bring to a given morally contentious situation. The idea that a person can be held accountable for their actions depends on the assumption that these actions flow from our previous behaviours, as these are shaped by the details of the places, situations and institutions that they inhabit. Yet it also depends on the idea that through time, the process of introspection, and with the patient reformation of their character, they might be able to change their habits and their situation, and in turn the nature of their actions. To the indifferentists he therefore poses the following question: “how can I be accountable for an action, when we cannot determine the extent to which it belongs to my soul?”89 Elsewhere in the text, Schleiermacher counters this same issue when he ­exclaims that it cannot depend “only upon the act of declamation [Aktus eines Ausspruchs] for us to become what we intend to become”.90 His p ­ roposal here is that rather than increasing moral virtue, or a person’s tendency to do good and to live well, this vision of human agency borne by indifferentism—or ­indeed by Kant’s doctrine of transcendental freedom—can instead ­engender a form of complacency. For why should we do anything to improve our moral ­character, 87 kga i.1, 314; OF 98. 88 kga i.1, 316; OF 101. 89 kga i.1, 316; OF 100–101. 90 See kga i.1, 294; OF 79.

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he supposes, or the noxious habits we have developed, if it is ­according to our very status as moral agents that we are capable of ­achieving the d­ emands of the moral law at any given moment? Why—if we hold to­­absolute freedom— should we commit ourselves to improvement over time, or to an awareness of our place?

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Conclusion I began Chapter one with an outline of the mature Schleiermacher’s theological vision. By describing the disciplinary boundary lines he drew up between religious and ethical enquiry, while explaining that these boundaries were relative rather than absolute, I prepared the ground for my overall argument in this book: firstly that Schleiermacher does not cloister the religious life from shared practices and society, and secondly that his early ethical writings help us to understand the understanding of human life, language, and social identity that will become integral to his mature theological position. This is a vision of human development that envisages individual identity as temporal, placed, and socially conditioned. In Chapters two and three I turned to study a series of Schleiermacher’s earliest texts. Experimental, unpublished, and unfinished, these pieces evidence a preoccupation with Kantian philosophy that Schleiermacher would later overcome, as we shall see in the next chapter. Far from being obsolete however, I attested that these texts demonstrate important moments in the development of Schleiermacher’s thinking, in both its ethical and theological dimensions. To Cecilie represented his rejection of religious enthusiasm, and with it a rejection of any presumption that the life of faith involves eschewing the world and pursuing an immediate, individualistic and entirely pre-linguistic relationship with the divine. In his notes on Kant’s second critique, as well as his essay On Freedom, Schleiermacher also denied the idea that human freedom should be defined as an absence of all constraint. Indeed, stating that human agents are unified wholes, whose decisions are affected by the feelings and the senses as well as the intellect, Schleiermacher argues in On Freedom that a person’s actions are anchored in their character, as this emerges through time. In this first part of the book I also introduced Schleiermacher’s burgeoning interest in literary form. I began to ask how form contributes with and through the content of a work to deliver its meaning, and I opened up some of the implications of Schleiermacher’s experiments with form for his ethical anthropology in particular. With the epistolary form of To Cecilie, for instance, Schleiermacher gestured to the social and particular nature of knowledge acquisition — the way that judgments are tied to particular situations and are mediated through language. As I move forward, we will see how language became central to Schleiermacher’s understanding of human development; how he understood language as that which frames and enables human society, but is also a tool for individuals to sculpt and adapt to the end of self-realisation.

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Part 2 Human Formation and Literary Form in Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies (1800)

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Introduction to Part 2 In Part 1, I explored the beginnings of Schleiermacher’s ethical anthropology, as he articulated this in his essay On Freedom. I demonstrated his view that fruitfully conceived, moral responsibility hinges on the idea that a person’s actions are inextricably bound up with the shape of their character. Human character, furthermore, Schleiermacher elaborated as a dynamic composite of drives, habits, inclinations and desires, which are patterned over the passage of time and in community with others. I also explored elements of his early theological perspective, formed in the midst of doubt over his future in the church. In his open-ended novella To Cecilie, Schleiermacher’s protagonist denounced religious “enthusiasm”, yet did not decry what we might call “the religious life” in the full sense. Rather, he suggestively indicated that the moral life—a “beautiful area of philosophy”1 — is not the highest end for a human being. In the decade following the literary experiments of On Freedom and To Cecilie, while Schleiermacher became a tenured pastor and began his academic publishing career, his thought matured to match these responsibilities. His writings reflected an increasing preoccupation with contemporary politics as well as societal and institutional structures. Building on his longstanding critical interest in Classical political theory,2 he tested and stretched his juvenile theses concerning human identity and personal freedom as he addressed a wide array of political and social issues. Among these were the rights of the Berlin Jewry to full Prussian citizenship,3 the nature of the relationship between­

1 kga i.1, 212; Cec 31. 2 Having studied the Greeks as a student at Halle, Schleiermacher wrote a short essay as a 24-year-old graduate called “Comparison of the Political Philosophies of Plato and Aristotle” (1794). Composed in Latin, this piece foreshadows his commitment to human particularity, and to a transcendental dimension to ethics. He signals his approval of the following passage from Plato’s Laws: “only he deserves to be called an excellent man who is not coerced by any necessity, nor conditioned [plastos], as if moulded by the art of ancestral institutions and education, but would attain to praise for his outstanding virtue by his own will and some divine fate”. f.d.e. Schleiermacher, trans. Esther D. Reed, “Comparison of the Political Philosophies of Plato and Aristotle”, in “To Cecilie”, and Other Writings By and About Schleiermacher, ed. Ruth Drucilla Richardson, New Atheneum/Neues Athenaeum 6 (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001), 48–49. 3 See Schleiermacher’s “Letters on the Occasion of the Political-Theological Task and the Open Letter of Jewish Householders” (1799), in A Debate on Jewish Emancipation and Christian Theology in Old Berlin, eds. Richard Crouter and Julie Klassen (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), 80–113.

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the Prussian Church and the state,4 the rights and status of women, and the activities of the British colonials in “Neuhollands” (present-day Australia). The significance that Schleiermacher’s interest in all of these questions and more had for his account of anthropology and ethical agency, however, was that they encouraged him to imagine and write about human self-development in a more holistic way, whereby the health of an individual’s “higher” spiritual and intellectual faculties is not only affected by, but also in a real sense grounded in and supported by, the quality of their political and social environment. In this part of the book I shall examine Schleiermacher’s position in 1800, at the end of the fertile decade to which I’ve just referred. And once more, my examination of Schleiermacher’s ethical thought here occurs in anticipation and service of my final purpose: elaborating his “theology of finitude”, and thus asking what for him it means to be human at once in relation to the world and in relation to the Infinite. In Chapter four, I shall begin by examining the ethical position Schleiermacher had come to hold at this point, according to which he stressed the irreducibly unique nature of particular individuals. Then, in Chapter five, I shall flesh out my analysis of this developed ethical position by examining Schleiermacher’s commitment to Bildung (a theory of self-cultivation)­, before studying two of the shorter projects alluded to above, on the emancipation of women, and the activity of the British colonisers. These projects demonstrate Schleiermacher’s attention to concrete social and political issues. Yet they also evidence the difficulty he had in his attempts to avoid using reductive universalising language about human nature, and his struggle to critique the societal structures and normative values of his day, hindered—as inevitably he was—by his own prejudices and assumptions. Across this part of the book, the discussion will take a single text, Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies [Monologen], as its core and eventual focus. Schleiermacher published this difficult and obscure [dunkel]5 little book of five interlocking­ 4 Schleiermacher opposed the idea that church and state should have a close or interdependent relationship, arguing that the church’s mission could be corrupted if it became preoccupied with the needs of the state. His views on the topic in this period can be glimpsed in passages from the fourth speech of his 1799 text, On Religion (see OR 82–91). Slightly later, in 1803, he composed a treatise named “Two Impartial Judgments on Protestant Ecclesiastical Affairs”, which treats of the topic in detail. For commentary and analysis see Theodore Vial, “Schleiermacher and the State”, in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 269–285, and Jerry F. Dawson, “Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Separation of Church and State”, Journal of Church and State 7, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 214–225. 5 This is Schleiermacher’s own terminology. See his letter to his sister, 14th Feb, 1801, kga v.5, 54; Life 1, 251.

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monologues in 1800, and in haste.6 He was thirty-one years old and had reached the apex of his involvement with Friedrich Schlegel and the group of philosophers, literary critics and theorists who made up the Early German Romantic Circle. This was a group that had established itself in Jena—a Prussian intellectual hub—but was at that time based in Berlin. While these Soliloquies, written floridly in the first person, are notoriously difficult to analyse, Schleiermacher would subsequently produce a more systematic presentation of his ethical and political views. In 1803 he published a 500-page critical survey of previous ethical theories [Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre], in which he examined a whole host of Western texts beginning with Greek antiquity, through Spinoza, right up to offerings from contemporaries Kant and Fichte, whose work he critiqued and sought to overcome.7 Later, in the winter of 1805 and having taken up a professorship at the University at Halle the previous year, Schleiermacher devised the first of many lecture courses on the subject of philosophical ethics. In these lectures, which have been preserved in the form of his own copious notes and plans— his Brouillon zur Ethik—he expounded a theory of the human as a participant in what he named variously as four key public institutions, realms, or historical “organs”: namely the state; interlocking communities of free sociality; the academy; and the church. Given these later, more formal and systematic efforts at ethical theory, Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies may seem an unlikely focus for study. However, my argument in Chapter six will be that the singular searching voice that Schleiermacher takes on in this text, as well as its literary form and its social and political agenda, make it a manifesto of his developing views on human identity, freedom and flourishing.

6 It took Schleiermacher less than a month to compose the text. He describes its origins in a letter to E. von Willich on 11th June 1801: “I glory in having written [the Soliloquies]; I was driven to it by an irresistible desire to pour out my soul [unbezwingliche Sehnsucht mich auszusprechen] to the empty air, without any premeditated object, without a thought of producing any effect, and I have often said to myself that it was folly; but, while thinking myself a fool, I have grown wise” (kga v.5, 137; Life 1, 266). 7 See Schleiermacher’s letter to Eleanor Grunow, Sept. 1802 (kga v.6, 113; Life 1, 317) on the difficult task of researching and writing this text.

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Chapter 4

Freedom and Formation Anew We arrive nearly everywhere via a leap.1

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Beyond the Moral Law, and the Idea of Universal Reason

There are at least two basic points of congruity between Schleiermacher’s ­academic juvenilia and his thinking on ethics and moral philosophy by 1800, when he published the Soliloquies. The first is the theme of freedom, for at both s­ tages in his career this functioned as a surface against which he formed his views about the nature of the human personality. The second concerns ­structure, for consistent with what I outlined in Chapter one, ­Schleiermacher ­continued to maintain disciplinary boundary lines between the realms of ­ethics and t­ heology. This much is made manifest in the distinction he draws, both in terms of theme and subject matter, between the Soliloquies and his speeches On Religion (1799). In the latter text, Schleiermacher famously ­depicts religious humans as passive intuiting agents—receptive to the Infinite which acts upon them, and which is absolutely other to them as finite creatures. M ­ oreover, as I discussed in Chapter one, Schleiermacher also depicts religion as the means through which human agents seek and are put into contact with the ­unconditioned referent both of their own existence and at the same time the continuing existence of the entire finite realm. In On Religion, in other words, Schleiermacher urges that the self as individuated consciousness is unable to ground itself. He argues that intelligent finite beings locate the origin of their individuality or uniqueness in the “marriage of the Infinite with the finite”—“that incomprehensible fact beyond which [they] are not able to pursue the finite series further”.2 To use his mature terminology—human selves have their ultimate origin and coherence, Schleiermacher thinks, in “the Whence of our receptive and self-initiated active existence”,3 namely 1 F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, ed. and trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge University Press 1998), 275. 2 kga i.2, 306; OR 107. 3 kga i.13/1, §4 (39); CF §4.3 (24). © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_009 Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft

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God, to Whom we have access only in faith, and not through knowledge or understanding. By contrast, in the preface to the third edition of his Soliloquies, Schleiermacher assures his readers that the book contains little to instruct or engage them on such religious matters.4 There is no explicit reference to God in this text, or—which is the same—to a Supreme Being, or to the Infinite or universe. And although he doesn’t suggest that the piece denies or overwrites the religious perspective, it is nevertheless firmly situated as an “ethical” text. Here human individuality is understood in terms of how it emerges through human history, community, and culture. Notwithstanding these basic similarities, in the decade between On ­Freedom and his Soliloquies there was a marked shift in the imagery, language, and ­epistemological framework that Schleiermacher employed in order to think about the nature of human development and flourishing. This shift took place as Schleiermacher continued to critique Kant’s moral p ­ hilosophy, with its ­portrait—as Schleiermacher understood it—of a self-defining and self-­ legislating moral agent, transcendentally free from worldly bonds.5 Indeed, we remember that in On Freedom, Schleiermacher did in fact agree with and ­emulate aspects of the Kantian perspective, insofar as he tied his portrait of moral accountability to the concept of a universal moral law—a rationally discernible standard of conduct, that is, which applies to all rational agents. Furthermore, where Schleiermacher invoked the concepts of reason and ­rationality in On Freedom, he does so simply with regard to the decision-­ making power of the individual human intellect. As I noted in the previous chapter, Schleiermacher does not clarify exactly how he conceives of the ­relation between reason and moral law in this text, nor describe in detail how rational humans come to reach moral and ethical judgments. Nevertheless, we gather that at this stage, and as the author of On Freedom, Schleiermacher 4 kga i.12, 326–327; S 6: “What is in a more narrow [engern] sense religious should nowhere be prominent therein”. 5 As Brent Sockness summarises: “Throughout these Jugendschriften, we find the young ­ministerial candidate struggling to formulate a more experientially realistic account of moral psychology and human agency than that offered by the latest moral system—Kant’s. ­Schleiermacher is also clearly bent on understanding the human condition generally—the “Bestimmung des Menschen”, to employ the eighteenth-century idiom—and arriving at an ­existentially compelling philosophy of life. These twin aspirations will ­eventually find r­ enewed focus and expression in the Monologen of 1800”. (‘The Forgotten Moralist: Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Science of Spirit’, 337). Frederick Beiser also analyses ­Schleiermacher’s relationship with Kantian theories of morality in his chapter ­“Schleiermacher’s Ethics”, in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2005), 53–72. For a precise, encyclopaedic guide to Schleiermacher’s philosophical ­development in this period, see Peter Grove Deutungen des Subjekts: Schleiermachers ­Philosophie der Religion. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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reckoned that to propose and formulate maxims for our behaviour is not only natural and proper to the human soul, but is also an endeavour that may run against—or serve to organise—the operations both of the faculty of desire and of the senses.6 By 1800, however, Schleiermacher had adopted a qualitatively different ­ethical framework to the one we find in On Freedom, and one through which he reshaped his views on human identity. An important contributing factor to this shift was that he deepened his critique of Kant’s critical philosophical project. Schleiermacher was already disputing the notion of transcendental freedom in 1789, we remember, and arguing that the notion of such freedom rent the feeling and judging subject in two—isolating the rational self, considered as noumenon, from the sensing and desiring self, considered as phenomenon. As the author of the Soliloquies he implicitly extended this critique of Kantian morality, however, so that he also disputed the notion of a universal moral law to which all rational agents are identically bound.7 What Schleiermacher took on in the stead of such a universalising structure for imagining moral fortitude, was a cosmic vision of human purposefulness. He adopted an ethical framework according to which each individual person has a unique vocation within society, a vocation they are called to fulfil through the passage of time and according to their specific place. And as ethical human agents develop their individuality, Schleiermacher suggests, this is not merely an aesthetic achievement. For they also make a concrete mark on the world, manifesting themselves in and through history and culture. “The individual existence of a plant is perfected in its blossom”, he muses, “but the world attaches supreme value to its fruit, which serves as a protection [Hülle] to future generations and is a gift which every creature must offer in order that the rest of nature may receive his life”.8 Moreover, by 1800, Schleiermacher was also contesting the notion that ­human reason could be “pure”—pure, that is, in terms of an ability to ­operate absolutely over and above phenomenal processes, or of its being ­unconditioned by feelings, the senses, and historically-placed linguistic expression. This too we can arguably count as an extension of his critique of Kant’s concept of t­ranscendental freedom. In his Soliloquies, Schleiermacher continued to ­portray human agents as constituting the highest form of finite life, due to their rationality and their capacity for self-reflection. He understood human selves to 6 See kga i.1, 220–221; OF 5. 7 In his Ideen, Schleiermacher’s friend Friedrich Schlegel wrote: “The Kantians’ conception of duty relates to the commandment of honor, the voice of God and of one’s calling in us, as the dried plant to the fresh flower on the living stem”. “Ideas”, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 244. 8 kga i.3, 59; S 98–99. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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possess “transcendental” intellectual faculties which enable them to navigate, perceive and filter the world around them.9 (Indeed, the self’s ­“transcendental” subjectivity was something he stressed through the first-­person form of his work, as will become clear in Chapter six). Yet here, as Schleiermacher denied the idea that ethical responsibility can be measured in response to a series of moral laws (or atemporal and external maxims), he also challenged the idea that human flourishing and fulfilment hinges upon the powers of a pure p ­ ractical reason, which in the Kantian moral system is cast in the role of ­discerning the content of such universal maxims. Instead, he explains in the Soliloquies that a “sublime revelation” [hohe Offenbarung] lies at the centre of his ethical perspective. This revelation came from ­within, he states—it was not the product of “any code of ethics [Tugendlehre] or s­ ystem of philosophy [System der Weisen]”.10 Instead, he says that in a singular and ­non-transposable moment of insight, he recognised himself to be a microcosm of reason, f­ eeling, and action for humanity as a whole. Therewith, ­Schleiermacher proposes an ethic according to which particular individuals enact their own distinctive ethical sensibility within the world, pouring what is inward outward, until the self becomes a coherent ethical unity. “Behaviour [Sitte] should be the outer garment worn by inner individuality”, ­Schleiermacher urges—“delicately and significantly adapted to its form [­ Gestalt], revealing its fine p ­ roportions and gracefully following its movement”. We should “always treat this beautiful artwork with piety”, he continues, “giving it ever a lighter and finer texture, drawing it ever more closely about the self”.11 Later in the text, he proceeds to ­further clarify this point about ethical action in the world: I give the world its due; in my outward behaviour I strive for order [Ordnung] and wisdom [Weisheit], discretion [Besonnenheit] and proportion. Indeed, what reason have I to disdain anything that proceeds so readily and happily from my inner being [Wesen] and activity?12 To corroborate and elaborate the above account of the development of ­Schleiermacher’s ethical position, it is worth turning to a pair of passages from the Soliloquies, which, for their suggestive summary of Schleiermacher’s ­shifting attitudes towards the Kantian moral system and its attendant portrait 9 10 11 12

For an elaboration of this point, see Mariña’s excellent book, Transformation of the Self in the Thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher, 126–145. kga i.3, 16–17; S 29. Schleiermacher proceeds to explain here that he is no longer ­“especially elated by some particular act, as are those whose fleeting existence is only now and then visited by a dubious gleam of inner reason”. kga i.3, 38; S 65. kga i.3, 61; S 102. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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of h ­ uman agency, are often cited in scholarship on Schleiermacher’s ethics. In the first, Schleiermacher explains his previous commitment to a doctrine of fixed human essences, and his previous view—now overcome—that m ­ oral conduct is judged against a universal standard. Although Kant is nowhere ­mentioned in this section of the text, Schleiermacher’s description of this ethical picture which transfixed him, taken together with his later references to duty-bound ethical agents,13 attest that he is referring here to Kant’s moral ­doctrine of the categorical imperative, and its attendant anthropological scheme. He writes: For a long time I too was content with the discovery of a universal reason; I worshipped the one essential being as the highest, and so believed that there is a single right way of acting in every situation, that the conduct of all men should be alike, each differing from the other only by reason of his place and station in the world. I thought humanity revealed itself as varied only in the manifold diversity of outward acts, that man himself, the individual, was not a being uniquely fashioned [eigenthümlich gebildet], but of one substance [Element] and everywhere the same.14 By 1800 however, Schleiermacher sought to denounce what he now considered to be a moral anthropology which universalised human agents as identical and uniform according to their rationality. In the following passage, ­Schleiermacher describes the vision of humanity he came to favour in its place—one w ­ hereby individual human identity is established in relation to the greater and ­ever-expanding whole of humanity’s temporal and spatial unfolding of itself. His description includes a rejection of an exaggerated anthropological dualism, according to which the inner, rational, and spiritual is understood as that element which binds all humans together as like creatures—each of whom is challenged with attaining the same exact standard of behaviour, and each of whom is inwardly identical. He also rejects the idea that it is simply a person’s extrinsic circumstances—their coordinates, mass, trajectory, and so forth— which marks him or her out as “different”: 13 See kga i.3, 18; S 30–31: “When, turning with discontent from the unworthy particularity of a sensuous animal life, man wins a realisation of humanity in its universal aspects and submits himself to duty, he is not straightaway capable of rising to the still higher level of individuality in growth and in morality, nor to perceive the unique nature that freedom chooses for herself in each individual”. 14 kga i.3, 17; S 30.

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I was not satisfied to view humanity in rough unshapen masses, inwardly together alike, and taking transient shape externally only by reason of mutual contact and friction. Thus there dawned on me what is now my highest intuition [Anschauung]. I saw clearly that each man is meant to represent humanity in his own way, combining its elements uniquely, so that it may reveal itself in every mode, and all that can issue from its womb be made actual in the fullness of unending space and time. [in der Fülle der Unendlichkeit]15 I venture that Schleiermacher’s use of the term Unendlichkeit at the close of this passage is significant. By framing the vocation of individual human ­beings in this way, he avoids tying the telos of humanity down to a strict ­linear line of historical progress, or fixing it to any one, single, finite point in history. It also means that he resists forming a vision of perfected humanity which n ­ ecessitates the refinement of any one finite human quality or series of ­qualities. Rather, by stipulating that humanity as a whole is made actual “in the fullness of ­infinity”—that in other words, the nature of “humanity” is ­always exceeding itself—Schleiermacher allows room for the thought that each f­urther g­eneration of people might express anew, in different ways, ­exactly what it means to be human. Each particular cultural grouping might in their own way represent the universal. And by describing individuals as called to ­represent humanity each in their own way, too, Schleiermacher thus stresses the irreducible particularity of individual ethical agents—a uniqueness he believes is compromised when people are encouraged to define their actions and their character against a general scale or classification.16 What Schleiermacher also makes clear here, is that pursuing one’s own unique vocation is not something that causes one to be at odds with other individuals, or to be in competition with them. Instead, he suggests that acting according to one’s own particular inclinations—developing one’s own ­particular character—works to the mutual benefit of all and expands human community on a global scale. Later on in the text, Schleiermacher explores this point further, as he develops the following image of reciprocal human community: 15 16

kga i.3, 18; S 31. Cf. Brent Sockness, “Was Schleiermacher a Virtue Ethicist? Tugend and Bildung in the Early Ethical Writings”, 32: “Become what you are!” is a maxim that applies as much to Schleiermacher’s thought in 1800, as it did from 1789 to 1793. But “what you are” is no longer given to you by your “menschliches Wesen” in general; rather it is achieved by ­introspection and discernment [Selbstanschauung] into your unique “eines Wesen”.

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The work of humanity is promoted throughout the world [Erdkreis]; ­everyone feels the influence of others as part of his own life; by the ingenious mechanism [kunstreiche Maschine] of this community ­ ­[Gemeinschaft] the slightest movement of each individual is conducted like an electric spark, through a long chain of a thousand living links, greatly amplifying its final effect; all are, as it were, members of a great organism, and whatever they may have done severally, is instantaneously consummated as its work.17 Schleiermacher’s reference to humanity as a “great organism” in this passage reflects the centrality of this organic metaphor to Romantic thought as a whole, and the proclivity among the group, including Schleiermacher, to eschew ­using mechanistic images to describe worldly life—machines, cogs, clock-time, and systems—motifs that in the present day remain associated with modern science.18 Hans Eichner has described the Romantic “organic” vision of worldly life in the following way: Nature, according to [the Romantics], is not a mere “nonego” but ­unconscious, visible spirit striving toward consciousness. The world is not a “Great Engine” resting in God’s hand but a great organism, a “cosmic animal” or “All-Tier”, as the Romantic physicist Ritter calls it… Romantic philosophy sought to explain all phenomena, including so-called dead matter, by freedom, by conscious or unconscious mental processes, and by the analogy of organisms. But what else is clear from this text, is that sociality is right at the heart of Schleiermacher’s understanding of ethical development in 1800. In the ­following passage, he confirms that the very sense of belonging or connection that a given individual has to their environment—their relation to the world, their position before it—is something that they cultivate through social and linguistic interactions with other human beings. We read: [E]verything I do, I like to do in the company of others [in Gemeinschaft]; even while engaged in meditation, in contemplation [Anschauen], or in the assimilation of anything new, I need the presence of some loved one, so that the inner event may immediately be communicated, and I may 17 18

kga i.3, 29; S 52. See James Benziger, “Organic Unity: Leibniz to Coleridge”, pmla 66, no. 2 (Mar., 1951): 24–48.

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forthwith make my account with the world through the sweet and easy mediation of friendship.19 These passages illustrate Schleiermacher’s view, then, that each human person is formed and bonded to their environment by way of the relationships they have with other individuals. Sociality mediates and organises even our most basic relationships with the world around us. But what we also see here is c­ onfirmation of Schleiermacher’s stress on the reciprocity at work in the development of human personalities: these are defined over time in relation to something much grander and more significant. In the Soliloquies, Schleiermacher portrays individuals as contributing in their own distinctive way to a global, organic, reality which itself expands to include each of these distinctive contributions. Human selves supply an irreducibly particular and irreplaceable part to society, or “humanity”, as this constitutes a dynamic and ever-growing whole. 2

Freedom and Rationality

To supplement my treatment of the Soliloquies, it is worth turning briefly to consider a lecture course on ethics that Schleiermacher delivered a few years later, in the academic year 1805–6. His programmatic notes and sketches for this lecture course have been preserved for us as his Brouillon zur Ethik—a document first published posthumously in 1870 as part of a volume of his work on philosophical ethics. Here, Schleiermacher sets out his understanding of the world as a cultural, historical and intelligible whole, which is produced and directed by reason. Reason manages this productive work not simply by establishing absolute fixed ideals or universal laws, he argues, but through ­incarnation and manifestation: by “appropriating” human beings as its organs and actors on, within, and through, the world. Schleiermacher refers to such appropriation as “ensouling”. “Reason should be soul”, he writes, proceeding in such a way as to demarcate “soul” as an incarnated rather than abstracted principle: “The ensouling principle forms and sustains body and life; we must thus discover reason as appropriating human nature and maintaining itself as soul in reciprocity with the whole”.20 A further point that Schleiermacher drives home in these lectures on ­ethics—which builds on his early position in On Freedom—is that human 19 20

kga i.3, 21; S 37. Brou, 38–39.

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agents should not be imagined or envisaged as the singular originators of their acts. He depicts the world as a churning nexus of reciprocal action, where no one part carries its meaning, its significance, or even its power and its life force, in isolation from the whole. He writes: Life everywhere appears as diverse functions standing in relative contrast to one another. Yet, in isolation these functions can neither be u ­ nderstood nor exist; rather, they must stand together in necessary connection. Thus, this is how we must also discover the life of ensouling reason; we must observe it in particulars, but only as they organically and necessarily belong together.21 As he portrays this grand ethical vision of a rationally-ordered world, then, Schleiermacher reveals himself to have drawn further away from his earlier ­preoccupation with Kant’s philosophical project and his own interpretation and development of it. At the same time, he moves closer to a depiction of the good life as involving the acquisition and cultivation of virtue, as well as the tradition that finite goodness is not achievable through a person’s own means alone, but is derived from a single life-giving, transcendent source.22 It is in the business of exploring this point, that Albert Blackwell turns by way of c­ omparison to Schleiermacher’s 1799 text On Religion, and to an infinitive phrase therein—das Eigenthümliche hervorzubringen. Blackwell translates this phrase as “to bring forth the characteristic”.23 And to say that humans bring forth what is characteristic, and not what is original, Blackwell i­nsists, is a phrase that epitomises Schleiermacher’s disagreement with Kant’s p ­ roposal that our wills are an absolutely self-determining causality. We have already seen how in On Freedom, Schleiermacher resisted this proposal with an ­assertion about the determined nature of human character. The cosmic ­dimensions of his ethical theory are such, Blackwell contends, that he portrays human 21

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Brou 41. In his editor’s postscript to the text, John Wallhauser summarises neatly how at this stage in his career, Schleiermacher’s view was that “ethics should express the character of the formative process, the moral development moving from the physical and unformed to the spirited and articulated, from nature to history”. (Brou, 228–229). In both his Broullion zur Ethik (1805–6), and his Outlines of a Critique of Previous Ethical Theory (1803), Schleiermacher suggests that it is necessary to amalgamate at least three major and traditional ethical theories, in order to adequately describe the nature of the human vocation. See Brou 39: “In order to describe the relation of the particular to the whole (temporally or spatially)”, he explains, “we must combine the (a) theory of the highest good, (b) theory of duties, (c) theory of virtue”. John Oman, whose English translation of On Religion was published in 1893, renders this term as “characteristic production”, 59.

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agents, p ­ articularly as linguistic beings, as constitutive of the world’s life and ­intelligibility as a whole. Our actions, he thinks, “are the “bringing forth” of powers that we have internalised from the world around us”.24 The global dimensions to Schleiermacher’s understanding of the ­relationship between universal and particular and the stress he puts on the genuine u ­ niqueness of individuals, who are nevertheless indebted to and in a real sense emergent from the world around them, does not of course ­resolve the query that I issued in Part 1 concerning Schleiermacher’s a­ doption of a “mediational” ­epistemology, where subjects receive and p ­ rocess the world through the work of their faculty of representations or powers of imagination [­Vorstellungsvermögen]. The problem I highlighted with such ­“representational” l­anguage, in light of the critiques famously ­offered by twentieth-century p ­ ­henomenologists, is that it seems to depict rational subjects as cut-off, b­ ulwarked, from the world around them. To “know” the world through the ­content of one’s own representations of it, is rather to be ­imprisoned in a world of one’s own construction.25 Yet Schleiermacher’s ­reworked ­model for u ­ nderstanding ethics and human identity does offer a renewed form of resistance to the ­assumption that human intellects are ­processors and subjective refashioners of a world that is external to them. This is because Schleiermacher depicts the ­relationship between selves and world such that the world’s ­intelligibility as a whole is established precisely through and in the actions of creatures working together, as unique and ­“nontransposable” [unübertragbar]26 parts to a single whole. In other words: since Schleiermacher construes human becoming as an integral part to the becoming of the world, and since he argues that human rationality is achieved through time and in the context of embodied, placed, existence, by 1800 his model for the self-world relationship seeks to undermine any sense of a ­division between the “inner life” as sealed off from the “outer”.27 24 Blackwell, Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life, 138. 25 Here I have paraphrased Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Kant’s representational epistemology. For Merleau-Ponty’s rebuff see Phenomenology of Perception, xviii: “The world is not what I think, but what I live through”. 26 See Brou 45: “We attribute the character of nontransposability [Unübertragarkeit] to the individual. The formed organ, insofar as it is an organ of uniqueness, cannot become that of another. Knowledge, insofar as uniqueness is embedded in it, likewise cannot become the vital knowledge of another”. 27 The following passage from Schleiermacher’s Brouillon zur Ethik, is illuminating on this ­issue: “That which has universally valid identity is the product of reason in itself. ­However, if it is actually to become such a product through the activity of individual persons, then it must be the activity of all individuals, and so it must come to the fore for them if it is to pass over into them. However, in order that it may also become their act it must also be

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The Role of Language in the Ethical Life

I have just noted that Schleiermacher understands the intelligibility of the world to be established through the work of rational and sentient beings. In his view, order, meaning, and sense are established in the concrete shape of communal human life. It is within this picture that we find language b­ ecoming central to Schleiermacher’s understanding of human existence. Humans of their very nature are linguistic, communicative beings. In the Soliloquies, Schleiermacher makes clear that the “objective” l­ anguage that communities share is what keeps them together as coherent and d­ iscretely formed groups.28 Shared language is a historical living whole, which shapes and grounds individuals as they dwell in it, grow up within it, and are thereby formed by it. “Language has exact symbols in fine abundance for everything thought and felt in the world’s sense”, he writes—“it is the clearest mirror of the times, a work of art revealing the current spirit”.29 This echoes the point that I  made in the previous chapter, when I discussed Schleiermacher’s approach to defining the term “freedom”, and to pinning down its “general” or most basic meaning. For in On Freedom, Schleiermacher was already depicting language as a historical living whole, which is picked up and participated in by its users. The suggestion was that human ethical development cannot take place on either an individual or corporate level without shared language, aside from it, or “before” it. What we also learned in On Freedom, however, is that all embodied ­humans contribute to the development of language, and each in their own way, a­ccording to their circumstances and their place. “Freedom” gathers its ­meaning as a term used on a public and popular level, Schleiermacher stressed—its sense, what it contains and conveys, is not something which the individual mind can take charge of alone. Its meaning in one person’s mouth is not defined solely by the intention of that particular speaker. In his ­Soliloquies, Schleiermacher returned once more to this idea that individual ­humans have a role to play in shaping shared language. Yet here, his focus was not ­merely on the way that this changes language itself, as it is pushed and pulled in ­different directions by members of a linguistic community. He also points out the ­importance that linguistic play has for individual human development

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formed in them and hence that coming to the fore must be only a summons to reduplication, that is, for signification”. (Brou, 107). Schleiermacher’s insight here was indebted to the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder, who I will discuss later in this part of the book. kga i.3, 37; S 64.

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­(Bildung). By c­ ontributing to language, he suggests, a person draws themselves outward. This is not simply a matter of transient artistic expression, but again it is about embodiment. Individuals manifest the patterns of their hearts and minds in concrete, public discourse. Sketching out his vision for an edifying communication of self through language, he writes: Each of us need only make his language thoroughly his own and a­ rtistically all of a piece, so that its derivation and modulation, its logic and its sequences, exactly represent the structure of his spirit, and the music [Harmonie] of his speech has the accent of his heart and the keynote [Grundton] of his thought.30 This idea that humans manifest themselves—their personalities—in l­ anguage, and that this can be done to a better or worse extent, unifies ethics and aesthetics when it comes to language’s import for human development. If we recognise the role that language plays in forming minds and shaping actions, Schleiermacher urges, then we see that it is at its best when it is beautiful and edifying in its structure and content. Yet Schleiermacher’s contention that language is integral to human formation also leads him to discuss its negative impact. In the following passage for instance, he explains that established language can smother and contain the development of a person’s own views and individuality; that accepted categories and concepts must often be overcome, if a person is to live ethically and responsibly. He explains that: Before it has yet found itself, the spirit is enmeshed in the world through language, and its first difficulty is to gradually extricate itself from this ­entanglement [Verstrikung]. And if in spite of all the errors and ­corruptions introduced through words, the spirit has at last penetrated through to truth, how treacherously language then changes her tactics, now isolating and imprisoning its victim, so that he cannot communicate [mittheilen] his discovery, nor receive further sustenance [Nahrung] from the outside.31 Schleiermacher introduces this passage—the drama of which seemingly ­opposes the liberated human spirit on the one hand to language on the other, painting the latter as a cold and hardened husk—with the clear message that it needn’t be this way. Language needn’t be an external foe to be overcome, 30 31

kga i.3, 38; S 66. kga i.3, 37; S 64.

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he suggests, and yet it is, if it amounts merely to “lifeless formulas” [todten Formeln], which cannot properly witness to the distinctive nature of human individuals.32 Addressing his readers, who he hopes will empathise with his own position, he suggests that “for our purposes language is still crude and underdeveloped, a poor instrument of communion”.33 In his Brouillon zur Ethik, Schleiermacher would proceed to make these points about language and its ethical function in a more systematic manner. “Language is simultaneously given with knowing as a necessary human ­function”, he explains, “and is nothing other than the emerging communality of knowing”.34 And later still in his lectures on hermeneutical theory, Schleiermacher would return to explore this idea at length.35 The following phrase, with which he describes the relationship between speaker and language, is particularly evocative: “He is her organ, and she is his” [Er ist ihr Organ und sie ist seines].36 With this statement, Schleiermacher encapsulates the tension between the nature of language as a creature which enframes the human—as something shared, which a person lives within, and is always-already shaped by—and the function of language as a tool for the individual. An instrument, in other words, that they can sculpt or adapt to the end of s­ elf-expression.37 As 32 33 34

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kga i.3, 39; S 67. kga i.3, 37; S 64. Brou 109–110. See also Brou 108: “Just as objective knowledge forms of itself an organic whole, so also does signification. The system of the signification of knowing is language. Thus, without language there would be no knowing and without knowing no language. In accordance with its special constitution as articulated expression, however, language cannot be deduced in ethics; rather, it must be previously given, and one can show only how as such it can especially be what we have ethically posited it to be”. Kristin Gjesdal has demonstrated that Schleiermacher’s lectures on Hermeneutics (1805– 1833) evidence his commitment to human self-expression as an ethical task that takes place through language. My own attention to the Soliloquies follows her argument in dialogue with these lectures, that Bildung is not merely about “aesthetic feeling or celebration of style”, but “addresses meaning and thought as expressed in the communal medium of language”. See Kristin Gjesdal, “Hermeneutics, Individuality, and Tradition: Schleiermacher’s Idea of Bildung in the Landscape of Hegelian Thought”, The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, ed. Dalia Nassar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 92–109. kga, ii.4, 75, E 15. This quote is not from a manuscript that Schleiermacher intended to publish. It was not until 1819 that he devised and wrote up a thorough or systematic hermeneutical theory—before then, he relied on aphoristic notes and broken phrases to deliver his lecture courses on the subject. This quote is one such aphorism. It is well known that Schleiermacher later theorised this dual nature of language in his Hermeneutics by speaking about its “universal element” (which he treats in terms of “grammatical interpretation”) and its “particular element” (which he treats in terms of “psychological interpretation”).

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Theo Hermans has described it—“The notion of language as both conditioning a speaker’s thought and a malleable instrument when handled by creative minds will become a cornerstone of Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics”.38 Later on in this part of the book, we will see Schleiermacher negotiating this tension between language as that which structures and determines humanity, and language as humanity’s tool, as he employs distinctive literary forms in o­ rder to stress individual particularity. But in this period, we find Schleiermacher articulating in his ethical writings how human language is essentially communal knowledge enacted socially. It is the means by which the world becomes intelligible to itself. 4

A New Approach to Freedom

The final and perhaps most clear sign of the shift in Schleiermacher’s thinking in this period, and one which recapitulates the points I have made above, is the change in his understanding of freedom. In a way which mirrors the critique of Kant’s notion of transcendental freedom that he had offered a decade p ­ reviously, in his Soliloquies Schleiermacher continues to deny the self an absolute, immediate, and spontaneous power of causality over the world, and denies too that such unconditioned possibility should constitute the proper definition of “freedom”. A person who “wins a realisation [Bewußtsein] of humanity in its universal aspects, and submits himself to duty” is not, Schleiermacher urges here, “straightaway able … to perceive and understand the unique nature [Natur] which freedom chooses for herself in each individual”. Indeed, he writes: The sense of freedom [das Gefühl der Freiheit] alone did not content me; it gave me no meaning to my personality, nor to the particular unity of the transient stream of consciousness flowing through me.39 Instead, by 1800, Schleiermacher had begun to theorise human freedom in terms which conceived it as a constructive developmental endeavour. ­Freedom for Schleiermacher now meant the task of cultivating a flourishing and ethically-sound human personality. It now meant a practice demanding 38 39

Theo Hermans, “Schleiermacher and Plato, Hermeneutics and Translation”, in Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Question of Translation, edited by Larisa Cercel and Adriana ­Serban (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2015), 83. kga i.3, 18; S 31.

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contemplation, rational reflection, and the challenge of living in community. As such, Schleiermacher speaks in his Soliloquies of the vocation to “develop one’s inner humanity into distinctness, expressing it in manifold acts”.40 In so doing, he describes existing as a free agent as a constructive, temporal, and worldly endeavour, through which the individual gathers up accretions, habits, knocks and marks which distinguish her from other temporal persons.41 We read: The purpose of my actions is to shape [bestimmen] what is human in me, giving it a particular form [endlichen Gestalt] and definite characteristics [Zügen], thus contributing to the world through my own self d­ evelopment and offering to the community of beings [Gemeinschaft freier Geister] the unique expression of my own freedom.42 To be free, for the author of the Soliloquies, is thus the habit of making one’s mark on the world—establishing the contours of one’s character in specific decisions made through discourse and encounter. And in speaking of “freedom”, we presume all persons in the world to be becoming, finite, yet spiritual and rational wholes, whose destiny cannot be narrated or understood from the perspective merely of concepts or empirical categories. This assertion, of course, resists the idea that the shared spaces in which humans live—whether described in cultural, linguistic, historical, religious, psychological, or ­physical terms (the list goes on)—can be experienced or evaluated ­“objectively”: ­plotted as if they were flat, visible and accessible areas, in the way that is ­conventional to modern cartography.43 To put it another way, Schleiermacher stresses in the Soliloquies that humans are bound up together. They are formed ­interdependently and in a common environment, so that no individual is 40 41

42 43

kga i.3, 20; S 34. Albert Blackwell states that for Schleiermacher, “ethics must deal with human beings as individuals among other individuals, each with his or her finite perspective. A ­virtual infinity of such perspectives interact with each other and with inanimate reality to ­constitute the ethical ‘world’”. (Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life, 229). To steal an important image from the twentieth century phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we might say that for the author of the Soliloquies, “the social is not collective consciousness but intersubjectivity, a living relationship and tension between individuals”. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Metaphysical in Man”, in Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H.L. Dreyfus and P.A. Dreyfus (Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1964), 90. kga I.3, 11; S 20. Schleiermacher began to problematise this idea in On Freedom, since he endorsed Kant’s claims about the limits of rational enquiry and stressed the finite position of each ­representing mind in the world.

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i­solated from another or able to express themselves without that other. Each one is always-already embedded in the shared linguistic and physical world. And yet, within this interplay of persons each individual also experiences the world in her own discrete way, so that to assume either that the world’s spaces can be treated as inert, measurable, surfaces, or to occupy the standpoint of a supposedly “objective” or unbiased gaze over the world is to be both ­reductive and distorting. For Schleiermacher, there is no universalisable, neutral or i­ nert worldly “space” for the free agent to roam through or make meaning in. Instead, “freedom finds its limit in another freedom [Es stößt die Freiheit an der Freiheit sich]”, he writes here, “and whatever happens freely bears marks of limitation [Beschränkung] and community”.44 The ethical framework I have sketched out and attributed to ­Schleiermacher in 1800 is one that I shall need to continue supporting and expounding throughout this part of the book. It is important to explain here that this framework and his attendant understanding of human identity is not one that Schleiermacher posited as a system or an abstract set of principles.45 Rather, it is a “framework” only in the loosest and most fluid sense of this word, and one that was also influenced by his responses to concrete social and political issues.

44 45

KGA I.3, 10; S 18. Cf. Schleiermacher’s comment in 1805 that “Among the detrimental consequences of ­organising ethics into fundamental principles and derivative propositions is slavery to formulas and words”. (Brou 36).

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Schleiermacher’s Commitment to Bildung Everything in each nation forms One knowledge [Bildung], but [it is] ­enlivened by a large amount of individuality and relative oppositions.1

∵ 1

Bildung in Berlin

One of the catalysts for the development in Schleiermacher’s ethical thinking was, as one would expect, his response to concrete social and political issues. Having left Halle in 1790, he graduated quickly from being an uncertain and disillusioned student via a three-year stretch as a private tutor to an a­ ristocratic household in the village of Schlobitten, East Prussia. He then served for another three years (1793–6) as an assistant pastor (Hilfsprediger) in Landsberg an der Warthe. He had regained confidence in his ministerial vocation. In 1796 he then moved to Berlin, to take up a post as chaplain for the city’s Charité hospital. And in the space of four years, Schleiermacher would not only make a name for himself in the city as a gifted preacher but would also establish himself as a member of the city’s intellectual and social elite and become a published author. Schleiermacher’s juvenile essays and dialogues of 1790—his digressive ­attempts to situate the Kantian ethical system in relation to Classical systems and schemes—had represented the work of a precocious university student of philosophy. The circle of friends and scholars that Schleiermacher joined in 1797, however (the Frühromantiker we introduced in Part 1) were by ­contrast acclaimed writers, critics, and theorists. Through his acquaintance with the celebrated Berlin salonist Henrietta Herz, Schleiermacher met Friedrich ­Schlegel, who was an industrious young scholar of Greek and Roman ­literature and of Dante and Shakespeare. Schleiermacher, who as Herz put it “had not as yet attained celebrity, or even a more than ordinary reputation”,2 was ­immediately drawn to the accomplished and well-connected Schlegel. Of the latter, Schleiermacher gushed to his sister Charlotte that “as regards my activity 1 Cri 277. 2 The description comes from Henriette Herz’s Erinnerung. Cited in Life 1, 139. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_010 Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft

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in the world of philosophy and literature, my more intimate acquaintance with him forms an epoch”.3 Further core members of the circle of Frühromantiker Schleiermacher joined included Schlegel’s brother August Wilhelm, as well as the Jena residents Ludwig Tieck, and the poet known as Novalis (George ­Friedrich Phillip von Hardenberg).4 All of these individuals were innovators who, after Goethe, held the human imagination to be the primary faculty in art and understanding.5 They were prolific creators and authors who demanded the same industry and energy of their new friend Schleiermacher. It was through his association with them that Schleiermacher not only accrued a new philosophical vocabulary, but also the desire to theorise in public, the impulse to express himself in the written word, and an even deeper appreciation for literary form.6 A significant way in which this circle of Romantics helped Schleiermacher to conceive freedom as a positive concept—as a process of self-disclosure, or 3 Life 1, 159. 4 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, a childhood friend of Tieck’s, and a primary figure in the creation of Romantic Musikästhetik, died of typhoid fever in Berlin, in 1797. 5 Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Volume v: Poetry and Experience, trans. and ed. ­Rudolf Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 44: “In the ­eighteenth century, poetry became a dominant power in Germany; it became conscious of a capacity—rooted in genius—to generate a world of its own. This capacity was embodied in Goethe. Thus poetry was led to recognize the following fundamental truth: poetry is not the imitation of a reality which already exists prior to it; nor is it the adornment of truths or spiritual meanings which could have been expressed independently. The aesthetic capacity is a creative power for the production of a meaning that transcends reality and that could never be found in abstract thought”. 6 Although in Part 1 I demonstrated that Schleiermacher’s attention to literary form ­began ­before he became acquainted with the Romantics, the group themselves were of course famous for their experiments in this regard. In 1799, in a letter to Henriette Herz, ­Schleiermacher wrote: “Schlegel has recently demonstrated to me, in many ways, that I ought to write a novel. My religious notions of love, marriage, and friendship, c­annot, he says, be communicated in any other form, and communicated they ought to be, ­consequently, I ought to be able to write the novel. I confessed to him that I had for some time felt it to be my vocation, but that I doubted of my ability, and so I do still”. Life 1, 223. Schleiermacher’s contribution to Romantic thought has been well documented in ­scholarship, and in my own reading, I follow the position taken up by Kurt Nowak, Bernard Reardon, Richard Crouter, and Jack Forstman. These scholars all argue that Schleiermacher had a special and distinctive role to play in the group, although he also shared in their approach to philosophy, their love of language and the ancients, and that he also adopted core Romantic imagery. See Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher und die Frühromantik. Eine ­literaturgeschichtliche Studie zum romantischen Religionsverständnis und Menschenbild am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1986); Jack Forstman, A Romantic Triangle: Schleiermacher and Early German Romanticism (Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, for The American Academy of Religion, 1977); Richard Crouter, “Introduction” to OR. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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self-expression—is that among them he took up and reimagined the motif of Bildung, a word that he uses throughout his Soliloquies.7 Schleiermacher would famously employ a derivative of this word—‘die Gebildeten’—in the full title of his 1799 speeches On Religion [Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern]. In this context, he used the term to refer to the early ­Romantics themselves, who he painted up as religion’s educated, cultured, and refined “despisers”. It was also the leading motif in his third speech, entitled “Über die Bildung zur Religion”. And having become established as a concept in his ethical and religious writings at the turn of the century, the term continued to be a central motif in Schleiermacher’s thought throughout his career.8 In the present day, “Bildung” is regularly deployed by German scholars in the technical context of discussing educational theory and pedagogical ­practice. And in English translations of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German texts, including the Soliloquies, “Bildung” is often rendered as “formation”, “cultivation”, or “education”. Nevertheless, in contrast to the term Erziehung, which Schleiermacher himself used to refer to that “education” which takes place within the context of the academy or the schoolroom,9 for Schleiermacher and his peers the evocative Bildung signalled more broadly to a kind of holistic development—that is, a spiritual and cultural formation, as well as an 7 This point has been well-attested. My analysis of the Soliloquies in the present chapter and the next is indebted to Brent Sockness’s article “Schleiermacher and the Ethics of ­Authenticity: The Monologen of 1800”. Here, Sockness puts the text into dialogue with Charles Taylor’s work on Early German Romanticism, arguing that it bears the hallmarks of the ­“expressivist” ­conception of subjectivity and of human freedom which Taylor elaborates in his works Hegel, and Sources of the Self. According to Taylor, this expressivist philosophical anthropology “­rejected the Enlightenment’s bifurcation of the human into body and mind”, as well as “its dissection of the psyche into discrete and conflicting faculties (reason, feeling, will, and desire)”. This philosophy, Taylor avers, contained the “epoch-making demand that my realization of the human essence be my own, and hence launched the idea that each individual … has its own way of being human, which it cannot exchange with that of any other except at the cost of distortion and self-mutilation”. W.H. Bruford studies the Soliloquies as part of the German Tradition of Bildung in his chapter “Friedrich Schleiermacher: Monologen (1801)”. The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: “Bildung” from Humboldt to Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 58–87. Also see Christiane Ehrhardt, Religion, Bildung und Erziehung bei Schleiermacher. 8 Hermann Fischer, “Schleiermacher’s Theorie der Bildung”, in Bildung in evangelischer ­Verantwortung auf dem Hintergrund des Bildungsverständnisses von F.D.E. Schleiermacher: eine Studie des Theologischen Auschusses der Evangelischen Kirche der Union, ed. Joachim Ochel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 139: “Bildung gehört zu den zentralen Themen Schleiermachers. Es begleitet ihn von seinen ersten beruflichen und literarischen Anfängen bis zu den Vorlesungen der Reifezeit, es taucht im Zusammenhang konkreter ­Aufgaben oder spezifisch religiöser bzw. ethischer Fragestellungen auf und reicht bis in die Fundamente seines spekulativen Systems”. 9 See Brou 45. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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intellectual one. Indeed, today it has no easy counterpart in English, whether technically and conceptually or in terms of the historical and cultural resonance that the word had accrued by the nineteenth century as a feature of the German language.10 It is of course beyond the scope of this study of Schleiermacher to present the diffuse history of this term in detail. However, in the next two sections I shall point to a few of the significant ways that Bildung was employed and understood at the time that Schleiermacher and his Frühromantiker peers inherited it as a guiding motif. It will become clear that with this term “Bildung”, Schleiermacher had tapped into a resource which helped him to articulate human identity as social—as something enacted in time and place, so that he could envisage each human individual as belonging to and involved in developing a greater whole. This concept of Bildung, that is to say, can help us to imagine what Schleiermacher meant in the following passage, which I quoted in the introduction to this book: “My way of thinking really has no other ground than my own singular character, my inborn mysticism, and my cultivation, which proceeds outward from within”. 2

The Meaning of Bildung

It is worth noting first of all that in the context of sixteenth-century Pietist mysticism, Bildung had currency as a term denoting human formation, where this was believed to be patterned and encouraged by the imago dei—the ­image [Bild] of God present in the human soul, through the will of the creator.11 This usage was not lost, however, when the term was picked up and deployed on a broader scale. In his Wahrheit und Methode (1960), Hans Georg Gadamer traces out how Bildung (“perhaps the greatest idea of the eighteenth century”) became one of the guiding principles of nineteenth-century humanism. And here, Gadamer explains, it continued to evoke precisely this mystical usage— the notion that a human carries within herself the image of that which she will develop outwardly, through words and action in the world.12 Schleiermacher’s contemporary Wilhelm von Humboldt, the liberal educator and founder of the University of Berlin (1810), proposed that when Germans speak of ­Bildung 10

The translators of Herder’s Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menscheit refer to their rendering “Bildung” with the English word education, as a “failure”. See ­Herder, “Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind”, xliv. 11 See Hans Sperber, “Der Einfluß des Pietismus auf die Sprache des 18. Jahrhunderts”, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 8 (1930), 508– 509, and E.L. Stahl, Die Religiöse und die Humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee, und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert (Bern, 1934), 97–101. 12 Gadamer, Truth and Method, 10. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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they mean to indicate “something both higher and more inward, namely, the ­attitude of mind which, from the knowledge and the feeling of the total intellectual and moral endeavour, flows harmoniously into sensibility and character”.13 Bildung, it is therefore suggested, indicates a holistic cultivation of one’s whole life, where inward reflection is manifested in outward action, in a process of self-development that is vital and strived after yet never fully completed. During the turn of the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the meaning of Bildung approximating “education” thus went beyond that formal vocational or academic tuition offered by institutions, whether administered by the state or through private means. In his intellectual history of the disciplinary “calving” of anthropology from philosophy, John Zammito also reveals a vital aspect to the social and political function of the word in eighteenth-century Prussia. At this time, the motif of Bildung had been taken up by an emergent social order, the gebildeten Stände— an educated bourgeois group, who found in it a tool for their s­ elf-understanding. This emerging gebildeten Stände were a tributary stream, feeding into what by the close of the nineteenth century in Prussia it would be possible to refer to as the Bildungsbürgertum,14 a widely-established intellectual upper stratum of the bourgeoisie, whose views concerning education and culture were framed by their exposure to the ideals of classical antiquity. This group or groups that Zammito designates as gebildeten Stände were not professional scholars, and their ideas and aspirations were not grounded in an institutional context.15 On the fringes both of university life and the aristocracy, Bildung became an aspirational term that communicated not only the feat of self-development, but also social and political emancipation.16 For the purposes of the present study 13 14 15

16

Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Schriften, Akademie ed., vii, Part 1, 30. Cited by ­Gadamer in Truth and Method, 10–11. For a history of the emergence of the Bildungsbürgertum in the Prussian nineteenth ­century, see the fundamental study Das Bildungsbürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Jürgen Kocka, 4 Vols. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985–1992). Zammito cites Franklin Kopitzsch: while “academic schools and universities were of substantial importance for the propagation of enlightenment ideas, the enlightenment expanded in all ways [in the eighteenth century]—in thematic terms as well as in ­recruitment—turning from a matter of “scholars” [Gelehrten] to a concern of the ­“educated” [Gebildeten]”. ‚Die Aufklärung in Deutschland: Zu ihren Leistungen, Grenzen und ­Wirkungen”, Arkhiv for Sozialgeschichte 23 (1983), 3–4. John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago and London: ­University of Chicago Press, 2002) 29: “[The gebildeten Stände] conceived Bildung not as a possession but as a way of life. That way of life offered possibilities of self-definition and even self-assertion above all against the traditional Stände. This is the historically apt sense of the term emancipation”.

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it is of course significant that Bildung as a motif was seen to carry with it such social and aspirational inflections, since it indicates that as ­Schleiermacher incorporated this language of cultivation and self-development into his own ethical anthropology, he was articulating a perspective on human identity that was not merely and solely theoretical. Instead, the suggestion is that the term embroiled him in a broader conversation about human identity, as this ­manifested itself within relations of social and political power. Furthermore, as Rebekka Horlacher has suggested in her work on the ­“pre-history” of Bildungstheorie, the use of Bildung among philosophers to ­indicate cultural and spiritual expression was catalysed by the impact of the deist philosopher Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, upon eighteenth-century German philosophers and theologians.17 I mentioned Shaftesbury briefly in Part 1, in virtue of his influence on Johann Augustus ­Eberhard, Schleiermacher’s teacher at Halle. And in this period, when the ­Scottish Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Francis Hutcheson were making an impact within German scholarship, Shaftesbury, a central ­figure in the British Moralist tradition, had one of the most prominent ­legacies of any British philosopher in Europe. The most significant translations of his work at this time were undertaken by Johann Georg Hamann, F­ riedrich ­Christoph Oetinger, and Johann Joachim Spalding. All of them used the word Bildung to render into German Shaftbury’s notion of a person’s “inward form” or ­formation, which he articulated in his philosophical rhapsody “The ­Moralists”. In this dialogic essay, inward form indicates the human powers of “­ intelligence, action and operation” and the faculty of cultivating external ­objects. These are powers, Shaftsbury tells us, which distinguish humans from “the dead forms” (natural objects and non-human life) who are capable of no such active, creative and rational power. Yet although such “inner ­formation” dignifies humans, it does not appear in Shaftesbury’s text as humanity’s ­highest end or function. For we learn that humans have such power only in relation to an even higher purpose, namely “that third order of beauty” (third, after [1] “the dead forms”, and [2] “inward form”): which forms not only such as we call mere forms, but even the forms which form. For we ourselves are notable architects in matter and can show ­lifeless bodies brought into form and fashioned by our own hands, but 17

See Rebekka Horlacher, Bildungstheorie vor der Bildungstheorie. Die Shaftesbury-Rezeption in Deutschland und der Schweiz im 18. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), and her article “Bildung—A Construction of a History of Philosophy of Education”. Studies in Philosophy and Education 23 (2004): 409–426.

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that which fashions even minds themselves contains in itself all the beauties fashioned by those minds and is consequently the principle, source, and fountain of all beauty.18 Through Shaftesbury’s readers, and most particularly Hamann’s friend the ­theologian Johann Gottfried Herder,19 the dissemination and ­theorization of Bildung accelerated. Alongside Shaftesbury, who he called the “Plato Europens”,20 Herder too held to the maxim that the growth or development of the particular creature takes place in relation to the greater and i­neffable Whole of the universal order.21 In Herder’s scheme, there was a mutual ­interplay ­between the self’s ability to arrange and determine itself, and the self’s role as an instrument of communal identity. As Ioannes D. Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin have put it, Herder understood every creature in the universe to be “simultaneously means and end: a tool in the hands of Providence, but also a universe all of its own”.22 Moreover, in Herder’s thought Bildung also impinges on the idea of a nation or nationality, since he conceives the former as a group of people which emerges organically (as opposed to ­constitutionally and contractually), as free individuals come together through a common ­language, set of customs, place and history.23 Helped thus not least through 18 Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 323–324. 19 Herder expressed the sentiment that it was “one of the most beautiful of Spalding’s ­accomplishments, to make Shaftesbury’s ‘The Moralists’ known to us at that time, 1745”. See Brief 33 in Briefe zu Beförderung der Humanität (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1971), Vol 1, 161, cited by Ernst Boyer in “Schleiermacher, Shaftesbury, and the German Enlightenment”, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 96, No. 2 (Apr., 2003), 194. In this aricle, Boyer describes the influence that Shaftesbury had on Schleiermacher himself. 20 Johann Gottfried Herder, “Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind”, trans. Ioannes D. Evrigenis & Daniel Pellerin, Another Philosophy of History and Selected Political Writings (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), 22. 21 See Herder, “Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind”, 72: “Behold the entire universe from heaven down to earth—what is a means, what is an end? Is not everything a means towards a million ends, everything an end by a million means? The chain of omnipotent, omniscient Good contains thousands of entwined meshes: every link of this chain hangs in its proper place as a link, yet none can see where the chain [as a whole] hangs in the end”. 22 Ioannes D. Evrigenis & Daniel Pellerin, Introduction to Herder, “Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind”, xxxiv. 23 For Herder and later for Schlegel and his Romantic contemporaries, exploring the ­literature of other cultures, nations, and ancient civilisations was decisive for understanding the extent of their own individuality. See Kurt Mueller-Volmer, “Language theory and the art of understanding”, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 163: “The poetic

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Herder’s influence, Bildung as a philosophical and anthropological concept which resisted the idea of uniformity, stressed individual particularity, and was anti-mechanistic, was well established among German elites by the close of the eighteenth century. It informed and grounded conversations not just in in art and education, but also in morality, politics, and religion.24 3

The Self Negotiated in Society

An important source for registering the significance of Bildung among ­Schleiermacher’s friends at this time is the Athenaeum—the journal that Friedrich Schlegel founded and edited alongside his brother August ­Wilhelm, with some editorial help coming from Schleiermacher too. Running between 1798 and 1800, it was a short-lived yet notorious publication, and in the task of producing it these men considered themselves not as a ­committee of cordial and professionally-arranged co-editors, but as a group of friends, ­collaborating and philosophising together, sharing their poetry, literary criticism, ­aesthetic theory and religious ideas with the intelligensia both in Jena and Berlin.25 The habit that Schleiermacher had already developed as a precocious Halle student, of experimenting with different literary forms, was one now e­ ncouraged and edified by the example of his prolific friends. They were ­publishing n ­ ovellas, constructive reviews, and new translations of ancient texts, and they filled their journal with ironical fragments and poetry. A love of language and of self-expression coursed through the group, and in the f­oreword to the j­ ournal’s first edition, Bildung is invoked as the practice that unites and ­inspires them.26

24

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spirit for the Romantics had many incarnations—in different individuals and national literatures ancient and modern. Yet accepting the multiplicity of individual spirits also entailed a confirmation of their own distinct being. They thought that by recognizing the creative spirit in other cultures and other geniuses one would become aware of one’s own indelible individuality”. Herder’s widespread impact on the meaning and status of Bildung in German scholarship and in German society is well-documented. See R. Wisbert, Das Bildungsdenken des ­jungen Herder. Interpretationen der Schrift “Journal meiner Reise im Jahr 1769” (Frankfurt am Main: Lang., 1987); J. Ruhloff, Bildung heute. Pädagogische Korrespondenz. Zeitschrift für kritische Zeitdiagnostik in Pädagogik und Gesellschaft, Band. 21, (1997/1998): 23–30; H.R. Müller, ‚Bildung der Sinne. Ästhetik, Anthropologie und Bildung im 18. Jahrhundert‘. Bildung und Erziehung 54, no. 2 (2001): 151–165. See Ruth Richardson, “The Berlin Circle of Contributors to Athenaeum”, 816–858. In a collection of aphorisms in the third volume of the journal, Schlegel also states that Bildung is “the greatest good and it alone is useful”. See Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 244.

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Again—Bildung appears here a nebulous motif, and among the ­writings of the journal’s various contributors there exists no single ­established definition or worked-through understanding of it. Yet it is useful to note the idealised ­picture that Friedrich Schlegel offers in his poem, Das Athenaeum (1800), which featured in the journal’s final issue. Here Schlegel follows the same trajectory as Herder, because he cites Bildung as that practice through which ­order might be brought to the many in relation to the One.27 The sense is that he ­understands there to be an interplay between the natural forces which bind individuals, and the freedom which allows individuals to develop their own natures into ­distinction, and that both freedom and nature together tend in purpose t­owards a higher unity striven for but never absolutely achieved in worldly life.28 We see this as he introduces Bildung as the mediating force through which individuals are called to be faithful to one another in “free ­society”, or in “free association”. He writes: “Der Bildung Strahlen all’ in Eins zu fassen | Vom Kranken ganz zu scheiden das Gesunde | Bestrebten wir uns treu im freien Bunde | Und wollten uns auf uns allein verlassen”.29 It is important to emphasise how the Romantics also understood the term to indicate a self which is negotiated out in society and through culture. I­ ndeed, in the very project of inaugurating and publishing their Athenaeum journal, the Frühromantiker had elected to do their thinking and philosophising on an open and public level. Far from understanding self-development to mean a retreat into purely aesthetic or religious expression, then—as if it even makes sense to talk about “purely” religious or aesthetic expression30—the Romantic conception of Bildung endorses the view that an individual will undertake the work of establishing their own identity via concrete decision-making, through the re-articulation of ideas that he or she has learned from external sources, and through the acknowledgement too of the freedoms of others. Their 27

28

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Frederick Beiser argues that the Romantic project is sustained by a “holistic spirit”, with the goal of establishing “the unity of art and life”. See Romantic Imperative, 7. Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert traces Friedrich Schlegel’s “striving for wholeness” (9) in her Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy. In his essay On the Study of Greek Poetry, trans. Stuart Barnett (Albany, NY: State ­University of New York Press, 2001), Schlegel construed Bildung as a reciprocity between freedom and nature. “The development [Bildung] or evolution of freedom” he wrote, “is the necessary result of all human activity and suffering, the ultimate result of every interaction between freedom and nature” (25). See Ernst Behler, “Friedrich Schlegel’s Theory of an Alternating Principle”, Revue internationale de philosophie 50, no. 197 (1996): 383–402. Friedrich Schlegel, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler and Hans ­Eichner (München: Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, 1962), i.5, 317. Schleiermacher himself denounces the notion of a “pure” [rein] religion in the fifth speech of On Religion.

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e­ mphasis on individual uniqueness issued in the charge that a person should carve out a specific position for his or herself in society, one—honouring such particularity—that would not simply be defined by existing cultural norms and generalisations. As Frederick Beiser has explained: The romantics insist that Bildung must arise from the free choice of the individual, that it must reflect his own decisions. The self realizes itself only through specific decisions and choices, and not by complying with general cultural norms and tradition.31 Indeed, if the purpose of individual Bildung is to strive to generate a g­ enuine, unified society—the freier Bund that Schlegel refers to in his Athenaeum poem—then as self-appointed champions of such education, the Romantics charged themselves with liberating “the spirit from all forms of social and ­political oppression”.32 And this, in turn, entailed highlighting and ­confronting those institutional structures, traditional values, and social norms that they perceived as a hindrance to the ability of certain individuals to flourish in ­contemporary Prussian society.33 31

See Beiser, Romantic Imperative, 29, and xi: “no less than Plato and Aristotle, they insisted that this ideal [of self-cultivation] is realisable only within society and state”. See also Beiser’s comment in his essay “Schleiermacher’s Ethics”, The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed Jacqueline Mariña (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 62: “Schleiermacher understood sociability on both a social and political level. If on the social level it meant the demand for spheres of social life independent of ­political control, on the political level it signified the fact that each individual could develop his p ­ owers only through his participation in political life. In the Monologen he laments the loss of the virtue of the ancient republics, where each individual was ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of the public good”. On the imbalanced emphasis on the group as a literary movement, at the expense of their political agenda, see Philippe Lacoue-­Labarthe and Lean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester, (NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 5: “Their project will not be a literary project and will open up not a ­crisis in ­literature, but a general crisis and critique (social, moral, religious, political: all of these aspects are found in the fragments) for which literature or literary theory will be the p ­ rivileged l­ocus of expression”. See also Theodore Ziolkowski’s masterful study The German R ­ omantics and their Institutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), which seeks to revive a point Schleiermacher himself makes plain in his lectures on ­ethics—that Romantic ­writers and poets were shaped and grounded in institutions. 32 Beiser, Romantic Imperative, 100. 33 See Ruth Richardson, “The Berlin Circle of Contributors to ‘Athenaeum’”, 840–841: [For both Schlegel and Schleiermacher], “our highest Beruf is the development of our ­God-given individuality… this means overcoming socially contrived and conceived boundaries and stereotypes”.

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Schleiermacher, Bildung, and the Question of Gender

Having explored a little further the significance of this word Bildung, I have indicated that Schleiermacher’s contemporaries associated it with a process of self-realisation that has an important social dimension, which includes the public arena of state and society. Bildung entails an assertion of ­individuality within the cosmic context of humanity as a whole, and to champion the cause of Bildung incorporates the task of liberating particular agents from those tired institutional structures which prevent them from properly fostering their unique talents, gifts, and virtues in their social and political communities. At this juncture then, having established the socio-political depth of this motif of Bildung, I shall now resume my focus on Schleiermacher, and the task of ­building a picture of how he imagined and portrayed human identity in practice. A text that it is instructive for us to turn to here, as evidence that ­Schleiermacher too understood human self-realisation as a process that must be negotiated within human society and its institutions, even if individual Bildung with its religious telos cannot finally be fulfilled within these institutions, is an Athenaeum fragment that he wrote in 1798, entitled Idee zu einem Katechismus der Vernunft für edle Frauen (Idea for a Reasonable Catechism for Noble Women). This piece would eventually go on to have a large audience. By the close of the nineteenth century it had been disseminated throughout German-speaking lands, and Ruth Richardson has described how, remarkably, it was even considered as a therapeutic aid that would “emotionally strengthen women, leading ultimately to their physical health also”.34 In the fragment, Schleiermacher raises the issue of women’s emancipation in an indirect and ironical manner.35 We can reasonably suppose that he is drawing on his knowledge of the frustrations facing his female contemporaries in the literary salons of Berlin—elite, noble (edle) and educated women, a good proportion of them part of the Jewish community too—whose creativity and aesthetic ambition he knew to be stultified by gendered norms and institutional practices. 34 35

Ruth Druscilla Richardson, “Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Weihnachtsfeier as Universal Poetry: The Impact of Friedrich Schlegel on the Intellectual Development of the Young Schleiermacher”, PhD Diss. Drew University, 1985, 718. As Martha B. Helfer explains, Schleiermacher was writing “against the backdrop of the increasingly conservative polarization of binary gender categories in the economic and social spheres that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century”. Helfer, “Gender Studies and Romanticism”, The Literature of German Romanticism, ed. Dennis F. Mahoney ­(Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 233.

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Among the great women whose hospitality and friendship ­Schleiermacher enjoyed in turn-of-the-century Berlin were Henriette Herz, who was the ­salonière responsible for introducing him to Friedrich Schlegel, ­Caroline Schelling (née Michaelis, divorced [August Wilhelm] Schlegel), Rahel ­Varnhagen, and D ­ orothea Veit. The latter had left a traditionally-arranged yet loveless marriage with banker Simon Veit in 1799, in order to live with and eventually marry Friedrich Schlegel. In their capacity as hosts of some of Berlin’s famous salons, or “open houses” of the early nineteenth century, these women were mediators of high culture, and they provided a space for intellectuals like the Humboldt brothers, the Schlegels, and Carl Gustaf von Brinkmann to share thoughts and ideas with one another. At the same time as they were active participants in philosophical and literary discussions with their male friends and associates however, these exceptional women were also accomplished linguists, invited contributors to the Athenaeum, authoresses (albeit usually anonymously or pseudonymously) and translators. Indeed, we note that Herz, Veit, and Caroline Schelling, the daughter of Göttingen Professor Johann David Michaelis, not only influenced young ambitious scholars like Schlegel, and informed the sort of company that these gentlemen kept, but they were also thinkers and writers in their own right. They naturally played a positive role in the germination and production of Early German Romantic literature and  ideas.36 These elite or “noble” women (to adopt Schleiermacher’s own adjective) enjoyed genuine, mutually constructive and critical dialogue with their male companions, then, and were encouraged to express themselves and their ­opinions. Here one thinks in particular of the lengthy chains of debate-laden letters sent between Schleiermacher and Herz, between Friedrich ­Schlegel and Veit, and of course between the four among each other. It was in fact ­Schlegel and Herz together who persuaded Schleiermacher, at 29 years of age, to d­ evelop and publish his speeches On Religion. The both of them became his critical readers and editorial guides for the project.37 Nevertheless, it is also the case that due to the expectations surrounding their gender in 36

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For an account of these women writers, see Ricarda Huch’s seminal study Romantik. In Gesammelte Werke, Vol vi: Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik, ed. Wilhelm Emrich. (Cologne: Kiepenhauer und Witsch, 1969), 17–646; Margarete Susman’s 1926 fine work Frauen der Romantik (Frankfurt am Main und Leipzig: Insel, 1996), which devotes ­chapters each to Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Veit Schlegel, Rahel Varnhagen, Karoline von Günderrode and Bettine von Arnim; Barbara Becker-Cantarino’s much more recent book Schriftstellerinnen der Romantik (München: C.H. Beck, 2000), which attends to gender and societal roles in nineteenth-century Germany. Life, Vol 1, 139–140.

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this period, and the limited roles open to them both within society on the one hand and the home on the other,38 that even as wealthy, well-respected and connected individuals, these women, including Herz, were not afforded the same standing or treatment as their male contemporaries were, within what we now might refer to as the Romantic school. We can bring this point about the different ­expectations and perceptions surrounding the women ­Romantics as authors and intellectuals into stronger relief if we consider that they were excluded from university and academy at all levels. To become a “student” in the e­ stablished and i­nstitutionally-ratified sense of the word was so rare for ­women at this time as to be effectively impossible for them. And much less did they have the opportunity to match the legacy of their fathers, ­husbands and ­correspondents by pursuing academic posts and writing lecture ­syllabuses. Indeed, the ­philosopher ­Dorothea von Rodde-Schlözer, a friend and ­correspondent of C ­ aroline Schelling’s, was, in Göttingen, in the late 1780s, only the second woman in Germany to receive a doctorate. (The first was ­Dorothea Christiane Exleben, a practitioner of ­theoretical and practical medicine, who gained hers in 1755 at Halle). Such were the regulations surrounding the admission of women to the University of Göttingen at this time, that Rodde-Schlözer studied and was examined in private, by a select faculty committee.39 Furthermore, there is also the issue of the mediums in which these ­women chose to write—the nature, that is, of their literary output. In her study Von Berlin nach Krakau: Zur Wiederentdeckung von Rahel Levin Varnhagens ­Korrespondenz, Barbara Hahn characterises Rahel Varnhagen as a writer ­“without an oeuvre” [ohne “Werk”].40 In doing so, she signals how the literary labour of these women writers around 1800, large amounts of it recorded in letters, diaries, and autobiography, often fell outside the traditional genres of 38

39 40

See John C. Fout, ed., Germany in the Nineteenth Century: A Social History (New York and London: Holmes & Meier, 1984). In his introduction to this collection of essays, Fout ­asserts that the book as a whole seeks to tell a “woman-centred” history that will focus on the perspectives and experiences of women themselves, and will seek to avoid speaking simply in terms of the roles and expectations foisted onto them by patriarchal norms. For a biographical portrait of Dorothea alongside four other so-called “Universit­ ätsmamsellen”, see Eckhart Kleßmann, Universitätsmamsellen: Fünf aufgeklärte Frauen zwischen Rokoko, Revolution und Romantik (Frankfurt am Main: Eichborn, 2008). See Barbara Hahn, Von Berlin nach Krakau: Zur Wiederentdeckung von Rahel Levin ­Varnhagens Korrespondenz (Berlin: Zentraleinrichtung von Frauenstudien und ­Frauenforschung an der Freien Universität Berlin, 1989), 3. Hahn’s comments relate specifically to Rahel Varnhagen, but could equally well be applied to Caroline Schelling and Henriette Herz. For a study of Varnhagen, see Hannah Arendt’s masterful Rahel ­Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, edited by Liliane Weissberg, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

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the literary canon, like the lyric and the novel.41 Indeed, in an essay on the ­issues surrounding the reception and interpretation of “the women writers of Romanticism”, Gesa Dane concludes that in stark contrast to their male ­contemporaries, Herz, Veit, Caroline Schelling and others became “women of the Romantic School” only by the virtue of narratives constructed much later, by literary historians in the twentieth century. Dane corroborates her proposal with the fact that in his Die romantische Schule of 1832, the only text H ­ einrich Heine referred to which had a female author was Veit’s pseudonymously-­ published novel of 1801, Florentin. Moreover, in Rudolf Haym’s massive study of the same name, written in 1870, women similarly play “only bit parts”.42 In addition to the above considerations about the gebildete Frauen to whom Schleiermacher was a friend and dialogue partner, as we reflect on his ­“Catechism” fragment, it is also worth considering the point I made in the ­previous chapter about Schleiermacher’s attention to language, and his views concerning its ability to shape not just human attitudes, but the c­ omposition of human society. Schleiermacher, I contended, understood an individual’s unique perspective on the world to be borne from without as well as from ­within. We saw this as he explained the potentially negative function that ­language can have, including the notion that as it is shared and ­developed among a ­particular group or nation it can inculcate unhelpful ­categories among its users. It can introduce “errors and corruptions” in hearts and minds. S­ chleiermacher ­suggested that a person is always already enmeshed in a ­composite of ­individual habits, impressions, culturally-specific ideas, and community-based practices. In such a view, the implication is that no person, critic or otherwise, is able to get “behind” the culture(s) that they inhabit, and no individual has access to the pre-cultural, or the pre-linguistic. This view therefore seems to dispute the possibility of obtaining sufficient critical ­distance from whatever societal object(s) or trend(s) it is that one seeks to describe or narrate. Indeed, in light of it, it seems wise for the critic to proceed with a firm sense of his or her own limitations, since their ability to garner the adequate critical distance required to coherently judge cultural and societal 41

42

Lorely French addresses this issue in her German Women as Letter Writers, 1750–1850 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). See also Katherine R. Goodman and Edith Waldstein, eds., In the Shadow of Olympus: German Women Writers Around 1800 (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992), and Elaine Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness”, in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Pantheon, 1985). Showalter’s suggestion is for a “gynocritics” that embraces mediums like the letter and the diary. Gesa Dane, “Women writers and Romanticism”, The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, ed. Nicholas Saul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 134.

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norms seems to be utterly ­precarious. The critic’s ability to allow an ­individual to ­express their identity in their own way—to help them to speak out and develop their own individuality—without judging them from the outside, ­according to learned ­generalisations, ­wavers on a knife’s edge.43 Given all of these various factors, it is significant that in this playful little piece, Schleiermacher does not directly confront the issue of women’s ­emancipation or seek to describe in analytic terms the role of women in contemporary society. But what he does do here is to poke and prod away at existing categories by employing a distinctive literary form: he parodies a traditional Protestant teaching document and produces a short creed and a set of ten commandments for educated Prussian women of polite society. These commandments constitute a series of ironical recommendations, driving at the shortcomings of contemporary expectations about the behaviour and role of women. “Thou shalt not of set purpose bring life into being”, we read. “Thou shalt not enter into wedlock, if it is inevitable that its tie will be broken”.44 As Schleiermacher proceeds in this way, he persists of course in ­repeating traditional hierarchical language about gender roles. In his assertion that his female readers should “covet what men have in education, art, ­intellect and honour”45 for instance, the assumption communicated is that the emancipation of women relies upon their pursuing those qualities and ­virtues typically associated with male success and masculine civility.46 Women s­ eeking 43

44 45 46

Schleiermacher revisits this point in his essay on translation theory (1813). See Tran 46: “On the one hand, every human being is in the power of the language he speaks; he and his thoughts are products. He cannot think with complete certainty anything that lies outside his boundaries; the form of his ideas, the manner in which he combines them, and the limits of these combinations are all preordained by the language in which he was born and raised: both his intellect and his imagination are bound by it. On the other hand, every free-thinking, intellectually independent individual shapes the language in his turn”. kga i.2, 154; Ca 709. kga i.2, 154; Ca 709. Katherine M. Faull makes this point in “Schleiermacher—A Feminist? Or, how to Read Gender Inflected Theology”, Schleiermacher and Feminism: Sources, Evaluations, and Responses, ed. Iain G. Nicol, Schleiermacher Studies and Translations 12 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 14. For further evaluation within Anglo-American scholarship of Schleiermacher’s early attitudes to women and women’s rights, see the ­contributions to the same volume made by Iain G. Nicol and Sheila Briggs, as well as Robert F. ­Streetman’s essay “Romanticism and the Sensus Numinis in Schleiermacher”, The Interpretation of Belief: Coleridge, Schleiermacher and Romanticism, ed. David Jasper (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 104–125. It is generally accepted that Schleiermacher became more conservative on the question of gender in his later years. Hermann ­Walsemann writes of the mature theologian that “there has hardly been any great thinker

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happiness and fulfilment should carve out a new purpose for t­hemselves, and a ­masculine one. “What men have”. A similar supposition seems to be ­manifest in the short “creed” included in the catechism. The creed enjoins ­Schleiermacher’s f­ emale contemporaries to “believe in enthusiasm and virtue, in the nobility of art, in the delight of learning, which men enjoy, in loving my ­country, in past g­ reatness and in future nobility”.47 Indeed, these recommended­ aspirations are n ­ umerous across the whole fragment, such that we might ask whether S­ chleiermacher, as the author of this parodic teaching document, has ­thereby appointed himself the discerner and judge of true female needs, behaviours, and desires. In both of the recommendations we have just noted, the document is prescriptive about the nature of female ­emancipation, and the ­intended f­ emale reader is invited to join the author in his views only by way of passive assent. The creed is written to be recited, it is presented as an authority to which the reader gives her trust [credo]. When it is read and considered in this manner, we see Schleiermacher ­thereby participating in the production and perpetuation of gender stereotypes and masculine authority, even if Schleiermacher subverts the norm insofar as he presumes that it is just as valid for women to aspire to these masculine goods (to become male?): education, art, intellect, honour. That Schleiermacher shares in the assumptions about gender common in his day is, again, not a surprising thought. But it is important to highlight these biases in his work, where they exist, for the purposes of evaluating his vision of individual Bildung and its limits. For does not Schleiermacher elsewhere stress the particularity

47

in the past that has so emphatically directed women towards the home and their ­domestic duties as has Schleiermacher”. [“Schleiermacher und die Frauen”, Preußische Jahrbücher 154, ed. Hans Deibrück (Berlin: George Stilke, 1913), 481]. This conservatism is evident in a sermon that delivered on Ephesians 5, which endorses a traditional ­institutionalised hierarchy of male as leader and representative over the female. Schleiermacher p ­ reaches that “it is only in the Christian Church and in a civilised community that there can be a Christian marriage; and in both of these it is the part of the man, to whom God has assigned the binding word and the public deed, to represent the household; and it is never well if the wife takes a direct part in those larger concerns”. [Friedrich Schleiermacher, Selected Sermons of Schleiermacher, trans. Mary F. Wilson (London, Funk and Wagnalls, 1890), 141]. Nevertheless, Schleiermacher also conveys an openness to the nature of marriage and gender relations in this sermon, as he explains that “if in a C ­ hristian marriage we had no other joy than this, that it exhibited to us a harmonious play of natural powers, and if this were the highest end of conjugal love, I could find there no resemblance to the relationship between Christ and His Church. Married love is Christian only when each party receives a spiritual stimulus from the other; when each, if include to grow weak in this direction is lifted up and supported by the other…” (135). kga i.2 154; Ca 709.

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and uniqueness of each human person, and does not Romantic Bildung as we enumerated previously mean resisting or eschewing the uniform prescriptions of established societal ideas? It is at this point I would like to return to the matter of the text’s satirical and parodic character. A few years on from writing the fragment, Schleiermacher would include the following playful musing in a letter to his friend who was another salonière, Charlotte von Kathen: From whatever side I look at it, the nature of a woman seems to me nobler than that of man, and their life more happy. Therefore, if I ever find myself sportively indulging in an impossible wish, it is that I were a woman.48 From this note we get a glimpse of the tenderness and esteem Schleiermacher had for the lives and habits of his female contemporaries, even to the point of wanting to share equally in the happiness he sees there. The dynamic of this note is not one of wishing to improve women—rather, he suggests how his life might be improved if he were to become a woman himself. Likewise, in light of the satirical tone generated by Schleiermacher’s piece, I venture that it would be unwise to treat the above reading, which finds Schleiermacher p ­ roviding a masculating ideal for these women, as if it were final or ­conclusive. The voice that Schleiermacher takes up in this piece is after all supremely i­dealistic. ­Towards the end of the fragment he calls his audience to “believe in the eternal humanity which was, before it ever took on the veil of male and female”.49 In so doing, he carves out an abstract space in which he has the room and the ­facility to encourage his readers to consider worldly ­human identities as flimsy and precarious. By relativising the human body and its external c­ haracteristics, he gathers enough conceptual distance to advise his audience against ­essentialising gender as well as the way in which gender is expressed and inhabited. We gather that “humanity” considered from the perspective of “eternity” cannot easily or simply be riven into male and female. Furthermore, Schleiermacher gains an even greater critical distance from the particular societal structures that his piece gently calls into question, through the ironical remarks that he makes about the traditional station and role of woman as mother, beloved, and wife. These remarks are couched in a playful form. He writes:

48 49

Letter to Charlotte von Kathen, from Stolpe. 4th August 1804. Life, vol 1, 382. kga i.2 154; Ca, 709.

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Thou shalt not misuse even the smallest of the holy things of love; for that woman will lose her delicate feeling who desecrates her grace and yields herself up in return for presents and gifts, or merely that she may become the mother of children in peace and quiet.50 Here then, we note that Schleiermacher does not develop a sincere line of ­argument on the issue of women’s rights—or, we might add, the rights of those gebildete Frauen with whom he keeps company. Nor does he set out any ­program for what we might call “progress” for these women and their ­situation. He does not speak directly, and he does not treat existing categories about women as if they were fixed or true or had necessary purchase. Instead, rather than offering a sincere or serious argument, his comment—by virtue of its form and tone—is indirect and open-ended.51 Naturally, this point about indirectness does not negate or absolve the charge that to a significant extent Schleiermacher p ­ erpetuated an existing social imaginary; one which assumes typically masculine attributes and activities as markers of fruitful ­human endeavour. Nevertheless, it does indicate that commentators like Robert F. ­Streetman and Patricia Guenther-Gleason52 whose treatments of the piece fail to draw ­attention to its form and ironical bent, likewise miss the sense in which it ­subverts a “straight” or scientific analysis, because it incorporates ­provisionality and ambiguity right into the centre of its message about gender inequality. To put it another way: Schleiermacher avoids attaching his own ­serious categories to women and to women’s roles in society. If Schleiermacher’s Catechism is well-intentioned but not entirely s­ uccessful as a text that promotes individual Bildung, then this is partly because in his words about women and in the structure of the text he still defines them from without. His teaching document turns on his own ideas and ideals about what 50 51

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kga i.2 154; Ca, 709. In 1799 Schleiermacher made the following comment about satire [Persiflage] and ­allusion [Anspielung], indicating his appreciation of the inexhaustible character of ­linguistic meaning: “All social expressions must have a twofold tendency, expressing as it were a twofold meaning. One I would like to call the common meaning, relating ­directly to the conversation and necessarily and unerringly attaining its end, and a­ nother higher m ­ eaning, as it were, which is only indeterminately thrown in, in case anyone wants to pick it up and pursue further the suggestions it contains”. See kga i.2, 181, and Friedrich ­Schleiermacher, “Towards a Theory of Sociable Conduct” (1799), in Friedrich ­Schleiermacher’s Toward a Theory of Sociable Conduct and Essays on its IntellectualCultural Context, ed. Ruth Drucilla Richardson, A Publication of New Athenaeum/Neues ­Athenaeum 4 (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 36. See their respective contributions to Nicol (ed), Schleiermacher and Feminism: Sources, Evaluations, and Responses.

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emancipated femininity looks like. This being the case, however, the text ­actually serves to reinforce his own point about the impossibility for humans of getting “behind” the placed and temporally-defined language that they are using. Indeed, as Schleiermacher reaches to avoid prejudice against women, and to assert their equality with men, he has to appeal to the very idea of “eternal humanity”, an idea which his ethical theory suggests does not exist in the world of time and change but manifests itself through and in time in the bodies and actions of particular human agents. Schleiermacher’s Catechism therefore develops the idea that as finite agents, embedded in contemporary language, will find it impossible to properly attend to the radical particularity of other agents—to give them room to define themselves in their own way, ­independently from existing norms and categories. 5

Schleiermacher’s Project on the Colony in “New Holland”

Keeping Schleiermacher’s attention to form and language use in mind, my final section in the present chapter will consider another of Schleiermacher’s texts from this Romantic period, but this time a failed and unfinished project. Again, my purpose here is to continue testing the coherence of S­chleiermacher’s commitment to Bildung as an endeavour which encourages the flourishing of human individuals in and through their particular place in the world, urging them to “represent humanity in his [or her] own way”.53 The materials in question are Schleiermacher’s working papers on the ­history of the British penal colony that was established in 1788, on the East coast of what he refers to as New Holland (the name given to presentday Australia by the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, in 1644). This obscure ­sociological-ethnographic project, which Schleiermacher eventually abandoned, is one that expanded in scope over a period of three years while ­Schleiermacher translated and analysed a number of reports from the ­British press and from English travel diaries, towards drawing up a narrative of the colony’s origins and development. Schleiermacher’s initial plan had been simply to translate an ethnographic travel diary written by the English writer David Collins, named An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (1798). Although little of Schleiermacher’s unfinished project remains, a ­transcription of the selection of the materials that he compiled was ­published 53

kga i.3, 18; S 31.

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in 1988.54 The featured documents include a set of English-language extracts which Schleiermacher lifted from a 1785 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle. Excerpts from Schleiermacher’s history of the New Holland settlement itself also remain (his working manuscript was entitled Zur Siedlungsgeschichte Neuhollands), including an account of its inception as a radical solution to the British problem of prison overcrowding. This obscure project—a compilation of translated documents, a map of the territory, original English sources and Schleiermacher’s own summative ­manuscript, is not regularly referred to in Anglo-American scholarship. Where it has been picked up, however—and it is being increasingly and rightly drawn on in discussions about the history of race and religion as ­categories in ­modernity55—commentators have asked to what extent S­ chleiermacher’s interest in discussing and investigating the colony ­entangles him in the ­imperialist imaginary concerning use of global space which ­characterises many texts produced in eighteenth-century Europe. And to ­repeat a point that Joerg Rieger has made: in Schleiermacher’s case, and more ­generally for German t­heologians of the nineteenth century, we should bear in mind that ­ “colonialism and empire [often] shape intellectual developments ­unconsciously rather than consciously”.56 As Steven Jungkeit has argued, for instance, Schleiermacher’s penal colony project participates in the then-dominant tendency to imagine the world’s regions as if they were homogenous, measurable areas—land masses which in and of themselves can be reduced down to constituent parts, are ripe for capture by foreign powers, and can be easily put to new use. In Jungkeit’s view, Schleiermacher’s curiosity about the colony as well as the conditions for its ­existence was not sufficiently accompanied by a critique of the ­colonialist logic and imaginative patterns at play to excuse him from the accusation that here, in this project, he capitulates to a harmful spatial i­ maginary and to a n ­ arrative 54 See “Materialien zur Siedlungsgeschichte Neuhollands (Australiens)”, and “Zur ­Siedlungsgeschischte Neuhollands (Australiens)”, which have been separately itemized in kga i.3, 250–279. In his introduction to the material, Meckenstock explains that Schleiermacher was preparing a project for publication in Johann Karl Philipp Spener’s Historisch-genealogischer Calender oder Jahrbuch der merkwürdigsten neuen ­Welt-Begebenheiten (Haude und Spener, Berlin). 55 I engage with a number of commentators in the following chapter, but it is also worth mentioning Kwok Pui-Lan’s assessment of Schleiermacher’s work in its colonial context. See her Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 189–193. 56 Joerg Rieger, “Power and Empire in the Study of Nineteenth-Century Theology: The Case of Schleiermacher”, Journal for the History of Modern Theology/Zeitschrift für Neuere ­Theologiegeschichte 20, no. 1 (2013), 44.

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of power whereby “geography becomes a tool for waste management”.57 Schleiermacher’s resistance to the typical mindset of the contemporary ­ ­European Establishment, whereby “curiosity about the globe shades into a ­vision of the world to be appropriated at will” is, for Jungkeit, signified in this project only by his decision to abandon it before completion. Indeed, the ­“materials linger there”, Jungkeit suggests, “as a testimony of a path chosen, a path considered, and then scrupulously avoided”.58 There is evidence to support the judgment that while Schleiermacher was compiling materials from various sources towards writing a history of the ­colony’s institution, he offered no significant resistance to the a­ nthropocentric and utility-maximizing59 model for surveying and appropriating the world’s spaces that the European explorers and colonizers themselves perpetuated in disturbing and dehumanising ways. In the excerpts remaining from his text Zur Siedlungsgeschichte Neuhollands, in which he integrated various reports from European explorers, we find detailed measurements of Botany Bay and ­Norfolk Island (two eventual colony sites) as well as appraisals of the first ­region’s ­geographical facets, flora, and fauna. Yet as ­Schleiermacher’s text ­introduces the island and describes the impressions of the Dutch ­seafarer Tasman and the explorer William Dampier as they discover the North— and ­Southwestern coasts to “New Holland”, his account is replete with value judgments. The ­implication is that he is transmitting a tendency, clear in the ­original explorers and report-makers, to survey the land with concrete ­questions and e­ xpectations in mind. Closed questions that is, like “is it suitable for our purposes?”, or “is it fit for habitation?”, and expectations which were framed by a ­particular eighteenth-century European vision of what it meant to live in a civilised, reasonable and efficient manner. Schleiermacher reports how from Tasman’s perspective, the land on the West coast had no charm. We read that it housed “only a pair of species of four-footed animals, and even these s­paringly”, and it bore “no trace of metals, noble or ignoble”60—two notes which are of course reflective of general European dietary habits and the purposes of European industry. ­Furthermore, Schleiermacher also reports that upon discovering an abundance of fish circling the coast, the Dutch travellers 57 58 59 60

Steven R. Jungkeit, Spaces of Modern Theology: Geography and Power in Schleiermacher’s World (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 70. Jungkeit even states that “the breaks and ruins of the project suggest something like an ethics, a monument to the ruins wrought by colonial power”. Spaces of Modern Theology, 75. I refrain from deploying the term “utilitarianism” here; this would be anachronistic, since it was popularised by J.S. Mill in the late 19th century. kga 1.3, 269.

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soon deemed this a­ pparent resource to be a “futile gift”. Most unsatisfactorily it seemed, the fish lay beyond a series of “low, inaccessible, dangerous rocks”, which “surrounded the coast almost everywhere”, comparing unfavourably with the safe and p ­ rotective ­environs of Dutch villages and coastal areas.61 Moreover, Schleiermacher’s report also evidences how the colonisers’ task of judging or sizing-up this new landscape involved, by extension, an a­ ppraisal of the people who were already dwelling within it. And from the ­perspective of the Europeans, there appeared to be very little about the behaviour of this ­indigenous group which matched their preconceived ideas about l­ iving well, or even to an acceptable standard. In contrast, S­ chleiermacher reports that in the eyes of Tasman and his crew, these people lived a brutish, miserable ­existence. They were “worse off than the ants” he writes, in the respect that they lacked clothes as well as housing, and that they were also—or “so it seemed”—­without tools to catch the abundant fish. Moreover, ­Schleiermacher’s project tells us that these people were “so miserably tormented by flying ­vermin, that they hardly dared open their eyes properly”.62 For our purposes, however, ­perhaps the most significant point in the passages we have from ­Schleiermacher’s Zur ­Siedlungsgeschichte Neuhollands, is his comment that from the ­perspective of both the English and the Dutch explorers—who could find among these ­inhabitants no trace of a constitution, or of civil laws, of r­eligion, art or ­agriculture—this indigenous group were “in every respect at the lowest level of human cultivation” [auf der niedrigsten Stufe der menschlichen Bildung].63 For with this description, the colonizers not only explicitly cast the indigenous group’s way of life as inferior to that enjoyed by the Europeans, but they also relativize their behaviours and their personhood, narrating it as though it ­resembles an earlier stage of their own historical progress.64 Schleiermacher’s account thus suggests that the colonizers worked under the general ­assumption that there exists only one, universal scale of human ­“development”, which they themselves are further along than this “most wretched race of men” [die elendeste Menschenart], who seem to them to represent a mirror into the past. 61 62 63 64

kga 1.3, 269. kga 1.3, 269–270. kga 1.3, 271. Chad Wellmon, a commentator that I will reference again below, has already made this point. See “Poesie as Anthropology: Schleiermacher, Colonial History and the E ­ thics of Ethnography”, The German Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 4 (2006): 423–442. Wellmon’s exce­ llent essay narrates the Colony project as evidence of Schleiermacher’s continuing ­dissatisfaction with Kantian anthropology. He argues that these materials, together with other pieces of Schleiermacher’s from this period, “question the categorical stability of anthropology’s most basic category: the human”. (p.424).

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From the above, the evidence is that Schleiermacher was embedded in and capitulated to a narrative of geography and power, which his writings here perpetuate. In the process of looking at Schleiermacher’s Catechism, we saw how his stated commitment to self-realisation and his stress on individual freedom was betrayed by his inability to develop the resources to see or ­acknowledge his own prejudices, or to register those structural prejudices he was perpetuating. It is likewise poignant, then, in regard to his championing of individual Bildung, that his unfinished New Holland project also carries a series of imperialist assumptions regarding the island’s inhabitants. The Dutch and English sources from which Schleiermacher is working treat this “new” land that is being explored as a possible site for their own use, driven by concerns about domestic space and rising prison populations. And in their reports of making contact with the group of people indigenous to this foreign land, these same Dutch and British sources foist on to these people those markers of value and life-quality which are current within the slim demographic to which they themselves belong: educated, cultivated, white, European, male. To borrow a line from Joerg Rieger, who has argued that Schleiermacher’s study of “New Holland” throws new light on his hermeneutical theory and his christology, the fact that Schleiermacher “shares in the colonial sentiments of his time does not come as a great surprise”. Indeed in Rieger’s view, the ­methodological challenge for theologians in twenty-first century … “is how to become aware of these (often unconscious) biases, and what to do with them”.65 If we are to take seriously the attempt that Schleiermacher makes in his ­Soliloquies to highlight and critique contemporary ways of portraying human identity, and to attempt to offer a cosmically-framed anthropology of finitude in its place, then it is necessary to confront this evidence that ­Schleiermacher ­capitulates nevertheless to an imperialist imaginary. For Schleiermacher’s ­emphasis on individual human uniqueness, his c­ ommitment to Bildung, and his portrait of an unfolding humanity that continually exceeds itself in life and meaning: all of these lie in tension with the disturbingly c­ ondescending ­dimensions to his project on the penal colony that I have outlined above. In this project, he perpetuates a schema for imagining space and place which lacks respect for human particularity outside of the very narrow confines of his own social and national grouping. What then to do with Schleiermacher’s prejudices? As I attempt to dig ­deeper into this contradiction, which we might legitimately call an epistemological inconsistency in Schleiermacher’s thought, there are a couple of a­ spects to Schleiermacher’s material and political context in 1799 that it is worth 65

Reiger, “Power and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Theology”, 55.

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c­ onsidering for their relevance to questions of imperialism and ­anthropology in this ­period, and for the point that colonialist and racist ­attitudes developed at this time on pervasive structural, institutional, and philosophical levels. Firstly, let us return to the extremely basic point that Schleiermacher ­himself was not among the explorers who sailed out to “New Holland”. He was a ­second-hand collator, compiler, and editor of reports concerning ­British ­colonial policy, voyages out to the territory itself by British and Dutch ­explorers, and various encounters between the voyagers and the indigenous people, ­meaning that he stands at an abstract remove from the situation in which he is ­interested. Schleiermacher’s distance from the situation does not excuse or absolve his ­participation in the imperialist and white supremacist logic at play in his ­report. Nor, evidently, does it preclude his participation. I will return, ­presently, to the i­nterrelated topics of how Schleiermacher’s philosophy, his social theory and his a­ nthropology relate to his perpetuation of imperialist and racist prejudices. At this stage however, it is worth considering how Schleiermacher’s physical ­abstraction from the events he is dealing with will surely affect the quality or nature of the knowledge—‘knowledge’ here construed in the widest possible sense—that he is able to gather about the people dwelling in “New Holland”. It will also affect the quality of his perspective on their ­language, culture, and practices too. This point about the relationship between knowledge and experience is one that Russell Berman has considered in his work on colonial ­discourse in ­ eighteenth—and nineteenth-century German culture. In his book ­Enlightenment or Empire, Berman proceeds under the view that “real travel through space and encounter with foreign cultures and society certainly has the potential to elicit qualitatively new experiences”. And this contention that humans can learn through experience, Berman continues—the notion that they can “encounter the world in ways that change their ­thinking”—is one which challenges the idea that “thought is only a function of paradigms and epistemes, ultimately impervious to experience”. By examining the ­diaries and travel ­narratives of various German figures, then—figures who unlike S­chleiermacher were out in the field themselves—Berman sought to ­demonstrate in his study how the colonial site itself can become “a location where, through perpetual acts of cross-cultural contact, transgressive change occurs precisely despite the efforts of colonial regimes to separate and control”.66

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Of course, this point about the value of actual personal experience and e­ ncounter for human learning is also one that Schleiermacher himself makes. We have already seen how in his Soliloquies and in his early ethical writings he stresses the social nature of knowledge, and the foundational role that shared places and reciprocal dialogue have in the way that people form opinions and perspectives about themselves and others. Since Schleiermacher himself had no opportunity to meet with the people described in the “New Holland” travel reports, then—no chance to share time and space with them, and to come into contact with their utterly different ways of inhabiting their world—what Berman’s work suggests is that the alterity of this new group would have remained an abstract “otherness” to Schleiermacher, an “otherness” conceptually constructed from a collection of reported judgments, and easily configured according to Schleiermacher’s existing categories of perception and human identity. His view or understanding of this group, based on travel diaries and newspaper reports, could stretch no further than such a limited and abstract perspective. A further factor which is relevant for this discussion of Schleiermacher’s ­anthropology, and the specific nature of his participation in a Western imperialist imaginary, is the point that in Schleiermacher’s period Germany itself did not exist as a country straightforwardly in “the West”. That is: it did not easily identify itself with other European nations. Nor did the various German states of the period have a colonial empire, or a programme of colonial expansion to rival that of Britain and France.67 Indeed, it is significant that until its unification much later, in 1871, “Germany” did not actually even exist as a cohesive modern nation-state under that name. A period in Germany’s history that would prove decisive for its ­self-understanding in the nineteenth century as a whole, was that which lay between the dissolution of the vast composite state of Holy Roman Empire in 1806, and the founding of the Deutscher Bund in 1815—after the defeat of the Napoleonic empire. These unsettling and humiliating years of i­nvasion and o­ccupation by French troops (1806–1815) fall after the time during which Schleiermacher was putting together his history of the penal colony.

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The lack of a German colonial empire in the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth c­ entury shaped Edward Said’s decision to exclude the tradition of German Orientalism from his famous 1978 work, Orientalism. Said writes: “There was nothing in Germany to correspond to the Anglo-French presence in India, the Levant, North Africa. Moreover, the German Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly, or classical Orient: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but it was never actual, the way Egypt and Syria were actual for Chateaubriand, Lane, Lamartine, Burton, Disraeli, or Nerval”. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 19. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Yet by mentioning this period, we can help to illustrate the ambivalent and ­distinctive position that Germany occupied within Europe at the turn of the century, as a war-torn complex of kingdoms or territories that was ­struggling to articulate and ground an identity for itself, and could not match the n ­ ations of France, England, and the Netherlands in terms of colonial prowess and ­imperial ­expansion.68 Again, it is important to stress that an absence of a large colonial empire did not ­absolve thinkers like Schleiermacher in Germanspeaking territories from colonialist discourse, or from the habits of thought and ­imagination which a­ ccompanied such an imperialist programme. Indeed, in her book Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial ­Germany, 1770–1870, ­Susanne Zantop demonstrates that statesmen and ­scholars in German-speaking lands were highly invested in the image or prospect of a German colonial empire, while also academically interested in the linguistic and cultural history of certain colonised lands, such that that it was possible to speak of a “pervasive desire for colonial possessions” in Germany at this time, and a “sense of entitlement to such possessions”.69 Far from remaining aloof from the colonialist projects of their European neighbours then, Zantop gives examples not only of Germans whose “fantasy” it was for Germany to become a colonial agent, but also of a number of German thinkers and scholars who in Schleiermacher’s day felt a sense of moral superiority over those nations who were colonising, and were sharply critical of violent colonisation.70 Nevertheless, during this time of Napoleonic invasion, if German scholars and writers were undertaking a “prolonged contemplation of the nature of a communal identity”, as Nicholas Germana puts it,71 then this energy behind the task of 68

See the collection of essays edited by John Breuilly, The State of Germany: The national ideal in the making, unmaking and remaking of a modern nation-state (London: Longman Group UK Ltd., 1992), and especially James Sheehan’s contribution, “State and Nationality in the Napoleonic Period”. Reflecting on the humiliation suffered by Germans in this period, and how it affected their self-understanding, Golo Mann writes the following: “The Germans certainly could not remain as innocently peace-loving and cosmopolitan as they had been in Kant’s day. Napoleon had taught them too roughly what power was and the reward of weakness. The misery of state and nation made them discover state and nation, though they still approached the new problem with high idealism”. Nicholas Germana cites this passage from Mann in the fifth chapter of his The Orient of Europe: The Mythical Image of India and Competing Images of National Identity (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 133. Here, Germana explores the effect that Napoleon’s invasion had on German Orientalism and Indology. 69 Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 7–8. 70 Zantop, Colonial Fantasies, 22–29. 71 Germana, The Orient of Europe, 15. Germana here also recalls Friedrich Schlegel’s famous declaration in the Athenaeum journal (fragment 38) that Germany “doesn’t lie behind, but before us”—that Germany is a nation that remains to be constructed. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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defining “Germany” was also catalysed by the perception that their nation was under threat, and from a European enemy. These points about the precariousness both of Germany’s s­ elf-understanding and its place in Europe are echoed in Schleiermacher’s own personal correspondence from 1806–7, during which time he was a Professor at the University of Halle. On the 20th June 1806 for instance—before Napoleon’s troops invaded Halle in October that year—Schleiermacher wrote to his friend Charlotte von Kathen with an emphatic defence of German freedom and culture. In the context of a discussion about the military threat hanging over his country, Schleiermacher’s letter, which I quote below, conjures up a vision of a strong and cohesive Germanic nation. Yet it is significant that this future Germany that Schleiermacher projects is one strong in regard to its culture, its people, and its religion, but not in terms of its military power. We read: You ask me how I feel in these warlike times [Kriegesunruhen] … ­Remember that the individual cannot stand, cannot save himself, if that in which each and all are rooted—German freedom and German ­feeling [Deutscher Freiheit und deutscher Gesinung]—be lost; and it is these that are threatened… . Believe me, sooner or later, a great and ­universal ­struggle must ensue, the objects of which will be as much our sentiments, our religion, and our mental culture [Geistesbildung], as our outward liberty and worldly goods—a struggle which must be carried on, not by kings and their hired armies, but by the nations and their kings ­together—a struggle which will unite sovereign and people by a more beautiful bond than has existed for centuries, and in which everyone— everyone w ­ ithout exception—must take the part that the common weal imposes on him.72 Even in the face of military threat, Schleiermacher stresses here that the key to securing Germany’s future as a nation is not simply to rely on military force or to fight for expansion. He does not mention the importance of land or territory per se, so much as the importance of ascertaining the freedom and feeling

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Letter from Schleiermacher to Charlotte von Kathen, 20th June 1806. kga v.9, 40–41; Life 2, 58. See also the following passage from a letter from Schleiermacher to E. von Willich, 15th September 1806 (kga v.9, 140; Life 2, 62): “I exult in the war against the tyrant, which I think is now unavoidable, and am delighted with the courageous spirit which prevails generally here among the troops and among the people. I have often felt a strong desire to speak out upon politics too, if I could but have found leisure. In the pulpit I allude to these matters from time to time, but in a very different way from what I hear others do”.

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of the German people. He urges his friend: “Would you desire to be spared any danger, any suffering, at the cost of the conviction of having delivered over future generations to base servitude, and of having exposed them to be ­inoculated with the despicable sentiments of an utterly corrupted people?”.73 Schleiermacher’s point is that as it faces war, Germany should work to preserve those spiritual and moral goods in which it is rich, and should invest in its people and their relationships with one another. A further letter of Schleiermacher’s that it is worth quoting at this point is another he wrote to Charlotte von Kathen, but this time from Berlin, and over a year later in October 1807. For since October 1806 Halle had been u­ nder ­occupation by French troops, and having had his own home invaded and burgled by soldiers, Schleiermacher withdrew to Berlin in May 1807, where he continued to research and to prepare lectures.74 In this letter to von Kathen, Schleiermacher expresses the desire “to get back to my books and papers [in Halle]”, before complaining that no such plans can be entertained at present. And as he turns once more to the subject of war, he reveals an increased ­level of uncertainty about Germany’s future, but reveals how his own vocation to the P ­ rotestant Christian ministry is inseparable from his being a German. He writes: One determination only I hold fast, and that is to follow the fortunes of my immediate [unmittelbaren] fatherland, Prussia, as long as it c­ ontinues to exist… Should it entirely succumb, then I will as long as it is feasible seek the German fatherland wherever a Protestant can live and a ­German ­governs. In this way, I shall always be able to accomplish, in some ­measure, the duties of my vocation.75 In the above passage, the way that Schleiermacher delineates between his ­“immediate” fatherland of Prussia, and the broader, secondary sense in which he conceives Germany as his fatherland, reflects what I have already indicated about the nebulous way in which “Germany”—a loose complex of kingdoms or territories, rather than a coherent nation—existed and was understood by its people at this point in history. Certainly, across these two letters ­Schleiermacher readily admits the weakness of the German kingdoms, like Prussia, in terms of their political and military power within Europe. He suggests instead that 73 74 75

kga v.9, 40; Life 2, 58. See Schleiermacher’s personal correspondence during this period, in kga v.9, 154–461. A letter from Schleiermacher to Charlotte von Kathen. c. October 1807. kga v.9, 541–542; Life 2, 97.

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the distinction and distinctiveness of his German fatherland lies in its being a home for culture, feeling, and religion. And although we cannot take these later letters to indicate Schleiermacher’s position on Germany in 1799, as he was putting his penal colony project together, what they do serve to do is help qualify the specific nature of his participation in that imperialist imaginary of territorial conquest, military expansion and nation-building which we link with the British politicians and explorers in his project materials.76 Schleiermacher’s actual physical distance from the colonial voyage that his project deals with, as well as the specific situation of his own country Germany regarding issues of empire and imperialism, are thus both factors to keep in mind as we consider the implications of Schleiermacher’s unfinished and unpublished project and what it implies about the assumptions governing his anthropology. Both of these factors, indeed, warn us that we should hesitate before assigning Schleiermacher an imperialist imaginary identical to that belonging to a British colonial of his day. Yet it is in light of this discussion concerning the potential distance between Schleiermacher’s own perspectives and the perspectives of the colonialists in his sources, that I suggest that we turn back to the question of literary form. For in his materials on the ­institution of the British penal colony, Schleiermacher maintains a certain literary distance from the views of those explorers and ethnographers on whose work he is drawing, towards compiling this narrative of British colonial endeavour in “New Holland”. Indeed, in all of the other texts which have featured in this book so far, we have seen how Schleiermacher adopted a special literary form as part of his approach to a given line of inquiry. These forms have served to make his claims inherently indirect (To Cecilie), to highlight the dialogic nature 76

For a detailed argument as to how the German experience of imperialism in the e­ ighteenth and nineteenth centuries was quite different to the British model of empire and ­conquest, see Russell A. Berman’s Enlightenment or Empire. Under the “less stable and more permeable notion of ‘German’” operating in this period, Berman explains, we find quite different approaches to alterity, as well as conceptions of empire arranged around notions of empathy with the colonised (p. 15). Another important contribution to this more general discussion of the German experience of imperialism is Suzanne Marchand’s work on the emerging tradition of German Orientalism in the eighteenth—and nineteenth-century. In her book German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), Marchand highlights how between 1830–1930 the most significant orientalist scholars were German, despite the absence of a German overseas empire. In doing so, she problematises Edward Said’s judgment that Orientalism was a discipline largely shaped by European imperialism, while also showing that for Germans in particular, cultural factors aside from colonising aspirations (like the theological concerns of Protestant scholars, interested in the genesis of Christianity and the Christian scriptures) inspired the study of the East.

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of argument (On Freedom), and to introduce irony as a tool for disrupting and confronting established attitudes (his Catechism). In the case of those extant materials which together represent Schleiermacher’s unfinished and unpublished penal colony project, we find un-edited primary sources from the British press, included alongside passages from Schleiermacher’s own “history” of the settlement—itself braided together from the diaries of David Collins and others, as well as transcripts from parliamentary debates and other documents illuminating the socio-political factors impinging on the colony’s inception. And as such, we might already contend that these documents lack a single voice to demonstrate or identify neatly with Schleiermacher’s own. In an article on Schleiermacher’s distinctive “anthropology” and the ­“ethics of ethnography”, Chad Wellmon argues that the reader should attend to the multiple layers of analysis and composition woven into Schleiermacher’s project on the colony, and the latter’s ambition to “resignify the history of the English colonial undertaking from numerous perspectives, not just that of one travelogue”.77 These factors give us reason, Wellmon argues, to hold that ­Schleiermacher’s view of the situation is more subtle and critical than that of his colonialist contemporaries.78 Wellmon posits that in his project, ­Schleiermacher draws attention to the “means and goals of colonial practice” at the same time as he describes the engagement between the indigenous group and the Europeans. This means that under Schleiermacher’s editorial gaze, “the practices of ethnographers, anthropologists and colonialists are the object of inquiry just as much as the non-Europeans, who are the more t­ raditional o­ bjects of anthropological inquiry”.79 Moreover, since both the indigenous people and the colonialists come under Schleiermacher’s scrutiny, Wellmon argues that he not only resists taking on the cultural and societal identity of the latter, but he also throws open the question as to what c­ onstitutes good and profitable human behaviour, or true “civility”. For ­Wellmon, ­Schleiermacher ensures that the “foreignness” of the indigenous people r­ emains “to a certain degree, foreign”. He also argues that since ­Schleiermacher is able to undercut the notion that the European colonialists occupy some sort of absolute, ­objective ground 77

Wellmon, “Poesie as Anthropology: Schleiermacher, Colonial History and the Ethics of Ethnography”, 429. 78 Wellmon argues that Schleiermacher’s Penal Colony project made manifest his ­dissatisfaction with the methods and assumptions integral to late eighteenth-century Prussian anthropology, which at that time was establishing itself as a discipline in its own right. For a history of the birth of anthropology in the eighteenth century, see John H Zammito’s, Kant, Herder and the Birth of Anthropology, and Christoph Wulf, Anthropology: A Continental Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 56–113. 79 Wellmon, “Poesie as Anthropology”, 431.

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from which they are justified in judging and analysing the group that they have just met, he also leaves behind a text which—reflected not least precisely by the fact that it was left disjointed, fragmented, and unfinished—“reflects on the very premises of reason and knowledge”.80 Let us think through Wellmon’s reading of Schleiermacher a little more closely here by considering a couple of lines from Schleiermacher’s ­manuscript Zur Siedlungsgeschichte Neuhollands, where the behaviour of some of the British figures in this history comes under greater focus. In this passage, Schleiermacher is describing a proposal in Parliament to install a penal colony on land lying next to the Gambian river, as a measure to alleviate pressure on prisons in England. His account is peppered with adjectives and adverbs which lend the turn of events a dramatic and almost overstated rhetorical quality. He writes that as soon as this proposal to “transport” prisoners became known in Parliament, consternation and the “most violent contradiction” ensued. And of the inflated behaviour of one MP in particular, Schleiermacher explains that: Burke was particularly interested in seeking in his exaggerated manner to describe that region as the real palace of the plague and all disease, and as an open grave, which would devour all Europeans.81 Schleiermacher’s description of Burke’s posturing as exaggerated or o­ verdone [übertreibend] here, together with a paraphrase of Burke’s own rhetoric, ­contrasts with the account we find in Schleiermacher’s source text, a report on this parliamentary debate on prison reform published in The Gentleman’s Magazine, where no such overt value judgments concerning Burke’s manner appear.82 In Wellmon’s assessment, it would seem that it is this kind of treatment which signals Schleiermacher’s critical distance from his European ­colonising contemporaries. Overall, Wellmon argues that Schleiermacher’s text offers particularising comments on the various human actors and groupings in this history of the colony, and resists the notion that there exists a comprehensive, 80 81 82

Wellmon, “Poesie as Anthropology”, 431. kga i.3, 267. kga i.3, 257. The relevant section of the report reads: “Mr. Burke said that everybody knew that remission of punishment to criminals was in many cases inhumanity to the ­innocent: all he aimed at, was, that when we professed to be merciful we should not enthrone c­ ruelty on the bosom of mercy. The island on the river Gambia where it was now proposed those wretches should be sent, he said, if there was a palace upon it, it must be the palace of pestilence where death and destruction reigned with never ceasing devastation”.

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trans-historical category of “the human”. Nevertheless, although Wellmon’s article provides strong conceptual leverage to both negotiate and mitigate the evidence of what we might call assumed European superiority in Schleiermacher’s project, his reading does not, I contend, deal with all of the dimensions to Schleiermacher’s role as the editor in charge of these materials, and the assumptions about analytical authority and epistemic power which are carried along in his mode of approach. Questions linger here I think, about Schleiermacher’s attentiveness to the placed, limited, and culturallyconditioned nature of his own epistemic perspective. Indeed, for if—as in Wellmon’s analysis—Schleiermacher manages to ­render both the colonizers and the inhabitants of the island as the “objects” of his investigation, then this practice in itself does not stop him from judging both groups by a preconceived set of notions concerning what it means to live well or to fulfil one’s “human” potential. Unlike Schleiermacher’s Catechism or his Soliloquies, where his concern for individual Bildung features as a guiding motif in the production of the text, and Schleiermacher plays with this motif via both the form and content of his work, the penal colony project features only an oblique and accidental treatment of Bildung. It does not structure the text in the same way. Moreover, it is also worth remarking that Schleiermacher’s redaction of this unfinished and fragmented project is uneven to the point that he fails to offer a consistent editorial voice. As Jungkeit has pointed out for example, Schleiermacher retains the first-person pronouns of the English explorers when he imports their reports into his own materials, while at other points (as we have seen) he will narrate from a third person perspective, more abstracted from the position of the original sources.83 Such inconsistencies in the text’s voice may count as evidence that Schleiermacher has a less than masterful command over the perspective offered in the piece. Yet it does not necessarily follow from these inconsistencies that Schleiermacher seeks to afford the different groups in his text a distinctive voice of their own. I noted earlier in this section how Schleiermacher’s nascent manuscript on the history of the colony described the group indigenous to “New H ­ olland” as being without trace of a constitution, or of civil laws, of religion, art or ­agriculture, and that they were “in every respect at the lowest level of human cultivation” [auf der niedrigsten Stufe der menschlichen Bildung].84 Coming back to this point now that we have considered the literary quality of the text, as well as aspects to Schleiermacher’s historical and political context, the force of it remains: Schleiermacher fails to transcend the habit of judging this group 83 Jungkeit, Spaces of Modern Theology, 72. 84 kga 1.3, 271.

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against a set of existing and seemingly fixed assumptions about human nature, as well as the nature of civility, intelligence, and progress. S­ chleiermacher’s work in this project thus, at the very least, betrays an i­nattentiveness to the ­limitations of his own position, and a contravention of those ideals of ­individual Bildung that he elaborates elsewhere. This issue of presuming one’s own habits of perception to be universal— this problem of making room for the other—persists in the production of ­ethnographies to the present day and goes beyond being an issue of historicallyrelative prejudice, or being diagnosed, as the temptation might be in this case, simply as an accretion of the eighteenth/nineteenth-century imperialist context. The anthropologist Marilyn Strathern demonstrated this in her 1987 article “Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology”, where she writes that when anthropologists attempt to produce literature, they are faced with the issue of “how to create an awareness of different social worlds, when all one has at one’s disposal is terms that belong to one’s own”.85 Given Strathern’s observations, and Schleiermacher’s own social and cultural context, his failure to match this challenge in a satisfactory manner may not be utterly surprising per se. However, what is striking in his case, and what the references to his Soliloquies in the previous chapter have indicated, is that Schleiermacher did elsewhere attempt to develop a way of speaking about human personhood which respects individual uniqueness, and, as a consequence, to engender a posture of humility in regard to the freedom of the other. Schleiermacher not only falls short from the perspective of the twenty-first century reader, then, who can identify the descriptions of the island’s inhabitants in these materials as racist and imperialist, but he also falls short by the measure set out by his ethical writings and his social thought. Before I turn back to the Soliloquies, further support for this notion is ­contained in another piece of Schleiermacher’s from 1799—his short essay Towards a Theory of Sociable Conduct [Versuch einer Theorie des geselligen ­Betragens], which demonstrates his understanding of the human as a creature of context. Describing what for him constitutes “the free sociality of society” [der freien Geselligkeit der Gesellschaft]—a distinctive concept which we came across earlier in Schlegel’s poem about the nature of Bildung [‘Bestrebten wir uns treu im freien Bunde’] and which also became central to his later ethical theory86—Schleiermacher proposes that meaning-making happens as unique 85 86

Marilyn Strathern, “Out of Context: The Persuasive Fictions of Anthropology”, Current Anthropology 28, no. 3 (1987), 256. As was noted above, “free sociality” was one of the four social and political realms which Schleiermacher described in his Brouillon zur Ethik.

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individuals grow together in community. He indicates here that people both contribute to, and are changed by, the society of others: If we analyze the concept of the free sociality of society in the strictest sense of the word, we find that many persons are to act upon each other and that this action cannot be unilateral in any way… the true character of a society should be a reciprocal action that is interwoven among all the participants but one that is also fully determined and made complete by them.87 However, while Schleiermacher implies here that people are bound to the categories, words, and frameworks of the local social worlds they inhabit, he simultaneously places a check on the individual’s own ability to speak for the other. Later in the same text, we read: All persons as finite beings have particular spheres [bestimmte Sphäre] inside of which they alone can think and act and, therefore, c­ ommunicate with others. The sphere of one person is never identical to the sphere of another, just as certainly as one person is not the other.88 Evidenced here then is an epistemological scheme that would work as a ­foundation for the type of intellectual humility that Wellmon thinks can indeed be found in Schleiermacher’s penal colony materials. For in this passage Schleiermacher is firm about the inherently bounded and subjective nature of human experience. He sets cognitive, linguistic and perspectival limits around the individual—limits which afford each individual their own radical subjectivity, and which also demand that they be given room to “represent humanity in his own way”.89 If I diverge from Wellmon on his account of Schleiermacher’s epistemology of humility, then it is because I disagree that the latter’s penal colony project is properly representative of his commitment to human particularity. Like his Catechism, Schleiermacher’s abandoned and unfinished editorial project risks defining the identity of human subjects from without, without giving them room to properly speak for themselves. 87 88 89

kga i.2; 169. Soc, 24. kga i.2; 171. Soc, 26. See also Schleiermacher’s remark in 1813 that “[Every nobler, free ­utterance] must be understood in terms of the speaker himself, as an act that can only have emerged out of, and be explained as a product of his particular being” (Tran 47). kga i.3, 18; S 31.

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From this vantage point, what I seek to demonstrate in the next chapter is that a more instructive text for encountering Schleiermacher’s ethical ­anthropology in this period is his Soliloquies. In this text, Schleiermacher does not aim to get at the importance of Bildung by speaking about other groups—groups in whose irreducibly particular perspective he does not himself participate. Instead, the distinctive literary form that he adopts here, the monologue, allows him to draw attention to the unique nature of human individuals by voicing his own experiences. It is by using his own language, trying to become more aware of the limits of this, and demurring to speak beyond what he does know, that Schleiermacher finds his way to offering a more fruitful portrayal of humanity.

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The Soliloquies ‘Everything individual in the person is connected and bears a common character. But understanding and demonstrating its connection, which is ­everywhere to be presupposed, is the highest test of insight into individuality’.1

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1

An Idealistic Performance

It is with his very title that Schleiermacher begins to tell his readers about the central ideas and motifs in his text. Soliloquy indicates a distinctive, lone voice in “intimate converse with itself”,2 but according to its theatrical (after ­Shakespeare) and modern philosophical (after Shaftesbury) associations, it also carries the suggestion of a disclosive event. It signals an opportunity for the audience to gain insight into a character, to share in the secret contemplations and hesitations of their mind, and to hear about the longings of their spirit. Both introspection and disclosure are central notions in Schleiermacher’s book, and the latter idea is also communicated in his description of the work as a gift [Gabe]. The page-long introduction that he uses to open his five monologues has the simple title “Darbietung”, which in the critical English edition (1926) has been translated as “Offering”. And as a gift, these monologues are an opening out and donation of self. We learn here that what Schleiermacher pursues is loving friendship, and by conveying his ideas and feelings, his intention is to captivate and inspire an audience of such friends.3 He writes: Come, take the gift, you who can understand my spirit’s thought! May my feelings here intoned be an accompaniment to the melody [­ Gesang] within 1 Cri 292. 2 kga i.3, 5; S 9. 3 In Schleiermacher’s correspondence, he routinely refers to the Soliloquies in the context of discussing the nature of friendship. See Life 2, 251; 266; 288; 357; 359.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_011 Ruth Jackson

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yourselves and may the shock which passes through you at the contact with my spirit, become a quickening impulse in your life [Lebenskraft].4 By defining his book as a gift, Schleiermacher places both relationality and the status of the self as always-already in community at the very centre of this text, despite its being ostensibly about a lone voice.5 Nevertheless, as it employs this word “offering” to translate S­ chleiermacher’s original German word, Darbietung, the English edition fails to transmit some of the significant connotations of the latter term—connotations of performance, exhibition, or presentation. For as I have already suggested, Schleiermacher’s book comprises a deliberately exaggerated account of his inward reflections, resolutions, and convictions. It does not contain any detailed memories, specific anecdotes, or direct references to specific individuals. The content is vague and sweeping. In his penultimate monologue, Schleiermacher speaks wistfully of finding a woman with whom he might “link his life”,6 and his ensuing discussion of individual freedom, happiness, and fate resonates with the details of his relationship with Eleonore Grunow—a married woman with whom he had a failed romance. The reader, however, requires external biographical knowledge to make this inference, since the text itself offers no information to this end. Schleiermacher also omits to include any reference to the mundane tasks that would have punctuated his everyday life. Instead, this “gift” of selfdisclosure through self-contemplation that Schleiermacher offers his audience in the Soliloquies is a deliberate, abstracted, and selective performance. Framed in characteristic Romantic style by lofty, florid prose, it is an expression of selfhood comprising a stream of ideas, reflections, and second-order observations. It was due not least to its obscure style that Schleiermacher’s c­ ontemporaries found the Soliloquies to be a confusing and difficult text.7 We can glean this much about its initial reception from Schleiermacher’s personal correspondence, where he complains that his peers have misunderstood his intentions 4 kga i.3; S 9. 5 As Erich Franz has summarised: “This individualism [that Schleiermacher articulated] is not only compatible with the recognition of the community, rather it demands such community, and forms with it a self-contained unity. Only in the give and take of friendship does the development of the self unfold, because all friendship is based, if it is genuine, on the love one has for the particularities [Eigentümlichen] of one’s friends”. Deutsche Klassik und Reformation. Die Weiterbildung protestantischer Motive in der Philosophie und Weltanschauungsdichtung des deutschen Idealismus (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1937), 396. 6 kga i.3, 47; S 79. 7 That it remains a difficult text for modern commentators is evidenced by Andrew Dole’s remark that “it has never been easy to extract clearly delineated philosophical positions from the Monologen… any philosophically coherent reconstruction of the Monologen will face recalcitrant passages”. See Dole, Schleiermacher on Religion and the Natural Order. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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and overlooked the piece’s literary mode and tone. In one particularly telling letter from 1804, for example, he defends himself against a friend who has expressed incredulity over the personality Schleiermacher portrays as the author of the piece. This is a confident and unwavering soul, the friend asserts—a person who possesses a spiritual integrity unblemished by association with worldly ties and institutions. Yet how, he asks, could such a person exist? For if the author of this book is exactly how he says he is, then he “must be an extraordinarily perfect man”.8 In the eyes of Schleiermacher’s critic, then, the Soliloquies deny the temporal dimension to human existence, as well as the reality that human actions and motivations can never be entirely “pure”, mired as they are in complex chains of reasoning, responses to others, and events beyond their control. Schleiermacher rebuts this charge, however, by protesting that it was his aim to express an “idealised” version of himself in the text, and one which ­exaggerated the constancy of his thought, the strength of his will, and the transparency of his intentions.9 He maintains that this idealised self—this abstraction and hypostatisation of an entire temporal identity—does not rest upon a denial of his finitude, or a naiveté concerning the vicissitudes of human existence. By contrast, he asserts that both the knowledge that he is by nature incomplete, and the sense that his character has folded up in it countless mistakes and errors, constitute core assumptions in his writing. We read: In the [Soliloquies] I have put forward my ideas [Ideen], which do not, indeed, mean dead thoughts that have been worked out in the brain, and which calculation tells you must come pretty near to the truth, but ideas which really live in me, and in which I live. However, these ideas were not bestowed on me at my birth as a fairy gift, but, like all that is best in man, they dawned upon me gradually after many errors [Verirrung] and many mistakes [Verkehrheit]; and in my life, therefore, they are exhibited in progression only, and in constant conflict with the influences and ­remnants of what preceded them.10 8

Letter from Schleiermacher to Charlotte Pistorius, Stolpe, 28th July, 1804. (kga v.7, 408; Life 1, 380). 9 See Life 2, 129. Here, in 1808, in a letter to his future wife Henriette von Willich (they were married in May 1809), Schleiermacher writes about the tendency of her friends to “idealise him”. This is, he explains “owing to the Monologues, in which I idealised myself, and now the kind creatures think that I am in reality what I therein represent myself to be. And, in fact, so I am; for what 1 express in that book, are my innermost sentiments, my true spirit. But the innermost being is never clearly manifested in phenomenal life, but always appears veiled in ob­scurity in this imperfect world; when as this obscuration is not reproduced in the Monologues”. 10 Life 1, 381. Compare also kga v.6, 439; Life, 1, 359: “It must have been my good genius that impelled me to depict myself, or rather my aspirations, the innermost law of my life, [in the Soliloquies] in this manner”. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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Here then, Schleiermacher defines his book as a manifesto for his ideas, where they appear as work in progress and in abstraction from the processes ­surrounding their development. More than this however, the description he offers is that these ideas are living things, which not only contribute to the formation of his character, informing his decisions and actions, but are also borne out of his existence in the world, having “dawned on him gradually after many errors and mistakes”. This description is important because it corroborates once again our picture of Schleiermacher’s holistic vision of human identity in the world. As he reveals that his ideas emerge in him through the processes and procedures of life, while treating them as motivating forces in which he is fully immersed, he seems to assume a basic interplay between sensible, bodily, and pre-reflective facets to life, which to different degrees humans have in common with other organisms (both animal and vegetable) and those capacities for self-awareness, reflection, and comprehension which are distinctively human.11 “Ideas”, in Schleiermacher’s view, cannot be properly described according to the dictates of a “mechanical” model for the acquisition of knowledge—they cannot be reduced to sums or totals of quantitative data. Rather, they are dynamic principles that enter the mind gradually, crystallising there as one engages with others, as well as undertaking one’s own, private reflections. As a higher-level and specifically human activity, ideas nevertheless involve the activity of the whole temporal self, living in community. 2

Imagination and Individualism

This suggestion, drawn from Schleiermacher himself, that he offers an ­exaggerated and idealistic performance of self in the Soliloquies also provides an important hermeneutic for the text. It leads me to disagree with commentators like Ulrich Barth12 and Peter Grove,13 who understand the work to bear the 11 12

13

As Schleiermacher wrote in another piece from 1800, his Vertraute Brief über Friedrich Schlegels Lucinde: “Nothing divine can be separated into its elements of spirit and flesh, or freedom of choice and essential nature, without desecration”. kga, i.3 165. See Ulrich Barth, “Der ethische Individualitätsgedanke beim frühen Schleiermacher”, Aufklärung und Erneuerung: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Universität Halle im ersten Jahrhundert ihres Bestehens (1694–1806), (Halle: Verlag Werner Dausien, 1994), 314: “Nach allen drei Momenten folgt Schleiermachers Theorie der ‘Reflexion’ den Grundzügen von Fichtes Theorie der ‘intellektuellen Anschauung’ wie dieser sie in den berühmten ‘Einleitungen in die Wissenschaftslehre’ von 1787/98 vorgetragen hatte”. Peter Grove has written at length to demonstrate the influences of Fichte on Schleiermacher’s understanding of self-consciousness. See his Deutungen des Subjekts, 213: “Daß die neue Betonung des Freiheitsgedankens bei Schleiermacher in dieser Periode vor allem

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stamp of Fichtean philosophy and to reflect the strong idealist position that Fichte takes in his Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre), where he treats the self as the source and foundation of its own experiences, and absolutely free over the world in thought and act. Schleiermacher’s correspondence attests that he was deeply interested in Fichte’s work in this period, and that he admired the philosopher too.14 It is also the case that the beginning of his first soliloquy bears a similar style and exhortation to the opening lines of Fichte’s First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge. “Attend to yourself”, Fichte writes here, “turn your attention away from everything that surrounds you and towards your inner life. That is the first demand that philosophy makes of its disciple”.15 In similar terms, Schleiermacher enjoins his readers at the beginning of his Soliloquies to join him in the task of gathering themselves, and looking inward, contemplating “the inmost depths of your being”.16 He urges: As often as I turn my gaze inward upon my inmost self [so oft ich aber ins innere Selbst den Blik zurückwende], I am at once within the domain of eternity. I behold the spirit’s action, which no world can change, and no time can destroy, but which itself creates both world and time.17 This passage, taken together with Schleiermacher’s continued references to his “single will”, and his declared freedom over worldly objects,18 invites us to consider whether his performed self is not merely idealistic, but a dramatisation of a system of complete idealism.

14 15 16 17 18

vom Einfluß Fichtes her zu verstehen ist, der ebenfalls einen Begriff des Freiheitsgefühls in Anspruch nimmt, geht meines Erachtens aus dem Subjektivitätsbegriff der Monologen deutlich hervor”. Paul Seifert also states that Schleiermacher speaks of freedom in the Soliloquies in “outright Fichtean tones”. See his Die Theologie des jungen Schleiermacher (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1960), 136. See for instance Schleiermacher’s letters in Life 1, 222; 267; 270–271; 317. Fichte, “First Introduction to the Science of Knowledge”, Science of Knowledge, trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 6. kga i.3, 13; S 23. kga i.3, 13; S 22. See also kga i.3, 42; S 71: “I live always in the light [Bewußtsein] of my entire being [Natur]. My only purpose [mein einziger Wille] is to become more fully what I am; each of my acts is but a special phase in the unfolding of this single will; and not less certain than my power to act at all is my ability to act always in this spirit [auf diese Weise]”, and kga i.3, 43; S 72–73: “Let time move on, and bring me what manifold materials it may for my activity, my self-development [Bildung], and for the outward expression of my nature. I flinch at nothing, the order in which it comes is immaterial to me, and so are all the external conditions…”.

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Nevertheless, that Schleiermacher did not in fact intend to produce a piece of Fichtean-inspired philosophy in the Soliloquies is indicated in a letter he wrote to his publisher Johann Carl Philipp Spener in 1800. He explains in this note that “the Monologen contains something different than, say, what every Fichtean tends to put forward”.19 Moreover, it is also worthwhile to note the contrast in purpose and tone between the text of the Soliloquies—which ­carries friendship as a central motif and sets itself in intimate converse with its audience of friends, companions, and dilettantes20—with Fichte’s strictly philosophical purpose in the Wissenschaftslehre, for which he assumed an audience of philosopher scholars.21 A further reason against reading the Soliloquies as a Fichtean text is that Schleiermacher took an explicitly a­ nti-Fichtean line just one year earlier, in his 1799 work On Religion. I shall return to look at this text in more detail later in the final part of the book, but at this stage it is useful for us to note the following passage, where Schleiermacher denounces systems of complete idealism—like Fichte’s, we are given to assume—for their anthropocentric hubris. Indeed, he states that unlike the “higher realism” afforded in religion, such systems of idealism reduce the universe merely to an object of human construction, an emaciated picture of its true reality. In his second speech On Religion, Schleiermacher thus writes: And how will the triumph of speculation, the completed and rounded idealism, fare if religion does not counterbalance it and allow it to glimpse a higher realism than that which it subordinates to itself so boldly and for such good reason? Idealism will destroy the universe by appearing to 19

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kga v.3, 321. Jacqueline Mariña cites this letter in her own rejection of the notion that the Soliloquies are a Fichtean composition (Transformation of the Self, 127). Mariña elects to read the little book in tandem with Schleiermacher’s attention to Leibnizian philosophy, and also compares its account of human selfhood and self-knowledge with the anthropology implicit in Kantian ethical theory. For Mariña, indeed, the Soliloquies represents a move beyond both Kant and Leibniz, as Schleiermacher puts “emphasis on the importance of the historical arena for moral development, where human persons act and react upon one another”, and in turn comes “to understand that self-knowledge, and therefore moral development, is only possible in relation to the other” (144–145). Günter Meckenstock argues that Schleiermacher’s ethics begin with Fichtean ethics, but “modify” the latter’s teachings about the freedom of the human self. In Meckenstock’s view, Schleiermacher portrays human subjectivity as thoroughly social. See “Schleiermachers Auseinandersetzung mit Fichte”, in Schleiermacher’s Philosophy and the Philosophical Tradition, ed. Sergio Sorrentino, Schleiermacher Studies and Translations (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1992), 35. See Fichte, “Preface”, Science of Knowledge, 89.

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fashion it; it will degrade it to a mere allegory, to an empty silhouette of our own limitedness.22 Of course, since Schleiermacher explicitly defines the Soliloquies as an ­“ethical” text, we should not expect to find a similar appeal to a “higher realism” in its pages. For such an appeal assumes a religious perspective, according to which God (or the Infinite) is understood as the unconditioned ground of finite existence. The “ethical” self of the Soliloquies, however, makes no such appeal to his standing before the Infinite. As I have explained, Schleiermacher sets clear limits in the text to his efforts at self-narration, defining himself merely in relation to the world, and to humanity as a whole. He is absorbed in the immanent. This means that if we are to take the anti-Fichtean stance of On Religion to translate over to a complementary position in his Soliloquies, then we must also hold to the view that there is a continuity of standpoint between the two texts. We must assume that unlike the Fichtean system, the Soliloquies do not necessarily oppose or deny the realm of religion, as Schleiermacher understands this. In her nuanced treatment of Schleiermacher’s On Religion and his S­ oliloquies, Christiane Ehrhardt points readers to the fact that in these texts Schleiermacher deals respectively with two kinds, as it were, of human Anschauung. And what is striking, Ehrhardt contends, is that the young Schleiermacher can leave these two concepts—Selbstanschauung (which is the “ethical” self intuition we find in the Soliloquies) and die Anschauung des Universums (the central motif in On Religion)—side by side. Neither form of intuition usurps or can displace the other, she argues, and neither form is worth more or less to Schleiermacher than the other.23 To support her analysis, Ehrhardt appeals to a phrase from Schleiermacher’s own personal notes on the topic. In 1799, Schleiermacher is recorded as having mused that “intuition of self and intuition of the universe are interchangeable concepts; that is why every reflection is infinite”.24 22

23 24

Reden 213; OR 24. Elsewhere in On Religion, Schleiermacher writes that “[Religion] knows nothing about derivation and connection, for among all things religion can encounter, that is what its nature most opposes. Not only an individual fact or deed that one could call original or first, but everything in religion is immediate and true for itself” (Reden 63; OR 26). Responding to this, Schleiermacher’s translator Richard Crouter explains: “The German terms Tatsache, Handlung, erst, and ursprünglich, which are used to express the first principle of consciousness, the principle of identity, or A = A, leave no doubt that [Schleiermacher’s] target is Fichte’s Science of Knowledge”. (OR 26, n.10). Christiane Ehrhardt, Religion, Bildung und Erziehung bei Schleiermacher: Eine Analyse der Beziehungen und des Widerstreits zwischen den »Reden über die Religion« und den ­»Monologen« (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 186. “Selbstanschauung und Anschauung des Universums sind Wechselbegriffe; darum ist jede Reflexion unendlich”. kga i.2, 127, 6f. Schleiermacher’s editor, Gunter Meckenstock,

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William Johnson’s reflections on this same note of Schleiermacher’s bring him to a slightly different conclusion. He argues that since Schleiermacher ­envisages the human self as a polarised agent, at once both active and passive, these dyadic states or experiences which characterise human life issue in two different ways of encountering the Absolute. “In human self-consciousness considered as active”, Johnson writes, Schleiermacher theorised that “the Absolute was given in the experience of freedom and was therefore to be understood in an immanental way”. This preoccupation with human freedom and immanence is what we find emphasised in the Soliloquies. On the other hand, however, Schleiermacher held that in human self-consciousness considered as receptive, “the Absolute was given in the feeling of dependence and was therefore to be understood in a transcendental way”.25 From here, Johnson continues to qualify his assessment of Schleiermacher’s intuiting subject by returning to consider the polarised self as a unity, as a whole. In the flow of life, he argues, Schleiermacher imagines human self-consciousness to be a harmonious coming together of activity and receptivity. There can be no separation or dissonance between seeking the transcendent and the immanent. And since Schleiermacher advocates the religious life as the highest form a human might enjoy, we therefore find, Johnson contends, that Schleiermacher understands religion as that which can comprise the whole “unity of the active and passive elements of man’s existence”.26 Ehrhardt interprets Schleiermacher’s speeches and his Soliloquies as ­representing the opposing poles of the self’s activity, then, with Anschauung stimulated by the Universe in On Religion, and Anschauung provoked by a journey into self, “der Gedanke allein”,27 in the Soliloquies.28 But the reason I follow Johnson’s line on this question instead, is that he allows for the notion that in On Religion, his testament to the religious life, Schleiermacher includes the self’s communion both with itself and with the world—the self’s encounter with transcendence and with immanence. In the course of such a religious life, the act of looking inward and gathering up oneself is not done at the expense of looking out into the world. It is done to the end of seeing and enjoying the world more fruitfully.29 has dated this notation to 1799. Also see Dilthey, “Denkmale der inneren Entwicklung Schleiermachers”, 118. 25 William Alexander Johnson, On Religion: A study of the theological method in ­Schleiermacher and Nygren, (Leiden: Brill, 1964), 30. 26 Johnson, A study of the theological method in Schleiermacher and Nygren, 30. 27 kga i.3, 18, 21–22. 28 Christiane Ehrhardt, Religion, Bildung und Erziehung bei Schleiermacher, 89. 29 Schleiermacher also notes in the third speech of On Religion that “the communion between a person and the universe … are admittedly the two elements of religion”. kga i.2, 252; OR 59. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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It is at this point, having further clarified the differences in Schleiermacher’s view between the ethical and the religious, that I would like to return to my proposal that Schleiermacher presents an idealised self in this ethical text, his Soliloquies. What we are dealing with here is not, I contend, an attempt at a ­fully-fledged system of idealism. Let us turn back to consider the summons that Schleiermacher makes at the beginning of his text, for his readers to join him in self-contemplation. It is true that Schleiermacher portrays such ­self-contemplation as a withdrawal of the human spirit from material concerns. What is interesting for us, however, is that he proposes this self-contemplation not as a necessarily foundational activity—to the end of giving him, à la Descartes, a firm and presuppositionless surface on which to build—but as a “higher” activity. This self-contemplation is a process which rests atop the sum total of his existing activity (material, social, and cultural) in the world. It is a tool that a person can use to gather and confront themselves, to the end of discerning their vocation in life.30 “Meditation and contemplation are without profit”, Schleiermacher confirms, “for him who does not know the inner life of spirit”.31 He thereby suggests that it is only through such inward and reflective activity that he is able to appreciate the full complexity and total scope of his human nature. To retreat inward is thus to attempt self-narration or self-reflection.32 It is to consider the meaning of one’s place in the world.33 John Crossley Jr has already pointed to this dimension of Schleiermacher’s ethical thought. In an article on Schleiermacher’s early ethical texts, he draws attention to “the clear connection” that Schleiermacher

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kga i.3, 12; S 22: “It is this higher order of self contemplation, and this alone, that makes me capable of meeting the sublime summons [die erhabene Forderung] that man live not only as a mortal in the realm of time, but also as immortal in the domain of eternity”. kga i. 3, 8; S 13. Self-contemplation was a common motif among the Berlin Romantic Circle. As Frederick Beiser explains: “The romantics wanted to break outside the confines of our ordinary and mundane perfection of the world, where we automatically categorize everything according to common concepts, and where we see things only as objects of use. Their goal was to develop our power of contemplation so that we can see things anew, as they are in themselves and for their own sakes, apart from their utility and common meaning”. The Romantic Imperative, 101. See also Oskar Walzel’s appraisal that according to the Romantics, “through self-perception we attain perception of the Infinite. Self-perception becomes the organ of moral culture. It reveals in individuality the expression and reflection of the universe”. (German Romanticism, 50). In a letter to Eleonore Grunow in August 1802, Schleiermacher writes: “It is, indeed, a miserable thing when a book is merely taken in by the understanding, in which case, generally speaking, there is not much to be said either about the reader or about the book… It would be a master stroke, if you could teach M– to understand the Monologues with his imagination [Phantasie], which comprises the heart” (kga v.6 72; Life 1, 303). Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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makes in his Soliloquies between a person’s freedom and their inner spiritual life. This close connection leads Crossley to conclude that: Schleiermacher is not talking about freedom as the absence of causal compulsion… Here he is talking about the freedom to alter one’s state of mind, a freedom potentially open to everyone, but experienced only by those who turn their eyes inward.34 From this angle, Schleiermacher’s translator Horace Leyland Friess (1926) also interprets the text as a non-Fichtean work. Indeed, Friess distinguishes Schleiermacher’s position—that “conscience is consciousness of one’s ­ unique place in true humanity”—from Fichte’s, which is that “conscience is consciousness of true humanity, the universal self in the individual self”.35 This qualified understanding of the “free” self in the Soliloquies—the notion­ that a person is “free” as a unique organ of thought and life in the universe—also gives us a better approach, I submit, for interpreting Schleiermacher’s references to the human spirit as the “the first and only being”, and as a “creator of both world and time”. For in this light, Schleiermacher’s message is that each person obtains a distinct perspective on the world, one that cannot be possessed or lived out by another. Each individual human will experience the duration, tone, and emotional weight of a specific event in their own way. Note that this is entirely consistent with the commitment to Bildung I elaborated in the previous chapter. For Schleiermacher’s point here is that in a very real sense, each human individual walks through life generating their own specific versions of shared events, their own responses to different places and people. “A man belongs to the world he helped to create”, he writes in his third soliloquy—“his will and his thought are all absorbed in it, and it is outside its bounds that he is a stranger”.36 Once again then, Schleiermacher points out the way in which people are formed by their language, place, and social and 34

John P. Crossley Jr., “The Ethical Impulse in Schleiermacher’s Early Ethics”, The Journal of Religious Ethics 17, no. 2 (Fall, 1989), 13. 35 See S n. 27. Another important resource for maintaining the anti-Fichtean quality of Schleiermacher’s philosophy is Andrew Bowie’s work on aesthetics and subjectivity. Bowie has argued that Schleiermacher offers resources “for a view of subjectivity which does not reduce it to a structure of reflection”. (196). He writes: “A non-reflective conception of individual self-consciousness like Schleiermacher’s is perfectly able to allow that philosophy could not found itself from the very start, which is why it sets up a dialectic which tries to facilitate the admittedly endless, but socially necessary, attempt to overcome difference without repressing individuality”. (Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 199). 36 kga i.3, 35; S 62.

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cultural station in the world. And as he calls his audience to return inward and collect themselves, we therefore take this as his recommendation that they ­re-train their vision or adapt their patterns of imagination [Phantasie] about the meaning and scope of human identity in the world.37 3

Individuality and Immeasurability

In his first Soliloquy, Schleiermacher reveals a further motivation for calling for his readers to collect themselves, to acknowledge the higher life of the inner human spirit, and to thereby reconsider their perception of human identity. He starts by lamenting how across society as a whole, the metric assumed ­accurate and useful for measuring human experience is twenty-four-hour clock time, and the homogenous linearity of the secular calendar year.38 In Schleiermacher’s view, containing and describing human life according to such universal delineations is manifestly inadequate, and reflects merely a reduced picture of its nature: we divide the infinite line of time into equal portions [Entfernungen], at points determined arbitrarily by the most trivial circumstances, ­having no significance in our lives and determining nothing, since nought proceeds at an exact pace, not the structure [Gebäude] of our work,

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kga i.3, 13; S 22. The importance of the imagination for Schleiermacher—matched by his reference to the individual as a “creator” of the world to which he belongs—mirrors­ the central role it had in the aesthetic theory and philosophy of the time. The move within Early Romantic thought to stress individual uniqueness is one, for instance, that was matched by their innovative poetics. The Frühromantiker understood the creative imagination to have an integral part to play in the formation of language and its sense. They held the creative intellect to be primary over established rules, conventions, and grammatical paradigms. Interest in Early German Romanticism grew in the twentieth century through the work of scholars like Joseph Nadler, Fritz Strich, and Josef Körner. These scholars argued that the innovation and distinction of the Frühromantiker was precisely this rejection of mimesis—the imitation of nature—and their new emphasis on individual creativity. For more recent work on Romantic poetics, and the response to mimetic theory in Romantic literature, see Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity: From Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Frederick Berwick, Mimesis and Its Romantic Reflections (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Mattias Pirholt, Imitation in Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre” and Early German Romanticism (NY: Camden House, 2012). Schleiermacher’s use of the first person plural denotes his conviction that this is a shared assumption.

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nor the round of our emotions [Empfindungen], nor the play of our destiny [Schicksale].39 In these opening passages, however, Schleiermacher does not simply take ­issue with the human practice of mapping out time and space according to universally-applicable scales of measurement. He is concerned more specifically with the perspectival and ethical shift that occurs in an individual when they presume such universal metrics and systems to be fundamental frameworks for acquiring knowledge about the world. In his second paragraph, Schleiermacher offers a pejorative portrait of a typical modern individual—a determinist and a naturalist, who is preoccupied with material particulars, and who imagines life as a constellation of observable surfaces, bodies and forces. He writes: The average individual [Der Mensch] recognizes nothing but his transient existence [sein Dasein in der Zeit], and its irresistible decline from sunny heights into a dread night of annihilation [Vernichtung]. He thinks some hidden hand draws the thread of his life along, alternately weaving and unweaving a web of sensations [Empfindungen] and ideas ­[Vorstellungen] pulling it together now loosely, now tightly, and that nothing more exists… And could men also explain in mechanistic fashion the entire nexus of such a life, they would regard themselves as having reached the summit [Gipfel] of humanity and self-comprehension.40 Schleiermacher’s closing line here reflects his diagnosis of an epistemic and cultural hubris among those who participate in this mechanistic imaginary. He suggests that in time, and with improved scientific mechanisms for observing the “entire nexus” of the universe and its laws, those who perceive the world and its creatures as though it is fitting to divide [teilen] them in this way, will also assume it is possible to describe them exhaustively, and will assume they are doing so too from an objective standpoint. His proposal is thus that his contemporaries envisage absolute knowledge and absolute s­ elf-knowledge to 39 40

kga i.3, 6; S 10. kga i.3, 6–7; S 11. See also kga i.3, 12; S 21, where Schleiermacher describes the perception of an imagined sensuous man [der Sinnliche]—or materialist—whose action and whose thought “look outward”, in similar terms: “He cannot imagine himself as other than a sum of fleeting appearances [als einen Inbegriff von flüchtigen Erscheinungen], each of which supplants [aufhebt] and cancels the other, so that it is impossible to conceive them as a whole. A complete picture of his being thus eludes him in a thousand contradictions [Widersprüchen]”.

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be an achievable scientific task. If we read on, moreover, into his third soliloquy, Schleiermacher continues by relating how he despises [verachten]41 the tendency already among present-day educated Prussians to assert their impressive levels of civility, intelligence, and morality in contrast to previous generations—an assertion framed by a vision of human “progress” as something which can be assessed in reference to observable, material factors, and which can be mapped on a linear axis.42 Schleiermacher complains, for instance, how “this perverse generation loves to talk of how it has improved the world in order to plume itself and to be considered superior to its ancestors”. “To hear them discoursing on the world of today”, he continues, echoing the opening lines of Immanuel Kant’s Was ist Aufklärung?, “one would imagine the thundering voice of their mighty reason had burst the chains of ignorance… every least moment is supposed to have been full of progress”.43 According to Schleiermacher’s perspective then, the attitude that many of his contemporaries take is lamentable, since they base their assertions about “progress” upon their observations about widespread gains in health, physical strength, and an overall “heightened feeling of vitality [das höchste Gefühl des leiblichen Lebens]”.44 But these external, material gains—just like the u ­ niversal scales of measurement employed to assess them—do not prove anything about the true health of current human society, Schleiermacher argues, and pursuing them does not constitute “mankind’s entire task”.45 Instead, he urges, we should be concerned that this account of humanity’s progress includes no reference to “inner” development, a person’s moral or ethical grounding, or their ability to cultivate edifying and lasting relationships.46 In the following passage, which is also from his third soliloquy, Schleiermacher thus proceeds 41 42

43 44 45 46

kga i.3, 29; S 50. As we have already hinted, this idea was not unique to Schleiermacher. For the same conviction expressed in Herder, see his Another Philosophy of History, 40: “Every classic aesthete who views the regimentation of our age as the ultimate achievement of mankind is given the opportunity to belittle entire centuries for their barbarism, wretched laws, superstition and stupidity, lack of manners and bad taste… all the books by our Voltaires and Humes, Robertsons and Iselins are full of this, and there emerges so beautiful a picture of the enlightenment and improvement of the world from its murky past—via deism and the despotism of souls, that is to say philosophy and tranquility—as to make the heart of every lover of his times sing”. kga i.3, 28–29; S 50. kga i.3, 31; S 53. kga i.3, 30; S 52. See also kga i.3, 32; S 56: “Whatever spiritual association [geistiger Gemeinschaft] now exists is debased in service of the earthly; aimed at some utility it confines the spirit and does violence [Abbruch] to the inner life”.

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to defy the message of this prevalent progress narrative by depicting presentday Prussian society, with its complex social strata, norms, and conventions, as a place where the individual is simply unable to find the conditions within which to dwell happily, in love and friendship. “Society is not organised for such a purpose”, he contends: “to bring together those who need each other is no one’s business”. We read: Even if he, whose heart seeks love everywhere in vain, should learn where dwelt his friend and his beloved, yet would he be restricted by his station [äußere Stand] in life, by the rank [Stelle] which he holds in that meagre thing we call society [Gemeinschaft]. Man clings to these restricting ties more tenaciously than stone or plant to mother earth. The piteous fate of the black man, torn [fortgerißen] from his loved ones and his native land, for base servitude in a strange and distant country [unbekannte Ferne], is daily meted out in the routine of the world to better men [Beßern] also, who, prevented from reaching the distant homeland [ferne Heimath] where dwell their unfound friends, must waste away their inner lives ­ineffectually in surroundings that ever remain alien and barren to them.47 In the above excerpt, Schleiermacher’s guiding point once more is that an ­individual strives to develop the fulness of their character through time. He stresses that a person’s inner life can only be properly nurtured in community with others, people with whom one can find a common language. And as he does so, Schleiermacher suggests that the problem with contemporary society is that it currently exists merely as a “meagre” [dürftig] set of associations between individuals, and that it is scaffolded by a set of structures which, although they cannot fully define or destroy the individual, preclude him or her from becoming whole, and from living a good and happy life. Yet having got this far, and having seen Schleiermacher’s attempt to unpick some of the biases and assumptions of his age, we must at this point return full-circle to consider some of those prejudices in which Schleiermacher ­himself shares, which touch on the poignant political and social dimensions of his concern with Bildung. For lying at the heart of the above passage is also the use of a comparative—better men, and it is white European man who is named “better” than black man here—which reminds us of the imperialist standpoint that Schleiermacher engaged in those materials he assembled on 47

kga i.3, 31; S 54. Cf. S 67: “No one can live simply and in the way of beauty, save he who hates lifeless formulas, seeks after genuine self-cultivation, and so belongs to a world that is yet to be”.

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the penal colony in “New Holland”. Indeed, in these materials, we saw how the colonialist explorers Schleiermacher was researching portrayed the people indigenous to the land they visited as uncivilised and inferior. They were living, the colonialists thought, at the “lowest stage of human development” [die niedrigste Stufe der menschlichen Bildung] .48 The impression given here, then, was that the colonialists assumed there to be a single, universal scale of human progress against which all discrete human societies might be measured. And they, the colonialists, proceed to happily claim to be at its summit, thereby enshrining an image of themselves—white, educated, European male—as the apotheosis, or höchste Stufe of so-called “humanity”. As the editor of these materials, and despite the resources of his thought elsewhere to denounce rigid hierarchical thinking, Schleiermacher clearly failed to offer a successful critique of this way of imagining people. Indeed, he repeats this assumption that different human races can be rightfully compared by way of a linear scale of human development, without calling into question the inflexibilty of this assumed scale, or the imperialist assumptions about what it means to be “perfectly human”, which animate it. In this passage from the Soliloquies, then, Schleiermacher ushers in a ­restatement of this hierarchical assumption about the superiority of white European culture. It is true that Schleiermacher’s note reflects his rejection of the slave trade.49 He expresses sympathy for the horrors of the conditions facing a man who has been made a slave, he condemns the practice, he names it to be wrong, inhuman. But there is something else here too. Schleiermacher’s allusion to the suffering of a black man torn from his home land is made under the premise that such a wretched “fate” is analogous with the inward deterioration of “better men”—those (white European) individuals, we gather, who are disciplined by social structures such that they have trouble flourishing, trouble finding true friends. That Schleiermacher makes such a comparison here, and in doing so obscures the evil of slavery, signals to us the limits of his own vision, the limits of his notion of human “self-realisation”. A bitter irony of this passage is that while Schleiermacher’s assumptions lead him to veil and read human suffering in this way, his statements otherwise point to his awareness of human partiality, of the limits and the specificity of the individual human perspective, to the notion that one’s own p ­ erspective does not carry universal application. Indeed, Schleiermacher engages here 48 49

kga 1.3, 271. Schleiermacher offers denunciations of the slave trade too in his materials on “New Holland”. See kga i.3 278. For comment and analysis, see Rieger, “Power and Empire in the Study of Nineteenth-Century Theology”, 49.

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with that issue which he approached only indirectly, and unsatisfactorily in his penal colony materials, namely the problem of how to fully account for the uniqueness of different human communities and individuals when one is confined to one’s own language and to the pre-existing ideas and assumptions about human nature that one possesses as part of one’s own cultural identity. In this case, Schleiermacher portrays societal norms and traditions as inescapable bonds: ties which “tenacious” humans—including, naturally, the author himself—find it impossible to abandon when making judgments about the nature or value of another person or community. Having gone this far, however, Schleiermacher’s most significant move in the Soliloquies regarding this issue is an aspect to his rejection of ­contemporary narratives about human progress. He rebuts the notion that it is possible to refer to perceived material improvements in order to make clean comparative judgments about the quality of one generation against the next. He asserts that there exists no universal scale for comparing sets of human ­communities which are temporally distinct from each other, while he also stresses that the same holds true for spatially-distinct social worlds. The aim to make such comparisons, Schleiermacher avers, reflects an emaciated vision as to the ­nature of human life, and ignorance as to the true depth of its complexity. Schleiermacher’s impulse to adopt the theatrical form of Soliloquy, and to take on an exaggerated version of himself, might thus, I contend, be ­interpreted as a technique to engage the reader’s imagination. And in this view I ­follow Brent Sockness, who has argued that “in the Monologen, the imagination stands at the very heart of the process of progressive self-discovery and selfdefinition”.50 By using his text to encourage a contemplative withdrawal, Schleiermacher dramatises his contention that a human person comprises more than just the sum of his or her material parts, and that it is therefore impossible to fully come to know a person through observation or description, or to analyse them using those scales of measurements adopted in r­ational scientific investigation.51 The amplified, idealised “I” that Schleiermacher gives life to in his text instead makes manifest his conviction that individual ­humans transcend the linear march of the secular calendar and homogenous clock time. A person persists through passing moments, Schleiermacher observes, and her character is held fast by repeated behaviours, patterns of 50 51

Brent Sockness, “Schleiermacher and the Ethics of Authenticity: The ‘Monologen’ of 1800”, 503. “Be not a fool to prophecy the spirit’s strength in terms of time”, he writes, “for time can never be its measure!”… “Man’s measure and his destiny are not temporal; the spirit will not submit to such empirical delineations!” S 90–91.

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thought and imagination—that is, by living ideas. And it is this enduring “ethical” self that Schleiermacher finds in the practice of soliloquy—in his own thoughts and inner life. Here then, the general point that Schleiermacher wants to make about humanity as a whole is one that he approaches through his own particular experience. By animating this idealised “I” on the page for his readers, he does not presume to speak for the particularity of others. Here, indeed, he only speaks for himself. ­“Self-contemplation lifts me far above the finite [Endliche]” he declares, if we are to define the finite as that “which may be seen entire as a determined series with definite limits”.52 In the remainder of this passage, Schleiermacher proceeds to offer a lyrical statement of the two ideas central to the present study—firstly, that an individual should be assured that their character is on the one hand temporal and self-exceeding, but on the other hand unified, so that they are capable of acting according to a consistent ethical perspective which is particular to them alone. Secondly, Schleiermacher also states the importance of maintaining epistemic humility. Despite the fact that we may aim at consistency and reliability concerning our presentation of self within the world, and may seek to stake a responsible and coherent place within a community or society, it is nevertheless impossible, he stresses, to ever fully know oneself or another. For the human cannot be assessed or measured exhaustively, and human personality does not amount to an “averaged-out” assessment of one’s actions over time. Schleiermacher writes: No action transpires within me, that I can truly regard as isolated, and none of which I could say that it constitutes a whole by itself. Each of my acts reveals the whole of my being [Wesen], undivided, each of its ­manifestations [Thätigkeit] goes with the rest; there are no limits at which introspection can halt, it must ever remain unfinished [unvollendet], if it is to remain true to life.53 For the author of the Soliloquies it is thus clear that in order to properly ­appreciate their freedom, as well as to apprehend the freedom and uniqueness of others, his generation must resist the view that individual humans—as well as the world’s spaces—can be exhaustively mapped or measured according to the clean lines and divisions of the clock, map, and calendar. Built into the very framework of Schleiermacher’s text is thus a recognition of the limitations of the individual human perspective. Schleiermacher resists 52 53

kga i.3, 12; S 21. kga i.3, 12; S 21–22. Emphasis my own.

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the notion that the gaze of a single agent is or can be exhaustive. Given these signals about the humility of Schleiermacher’s epistemology, then, and his aim to formally include an awareness of difference in his work, it is a jarring ­reminder of the structural, institutional, and systemic nature of prejudice to see his own assumptions about the superiority of white Europeans woven so effortlessly into the text.

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Conclusion In this part of the book I have sought to establish the perspective Schleiermacher held by 1800, that human selves are temporal creatures—agents who manifest themselves through concrete decision-making in community and society. I have demonstrated that Schleiermacher set out to portray and declare human individuals as irreducibly unique beings who are nevertheless reciprocally bound up with other thinking and acting agents in the world. Rather than seek to pin down exactly what it means to be human, by highlighting some one characteristic and promoting its perfection—whether this be (say) reason, or culture or beauty—Schleiermacher contended that each person represents humanity in their own way, according to the details of their place and situation. As such, he envisioned “humanity” as an ever-unfolding whole which contains infinite difference and is capable of infinite diversity. Humanity as a group or category always exceeds itself, Schleiermacher suggested, since with each new human being its limits grow. With each new human being, it, as universal, gains a new particular through which it might be symbolised. A significant point Schleiermacher communicated in the texts we have been studying is that all human interaction and encounter is mediated through language. He contended that humans cannot get “behind” or beyond language in their dealings with the world. It was in light of this point, we saw, that Schleiermacher also criticised the tendency to adopt “lifeless formulas”1 as well as tired, universalising terminology to describe human life. For such language, he argued, puts us at risk of denying people their uniqueness—reducing them to “rough unshapen masses, inwardly together alike, and taking transient shape externally only by reason of mutual contact and friction”.2 And yet, despite Schleiermacher’s protests about the need to attend to individuality, we saw that Schleiermacher failed to do justice to the particularity of those people indigenous to “New Holland”, or to the very women who belonged to his Romantic Circle. These considerations led us to focus on the specific literary form that Schleiermacher chose for his most successful ethical text of this period—the soliloquy. I argued that with this form, Schleiermacher did manage to find a more appropriate vessel for articulating his distinctive ethical anthropology, and for developing his epistemology of finitude. Asides in his Soliloquies again betrayed Schleiermacher’s participation in an imperialist imaginary, and his 1 kga i.3, 39; S 67. 2 kga i.3, 18; S 31.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_012 Ruth Jackson

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assumptions­about the superiority of the “cultured” white European. What changes structurally here in the Soliloquies, however, is significant, I think, because it means there is the possibility for confronting these pernicious assumptions in Schleiermacher’s scheme by using the very principles that he claims to uphold. We can use his work, as it were, to critique him. For in his Soliloquies, we find Schleiermacher critiquing abstracting formulas about human nature. He demurred to produce his own moral or ethical system, and he proposed a retreat inward that refused solipsism and subjectivism. Instead, he chose to speak about himself as a specific individual—an independent spirit, who cannot be described merely in terms of objective empirical measurements and universal categories. And by speaking out in this way—manifesting himself on the page—he sought to gesture to the diverse nature of humanity as a whole, through the particular nature of his own being. The self of the Soliloquies is a social self, ever in relation, in search of friendship, and uses a language that he has been “given” through culture and society.

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Part 3 Dialogue and Incarnation

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Introduction to Part 3 With the exception of his roman à clef, To Cecilie (1789/1790), the selection of texts that I addressed in Chapters two to six of this study all dealt with what Schleiermacher defines as “ethical” material. These texts have concerned questions of human self-development and sociability and have been absorbed in predominantly “worldly” or historical goings-on. In them, Schleiermacher does not preoccupy himself with metaphysical questions or religious themes, even if such issues have crept in unavoidably, since we have seen that the implied telos of individual Bildung in Schleiermacher’s scheme is indeed religious; the self, ever-exceeding itself, will never stop striving in this life, and is always-already finally defined, together with the higher whole of humanity, in its relation to the Infinite. In this final part of the book, however, I will return to consider directly those questions that Schleiermacher broached in To Cecilie, about the nature of religious faith and the scope of divine action in the world. My contention is that the attention I have given these early ethical writings provides a fruitful vantage point for interpreting Schleiermacher’s later theological positions. Indeed, in the next chapter I will focus on the theology Schleiermacher was writing in 1806, when at 37 years old he was a Professor at the University of Halle. For having demonstrated Schleiermacher’s distinctive understanding of human freedom in the world, and his views on the placed nature of human knowledge and language, I shall now show how he maintains this acute awareness of human particularity in his theological writings. What I mean by this, chiefly, is that even in the religious life Schleiermacher recognises that humans are bound to the world and to their place within it. He teaches that individuals are unable to know God directly—that they should seek the Infinite “in the midst of’ the finite”.1 Yet Schleiermacher’s recognition of such apparent limits to human agency does not mean that he understands the human condition as an intrinsically negative or stultifying one. In other words, Schleiermacher does not preach a flight from the world as the task of religion. Instead, what I seek to expound and elaborate in this part of the book, is Schleiermacher’s understanding that religion is an inherently social phenomenon, incarnated in discrete historical communities. His conviction, I contend, is that it is precisely in encounter, friendship, and reciprocal giving that humans are able to flourish in the world, as well as to love and honour

1 kga i.2, 247; OR 54: “Mitten in der Endlichkeit Eins werden mit dem Unendlichen, und ewig sein in jeden Augenblick, das ist die Unsterblichkeit der Religion”.

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God, who Schleiermacher affirms as the transcendent creator and ground of all finite existence. In order to argue this, my primary focus will be on a short text that Schleiermacher wrote during the Winter of 1805/6, entitled The Christmas Celebration: A Dialogue [Die Weihnachtsfeier: Ein Gespräch].2 That this text has not been numbered, historically, among Schleiermacher’s more influential or popular works is indicated by Karl Barth’s comment to those Göttingen students who attended his lectures on Schleiermacher in the semester of 1923/4. The dialogue, Barth explains here, will be “unknown to most of you”.3 Despite its relative obscurity in comparison to On Religion (1799) or Christian Faith (first edition 1821–22) however, it is a formative piece which Barth went on to describe as an “important little work”—“very well adapted to convey a first acquaintance with Schleiermacher and his nature and life’s ideal”.4 Wilhelm Dilthey, too, described it as “the best introduction to the study of his dogmatics”.5 And indeed, the work demonstrates the extraordinary transformation that had occurred in Schleiermacher’s thinking from the position he had occupied in 1787, when he admitted to his father that he could not assent to the belief that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.6 For in this short piece of dialogic fiction, Schleiermacher positions the birth of Christ as the thematic and intellectual spur for the discussions and celebrations enjoyed by his characters, and also gestures to the deeper, cosmic significance of this event as the source of new life for the entire universe to which his characters belong. By 1806 then, Schleiermacher had reimagined the nature of the relationship between God and his creatures. His vision of history was now fundamentally Christocentric, because it focussed on the event of the Incarnation as the prism through which this foundational relationship is upheld and made known. The form of Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue is significant and must be taken together with the explicit content of the text as constitutive of its meaning. In Chapter seven, I will argue that it is in virtue of its polyphonic quality that this little book enables Schleiermacher to dramatise his view about the irreducibly particular nature of human beings and the material-historical dimension of human becoming.7 My argument in Part 2 of this study was that Schleiermacher’s decision to employ the form of the soliloquy bore structural 2 3 4 5 6 7

As a shorthand, I will be referring to this text as Christmas Dialogue. dts 109; tts 57. dts 109; tts 57. Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, 2nd ed.,775. Cited in tts, 57. A letter from Schleiermacher to his father, Jan 21, 1787. In Briefe 1, 42–43. My use of this word “polyphonic” is a deliberate nod to the work of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, who read Dostoevsky’s novels as polyphonic in character. See Bakhtin,

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and philosophical fruit, because it helped him to stress the radically unique nature of human individuals, each of whom is tasked with representing humanity in his or her own particular way. By writing a dialogue, then, Schleiermacher was able to maintain this point about human individuality while also presenting religion as an inherently social enterprise, where the religious believer is always-already embedded in a nexus of linguistic, cultural, and historical relations, and religious belief itself is entangled in specific times and places. In Chapter eight I shall turn back to survey Schleiermacher’s 1799 text On Religion and will analyse it in light of what we have learned about his attention to human sociality. Schleiermacher argues in the final speech of this work that there is no such thing as a private or personal religion, while he defends the role of historical religious traditions as the only legitimate dwelling place for a finite individual who seeks the Infinite. Once more here, we find evidence of his participation in the political and social biases that belonged to his age more broadly, in his misleading and derogatory portrait of the Jewish religion, against his positive portrait of Christianity. This comes, too, despite Schleiermacher’s protestations elsewhere in the text that “nothing is more irreligious than to demand uniformity in humanity generally”, and that “nothing is more unchristian than to seek uniformity in religion”.8 Again, for the twenty-first century reader, these biases in his work—although unfortunately unsurpris­ ing given his standing and cultural context—persist as a reminder of the limits of Schleiermacher’s own vision, but also the limits of the theologian’s gaze more generally.9 The theory of “religion” that Schleiermacher produces is one which inherently favours his own Western European tradition within Christianity, yet it is one that he nevertheless uses to name and categorise other religious traditions. At this juncture, what I would want to propose in conversation with Schleiermacher’s work, and as a critique of it, is that a “system” of Christian theology has failed if it looks outside Christ for “perfect humanity”. It has failed, indeed, if it presumes that humans are perfected through their own efforts, or if it forgets that the God of the Bible does not demand culture or learning, but calls the marginalized, the poor, and the foreigner. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 8 OR 123. 9 I am indebted to the work of Michael Mack for my own tentative approach to this subject. See his German Idealism and the Jew, 1: “There has been a lack of attempts to critically reflect on the relation between anti-Semitism, on one hand, and philosophy, aesthetics, and social theory on the other… [Anti-semitism] is not an autonomous entity that has nothing to do with other social and cultural issues. One simply cannot appraise a body of work, disregarding its prejudicial content”.

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At this stage, in Chapter nine I will put the points that we have gleaned from On Religion back into contact with his Christmas Dialogue, where he portrays worldly insight as that which emerges temporally and communally—over the course of a conversation as a whole, rather than residing in any one of its constituent voices. The resulting picture we can develop of Schleiermacher’s theological anthropology is that it resists a subjectivist account of human beings, whereby the “inner” is detrimentally isolated as a static and privileged place above the body and outside of language. Yet Schleiermacher’s account of the religious life is also able to uphold human ipseity. In Schleiermacher’s view, when a person becomes religious, their unique nature is not lost or neutralised under the universal dictates of an Absolute ideal. My final gesture in this part will be to argue that Schleiermacher’s depiction of religion as social also enables him to uphold divine transcendence, and to avoid collapsing everything into the finite.

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Chapter 7

Schleiermacher’s Dialogic Vision 1

A Household at Christmas

Schleiermacher composed his Christmas Dialogue1 in the Winter of 1805/6, when he was thirty-seven years of age. A Professor at the University of ­Halle, appointed the preceding year, he was teaching lecture courses on ethics, hermeneutics, an introduction to theology, and dogmatics—although in one of history’s ironies he professed this latter discipline to be one of his weakest subjects.2 He was also immersed in translating Plato’s dialogues into German, and at the close of 1805 he had already published three of the eventual six volumes that would make up this astonishing translation project. In getting this far with Plato, however, he had nevertheless parted company with his original collaborator, and one-time flatmate and close friend, Friedrich Schlegel (they terminated their collaboration after much disagreement in 1803). Indeed, in November 1805, Schleiermacher was inhabiting a different social milieu to the one that he enjoyed in 1800. He had left Berlin, and with it the circle of Early German Romantic philosophers in whose company he wrote his Soliloquies as well as his famous speeches On Religion. He was also deeply heartbroken. His six-year-long unconsummated courtship of Eleonore Grunow had finally ended that October, with her decision to remain with her husband. The Christmas Dialogue itself is short, suitable for lay audiences, and was hurriedly written over the course of just two to three weeks.3 Its structure and content is simple. It depicts the celebrations that take place on Christmas Eve in a pointedly gebildeten Prussian household.4 The cluster of friends 1 For an exhaustive reception history of the Christmas Dialogue in nineteenth-century and twentieth-century scholarship (1806–1984), see Ruth Richardson, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Weihnachtsfeier as “Universal Poetry”: The Impact of Friedrich Schlegel on the Intellectual ­Development of the Young Schleiermacher”, PhD Dissertation, Drew University (Madison, New Jersey, 1985), 240–478. See also Hermann Patsch, “Historische Einführung”, in kga 1/5, xlviii–l, lv–lxiv. 2 Briefe 3, 27. 3 See Briefe 2, 50, and 61. 4 Following his appointment at Halle in 1804, Schleiermacher built up an acquaintance with the composer, music critic, and one-time Court Capellmeister Johann Friedrich Reichardt, as well as Reichardt’s daughter, Luise. In Wilhelm Dilthey’s view, it was this high bourgeois family (who had a Friederike and a little Sofie among their number), and Reichardt’s l­ uscious country house and garden in Giebichenstein, that inspired the characters in Schleiermach-

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that Schleiermacher introduces here includes a pair of couples: Ernestine and ­Eduard—who are married with a child, Sophie5—as well as Friederike and Ernst, who are engaged. A further four adults then complete the party: Leonhardt (a lawyer and a rationalist, who reminds Barth of Feuerbach6), Agnes, Karoline, and Josef. All of those present are Christian men, women, and children bound to attend church services the next morning, but at this point in the festival they are celebrating privately, and in a house dressed with garlands and flowers and bursting with gifts and edible trinkets. Schleiermacher depicts anticipation, fluster, and bluster across each of the text’s scenes,7 the first of which is set in the drawing room as little Sophie—­radiating inner joy over the festival—guesses the hidden contents of her gifts, as she initiates the sharing and opening of presents among the whole party. For Leonhardt however, Sophie’s joy and childlike piety is at times alarming. In the second scene, he whips up a discussion about Sophie’s earnest acceptance of the Christian message and her devotedness to God. At length, the adults debate whether Sophie’s behaviour marks her out as a potential enthusiast or Schwärmerin—a believer likely to eschew the world as she grows older, in order to seek a cloistered life of devotion in a Herrnhuter community, or perhaps as a Catholic religious. In Leonhardt’s more extreme view, Sophie’s current behaviour reflects the likelihood that she will suffer that “inner perversion of the soul” [innere Verschrobenheit] which inevitably leads to the noxious prospect of her cutting family ties, and joining a community marked by spiritual purity and separatism. Nevertheless, and along with the rest of the party, Sophie’s parents do not share Leonhardt’s concern about the derangement and delusions that their daughter might suffer. Nor are they as quick to stigmatise the Herrnhuter communities in this way.8

5 6 7

8

er’s Christmas Dialogue. See Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers ii, 125. For further analysis of Reichardt’s influence on Schleiermacher, see Ruth Richardson, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Weihnachtsfeier as “Universal Poetry”, 137–150. For Reichardt’s influence on the Early German Romantics, see Samuel Paul Capen, Friedrich Schlegel’s relations with Reichardt and his contributions to “Deutschland”, (Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 1903). Following Tice and convention within English scholarship I have opted to use the anglicised version of Sofie’s name. dts 129; tts 69. Schleiermacher did not divide the text up into discrete formal sections. Any reference I make to scenes and sections therefore belong to my own assessment of the text. According to Ruth Richardson’s calculation, 60% of the book is devoted to mutual conversation among the men and the women, 20% to the women’s stories, and 20% to the men’s speeches. (Richardson, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Weihnachtsfeier as “Universal Poetry”, 186). Wei, 14–22; Chr 37–45.

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The group recovers from this confrontation as three of the women are encouraged to tell stories about previous Christmas Eve celebrations. Each describes an occasion where they have experienced the joy of Christ’s birth, and through a special event or encounter have reached a deeper appreciation of the Christian message. Ernestine recalls a visit to matins as a young girl, and her meeting there with a serene mother and child who represented a quiet tableau of devotion. Agnes recounts an infant baptism that took place within her family the previous year, and Karoline tells the story of a friend who thought she had lost her newborn to a desperate illness, only for him to recover, miraculously, the afternoon before Christmas. After these stories, the dialogue culminates in a fourth section—and one that does not lack a sense of irony and self-reflexiveness—wherein the gentlemen of the company elect to take turns speech-making on the topic of the nature of Christmas. Between them, the men debate the influence of rites and festivals in the life of a believer, contrasting these with the role of scripture and doctrine. They also explore the relation between the historical man “Jesus” and the Word of God attested to in the Johannine prologue. Eduard, our final speaker, claims to have the fourth gospel in view when he urges that it is through the festival of Christmas that “we should become conscious of an innermost ground out of which a new, untrammeled life emerges, and of its inexhaustible power”.9 Through these three extempore speeches, the other characters are thus offered an unresolved presentation of three differing and more academic reflections on the festival. The book is then brought to a swift conclusion with the arrival of a late visitor, Josef. Having “roamed about the whole evening, everywhere taking part most happily in every little happening”,10 Josef is in a mood to playfully chide the men for performing according to Leonhardt’s own tedious designs. Their speeches are too prolix and stuffy, he presses, to be a fitting tribute to the triumphant and holy festival of Christmas.11 By contrast, he exclaims that Christmas creates in him “a speechless joy”, and, recapitulating the child-like happiness with which Sophie opened the text, he then enjoins the group to end the evening in song together. From this synopsis, we can see how the text returns to those same questions and themes that troubled the young Schleiermacher as he wrote To Cecilie and negotiated the category of religious enthusiasm. The text encroaches on the question of how God is present and active in the world, as well as on the ­character of religious belief. All three women story-tellers testify to how 9 10 11

Wei 54; Chr 79. Wei 61; Chr 86. Wei 60; Chr 85.

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their faith emerged and their religious insight grew in the context of human encounters. And issuing from the mouths of Schleiermacher’s male speakers come a series of statements confirming that the Christian faith is socially mediated and effective only in communion. Eduard exclaims for instance that it is: only when a person sees humanity as a living community of individuals, cultivates humanity as a community, bears its spirit and consciousness in his life, and within that community both loses his isolated existence [abgesonderte Dasein] and finds it again in a new way—only then does a person have the higher life and peace of God within himself.12 A little later in the same speech, Eduard confirms that it is the specific communion of the Christian church that forms the locus for this personal transformation, the new life that is promised to the individual believer. With this in mind, a possible mode of approach for us would be to take Eduard’s statement, sample it alongside other such statements from the mouths of other voices in the dialogue and use these to try and construct an overall picture of Schleiermacher’s theological vision in this period. And yet, what I venture here is that reading the text in this way is not the best or most theologically fruitful way to proceed. For behind such a systematic approach is the assumption that contained in the raw content of Eduard’s speech—or Leonhardt’s speech, for that matter—are the boiled down views of our author Schleiermacher. Commentators have naturally tended to sample the text in this way, and paradigmatically Karl Barth, who, treating the dialogue alongside a collection of Schleiermacher’s sermons about Christmas, and making no special study of its distinctive form against these homiletical texts, analyses the piece as if Schleiermacher’s perspective was crystallised into the words of all of the male speech-makers:13 Schleiermacher is speaking in Leonhardt, Barth decides, “to the extent that, as most moderate theologians often like to do, he sometimes feels and acts like a non-theologian, like a cultured worldling, like a spectator of Christianity from the outside”.14 Furthermore however, Barth states his conviction that “Ernst, too, is Schleiermacher, and indeed, the outwardly most attractive Schleiermacher, the representative of the most

12 13 14

Wei 58; Chr 83. dts 117; tts 62: “alle drei Redner in bestimmten Sinn der Meinung Schleiermachers vertreten”. dts 118; tts 62.

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easily understood form of his christology.15 This is followed, finally, by Barth’s supposition that in Eduard too, we see that “here again, Schleiermacher is the speaker”16—completing a procedure whereby he treats the words of each individual character as if they were words from a sermon that Schleiermacher himself preached.17 In Chapter eight, I shall analyse Barth’s treatment of this text in more detail. Yet the case for challenging the governing assumptions of Barth’s reading is something that it is possible to prepare now, by attending to the form of Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue, and considering whether Schleiermacher has constructed something that demands to be read more carefully than as if it were a list of discretely-analysable authorial assertions. 2

A Platonic Scheme?

I noted above that by the time he wrote his Christmas Dialogue, ­Schleiermacher had already completed three volumes of his vast Plato translation project. This point is significant not because his little book about Christmas is an attempt to follow Plato, nor because Schleiermacher aimed to produce a philosophical tract or Socratic dialogue.18 He rebuffs such ideas in his correspondence19 where he also admits that in parts and from certain angles the book is more akin to a novella.20 Nevertheless, the ancient philosopher had a profound influence on the German theologian,21 and it is worth referring to two points 15 16 17 18

19

20

21

dts 121; tts 65. dts 126; tts 67. By contrast, Schleiermacher’s translator Terrence Tice casts Josef, the enigmatic visitor at the end of the dialogue, as the character who “is all Schleiermacher”. See Chr 20. Janet Soskice describes the Christmas Dialogue is an inversion of a Platonic text—“a Phaedo inside out”, since it includes women and personal encounter as central features. See Janet Martin Soskice, “The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us: Incarnation, Speech and Sociality in Schleiermacher and Augustine”, Incarnation: textes réunis par Marco M. Olivetti (Cedam: Padova, 1999), 571. See Schleiermacher’s letter to Henriette Herz, dated 14th March 1806: “What Johannes Müller said about the [Christmas Dialogue] gives me no pleasure… A comparison with Plato is verily too great an honour for that little book, that he must reserve until he sees my philosophical dialogues”. Life 2, 53. Influential commentators David Friedrich Strauss and Wilhelm Dilthey refer to the text as a “dialogic” novella. See Strauss, Charakteristiken und Kritiken: Eine Sammlung zerstreuter Aufsätze aus den Gebieten der Theologie, Anthropologie und Aesthetik, (Leipzig: Wigand, 1839), 5, 39; Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers ii, 152: “So wandelt sich das historische Drama des platonischen Dialogs hier zur Novelle”. In September 1802, Schleiermacher wrote to Eleonore Grunow : “Plato is undeniably the writer whom of all others I know best, and with whom I have almost grown into one [zusammengewachsen]”. see kga i.12, 113; Life 1, 317.

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that Schleiermacher makes in his general introduction to Plato’s Dialogues (first published in 1804), for what they suggest about his appreciation of literary form. Firstly, Schleiermacher criticises those readers who expect to find Plato’s own views distilled in the voices of his characters.22 These readers make strange enquiries, Schleiermacher explains, “[as to] what person’s mouths ­Plato has brought forward his own opinion at least upon this or that subject”.23 And since they let their views be shaped by such assumptions, he claims, these readers under-appreciate the form of Plato’s work, with the result that they completely fail to comprehend him. Such enquiries suppose that Plato’s dialogistic form “is only a somewhat useless, and more confusing than illustrative embellishment of the perfectly common method [ganz gemeinen Art] of expressing thoughts”, Schleiermacher continues. They are thus only ever made by those who do not understand Plato at all.24 Secondly, a little further on in his introduction, Schleiermacher introduces the following point about the Dialogues: Form and subject [Inhalt] are inseparable, and no proposition [Satz] is to be rightly understood, except in its own place, and with the ­combinations and limitations [Verbindungen und Begrenzungen] that Plato has assigned to it.25 Schleiermacher’s prescription here that readers should attend to the p ­ articular way in which Plato couches each of his statements, theories, and ideas, is matched by his reading of Plato as a “Philosophical Artist”.26 By envisioning him as an artist, Schleiermacher underscored what he saw as the unity of

22 At this point in the text Schleiermacher does not specify which readers he has in mind. 23 Pla 32; IP 8. 24 Pla 32; IP 8. 25 Pla 38; IP 14. 26 See Pla 28, 36–37; IP 4, 13. Julia A. Lamm elaborates Schleiermacher’s treatment of Plato as a “Philosophical Artist” in her articles “Schleiermacher as Plato Scholar”, The Journal of Religion, 80, no. 2 (2000): 206–239; “Reading Plato’s Dialectics: Schleiermacher’s Insistence on Dialectics as Dialogical”, Zeitschrift für Neuere Theologiegeschichte / Journal for the History of Modern Theology 10, no. 1 (April 2003): 1–25; “The Art of Interpreting Plato”, in The Cambridge Companion to Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005): 91–108. Across these pieces, Lamm also provides an account of how Schleiermacher managed his translation project, the details of how his relationship with original co-collaborator Schlegel broke down, as well as an account of the core motifs in his “General Introduction” to the Platonic Dialogues.

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Plato’s work—a unity generated by the constancy of Plato’s vision, or Plato’s personal integrity as teacher and author. Indeed, this title of “artist” signals Schleiermacher’s rejection of the view held by his contemporary, the Kantian philosopher historian Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann (1761–1819). Tennemann argued that as a philosopher Plato must have been a system-builder, and that Plato’s Dialogues contain only fragments of this philosophical system—indirect signs and signals of it.27 Indeed, Tennemann’s approach to Plato meant that he sought to reconstruct the work of the great Greek philosopher: his method was to build a “comprehensive system of Platonic philosophy”28 which stood apart from the poetic yet nonetheless obfuscatory Dialogues.29 Against such a systematic approach, however, Schleiermacher’s reading of Plato stressed the importance of the Dialogues themselves. For Schleiermacher, these works were not simply artistic accessories or embellishments to the core, rational task of philosophy. Rather, when read so as to attend to the unity of their form and content, the Dialogues could be appreciated as a fitting medium through which Plato could practice and teach the art of reasoning and the love of wisdom. According to his view of Plato as artist, Schleiermacher read the Dialogues as if they were the coming together of a number of beautifully coordinated brushstrokes upon an artist’s canvas. And each of these strokes—each statement or query issued from the mouths of Plato’s characters—provides the context against which the next makes known its particular tone, texture, colour, nature.30 As opposed to seeking a first principle in Plato’s thought, then—a ­foundation upon which he might scaffold an entire system, Schleiermacher contends in his general introduction to Plato that “[e]very skilful and self-experienced person will certainly allow that true philosophising [das wahre Philosophieren] 27 28

W.G. Tennemann, System der Platonischen Philosophie i (Leipzig, 1792–95), 266. E.N. Tigerstedt, “The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato: An Outline and Some Observations”, Commentationes Humanarum Litterarum 52, Societas Scientiarum Fennica (Helsinki, 1974), 67. My understanding of Schleiermacher’s divergence from Tennemann is indebted to Tigerstedt’s analysis. For a comparison between Tennemann and Schleiermacher as regards the concept “system of philosophy”, also see Leo Cantana, The Historiographical Concept “System of Philosophy”: Its Origin, Nature, Influence and Legitmacy (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 195–209. 29 Tennemann, System der Platonischen Philosophie i, 139. 30 Although Lamm argues that the Christmas Dialogue is specifically “Platonic” in character, she explains that by this, she means “Platonic in a strictly Schleiermacherian sense”. The text’s “strongest parallels are not with any one of Plato’s dialogues”, she writes, “but rather with the entire corpus of Platonic dialogues, as Schleiermacher understood that”. Julia A. Lamm, “Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue as Platonic Dialogue”, The Journal of Religion 92, no. 3 (2012), 396.

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does not commence with any particular point, but with a breathing of the whole”.31 Moreover, Schleiermacher’s conviction about the philosopher’s artistry also extended to his vision of Plato as an expert pedagogue. He read him as a thinker who understood that the acquisition of knowledge and the pursuit of wisdom relies, in a human context, upon conversation—upon the reciprocal activity and passivity of shared, ever-growing insight. “The dialogistic form”, Schleiermacher wrote, “necessary as an imitation of that original and reciprocal communication, would be as indispensable and natural to [Plato’s] writings as to his oral instruction”.32 In Schleiermacher’s view, Plato was thus neither a  system-builder nor a philosopher of the fragment. His work represented an “utter deviation from the ordinary forms of philosophical communication” and for this reason demanded a special attention: an epistemic humility, as well as an openness to the idea that the philosophical task can never amount to an exhaustive inquiry or begin from a purified Archimedean point.33 It commences, as Friedrich Schlegel taught, in media res.34 In the face of a claim which was made not only by Tennemann but also by Hegel too, then,35—that it is now possible to understand Plato better than he understood himself—Schleiermacher stated that cultivating such a “feeling of satisfaction” would be somewhat premature. Indeed, “it may excite a smile”, Schleiermacher continues, “to observe how unplatonically one who entertains such a feeling comes to the investigation of Plato, who puts so high a value upon the consciousness of ignorance”.36 Taken together, these facets to Schleiermacher’s reading of Plato attest the significance of his decision to structure his own text as a conversation or ­dialogue. They suggest that Schleiermacher composed the Christmas Dialogue to be treated as a whole, and that it would thus be inapposite to dissect and analyse it as if it were a list of propositional statements.37 And indeed, it is 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Pla 87; IP 67. Pla 40–41; IP 17. Schleiermacher famously denied the existence of an “esoteric” Platonism, and asserted that scholars should limit their attention to Plato’s philosophy to an examination of the Dialogues. See Pla 34–38; IP 11–14. Pla 29; IP 5. Athenaeum Fragment 84. See Elizabeth Millàn-Zaibert, Friedrich Schlegel and the Emergence of Romantic Philosophy (New York: suny, 2007), Chapters 4 & 6. Tigerstedt, “The Decline and Fall of the Neoplatonic Interpretation of Plato: An Outline and Some Observations”, 69. Pla 29; IP 5. This point has already been stressed by Richard R. Niehbuhr, who reads the Christmas Dialogue as a dialogue in the Platonic tradition. Establishing his hermeneutic, Niehbuhr asserts that “The dialogue is not a collection of discrete views; it is a living whole. It is a reproduction of thought in motion. The dialogue as a dramatic form shows thinking as self-activity in the presence of others, and the purpose of its employment by an author Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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a function of the little book precisely as a “dialogistic” whole, that it enables Schleiermacher to show how the religious life is placed, historically bound, and mediated through language.38 Furthermore, these comments on Plato also show that Schleiermacher himself was himself acutely aware of the importance of literary form in process of meaning-making. In line with the approach that I have taken throughout this study, then, I suggest that this awareness must be considered relevant when interpreting his own work, especially where he himself is making use of unusual forms and styles. 3

Authorial Passivity

I have referred to the 17th-century philosopher Anthony Ashley-Cooper, the third Earl of Shaftesbury, on two occasions already in this book. He featured in my second chapter because of the influence he had on Eberhard, ­Schleiermacher’s mentor at Halle, and was included in my fifth chapter for his impact on Herder’s work and his contribution to Bildungstheorie. Arguably the most influential British philosopher in Europe during Schleiermacher’s career, I think it is worth involving him in discussion for a third time because of his insights concerning the nature of dialogue. In his short piece Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author, Shaftesbury proposes the following: In dialogue, the author is annihilated, and the reader, being no way ­applied to, stands for nobody. The self-interested parties both vanish at once. The scene presents itself as by chance, and undesigned. You are not only left to judge coolly and with indifference of the sense delivered, but also of the character, genius, elocution and manner of the persons who deliver it.39

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is to reenact the original thought processes by which a discovery or conviction was a achieved and to arouse in the reader s similar activity”. (Niehbuhr, Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, 67). In 1822, in his lectures on Dialectic, Schleiermacher recapitulated the point that human particularity cannot be represented through analytic propositional statements. He wrote: “A personality can never be reproduced by a definition, but, as in a novel or a drama, only by the image, which is the better the more all the parts in it cohere”. Dialektik 1822, 380. English translation in Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, trans. Andrew Bowie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 279. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author”, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999), 90.

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Of first note here is Shaftesbury’s point that a dialogue’s scenes present t­hemselves “as by chance, and undesigned”.40 For significantly, and in line with this view, readers of Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue have no plot to chase. There is no material crisis or dilemma for Schleiermacher’s characters to resolve, and Schleiermacher does not formally divide the piece into sections or use narrative cues and comments in order to introduce the different figures and players in the story.41 The piece also doesn’t have a linear progression so much as it resembles a web, spreading outwards and gaining a new thread as each new character enters the action unannounced, before fleshing out their identity through their behaviour and their speech. Shaftesbury’s primary suggestion here, however, is that a dialogue owes its distinctive nature to the author’s decision to relinquish authority over her material. Unlike a sermon, proclamation, or dogmatic tract, he describes the dialogue as a form that is not self-enclosed, or performed as a water-tight, c­ompleted piece. Rather, a dialogue is open-ended, and allows the reader to participate in the construction of its meaning. Since Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue is caught some way between a dialogue and a novella, and thus retains some elements of authorial authority and design, it would not be accurate to describe it using Shaftesbury’s language of authorial “annihilation”. Nevertheless, the latter’s comments about the self-negating dialogician remain useful, and not least because of Schleiermacher’s own reflections on the matter. In a letter to his friend Ehrenfried von Willich in November 1805, shortly before he composed the work, Schleiermacher wrote: I feel distinctly that in myself I am nothing now; but I am the organ ­[Organ] of so much that is beautiful and holy—a focus in which all the joys and all the sorrows of my beloved friends are concentrated; and that is why I honour [achten] myself, and why I live.42 Moreover, in the summer of 1806—just a few months after the book had been published throughout Germany—Schleiermacher repeated this image of ­himself as a passive conduit for a set of grander forces. In a message to his friend Charlotte, he wrote:

40 41 42

Shaftesbury, “Soliloquy, or Advice to an Author”, 90. The effect is not the same in Tice’s English edition of the text, since he has added a list of dramatis personae, and divided up the dialogue into a series of named parts. Letter to E. von Willich, Nov. 1805, kga v.8, 376; Life 2, 42.

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my art can do no better than weave together what I have seen revealed in noble souls, and this tale has touched many persons in a peculiar manner. It is, therefore, not a gift that I have offered you, but one which you have bestowed upon me, and which, having confidence in you, I have accepted from you.43 In both cases, Schleiermacher describes himself in dramatic language as a ­predominantly passive figure and claims that his task has merely been to weave together in a secondary account material that he has received as a gift from his peers. As he thus defines his Christmas Dialogue as a descriptive enterprise, we are cautioned from assuming that the piece carries a specific didactic function, or a moral message of Schleiermacher’s own design. It is not merely in his correspondence that Schleiermacher indicates his decision to eschew authorial authority. For in the dialogue itself we also find no single dominant voice. No one character is identified as the protagonist or portrayed as possessing that truth which others themselves should hope to ­attain. Each person in the text has differing aspirations, attributes, and ideas, and some plainly disagree with one another. As Dawn de Vries and Julia Lamm have pointed out, it is in fact the particularity of Schleiermacher’s characters, alongside the open-endedness of the piece, that allows for a significant sense of irony to accompany the traditional gender roles at play throughout the text.44 Overall, the women seem to have their place—decorating the house, entertaining the party with music, caring for the children—and the men have theirs—money-making, decision-making, speech-making. Yet a number of wry asides, and moments like little Sophie’s point-blank refusal to take up sewing, work to expose these traditional categories and to open them up for discussion and critique. A further assumption that the Christmas Dialogue disrupts is that the ­capacity for religious insight possessed by an aufgeklärt and gebildet adult is greater than that of a young child.45 This does not signal that Schleiermacher 43 44

Life 2, 57. See Dawn de Vries, “Schleiermacher’s ‘Christmas Eve Dialogue’: Bourgeois Ideology or Feminist Theology?”, The Journal of Religion 69, no. 2 (1989), 175: “[in the dialogue], traditional role models for men and women are held up as objects of discussion and irony… gender definitions are not, as they often masquerade to be, eternally given absolutes”. See also Lamm, “Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue as Platonic Dialogue”, The Journal of Religion 92, no. 3 (2012): 396: “to extract the men’s speeches from the rest of the Christmas Dialogue is to strip them of their deeper meaning and rich irony”. 45 See kga i.13/1, §3 (27–28); CF §3.4 (13–16), on the relationship between piety and ­knowledge, and Schleiermacher’s disavowal of the idea that “the most perfect master of Christian Dogmatics must also be the most pious Christian”.

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understood religious belief to be an emotional and private affair, which requires no cultivation, and is measurable according to the strength and purity of one’s feelings. Rather, the significance of the contrast between adult and child in this case, is that that the reader—in line with the view that Schleiermacher would proceed to state in his Christian Faith, about the testing and development of faith over the course of time46—expects the former, with age, to be a wiser and more capable Christian. The most obvious instance of a challenge to this expectation in the text is the interaction that Schleiermacher portrays between Sophie and the rationalist lawyer, Leonhardt. Indeed, evoking the traditional Christian teaching about the surprising and unpredictable nature of divine Wisdom incarnate (1 Corinthians 1:27), Leonhardt’s stern enquiries about the nature of Sophie’s faith appear both inappropriate and absurd to the reader. And at the climax of this parodic legal cross-examination is the complaint Sophie addresses to her mother: “please help! He is questioning me in such a strange way”.47 At the close of the text, Schleiermacher’s character Josef draws attention to a connected set of societal expectations, as he punctures what is portrayed as a civilised and typically masculine approach to celebrating Christmas. As I mentioned above, Josef arrives late in the evening, and just in time to chide the men of the party for their “rigid”, “tedious”, and “cold” speeches on Christmas to the group. “Your evil principle [schlechtes Prinzip] is among you again”, he urges in jocular fashion: “this Leonhardt, this contriving, reflective, dialectical super-intellectual [überverständig] man”. To Josef, it almost seems “folly” [töricht], that the evening should have proceeded the way it has. “Just think what lovely music [the women] could have sung for you”, he presses, “in which all the piety of your discourse could have dwelt far more profoundly”.48 Aside from Josef’s explicit denunciation of the approach the men take, however, the very structure and content of the text as a whole is such that these speeches appear anomalous and awkward. Protracted linear arguments made by a ­single voice, they sit in contrast to the dialogic and reciprocal offerings that the women and children provided earlier in the evening, first through the giving

46 See kga i.13/1, §4 (40); CF §4.4 (24–27), which we cited in Chapter one: “That which is given to human beings, along with the absolute dependence inherent in all finite being no less then in oneself, is also the immediate self-consciousness [unmittelbare Selbstbewußtsein] of that absolute dependence, arising to the point of G ­ od-consciousness. Now, in whatever measure this combined sense really arises during the temporal course of one’s personal existence, we ascribe piety to that individual to the same degree”. 47 Wei 28; Chr 52. 48 Wei 60–61; Chr 85.

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of gifts and then through the telling of Christmas Eve stories. The women’s tales are cloaked by self-effacing language, met with improvised musical accompaniment, and signal the attentiveness and passivity of the storytellers to the perceived work of God around them. In comparison, the men’s speeches are formal and intellectual in character. They are the work of model-making, or active and individualistic theorising. Ernst, Eduard and Leonhardt therefore seem less able than their companions—the women, Sophie, and Josef—to appreciate the role that listening and responsiveness have to play in the pursuit of wisdom and knowledge. As they offer their reflections on the nature of Christmas and the role of the Incarnation, these men fail in significant ways to perform according to their position as but one single voice in a larger group. Since it juxtaposes childlike faith with adult rationality, before ­counterposing “feminine” passivity and affectivity with “masculine” argumentation, Schleier­ macher’s dialogue generates space for the reader to critique and to challenge typical or dominant modes of sharing and discussing the nature of Christian faith in public. At the same time however, it brings to light the possibility that humility, modesty about one’s own point of view, and the realisation that one’s own thoughts are dependent upon external ideas are all fruitful principles for the pursuit of knowledge and for attempting discourse. And these are principles too, of course, that align with those insights about human particularity, dependence, and sociality that this book as a whole has sought to draw out of Schleiermacher’s ethical writings. 4

A Review from Kierkegaard

No less a commentator than Søren Kierkegaard has ventured a point about Schleiermacher’s use of the dialogue form which dovetails with the above ­discussion. In Kierkegaard’s journals, we find remarks not on Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue, but on a review that the latter wrote in 1800 of Friedrich Schlegel’s controversial book, Lucinde, which was itself a dialogic work, comprising letters, poetry and fantasies exchanged between lovers. In place of a conventional academic review,49 Schleiermacher’s evaluative piece mirrored the design of Lucinde as he discussed the text through an epistolary 49

In 1801, in a letter to a colleague who had criticised him for his friendship with ­Schlegel, Schleiermacher wrote the following: “Schlegel wrote Lucinde, a book one could not thoroughly defend without writing another book, and which I would not wish to defend entirely, since it contains, alongside much that is praiseworthy and beautiful, some things that I cannot condone”. See Blackwell, “The Antagonistic Correspondence of 1801”, 120; kga v. 5, 132–133.

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dialogue—a series of letters that were supposedly composed and passed among a group of friends. In response, the Danish philosopher has this to say about Schleiermacher’s efforts: [Schleiermacher] constructs a host of personalities out of the book ­itself and through them illuminates the work and also illuminates their individuality, so that instead of being faced by the reviewer with various points of view, we get many personalities who represent these various points of view. But they are complete beings, so that it is possible to get a glance into the individuality of the single individual and through numerous merely relatively true judgments to draw up our own final judgment. Thus it is a true masterpiece.50 The praise Kierkegaard has for Schleiermacher’s use of dialogue turns upon the open-endedness of this form, as well as the numerous levels of insight that he believes it enables. Kierkegaard states that Schleiermacher’s review offers a plurality of differing perspectives, which rather than speaking past each ­other are actually shaped by each other through discussion. This being the case, the implication is that there lies a more fundamental unity between dialogue partners—a unity which facilitates the emergence and expression of such differences.51 Kierkegaard argues that since Schleiermacher presents the reader with a number of “complete beings” or particular individuals, each of whom offers a differently nuanced opinion on the piece, he subverts the idea that there is a single, objective, “right answer” to be learned. This does not mean, 50 51

Søren Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, Vol 4, S-Z, trans. and ed. ­ oward V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, H 1975), 13. See Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 1990). Bowie assesses some of Schleiermacher’s later manuscripts on Dialectic and Hermeneutics, and argues that in these texts, it is ­Schleiermacher’s assertion of a fundamental unity, throughout difference, which enables him to overcome some of the issues and encountered by post-modernist theorists of difference, who deny the priority of Being before thought and language. See 150–151: “If there is nothing but conflict, then there are no conflicts because we would have no criterion for identifying them. Schleiermacher sees this as an issue of praxis: ‘if we take this relation of thought to Being away: then there is no conflict, but as long as thought only remains purely in itself, there is only difference’ [Dialektik 1833, 134]… An argument is not an argument if a priori it cannot be settled. Schleiermacher enables one to take account of the fears of the thinkers of difference. He can accept the fact that any conceptual agreement may be an imposition upon something which inherently resists identification. He does this, though, without involving himself in the absurd consequences that result from the farewell to agreement and identity on any level”.

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however, that Schleiermacher reduces each individual view to an equally valid but purely “subjective” opinion. Instead, each voice in Schleiermacher’s review contributes to the conversation about Lucinde, and each proffers a judgment about the text which is relatively true, to the extent that it speaks of what is Absolute in its own, irreducibly particular way. As Schleiermacher puts these differing voices into conversation with each other, Kierkegaard, as a reader, professes to be able to come to his own judgment about Schlegel’s work.52 Kierkegaard thus commends Schleiermacher for reviewing Lucinde through a literary form which makes room for a plurality of interpretations, but can also attend to the social dimension of human knowledge.53 In order to relate the Danish philosopher’s comments to the present discussion of the Christmas Dialogue, however, it must be borne in mind that there is a substantial ­difference between the two texts. For in contrast to the content of his review of Lucinde, the characters in Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue do not assemble around a finite point of shared interest, whether this be a book, an academic theme, or a social gathering. Instead, these characters are shown to participate together in an event, and one which they believe has cosmic significance. Since it remembers and re-presents the birth of the Redeemer, the divine saviour of humanity, the Christmas festival is—as Schleiermacher’s character Ernst puts it—“the announcement [die Verkündigung] of new life for the world”.54 Since it signifies a gratuitous abundance of love that frustrates any human measure, Christmas elicits hope and joy. It relativises present material and social concerns, and functions as a point of unity for the entire universe that features in the text. To match what Shaftesbury and then Kierkegaard appreciated about the dialogue form, then—the way it can displace authorial authority, and thus subvert the notion that a text has a single, linear meaning— one of Schleiermacher’s achievements in his dialogue about Christmas is that he brought these same effects to his treatment of this special festival. 52 53

54

For further notes that Kierkegaard made on Schleiermacher, see also Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 59; 118; 120. I am not the first to point out Kierkegaard’s respect for Schleiermacher’s use of the ­dialogue form. Richard Crouter studies Kierkegaard’s comments about The Confidential Letters Concerning Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde in his chapter “Schleiermacher’s not so hidden debt to Kierkegaard”, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Here, Crouter makes the case that Schleiermacher’s attention to Plato and Socrates, as well as his investment in Romantic literary theory, meant that he had made a direct contribution to Kierkegaard’s own discovery of “the power and suggestiveness of indirect communication”. Wei 12; Chr 35.

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The idea that the meaning of Christmas is reduced or obscured when it is narrated merely as a social and historical event is something that Schleiermacher’s character Ernst explores in his speech at the close of the dialogue. Here, Ernst criticises what he depicts as a growing custom of celebrating Christmas on New Year’s Day.55 He explains that the problem with this modern practice is that it eclipses the nature of Christmas Eve as heralding the cleavage “between time and eternity, appearance and being”. For at the turn of the calendar year, we do not witness a qualitative change or shift in the nature of existence. “New Year’s is devoted to the renewal of what is only transitory”, Ernst explains, thereby defining the day merely as another notch on what Walter Benjamin would later describe as the flat, homogenous march of empirical space-time.56 In contrast, Ernst and his companions experience Christmas as a chance to participate together in “the uniquely universal festival of joy” [allgemeines Freudenfest].57 This universality is not a general condition owed to human measurement or definition, however—Christmas is “universal” because it indicates the redemption and renewal of creation as a whole, by the God who creates and sustains it. Christ’s birth signals the in-breaking into historical, mundane, human experience of that which is transformative and qualitatively different. Moreover, by including a number of different characters in the text in order to dramatise the festival’s cumulative meaning and its effects, Schleiermacher also suggests that the inward and spiritual significance that Christmas has for a believer is one that is embedded in and drawn out by their involvement in such embodied and interactive celebrations. The meaning of Christmas as a celebration of the Saviour’s birth cannot be fully attained or narrated by any one idea or individual, even in the recesses of their own heart. Christmas is a communal festival with reciprocity and exchange at its core. Schleiermacher’s character Eduard communicates this point early in the text, when he ­underscores that familiar idea among Christians that “the great gift in which we all rejoice together” [das große Geschenk, dessen wir uns alle gleichmäßig erfreuen] is what precedes, allows, and is reflected in the lesser gifts that are exchanged as part of the Christmas festival.58 More significantly however, this same point is dramatised for us at the close of the dialogue’s first scene, where we are delivered a tableau involving the whole household, which likewise 55 56 57 58

Schleiermacher also mentions this custom in the opening section of his Soliloquies (1800). Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1968), 253–264. Wei 54–55; Chr 78–79. Wei 22; Chr 45.

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evokes the motif of an eternal and abundant gift mediated and imprinted in worldly relationships. Indeed, having listened to Sophie and a few of the adults sing a selection of hymns, the rest of the group are moved to enjoy “a few silent moments in which they all knew that the heart of each person was turned in love towards the rest, and toward something higher still”.59 While attending to Schleiermacher’s use of the dialogue form, we have seen how this form is not incidental to his treatment of the topic at hand. Rather, when taken together with the explicit content of his text, this form attests the view that we have attributed to Schleiermacher throughout the present study, namely that he understands human individuals to be irreducibly particular agents without this particularity being due to any solipsistic achievement— without it being due, that is, to any quality that is wholly original, or wholly self-originating. Of course, with the example of little Sophie in the text, whose childlike joy is later echoed in the figure of Josef, Schleiermacher offers us a picture of human character whereby the stress is upon potentiality. We discern a certain lightness, a certain detachment, in the way that Sophie navigates the proceedings. Her joy and her spontaneity frustrate Leonhardt, our rationalist, while they also signal an emerging personality that challenges fixed ­expectations or standards. And yet by reflecting on Sophie’s place within the narrative as a whole, we also find that her individual brilliance is something that depends nevertheless upon her social context, including the quality and state of her relationships. The dialogic form of the text helps to generate the sense that human character develops in community and is drawn out through interaction. Difference, we are told here, emerges only against the background of a greater whole. 59

Wei 11; Chr 34.

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Seeking the Infinite in the Midst of the Finite I speak to you as a human being about the holy mysteries of humanity ­according to my view [nach meiner Ansicht]; about which was in me when, still with youthful enthusiasm [jugendlicher Schwärmerei], I sought the unknown; about that which has been the innermost mainspring of my existence [die innerste Triebfeder meines Daseins] ever since I have thought and been alive and which shall eternally remain for me the highest …1

∵ 1

Schleiermacher’s Speeches On Religion

We have thus started to see how Schleiermacher maintains his attention to the social and situated nature of human existence, even within his depiction of the religious life. Having begun to gain this perspective, then, I would like to turn back to a text of Schleiermacher’s which far surpasses the Christmas Dialogue in terms of its renown and impact, and has been appraised, analysed, taught, and critiqued for over 200 years,2 namely his 1799 work On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. In this chapter, and by discussing this text, we shall continue to consider how Schleiermacher deals with human difference in his theology. In his 1929 introduction to a reprint of the text’s first edition, Rudolph Otto described Schleiermacher’s achievements in the following way: one is time and again enthralled by his original and daring attempt to lead an age weary with and alien to religion back to its very mainsprings; 1 kga i.2, 190–191. 2 Richard Crouter offers an overview in “On Religion as a Religious Classic: Hermeneutical Musings after Two Hundred Years”, Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and ­Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 248–270. See also Ulrich Barth and Claus-Dieter Osthövener, eds., 200 Jahre “Reden über die Religion”, Acten des 1. Internationaler Kongresses der Schleiermacher Gessellschaft, Halle, 14.-17. März 1999 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_015 Ruth Jackson

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and to re-weave religion, threatened with oblivion, into the ­incomparably rich fabric of the burgeoning intellectual life of modern times.3 And indeed, what we find in the opening lines of Schleiermacher’s work is the admission that now, “the life of cultivated persons [gebildeten Menschen] is ­removed from everything that would in the least way resemble religion”.4 It is in this context and under the impression of such urgency that the text ­comprises a series of five rhetorically powerful and personal addresses, in which Schleiermacher expounds the essence of religion “according to his view”, as we can see in the epigraph I have given this chapter. Schleiermacher will not only give a defence of “religion” on these terms—his opening speech being an Apologie—but will also present “religion” to his audience as a mode of life that they themselves should honour and take up. He does not profess to be offering these c­ ultivated persons anything new with his vision here, but rather— this is the whole point—he protests that he is trying to get at ­something which has ever been the same in him, which is the “innermost mainspring” of his existence, and which might be matched, in essence, in every single human being. In Schleiermacher’s apologetic opening, we find a series of lines which in prophetic and dramatic tones include a capsule summary of the whole book. Here, he plainly sets up the highest telos of his own Bildung as a religious one, urges that he is fulfilled and made who he is by his faith, and suggests that since this faith is of its very essence social, it includes within it a desire or n ­ atural tendency to communicate it to others: That I speak does not originate from a rational decision or from hope or fear… it is the inner, irresistible necessity of my nature; it is a divine calling [ein göttlicher Beruf]; it is that which determines my place in the universe and makes me the being I am.5 In contrast to his Christmas Dialogue however, we note that On Religion is ­famously not a Christian document in the traditional sense. Schleiermacher is not addressing fellow Prussian Christians with this work, he does not seek to speak “for” or on behalf of the church, and he does not therefore frame his 3 Rudolf Otto, Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1926). Translated by Salvator Attenasio, in Friedrich ­Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1958), vii. 4 kga i.3, 189; OR 3. 5 kga i.2, 191.

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discourse with the specific doctrines and language belonging to the tradition. He begins by confessing his office as priest, but lays this down, he says, so that his audience might be aware of his biases—“I am aware that I fully deny my profession [Stand] in all that I have to say to you; why should I not, therefore, acknowledge it like any other contingency?”.6 In speech four there also follows a critique of the bond between church and state, and Schleiermacher ­positions himself rhetorically outside of the church, trying to anticipate the sentiments of its critics. To quote Richard Crouter, translator of the first edition of Schleiermacher’s text into English, Schleiermacher demonstrates “what it is to believe”, simply “by showing how religious life arises from the self’s relationship to the universe”.7 Indeed, Schleiermacher’s “unchristian” approach here was such that the Prussian censor responsible for approving On Religion for p ­ ublication8—a conservative Reformed cleric named F.S.G. Sack—wrote to Schleiermacher in order to complain that the latter had presented a “desolate” and “pernicious” view of religion. Schleiermacher’s irreverent and open approach, Sack argued, diluted religion and deprived it of a personal God.9 If we look closely, however, this much does not render the book any less than an apology for Christianity in particular.10 Since Schleiermacher wishes to communicate his “own view” to his readers, we find him treading a very particular path to his very specific audience—one which is strewn with ­specific biases, including denominational and national prejudices.11 We also find him framing his discourse in ways which privilege a Protestant Christian account of faith or personal belief, carrying its categories, assumptions and emphases, and drawing on Christian scriptures. It becomes clear to the reader that Schleiermacher’s vision of “religion”, so given in this text, is not one that can stand for all. And this is something that Schleiermacher will 6 7 8

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kga i.2, 190 : OR 4. Crouter, “Introduction” to OR, xxix. In Schleiermacher’s day, religious material published in Prussia was subject to censorship. Authors were assessed against the 1788 Edict of Religion—a “campaign against rationalism in religion”. See Albert L. Blackwell, “The Antagonistic Correspondence of 1801”, 102–103, and Klaus Epstein, The Genesis of German Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 142–143. Albert L. Blackwell, “The Antagonistic Correspondence of 1801”, 113. “When Schleiermacher, in his Reden über die Religion, preached the gospel of personal, immediate and emotional religion, he was only reasserting the Pietistic ideal, and continuing, in its religious phase, an individualistic movement of long duration”. Walter Silz, Early German Romanticism: Its Founders and Heinrich von Kleist (Cambridge, MA: ­Harvard University Press, 1929). As Richard Crouter has noted, Schleiermacher refers in his opening pages to certain ­religious figures who cling to the “caved-in walls of their Jewish Zion and its Gothic pillars”. This is an allusion to the dominant view in Schleiermacher’s age that Judaism and Roman Catholicism were unreasonably legalistic. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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later confirm: there is no such thing as a “general” religion. Alongside biases of theological language and epistemology however, yet entangled with these too, we also see S­ chleiermacher perpetuating systemically operative social and ­political p ­ rejudices—prejudices carried by his elite social context which are also twinned with those imperialist assumptions that we saw earlier in his ethical work. Indeed, in his final speech, before commending his own (Protestant) Christian ­tradition and expounding it at length, he chooses not to dwell on “the crude and undeveloped religions of distant peoples”—­ religions he conceives as “exotic and strange” [ausländisch und fremd], and about which we hear no more in the work.12 He also presents Judaism in a disparaging light here, against the noticeably Christian yardstick that he has created. The religion of Judaism has an eternal necessity, Schleiermacher urges—its ­significance is not tied to history, and it is not to be regarded as “somehow the forerunner of Christianity”. And yet, Schleiermacher proceeds here to mirror a depiction of Judaism operating within certain Enlightenment Jewish circles, that it was no longer a living tradition, by claiming it to be a “long dead” r­eligion—an “undecaying mummy”.13 I shall return ­presently to ­Schleiermacher’s fifth speech, and also to his depiction of the relation ­between Judaism and Christianity. For the present study, however, a significant feature of On Religion is that here too, and consistent with his position in the Soliloquies, Schleiermacher teaches that individual humans find themselves and their purpose only in community. Even as he seeks to articulate the nature of the religious life, that is—a life that he understands to be found in intuition and feeling, and ­characterised by a search for that which cannot be explored or grasped by the ­human ­intellect—Schleiermacher continues to stress the situated nature of human existence, and the social nature of human knowledge. Indeed, in his view, ­religion can neither be the same for everyone (a single, pure “natural” religion) nor will it be different for everyone (in the sense of an isolated and ­subjectivist i­mpression of the universe). Rather, by the end of the text he will stress continually in a stream of ways how religion is inherently social and historical, how it entails the united and situated response of a particular ­community to the ­self-­revelation of the Infinite. In order to draw this point out, it is worthwhile turning our focus to the ­specific audience that Schleiermacher chooses to address with his speeches— the so-called “cultured despisers” of religion that he refers to in his title. Schleiermacher does not name his intended readership in terms any more s­ pecific 12 13

kga i.2, 314; OR 113. kga i.2, 314–315; OR 114. See Joseph W. Pickle, “Schleiermacher on Judaism”, Journal of Religion 60 (April 1980): 115–137. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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than this, yet it is generally understood that this group—these critics of ­religion—included his Romantic friends and intellectual sparring partners.14 In Chapter one of the present study, I noted that the Romantics had a s­ keptical attitude ­ towards historical religious traditions and particularly ­ towards ­Protestant Christianity. Later, in Part 2, I then explored how the ­commitment these Romantics thinkers had to Bildung meant that they ­prioritised individual human freedom and vitality over tired institutional c­ ustoms and structures. If we ­consolidate these points at this stage, then we are in a position to u ­ nderstand that there was thus an inevitable disjunct between S­ chleiermacher’s approach to religion and the one taken by Schlegel, Novalis, and their wider literary set. The Romantics were suspicious of Schleiermacher’s vocation as a minister in the established Prussian Reformed Church and his adherence to Protestant teachings and practices.15 We have already seen that the common ground Schleiermacher had with the Romantics in 1799 was the vision they shared about worldly existence. All were agreed that—as Schleiermacher puts it—“the whole corporeal world … [is] an eternally continuous play of opposing forces”.16 And yet in their commitment to Bildung, all also had a vision of an organically-arranged and whole ­humanity, existing in true and loving society—der freie Bund—with one another. The point at which Schleiermacher parted company from his friends, then, is that whereas he sought religion within and through the play of these polarities operating in finite existence, for Schlegel, Novalis, Hölderlin and their peers, religion meant rising beyond the push and pull of chaotic worldly life and seeking a holy unity above it.17 In other words (and as I noted back 14

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It was indeed these friends—and foremost Friedrich Schlegel—who had urged Schleiermacher to compose the text in the first place. On the occasion of Schleiermacher’s 29th birthday, Schlegel made the former promise that he would write “something original by the end of the year”. See Life 1, 163. (Letter from Schleiermacher to his sister Charlotte, 21st November 1797). See Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher: Leben, Werk, und Wirkung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 97–112, and Blackwell, Schleiermacher’s Early Philosophy of Life, 111–122. kga i.2, 191; OR 5. Bernard Reardon refers to On Religion as a “veritable manifesto” of Romanticism, not least in virtue of “its love of opposition for opposition’s sake”. Religion in the Age of Romanticism, 30. See also lectures 2 & 3 of Manfred Frank’s The Philosophical Foundations of German Romanticism, trans. Elizabeth Millàn-Zaibert (Albany: suny, 2004), 55–77. Key texts for the Romantic perspective on religion are Friedrich Schlegel’s Ideen (1800) and Novalis’s essay “Christenheit oder Europa”. (1799). Of this desire for a higher unity, Jack Forstman explains: “Novalis, and then Schlegel, caught sight of a vision that dissolves time, transporting the visionary to a plane above change and temporality. It was related to the Orphic myth, the ancient mysteries, Gnosticism, neo-Platonism, the medieval Cathari…. each [sets forth] a vision of reality as a cosmic process of separation from and return to the One. Salvation consists in the ultimate reunification with or of the One—a Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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in Chapter one) whereas Schleiermacher stressed the dependence of finite creatures and put his faith in Christ as the sole Mediator between finite and Infinite reality—the Son of God who eschewed Sovereignty, and came down into the world in order to save it—these poets and literary divines understood the creative individual herself to be a mediator for the Infinite. It is for this reason, namely the effort of distinguishing Schleiermacher’s religion from that of Schlegel, Novalis, and their wider literary set, that Ruth Richardson has already labelled Schleiermacher’s approach a “theology of finitude”—the phrase that has made it into the subtitle of this book.18 It is not least so he can endear himself to this specific audience of ­cultured critics and Frühromantiker then, that Schleiermacher begins his speeches with an apology for religion in purportedly general terms, and not for r­ eligion as it manifests itself in historical religious traditions. As I established in ­Chapter one and can reassert now with a fuller context: to speak of r­ eligion for ­Schleiermacher means referring to the birth of the religious life in human intuition. Indeed, in the original 1799 version of his second speech,19 he ­announced that the “highest and most universal formula for religion” is ­“intuition of the universe” [Anschauen des Universums]. Every single human is capable of such an intuition, he explains, and everything in religion must proceed from it.20 But to have it, a person must live in longing for it, and they must also will to submit to it. This is because intuiting the universe renders the self ­fundamentally passive. Indeed, such intuition, Schleiermacher explains, occurs because the Infinite affects, influences, and gives itself to the believer

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redintegratio in unum. This reintegration, of course, cannot be accomplished under the conditions of this world, time, space and matter. These conditions bring about separation and alienation; they lead to measurement, calculation, manipulation, misunderstanding, collision, mistreatment, and suffering. Thus only a dissolution of the conditions—that is, of this world—can bring about unification”. (Forstman, A Romantic Triangle: Schleiermacher and Early German Romanticism), 116. Richardson makes a passing reference to Schleiermacher’s “theology of finitude” in her article “The Berlin Circle of Contributors to ‘Athenaeum’: Friedrich Schlegel, Dorothea Veit, and Friedrich Schleiermacher”. It was this that inspired my own use of the term in my thesis title. Richardson explains that “Schleiermacher… understood himself to be a finite creature, representing but one unique angle of the universe’s abundance, living in a world governed by the laws of cause and effect. True, as he expressed in the ‘Reden’, from time to time he was grasped by the Infinite and felt compelled to communicate in writing his reflection upon those experiences. He, however, always was careful to maintain that the moment that the finite never became Infinite. Schleiermacher was to maintain a healthy respect for the majesty and the otherness of God throughout his life” (844). In later editions of the text, this terminology would shift. Rather than using the language of Anschauung, Schleiermacher spoke of Wahrnehmung—a perception, or (sensory) awareness. For analysis, see Dumbreck, Schleiermacher and Religious Feeling, 87. kga i.2, 213; OR 24. Ruth Jackson Ravenscroft - 978-90-04-39782-8 Downloaded from Brill.com 04/01/2024 12:22:19PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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before the believer can understand and conceptualise it. Humans cannot know or conceive of the Infinite directly, in other words, because intuition only secondarily involves the individual’s mind as a constitutive and active force.21 In the following quote—taken from a letter that he wrote in 1801, to his critic F.S.G Sack—­Schleiermacher extends this point. Here, he asserts that when an individual searches for the Infinite, they should refrain from defining the ­Infinite in advance through reason. For to do this, he suggests, would be to ­“distort” religious devotion, and to give in to a form of idolatry whereby the human ­creates their own divinity. He writes: [R]eligion does not depend upon whether or not in abstract thought a person attributes to the infinite, supersensual Cause of the world the predicate of personality… No religion evolves out of the concept of the personality of God; this concept is not the source of devotion; no one is conscious of the source of his own devotion in that concept; more likely, the concept distorts devotion.22 In sum, Schleiermacher confirms: “intuition proceeds from an influence of the intuited upon the one who intuits, from an original and independent action of the former, which is then grasped, apprehended, and conceived by the latter according to one’s own nature”.23 Religion is not a creation or fabrication of the finite human mind. Rather, it is an active response to that which is received passively, that which is intuited in the mode of dependence. Religion issues from the reality and recognition of one’s own finitude. It begins with and is continually fostered by the realisation that I cannot ground myself, that I ­cannot create myself. This portrait of religion’s origins in passive and pre-reflective intuition is one that Schleiermacher expects his audience to understand immediately. He respects them, he explains, for their indifference to “systems of t­ heology”, to “theories about the origin and end of the world”, and to “analyses of the 21 22

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kga i.2, 213–214; OR 24–25. Letter to F.S.G. Sack, 1801. Cited in Albert L. Blackwell, “The Antagonistic Correspondence of 1801”, 118. For a discussion of how Schleiermacher carefully avoids portraying religion as dependent on conceptual or rational activity, see also Reardon, Religion in the Age of ­Romanticism, 45: “[In Schleiermacher’s view], the substance of religion…is not to be equated with the concept of God as a ‘single being outside of the world and behind the world’—for that would be no more than an imaginative objectification of the divine— but our immediate consciousness of deity as he is found in ourselves and in the world”. kga i.2, 213–214; OR 24–25.

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nature of an incomprehensible Being where everything amounts to cold ­argumentation and nothing can be treated except in the tone of an ordinary didactic ­commentary [Schulftreite]”.24 Such indifference to rationalistic and ­systematising approaches to religion flows from their conviction that the ­Infinite transcends all human knowing and experience. And Schleiermacher thereby lauds his audience for understanding pace Kant and Fichte25 that ­intellectual individuality—the proclivity of the human mind to grasp and conceive the universe “according to its own nature”—does not necessitate the adoption of an intellectual foundationalism, whereby an individual assumes in her philosophical method that the mind is the basic constituting principle of reality.26 Indeed, in his opening two speeches, Schleiermacher describes at length how religion is not something built up atop speculative reasoning or empirical evidence. Religion, he asserts, does not amount to a code of ethics or morality, nor does it amount to a totalizing metaphysical system. For whereas both morals and metaphysics are marked by a hubristic and over-intellectual anthropocentricity, since they “see in the whole universe only humanity as the centre of all relatedness [als Mittelpunkt aller Beziehungen]”, religion—with its central admission that the human intellect cannot ground or understand itself—is by contrast inflected with epistemic humility, and an openness to the world of nature (the “non-human” world) as a site of divine action and revelation. Schleiermacher resists the idea that religion is a systematic means of mapping, ruling or managing human life. Rather, “religion wishes to see the Infinite, its imprint and its manifestation [Darstellung], in humanity no less than in other individual and finite forms”.27 24

kga i.2, 200; OR 13. In later editions of On Religion, Schleiermacher dims his criticism of didactic systematic reflection. 25 See kga i.2, 208–216; OR 20, 22–24, 26. 26 See Frederick Beiser, The Romantic Imperative, 108: “Schlegel’s Romanticism grew out of his critique of Fichte’s foundationalism… In a nutshell, Schlegel’s romanticism was the aesthetics of anti-foundationalism” Friedrich Schlegel conceives the beginning of his ­philosophy in the following, anti-Fichtean manner: “Our philosophy does not begin like the others with a first principle—where the first proposition is like the center or first ring of a comet—with the rest a long tail of mist—we depart from a small but living seed— our center lies in the middle”. (Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe. Vol 12, 328). Also relevant here is Schlegel’s oft-quoted line from Athenaeum Fragment 84, that “Viewed subjectively, philosophy, like epic poetry, always begins in in media res” (Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, 71). See also Elizabeth Millàn-Zaibert, “Forgetfulness and Foundationalism: Schlegel’s Critique of Fichte’s Idealism”, Fichte, German Idealism and German Romanticism, edited by Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Amsterdam and New York: NY, Rodopi, 2010), 327–342. 27 kga i.2, 211–212; OR 23.

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It is with all of this in mind that Schleiermacher flatters his readers, e­ xplaining that he esteems them to be the most qualified among his ­generation of intellectuals to be lovers of religion. His audience, he ventures, are not chained to things of the world. They are not preoccupied merely with transient issues and objects, and they do not think that the finite human self is limited to knowledge and experience simply and purely of the finite realm. The ­human is not, as the troubled playwright Heinrich von Kleist interpreted Kant’s ­philosophy, “­irrevocably cut off from knowledge of the eternal source of his ­being”, and thus “a prisoner of an opaque finitude, of absolute immanence”.28 Indeed, Schleiermacher treats the Romantics, avant-garde poets, critics, and literary d­ ivines that he is addressing as distinct among his peers for their ­ability to direct their attention heavenward, in order to seek that which is ­unconditioned and ­unseen. “I can call only you to me”, Schleiermacher explains in ­characteristically florid prose—“you who are capable of raising yourselves above the common standpoint of humanity, 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”.29 Schleiermacher therefore praises his intended audience for being at a point where they might understand true religion (as he sees it), and recognise its importance for human flourishing. And yet, his flattery here marks only the beginning of a longer procedure. His final aim is to convince his readers of his own position, namely that the religious life requires a person to accept and to bear their finitude. “You must abandon your vain and futile wish that there might be only one religion”,30 Schleiermacher commands his readers: there is no such thing as a single “pure” religion, one which might be rejoiced in beyond the world. Instead, to be religious means acknowledging the impossibility of transcending one’s earthly environment. It means accepting the idea that all human attempts to know and to seek the Infinite are mediated through the content of the mundane.31 At the end of his second speech, Schleiermacher confirms this with the following statement: 28 29 30 31

These lines of Kleist interpretation belong to Wessell, “The Antinomic Structure of F­ riedrich Schlegel’s ‘Romanticism’”, 653. kga i.2, 197; OR 11. Emphasis mine. kga i.2, 296; OR 97–98. In his 1811 lectures on “Dialectic” (philosophical method, epistemology and metaphysics), which he gave at the University of Berlin, Schleiermacher returned to this subject of the limits to human knowledge about God. See for instance Dialectic 31: “There is no such thing as an isolated perception of deity. Rather, we perceive the deity only in and with the collective system of perception. The deity is just as surely incomprehensible as the knowledge of it is the basis of all knowledge. Exactly the same is true also on the side of

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To be one with the Infinite in the midst of the finite and to be eternal in a moment, that is the immortality of religion.32 Schleiermacher’s point in his fifth and final speech is not merely, however, that human knowledge of the Infinite is always mediated. It moves beyond this ­because it also incorporates his conviction that religion is not purely interior or individualised, and that it would be wrong to assume that each religious person is consigned to their own private sphere of feelings and intuitions— their own isolated way of seeking the Infinite. Indeed, Schleiermacher tells his ­audience that if they wish to have more than a merely general and thus incomplete knowledge of religion, and if they wish to “understand it in its reality and its manifestations”,33 then they must attend to the world’s “positive” religions. By “positive” religions, Schleiermacher explains that he is referring to the world’s historical religious traditions or communities. Each one, he says, has its own determinate shape [eine bestimmte Form], doctrines, emphases, and particular rites and practices. These traditions, Schleiermacher proposes, are bodies within which religious individuals dwell. They are greater wholes which shape the course of a life lived in longing for union with the Infinite. ­Consistent with what I noted above about the Romantic suspicion of the established church in Prussia—a suspicion which Schleiermacher treats as if it extends to all “organised” religious communities—Schleiermacher thinks it is this part of his argument which his readers will find the most objectionable. The concern he believes his audience will have, is that the positive religions (as he calls them) inhibit individual flourishing. He anticipates that his ­Romantic contemporaries think such organised religions “bind all who confess them to the same form [Gestalt], withdraw [entziehen] from them the freedom to f­ollow their own nature, and constrain them in unnatural limits”.34 He worries that they will imagine them to constrict personal expression and to curtail the development of character. In response to this disquiet over religion’s effect on individual Bildung however, Schleiermacher argues that it is only within the positive religions that “individual development of the religious capacity is ­possible”. Religion doesn’t inhibit the individual—rather, it is religion which forms the

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feeling…our knowing concerning God is thus completed only with our perspective on the world. [Weltanschauung]”. kga i.2, 247; OR 54. In Oskar Walzel’s view, Schleiermacher’s injunction for believers to seek the Infinite in the midst of the finite is the “final and most sublime solution” that the German Romantics as a whole came up with for “finding one’s relation to life” or adjusting to life. See German Romanticism, 258. kga i.2, 295; OR 97–98. kga i.2, 297; OR 99.

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secret telos of all human creatures. And in a way which ­demonstrates his ­indebtedness to Herderian notions of Bildung, as we explored this in p ­ revious chapters, Schleiermacher continues: Just as no human being can come into existence as an individual ­without, ­simultaneously, through the same act, also coming into a world, into a ­definite order [bestimmte Ordnung] of things, and being placed among ­individual objects, so also a religious person cannot attain his i­ ndividuality without, through the same act, also dwelling in a determinate form of religion.35 A person will inevitably be “worldly” in their religion, then: this is Schleiermacher’s major premise at this point in the text. “Religious people”, he confirms, “are thoroughly historical” [religiöse Menschen sind durchaus historisch].36 Yet behind this conviction is his understanding that unless a person inhabits— l­iterally “lives in” [wohnen]—a particular tradition, then they will suffer from a lack of direction in their religious life. It is to this effect that in his fifth speech he offers a critique of “natural religion”—a deism whose principles are derived from rational enquiry, and tested through observation and argumentation.37 Such “natural religion” is meagre, Schleiermacher explains, because it seems to have “no pulse of its own, no unique vascular system, no unique circulation, and thus also no temperature of its own and no assimilative power for itself and no character”. The adherents of natural religion may claim that it enables “personal development and individualisation”, he continues—that it “accords its adherents more freedom to form themselves religiously according to their own inclination”.38 Yet in reality, Schleiermacher concludes, such freedom is merely “the freedom to remain unformed, the freedom from every compulsion to be, to see, and to feel something even remotely specific”.39 As Schleiermacher affirms the grounded and historical nature of the ­religious life then, he resists the notion that religions are essentially inward 35 36 37 38

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kga i.2, 308; OR 108. kga i.2, 313; OR 112. Cf. David Hume’s 1776 text Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. For a discussion of On Religion which relates this text specifically to Schleiermacher’s ­interest in Bildung, see Christiane Ehrhardt, Religion, Bildung und Erziehung bei Schleiermacher: Eine Analyse der Beziehungen und des Widerstreits zwischen den »Reden über die Religion« und den »Monologen«, 22–78. and Hans Ulrich Wintsch, Religiosität und Bildung: Der anthropologische und bildungsphilosophische Ansatz in Schleiermachers Reden über die Religion (Zürich: Juris Druck, 1967). kga i.2, 308; OR 108.

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in character. Indeed in the passage below, he also confirms that to think of religion merely as a “system” of feelings and intuitions is in fact to understand religion in sectarian terms. He writes: Whoever posits the character of a particular religion in a specific quantity of intuitions and feelings must necessarily assume an inner and objective connection that binds just these intuitions and feelings to one another and excludes all others; and this delusion is precisely the principle of building systems and sects that is so completely opposed to the spirit of religion. The whole they try to create [streben zu bilden] in this way would not be a whole such as we seek, whereby religion in all its parts attains a specific form, but it would be a violent excision out of the infinite, not a religion, but a sect, the most irreligious concept one can want to realise in the realm of religion.40 A religion does not amount, Schleiermacher argues, to a definite number of intuitions and feelings. A religion’s content is not, Schleiermacher says, systematically arranged, objectively held, and experienced universally and identically among the hearts and minds of its members. And such an idea of religion emerges, we gather, only when it is assumed that finite minds can “­create” religion— that they can build a system of their own in search of the I­ nfinite. Contrary to this idea, then, Schleiermacher explains that a positive religion is given its definite form by virtue of its having a “particular intuition of the universe” at its centre.41 “Every such formation of religion”, he writes, “where ­everything is seen and felt in relation to a central intuition, wherever and however it is formed, and whatever this preferred intuition may be, is a truly p ­ ositive religion”.42 To anticipate the Feuerbachian line of critique that I noted in the very introduction to this book, then: religion for Schleiermacher is thus not r­ educible to “content” generated and held inwardly by human minds. Having its font for believers in the act of intuition, religion is something shared, enacted, and practiced communally by individuals in the world. Schleiermacher ­understands it to be an ­inherently social, concrete, and historical response to the Infinite.43 40 41

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kga i.2, 300–301; OR 101–102. See also kga i.13/1, §6 (58); CF §6.4, (43): “If one is speaking of a distinct religion, this always happens with reference to a distinct church. Moreover, in general terms one takes this to mean the whole of the religious states of mind and heart that underlie such a community and that, accordingly, can be recognised as identical among its members”. kga i.2, 304; OR 104. To qualify this, Schleiermacher also explains the following: “Neither naturalism—which I understand to be the intuition of the universe in its elementary multiplicity [in seiner elementarischen Vielheit], without the idea of personal

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In his attention to the positive religions, Schleiermacher thus treats inner religious feelings as inseparable from those “outward” acts and judgments which not only make them manifest, but which also help to ground and s­ ustain the narrative within which they arise. He suggests that in finite existence, religious intuitions, feelings, actions and thoughts are all integral parts to a greater whole. This holistic and historical approach to religion is also reflected in the defence that Schleiermacher mounts against the claims made by his audience that positive religions are prone to corruption and are therefore unholy and unreliable structures. Summarising the complaints of his readers, he writes: You will remind me of how each of [the positive religions] proclaims i­ tself as the only true religion, and just declares its particular characteristic to be the highest… of how, wholly against the nature of true religion, they prove, contradict, and quarrel, whether with the weapons of art and of the understanding or with still more unusual and more unworthy means.44 In response to these charges, Schleiermacher concedes the “inevitability” of such corruption among the religions—that it is “generally unavoidable as soon as the Infinite takes on an imperfect and limited raiment [beschränkte Hülle], and descends into the realm [Gebiet] of time and the universal sway of finite things to let itself be dominated by it”.45 Nevertheless, Schleiermacher’s admissions about the corruptibility of the positive religions does not prompt him to deny their worth as vessels and channels for divine revelation—ways through which the Infinite reveals himself to his creation, and comes to dwell with them in history. He does not think that religion should attempt to retreat from “the civil world” and embed itself in “the depths of the heart”. Instead, he concludes that “it is the properly religious view of things to seek every trace of the divine [Spur des Göttlichen], the true, and the eternal even in what appears to be vulgar and base, and to worship even the most distant trace”.46 Indeed “it is an illusion”, Schleiermacher asserts, “to seek the Infinite precisely outside the finite, to seek the opposite outside that to which it is opposed”.47 From the above, we can see that in his fifth speech Schleiermacher a­ rgued that religion is by its very nature always fleshed out, enacted, and made

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consciousness [persönliche Bewußtsein] and will of individual elements—nor pantheism, neither polytheism or deism, is an individual and determinate religion such as we are seeking. (kga i.2, 303; OR 103–104). kga i.2, 297; OR 98–99. kga i.2, 298; OR 99. kga i.2, 298; OR 99. kga i.2, 252–253; OR 59.

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d­ eterminate in the world. The finitude of the positive religions does not, he argues, preclude their ability to direct those who dwell in them towards the transcendent. He stresses that the Infinite can be sought only within a ­historical faith community. A person cannot possess religion completely, no more than she can tap into such a thing as a single “universal” religion—a system of f­eelings and intuitions that all can share. Religion is not a discrete commodity for the self, a human creation, or a tool generated for personal ­expression and fulfilment. “Religion” can never be “general”, it is always lived and ­communicated as particular. 2

Interreligious Dialogue in Berlin

Having explored Schleiermacher’s argument concerning religion and “the religions” in some detail, it is clear that it reflects the epistemological stance we have seen elsewhere in his corpus, which is to say that he foregrounds human finitude and protests the limits to human vision. His scheme does not dictate a religious “pluralism” in the sense of a liberal position which relativises the truth claims of all of the religions in order to preserve the validity of each. Instead, he stresses that no one can possess religion completely. He contends that to be properly religious is to look for even the most distant trace of the d­ ivine—which cannot be shackled or captured or domesticated in the world—and in the most unlikely of places. He argues that the “whole” of religion and religious culture is something “infinitely greater” than the religious life of the single individual. He thereby suggests through all of this that although one’s own religious perspective—the small fragment of religion that someone will “personally exhibit”—will be wholly involving and wholly absorbing, it is bound to distort their understanding of other religious communities and how they are arranged.48 Echoing a Herderian philosophical schema while also incorporating that organic vision of earthly life that was common across the Romantics, Schleiermacher thus repeats that same sentiment we found in his Soliloquies: that human persons are formed as tiny particular parts of a much greater whole, a whole which in its complexity is breathtakingly ­unfathomable and ever exceeding itself, so that it cannot be mapped out or measured, understood or grasped by any finite mind. Schleiermacher will also finish his speeches by noting that “just as nothing is more irreligious than to 48

kga 1.2, 313; OR 112: “…dieses Ganze der Religion und die religiöse Bildung einer großen Maße der Menschheit etwas unendlich größeres ist, als ihr eignes religiöses Leben und das kleine Fragment dieser Religion, welches sie persönlich darstellen”.

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demand uniformity in humanity generally, so nothing is more unchristian than to seek uniformity in religion”.49 The implication of this seems to be that from Schleiermacher’s perspective, religious people of any and all traditions will be beholden to their own religion in such a way that they cannot possibly also be beholden to ­others. If I am religious, he means to say, then I am grasped by the Absolute in the midst of the finite, and I am grasped in a certain way: I know no other and cannot speak for the “truth” of any other. It is here, out of these flashes of epistemic humility, that we must return to a point that I raised at the start of this chapter. This is that despite the ­burgeoning promise of an epistemological framework which can honour religious difference without this appreciation of difference spilling over into oppressive othering and violence,50 Schleiermacher nevertheless offers a dismissive portrait of Judaism in this work—namely that Judaism is “dead”, that it is no longer a living tradition. In his fifth speech, Schleiermacher proceeds to claim that “those who at present still bear [Judaism’s] colours are actually sitting and mourning ­beside the undecaying mummy”. A flippant and bigoted statement, this reflects ­Schleiermacher’s generalising reflections concerning his acquaintance with a small group of acculturated Jewish thinkers and philosophers—the Berlin Haskalah community. This statement also signals his erasure or exclusion of the wider practicing Jewish community in Berlin, and indeed the reality of the Jewish communities in Prussia at large, where many were p ­ overty-stricken and belonged to the peasant classes. And yet—Schleiermacher also notes in On Religion’s fifth speech that he does not speak of Judaism “because it was somehow the forerunner of Christianity”. Indeed, he adds, “I hate that type of ­historical reference in religion”. The reason this line is noteworthy is ­because it also gives us a sense of Schleiermacher’s desire to theorise Judaism and ­Christianity (­ although the point will extend to all religions in general) as ­enjoying an i­ ndependence from one another which runs down lines of belief, tradition, mythology and practice. That is to say: Judaism and Christianity carry an “eternal necessity” in Schleiermacher’s view, and both of them i­ ndividually have a beginning that is “original”,51 since it is a beginning given through a new intuition of the Infinite in the finite. Moreover, both of them—again, we can 49 50

51

kga i.2, ; OR 123. Here I agree with and have benefitted from Joerg Rieger’s suggestion that Schleiermacher’s reflection in On Religion “Schleiermacher’s reflections that might push beyond colonial realities and lead to a different kind of appreciation of the world and of history”, however I develop this suggestion differently in my own engagement with the text. See Rieger, “Power and Empire in the Study of Nineteenth-Century Theology”, 56. kga i.2, 314–315; OR 114.

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see the Herderean influence here—form distinct communities, each with its own utterly unique idioms and patterns of thought that are mediated through language. Schleiermacher’s understanding that Judaism and Christianity enjoy a ­distinction or independence from one another as religious communions is one which would later be bolstered in his dogmatic theology through the structure of his christology. For here he articulates a vision of the Incarnation itself as a miraculous salvific event which establishes a new order in the world and founds a “new collective life”.52 We shall explore elements of Schleiermacher’s perspective on the Incarnation in the next chapter, as we focus in on his Christmas Dialogue. In his dogmatics however (which he referred to in shorthand as his Glaubenslehre) we find Schleiermacher introducing Christ as the sole original place—das einige ursprüngliche Ort—where the true Being of God is ­revealed in history. In these terms, as Allen Jorgenson has described it, Christ becomes the “inner telos”53 of creation as a whole. In Schleiermacher’s view, that is, Christ is the One in whom the divine plan of love and wisdom is fulfilled and the Agent in whom it is brought forth. In the event of the ­Incarnation, a ­creating and preserving divine grace thus becomes a perfecting grace in the world, and a wholly new beginning for humanity is made possible. Christ, for Schleiermacher, is the “new creative divine breath that is poured out into the spirit of the human race”.54 But as a new beginning and a new breath—he from whom alone the new collective life proceeds—Schleiermacher avers that ­everything about Christ must also have been “prototypical” [urbildlich], both historically and really, in time and for eternity.55 What this means, Schleiermacher goes on to explain, is that Christ cannot represent merely a ­historical ­evolution of Judaism, or a “more or less original and ­revolutionary Jewish ­reformer of the law”.56 It is in these stresses, and specifically through the person and work of Christ, that we see Schleiermacher moving again towards an ­emphasis on the independence of the two religious communions from each other. In addition to these christological resonances however, Schleiermacher’s ­vision of Judaism and Christianity as separate entities is also intimately related to his decision to treat the Old and New Testament as separate documents—his 52 53 54 55 56

CF §89 (553). Allen G. Jorgenson, The Appeal to Experience in the Christologies of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Karl Rahner, 105. Buran F. Phillips, Friedrich Schleiermacher’s Interpretation of the Epistle to the Colossians: A Series of Sermons (1830–1831) (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), 222. CF §94 (574). CF §93 (568).

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understanding that each text relates, expresses and gives ground to a tradition of its own. Some, including Adolf von Harnack in his 1921 book Das Evangelium vom Fremden Gott, have sought to name this tendency in Schleiermacher as a form of Marcionism.57 And certainly, in Christian Faith, ­Schleiermacher went on to draw a clear distinction between the Old and the New Testaments, in terms not only of their authority, but also in terms of whether they are able to “inspire distinctively Christian piety”.58 The Old Testament cannot do this, Schleiermacher argues, and the implication here is that he conceives it as being unable to point the reader to Christ. It is not “Christian” in this sense, ­because it does not tell the reader the good news of the gospel. And so the text, Schleiermacher claims, rightfully “belongs to the Jewish religion”.59 To what, then, does Schleiermacher think that the “Old Testament writings owe their place in the [Christian] Bible”? In the same section of his dogmatics, we find him arguing that they do so from a Christian perspective “in part to New Testament references to them, and in part to the historical connection of Christian worship with the Jewish synagogue…”.60 For Schleiermacher, then, the Old Testament is rightfully there as a kind of historical document or ­touchstone for Christian believers to learn about their origins. He therefore states that the two “testaments” should not be treated identically or with equal emphasis in Christian teaching or sermons, and concludes that: it would be better if the Old Testament followed the New Testament as an appendix, since where it is placed at present does unclearly set forth the presumption that one would have to work through the entire Old Testament in order to get onto the right path to the New Testament.61 57 58 59

60 61

Harnack’s book seeks to trace the underlying reception history of Marcion in the Christian tradition—a secret Marcionism, that is—through Augustine and Luther, down to nineteenth-century thinkers which include Schleiermacher. CF § 131 (848): “The scriptures of the New Testament are authentic in their origination and sufficient as norm for Christian doctrine”. In that letter to Jacobi in 1818, which I quoted in my preface, Schleiermacher tellingly writes the following: “The Bible is the original interpretation of the Christian feeling, and for this very reason so firmly established that we ought not to attempt more than further to understand and develop it”. CF §132 (853). CF §132 (853). For an analysis of Schleiermacher’s argument against the canonical s­ tatus of the Old Testament, see Klaus Beckmann, Die fremde Wurzel: Altes Testament und ­Judentum in der evangelischen Theologie des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002). For a Reformed Theological perspective of the question over the status of the Old Testament in the Christian tradition, see Paul Capetz, “The Old Testament and the Question of Judaism in Reformed Theology: Calvin, Schleiermacher, and Barth”, Journal of Reformed Theology 8 (2014): 121–168.

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It is clear here that our discussion of Schleiermacher’s understanding of the ­relationship between Christianity and Judaism, as well as his articulation of their difference and mutual independence, is taking us away from On Religion. And indeed, since Schleiermacher discusses Judaism only briefly—and the present-day reader would rightly surmise flippantly—in the latter text, it is worth turning elsewhere to get a further sense of how the pernicious ­biases operating in his portrayal of Judaism connect to other dimensions of his p ­ hilosophical and theological thinking. In 1799, the same year that he ­published On Religion, Schleiermacher contributed to the public debate over Jewish emancipation and Jewish citizenship in Berlin.62 This debate was provoked in March 1799 by an anonymous and bitingly satirical letter, written by a Jewish voice, entitled Political-Theological Task concerning the Treatment of Baptized Jews.63 In response to this letter, and arising from conversations with his close friends Henriette Herz and Dorothea Veit, Schleiermacher wrote a series of six oratorical and anonymised letters of his own, which were styled so as to have been written by a “preacher outside Berlin”, to a politician who is meant to have published them. These letters represent another incidence of Schleiermacher’s continued experiments with literary form, and as Richard Crouter has judged, illustrate Schleiermacher’s understanding that indirect communication and the dialogue form are powerful means of discourse “on topics which resist simple definition or resolution”.64 In these letters, Schleiermacher-preacher65 argues against the specific ­proposal that baptism and conversion to Protestant Christianity should be made a legal requirement for Jewish people seeking German citizenship and political emancipation. This proposal had been made anonymously by the Jewish community leader David Friedländer, in a document that addressed the head of the Protestant Church in Berlin, Wilhelm Abraham Teller, and was given the title Open Letter to His Most Worthy, Supreme Consistorial Counsel62

Commentary and historical background to the debate over Jewish emancipation at this juncture can be found in Werner G. Mosse, “From Schutzjuden to Deutsche Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens: The Long and Bumpy Road of Jewish Emancipation in Germany”, in Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship, eds. Pierre and Ira Katznelson ­Birnbaum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). 63 See kga i.2, 373–380. 64 See Richard Crouter, “Introduction”, in Letters, 19. 65 With this text, I find myself in a similar hermeneutical position to the one governing my analysis of To Cecilie. In light of Schleiermacher’s decision to write a series of anonymised letters rather than a “straight” academic treatise or essay, I want to underscore the distance that Schleiermacher himself has staged here between his own views as author, and those of the unnamed “preacher” styled in the text. To avoid cumbersome formulations, I have chosen the construction “Schleiermacher-preacher”.

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or and ­Provost Teller at Berlin, from some Householders of the Jewish Religion. ­Friedländer was a wealthy silk merchant who alongside his friend Moses ­Mendelssohn had established the Jewish Free School in Berlin in 1778, and was deeply committed to securing cultural, social, and political emancipation for Berlin’s Jews.66 However, as Michael Meyer has noted, Friedländer’s status as a member of the Jewish elite went hand in hand with his displaying a condescending view of popular Jewish piety. In 1790, the latter wrote in the Berlinische Monatsschrift that “the great mass of the Jews is characterised by a babbling away of their prayers, conscientious observance of religious ceremonies, and other outward piety, just like the riffraff of other religious groups”.67 Moreover, Meyer adds that Friedländer’s letter has in the modern context “generally been taken as a renunciation of Judaism”.68 Whether Schleiermacher himself knew that it was Friedländer who had made this proposal for Jews to be baptised as a means of gaining civil liberties is a contested issue. However in response to it, Schleiermacher argued vehemently that full rights and citizenship should not depend on religious affiliation. One should not need to be a Christian to be a citizen, Schleiermacher-preacher states in his letters, and to demand this— to encourage conversion by law—was clearly an “oppressive course of action [drückenden Handlungsweise]”.69 An extremely basic but nevertheless essential point to establish here is that Schleiermacher makes this pronouncement in the interests of Christianity, and from a perfomatively Christian standpoint; something we can easily ­anticipate from the “preacher” character he adopts as his voice. That is to say—the author of these letters stands up and positions himself as a man who preaches the Christian gospel. He has faith in Christ as saviour and hopes for the turning of individuals to Christ. This is the particular stance from which he condemns false and coerced conversion to Christianity, then, for he sees it as harmful to the integrity of both communions and communities—Christian and Jewish. He asks what sense there is in having Jewish people lie or become secretive about their religious commitments, before suggesting that the proposal also treats baptism merely as an empty ritual. He urges that it would do nothing good for the health of Christianity if many of its members were to be forced there, and without any faith in Christ. 66

For biography on Friedländer, see Steven M. Lowenstein, The Jewishness of David Friedländer and the Crisis of Berlin Jewry (Ramat-Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University, 1994). 67 Michael A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1979), 61. 68 Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew, 70. 69 kga i.2, 348; Letters 100.

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It is worth noting, as Joerg Rieger has already done, that this rejection of any notion that a person could or should be coerced into becoming a Christian is also reflected in the christology that Schleiermacher would later espouse in his Glaubenslehre.70 Human freedom—as far as this means the ability to do otherwise, to choose otherwise—becomes an important aspect to his account of redemption here, including his understanding of how this is effected in the individual life of the Christian. Indeed, Schleiermacher conceives Christ’s ­redeeming activity as belonging “originally” to Christ himself, and issuing from him in an act which is co-eternal with God’s continuing creation of the world ex nihilo. And yet, while Schleiermacher asserts Christ’s identity as the Son of God who creates, redeems, and conforms—as he who is “timeless and eternal even as an active principle”—he nevertheless stresses that Christ only influences what is free (namely humanity) in accordance with “the way in which what is free enters the sphere of Christ’s life, and only in accordance with the nature of what is free”.71 Redemption, the event of being conformed to Christ, thus cannot be forced on a person. It is down to the individual to invite Christ into his or her life. Evoking the Moravian piety in which he was surrounded as a boy, Schleiermacher goes on to confirm this notion in traditional language: …whether we might be looking at that collective life or at the community of individuals with the Redeemer, we will best designate the beginning of it with the expression a call, since this beginning is conditioned by a free acceptance, just as then the entire official activity of that communal life began with such a call.72 Aside from Schleiermacher’s theological considerations concerning the Christian doctrine of redemption, however, there is more to the logic behind Schleiermacher-preacher’s rejection of enforced conversion to Christianity as a means for Jews to gain civil liberties. For in Schleiermacherpreacher’s third letter, we read that “it is impossible for anyone who really has a religion to ­accept another”.73 What Schleiermacher seemingly puts forward here, then, is the idea that true conversion between two religions—from one into the other—is an inconceivable feat per se, even excepting the current debate about politically-motivated “conversion”. These 70 71 72 73

Joerg Rieger makes the connection between Schleiermacher’s “colonial perspectives”, and his account of Christ’s work in human beings. See Rieger, “Power and Empire”, 52. CF §100, (623). CF §100 (625). kga i.2, 347; Letters, 97. Emphasis my own.

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words would also seem to deny any notion of dual or multiple religious belonging, and thus call the coherence and nuance of Schleiermacher’s understanding of “religion” into question. As Richard Crouter puts it, Schleiermacher “makes it sound as if religious choice is determined organically by the accidents of birth, never to be altered or changed”.74 Religion here appears to be something fixed and essential, something tied to the circumstances of our upbringing and the texts with which we are surrounded. We therefore see Schleiermacher developing or crystallising that account of religion we already saw in On Religion, that it is a wholly involving way of life, one which immerses the believer in a particular series of rituals, practices and doctrines. Schleiermacher-preacher also adds an important qualifying note to his ­assertion that there should be no religious test for Jews desiring citizenship. Having spoken in his fourth letter of finding a “middle path” or compromise— one which does not mean using Christianity as a vehicle—he attaches the following prescriptions to his proposal towards Jewish political emancipation. Firstly, he contends that Jews wishing to enjoy civil liberties must be willing to subordinate ceremonial law to the law of the state. And secondly, he demands that they “officially and publicly renounce the hope for a messiah”, adding that he believes “this an important point where the state cannot yield to them”.75 Here then, Schleiermacher-preacher’s assertion that citizens need not be Christians, and his ostensible attempt therewith to advocate for the civil ­liberties of Berlin’s Jews, concludes in a disturbing failure to fully defend the religious freedoms of the latter. But what is the reasoning in this text behind Schleiermacher-preacher’s so-called “middle path”? At first blush, his argument is a political one. He contends that the Jewish practice of referring to themselves as a “nation”—a practice that he observes even among Enlightenment Jews like Friedländer—illustrates that they have political commitments which clash and compete with those of the state. He concludes that with such references, by which they declare their final loyalty to a foreign fatherland, Jews resist defining themselves as German. “Do you not find it completely natural and highly consistent”, Schleiermacher-preacher argues, “that a state should not bestow full civil rights on persons who are driven from some other state only for some period of time”?76 It is here that we can see how Schleiermacher’s theorisation of Judaism as a “religion”, alongside his assumptions about the relationship that should 74 75 76

Crouter, “Introduction”, in Letters, 22. kga i.2, 352; Letters, 103. kga i.2, 352; Letters, 103.

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carry between “religion” and the state, combine to direct his expressions in these letters about the possibility of Jewish citizenship in Prussia. Across his career, Schleiermacher consistently argued for the separation between church and state, and in 1799 his reasoning was not least that such a separation would guarantee freedom for Christians and would safeguard what we might call the health of the communion.77 To be a member of the body of Christ and to be a member of the nation do not, Schleiermacher-preacher avers, amount to the same thing or involve the same membership rites, and so to enshrine such an idea in law can only be harmful to both bodies. In On Religion, Schleiermacher buttresses this viewpoint by expressing disgust at any notion that the church should be conceived as providing a material and social benefit to the nation. He refuses the idea, as Jerry Dawson has explained, that it “should be allowed to exist solely because it functioned in such a way that the state realized a b­ enefit from its presence”.78 For in Schleiermacher’s view, “the work of the church is in the realm of the spirit”. And since this is the unique contribution of the church in the world, it immediately loses its role in society if it is valued and “used” according to another criteria. Schleiermacher’s Christian conviction that the Kingdom of God can never be fully realised in the temporal world thus clearly informs his politics here, as well his judgment concerning the proper r­ elationship between the religious and the political. What Schleiermacher poignantly fails to see, then (or at least, what he fails to acknowledge), is that together, his own theological assumptions about the nature of the religious life and its relationship to politics, as well as his ­presumption about national identity, its boundaries and its prescriptions, lead him to ­rationalise and recommend demands which are ­specifically p ­ unishing for practicing Jews, resemble a constraint on their religious freedoms and demonstrate an ignorance of Jewish tradition and teaching. For on the one hand, Schleiermacher-preacher divulges a thick and involving concept of ­nation, whereby he envisages it as an organically-generated social and cultural ­community, one which begins with and unfolds from the family unit, and one in

77

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See Jerry F. Dawson, “Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Separation of Church and State”, Journal of Church and State 7, no. 2 (March 1965): 214–225. Dawson explains that “from 1798 until the war crisis of 1806, [Schleiermacher] was interested in separation [between church and state] because of harm being done to the work of the church”. Then, from 1806 until 1818, he sought to separate the church from the state for the good of the state, “for the sake of nationalism”. Dawson, “Friedrich Schleiermacher and the Separation of Church and State”, 216. See OR 87–91. “The state even imports its interests into the most innermost mysteries of the ­religious fellowship and defiles them”. (OR 87).

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whose subjects share common moral values and a common education.79 In his later work, as Theodore Vial has noted, Schleiermacher would proceed to explicitly reject the idea that “the origin of the community is a kind of social contract between rational individuals”.80 His Romantic ­organicism and his ­reception of H ­ erderian ideas had influenced a conception of ­national ­communion as a shared l­anguage, a shared mode of Z ­ usammenleben. ­Schleiermacher, we note, would become an innovator of early German ­nationalism—one of just a few influential thinkers who proposed a German nation-state as a ­potential solution to the problems of the Napoleonic era. He called for a c­ onstitutional monarchy that would oversee active citizens, ­participating in the life and ­decision-making of the state, and was ­dissatisfied with a political system which rendered its subjects passive ­underneath a ­powerful aristocracy.81 On the other hand, however, Schleiermacher-preacher’s own conception of the Christian religion frames his biased expectations concerning the national commitments of other religious communities. Stating that they are united by their “belief that at some time they will once again make a nation of their own”,82 and averring that they have taken on a commitment to nationality which would trump or compete with their loyalty to Germany, ­Schleiermacher’s preacher speaks of Jews in his letters as “foreigners” or ­political sojourners in the land of Prussia. In sum, Schleiermacher’s rulings here do not simply represent ­inherited prejudices against Judaism, common to his day, which might be otherwise considered apart from his theology or his e­ thics. Instead, his approach to this question of Jewish citizenship in the Letters concerns the very structure of his thought and plays out in tandem with his assumptions regarding the relation between theology and politics. Indeed, in light of his teaching elsewhere that Judaism and Christianity are separate communions in regard both to their texts and to the wellspring of their faith, Schleiermacher-preacher’s discussion in the letters about the “foreign” nature of Jewish belief is particularly jarring. I direct the reader at this point to J. Kameron Carter’s work Race: A Theological Account, in which he argues that “modernity’s racial imagination has its ­enesis

79 80 81 82

kga i.2, 348; Letters 99: “it’s no purpose to want to deny that Jews increasingly take part in education in our times [Bildung des Zeitalters] in roughly the same way as Christians do”. Theodore Vial, “Schleiermacher and the State”, in The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher, ed. Jacqueline Mariña (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 271. See Vial, “Schleiermacher and the State”, 275. kga i.2, 353.

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in the problem of Christianity’s quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots”.83 These biases of Schleiermacher’s are a deeply ­theological matter. A final point I’d like to raise about the Letters here concerns their ­denunciation of the judgment that Jews are by nature morally corrupt and deceptive.84 In the course of addressing this notion, Schleiermacher-preacher also condemns the attendant belief that it is “dangerous” to accept Jews into civil society85—a prejudice that he specifies as being ubiquitous in his day, especially among politicians and civil servants. It is the reasoning behind ­Schleiermacher-preacher’s rebuttal of these anti-Jewish prejudices, however, that is most significant for the present analysis, because this reasoning contributes to our understanding of Schleiermacher’s conception of human Bildung. Indeed, Schleiermacher-preacher’s first rhetorically-charged line of d­ efence against these prejudices is to point out, goadingly, that he is not so selective in his own moral judgments. No—he would include many “Christians” in his estimation or definition of incivility. “Have you forgotten”, he ventures playfully, “that I also wished the greatest portion of Christians were out of the church?”.86 It is worth bringing our discussion back to matters of literary form here momentarily. For we see how Schleiermacher-preacher’s posturing, which is echoed by similar rhetorical questions and devices over the course of his six letters, enable him here to evade making absolute recommendations on the subject matter. What he produces in this document is not a static system of judgments which might be appropriated by the reader. Rather, we get a series of particular letters, which are laboured in their arrangement so as to stress the conversational and fragmented emergence of Schleiermacher-preacher’s resolutions on the issue. They mirror, perhaps, the ebb and flow of Schleiermacher’s own private discussions about Jewish citizenship with Henriette Herz 83 84

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J Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4. We find this portrait of Jews as deceptive reflected in the the notes that Herder took at Kant’s lectures on practical philosophy. Indeed, Herder indicates that the Königsberg ­philosopher said the following: “Every coward is a liar; Jews, for example, not only in ­business, but also in common life”. Later, Herder also records Kant as having referred to “the Jews, for example, who are permitted by the Talmud to practice deceit”. See ­Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J.B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 27 and 34. That transcriptions of Kant’s lectures from Collins, Mrongovius or Vigilantius do not features these lines about Judaism may also say something about Herder’s own priorities. On this point, compare Michael Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, 5, and James DiCenso, Kant, Religion, and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 262. kga i.2, 336–337; Letters 87. kga i.2, 339; Letters 101.

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and Dorothea Veit. Indeed, Schleiermacher backdated the missives, which were published in July, so that they matched up with the debate over J­ewish ­citizenship as it played out through Friedländer’s contribution (April) in ­response to the original Political-Theologicial Task (March). He also s­ tructured the letters so as to create internal drama and internal dialogue—dramatizing the unseen reactions of a fictional politician reader, who will purportedly pull him up or challenge him on some of his suggestions, and not least this notion of ­Jewish moral corruption. An anonymised presence behind these heavily ­curated ­letters, Schleiermacher thereby resists establishing himself as a firm or final judge of these events. These formal considerations are worth keeping in mind. And yet, it is also the case that in his fifth letter, Schleiermacher-preacher’s discussion of moral corruption leads him to make a series of statements which tie up civility and morality with education and social class. And it is in these instances that—just as we saw in his penal colony materials and in his Soliloquies—Schleiermacher falls back on the use of comparatives (“better” men and “lower” men), as well as on the imagery of a scale or ladder of human development. We surmise here that Schleiermacher-preacher thinks it imprudent to single out Jews as ­morally corrupt, because although he recommends that Jews “increasingly take part in education in our times [Bildung des Zeitalters] in roughly the same way Christians do”, honesty itself, he claims, is “the natural consequence of a secure well-being, when better sociability and a feeling of honour are able to work on the mind”.87 It is in such terms, where education and cultivation is assumed as the means of moral betterment—the vehicle for social improvement— that Schleiermacher-preacher will also speak of “the better Jews” [die beßern Juden], and the “educated Jews” [die gebildeten Juden], who stand apart from “the lower class, with all its superstitions and bad characteristics”.88 Similarly, of the Prussian peasant classes more broadly, Schleiermacher-preacher argues that they have an “inclination” to deceive foreigners, including Jews, who they will perceive as such (we remember) because of their commitment to a Jewish nation. “The sense of justice of all uneducated persons is only juridical and not moral”, Schleiermacher-preacher states, so that it “cannot be so pure in relation to persons with whom they believe themselves to be in relationship only for a short time, and who are only in it unhappily”.89 In the face of Schleiermacher’s use of comparatives again here (‘better’ or “worse” men), as well as the assumption of a scale of human development which 87 88 89

kga i.2, 348; Letters 99. Emphasis my own. kga i.2, 357; Letters 108. kga i.2, 353; Letters 104. Emphasis my own.

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is climbed via education, I think it is worthwhile turning briefly to ­consider ­Michael Mack’s 2003 book German Idealism and the Jew. Schleiermacher does not feature in this work, in which Mack focusses on the thought of Kant, Mendelssohn, Hegel and others. However, in an introductory chapter which deals with the critique of Idealism from postmodern theorists (most notably Derrida and Levinas), Mack notes the tendency of major ­German idealists to envisage German Christian culture as a performance of rational ­autonomous ­action. This supposition, he claims, led Kant and Hegel to ­“construct a r­ adical divide between Jewish and non-Jewish society”, since J­udaism was defined here as heteronomy, against the rational same-ness or homogeneity of ­non-Jewish ­society. Mack’s own study considers how G ­ erman Jewish scholars “from M ­ oses ­Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud set out to ­question the ethical ­superiority of a type of autonomous selfhood that paradoxically depends on s­ocial domination”.90 And his discussion has a bearing, I think, on S­ chleiermacher’s own proclivity to refer to scales or ladders of ­human moral and cultural achievement—his inclination to envisage people as politically and socially “better” or “worse”. Indeed, drawing on the work of Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz,91 Mack argues that against the conceptual background of this German Idealist opposition between autonomy and heteronomy, it is Judaism and Jewishness which for these thinkers signals the “otherness” or heteronomous opposite against which the controlled, autonomous, modern political self can define ­itself. “This is the famous quid pro quo in the debate about Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century German culture”, Mack writes. The Jews are excluded, “at least theoretically”, from the idealist body politic. Before they can become members of the state, Jews must therefore lose their otherness—they must become recognisable to the “sameness” of political autonomy.92 It is noteworthy on this score that a decade before Schleiermacher wrote his Letters, 90 Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, 17. 91 Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, “Harbingers of Political and Economic Change”, in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, eds. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 92 Mack, German Idealism and the Jew, 19. For an apposite discussion of the capacity of modern liberal democracies to represent religious difference, with particular reference to Islam, see Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular; Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003). Asad writes: “The ideology of political representation in liberal democracies makes it difficult to represent Muslims as Muslims. Why? Because in theory the citizens who constitute a democratic state belong to a class that is defined only by what is common to all its members and its members only. What is common is the abstract quality of individual citizens to one another, so that each counts as one”. (173).

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both Kant and his contemporary Christian Wilhelm von Dohm had argued that gebildete Jews could be the bearers of civil rights. And both Aufklärer, as J Kameron Carter has argued, would employ “a racial-religious logic that called for reconstituting the body politic on the basis of autonomy, or freedom”.93 In the work of Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, we find the following elaboration of how such an eradication of difference forms the motor for racism: Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavours to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves… From the ­viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who would be like us, and whose crime it is not to be… [racism] propagates waves of sameness until those who resist identification have been wiped out.94 Having dealt with Mack’s work only very briefly here, it would be unwise to try applying his critique of certain German idealist systems to Schleiermacher’s own (non-idealist) thought in any great detail. In this major that point Mack ­expounds, however, about political inclusion entailing the erasure of ­difference, we can see apparent flickers and repetitions of this in Schleiermacher-­ preacher’s own demands on would-be Jewish German citizens. As we have seen, the Letters seem to enshrine the image of the educated German as the “ideal” citizen. This is what the Jew too can become, Schleiermacher-preacher indicates, just as many of his contemporaries—who he names as gebildete ­Juden—have already proved true. Indeed these elite Jews stand out, we read, in comparison with those “richer orthodox Jews . . [who] will completely take sides with the lower class, with all its superstitions and bad characteristics”.95 Despite arguing vehemently that citizenship needn’t depend on religion, then, the Letters on the Occasion nevertheless display Schleiermacher’s prejudices and prescriptions about what makes for a good citizen: a judgment which he deploys via those same comparative judgements we have also seen flickering and emerging elsewhere in his thought. What we can point out as distinctive about Schleiermacher, however, in contrast to those idealist philosophers and philosophical schemes at which Mack’s critique is aimed, is that his thought explicitly resists the emphasis 93 94 95

J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 106. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 178. kga i.2, 357; Letters 108.

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on sameness (homogeneity) that Derrida, Levinas, Adorno et al. can find in ­Kantian and Hegelian accounts of rational autonomy. For due not least to his inheritance of Herder’s understanding that humanity issues in an inevitable plurality of cultures and languages,96 we have seen how Schleiermacher rejected a specifically Kantian commitment to human freedom. In his Soliloquies, in a statement implicitly aimed at Kant, he wrote that he was “not satisfied to view humanity in rough unshapen masses, inwardly together alike, and taking transient shape externally only by reason of mutual contact and friction”. Here, he also outlined his conviction that “each man is meant to represent humanity in his own way, combining its elements uniquely so that it may reveal itself in every mode…”.97 So much for Schleiermacher’s ethical writings, then, whose attestation of human particularity and difference is arguably betrayed and dismembered by his tendency elsewhere in his thought to conceive the human as social and ­political animal in terms of what Theodore Vial calls “value-laden hierarchies”.98 It is clear that Schleiermacher’s proposals in his Letters on the Occasion fail to properly defend or recognise the religious freedoms of the Jewish members of Berlin. And yet, a further place where Schleiermacher surely resists this emphasis on autonomy (and sameness), and thereby resists perpetuating in essential or absolute terms the racist assumptions described by Deleuze and Guattari in the passage above, is in his distinctive commitment to the Bildung zur Religion of the individual. Echoing and extending that same spirit we find in his Soliloquies, Schleiermacher writes the following in the third speech of On Religion: A person is born with the religious capacity as with every other, and if only his sense is not forcibly suppressed, if only that communion ­between a person and the universe—these are admittedly the two poles of religion—is not blocked and barricaded, then religion would have to develop unerringly in each person according to his individual manner.99 96

For an account of Herder’s pluralistic understanding of human nature, which ­nevertheless was “qualified” in its relativism, because of Herder’s belief in a common humanity, see Sonia Sikka, Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 97 kga i.3, 18; S 31. 98 Vial, Modern Religion, Modern Race, 2. For more detail on this point, and my misgivings about Vial’s overall treatment of Schleiermacher, see my review essay “Difference, and Religion: Is There a Universal Humanity?”, which is hosted by Marginalia, a channel of the LA Review of books: https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/race-difference-religionuniversal-humanity/, last accessed 28.10.2018. 99 kga i.2, 252; OR 59.

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It is in the structure of this commitment that we might find a reason to keep thinking with Schleiermacher, I suggest—to see a flexibility in his thought whereby critiquing him, underscoring what is rotten in his theology and his politics, and holding him to account for the prejudices in his work, result in a conversation which over time, and through critique, may indeed bear fruit. For Schleiermacher’s guiding principle, even if often and sometimes perniciously misapplied, remained this: that the realm of modern politics—the domain of the state—isn’t coextensive or identical with the realm of religion. Bonds between individuals cannot in his view be truly established, demarcated, or exhaustively described by political power alone. Furthermore, it was also at the heart of Schleiermacher’s argument in On Religion, despite this failing to translate into the substance of his Letters on the Occasion, that religion does not amount to some special knowledge. In his dogmatics too, Schleiermacher would stress that being a good Christian is not conditional on one’s learning or conceptual understanding. Religion cannot be “taught” to a person.100 And so, I venture, rather than underscore freedom or autonomy as the concept which underpins and arranges his theology, then, and rather than establish difference as something to be disdained or ignored, it is dependence—a sense of one’s own finitude—that Schleiermacher instead makes central to the theological task. That Schleiermacher will nonetheless sometimes fail to carry through on the implications of such a dependence-centred scheme, is something for which his theological readers and inheritors must hold him to account.

100 kga i.2, 250–251; OR 57. In the “explanations” that he added to his second speech in the third edition (1821) of On Religion, Schleiermacher asserts the following : “…if religion were really the highest knowledge [das höchste Wissen], then the scientific method would have to be the only expedient for its dissemination, and religion itself must be learned, which has never been asserted, and there would then be a ladder [Stufenleiter] between a philosophy which would not produce the same results as our Christian ­theology, and that would be the lowest stage; then the religion of the Christian laity, which as πίστις would be an imperfect way of having the highest knowledge, and then finally theology, which as γνώσις would be the perfect way of having the same and standing above. And none of these three would be compatible with the other”. This passage comes in the context of Schleiermacher’s wish to denounce the idea that the doctrine of the Trinity can be “proved”. kga i.12, 129–130.

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A Theology of Finitude 1

Barth’s Critique of the Christmas Dialogue

In 1799, Schleiermacher argued that religious individuals cannot escape their finitude, but he did not declare this an intrinsically negative or frustrating prospect. For having defined the relationship between self and the Infinite as one which is established beyond thought and language, and which is found in intuition and feeling, Schleiermacher taught that this relationship n ­ evertheless grounds and permeates all of the interactions that the self has within the world. As such, a person’s identity as a finite creature does not preclude their ability to flourish. Instead, Schleiermacher thinks that an individual’s response to the Infinite, and the life they live in search of the Infinite, must be guided by a particular and thoroughly historical religious tradition. In the previous chapter we saw how the promise in Schleiermacher’s ­religious thought for loving and abiding with difference, and for allowing difference to flourish, was nevertheless something which crumbled and failed in regard to his actual treatment of the differences between Judaism and Christianity. What is crucial, I have suggested, is that Schleiermacher’s theory of religion and the religions does not necessitate or entail this tipping over of an appreciation of difference into prejudice or political discrimination. And yet, his Letters on the Occasion testify to the frailty of his theological thinking in this regard, its connection to and participation in the wider political imaginary that belonged to the Berlin of his day. In the following chapter, in search of further evidence concerning the ­nature and limits of Schleiermacher’s treatment of difference, I shall return to 1806 and to Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue. In this book, Schleiermacher does of course not make any pretence about surveying the world’s “positive” religions from the outside. He is not fighting for the allegiance of religion’s cultured despisers. Instead, he explicitly introduces this text as a Christian author. Its questions and themes belong entirely to the Christian narrative. What we find here however is no straight exposition of the nativity—no detailed attention to scripture or doctrine. We are met with a dialogue, within which Schleiermacher depicts the Christian God as gracing the most mundane and civilised of finite settings: a primly-decorated Prussian drawing room.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_016 Ruth Jackson

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What I hope to keep attesting in this chapter is that Schleiermacher retained his acute awareness of human particularity in his account of the religious life. Once more here he gives us a view of human interaction which emphasises the present moment—which focusses on experience and encounter, on the matter of what is true “now”, for “me”, as an individual subject. With this emphasis, Schleiermacher eschews in important methodological ways the tendency to want to make essential or universal claims about human existence. The Dialogue leaves much open to interpretation. Yet what it also the case, I  argue, is that Schleiermacher upholds this emphasis on the present and on human particularity in such a way that he does not collapse everything into finitude. Schleiermacher depicts the Incarnation in this Dialogue as a cosmic event with universal significance. Yet it is still an event to which all people respond differently. A multiplicity of voices make up the whole. And with this, Schleiermacher portrays divine action as something which is mediated through the intricacies of human history and society. To begin however, and since we find Schleiermacher once more portraying religion as rooted in the midst of the finite, as God reveals himself to humans within and through history—it is important to attend to a charge that is commonly attached to Schleiermacher’s legacy, and especially following the involvement that Karl Barth has had in the transmission of his work. This is Barth’s own claim that Schleiermacher propagated a liberal, anthropocentric Christianity—the first flowering of that Kulturprotestantismus which Barth considered to be borne out in the later work of Ritschl, Harnack, and ­Troeltsch.1 Indeed, Barth’s own conclusions about Schleiermacher’s understanding of the God-world relationship and his theological anthropology were that they issued in a failed Christianity. This was a Christianity, Barth claimed, that was incapable of apprehending, answering, and living according to the sovereign Word of God. For Barth, in other words, Schleiermacher’s horizontal attention to human finitude rendered his theology self-referential, comfortable, and overly this-worldly.2 It is well-known that Barth’s quarrel with Schleiermacher lasted the ­duration of his career (‘one is never done with Schleiermacher!’3), and that his negative assessment of Schleiermacher’s theological legacy was hard-won, 1 Cf. Karl Barth’s essay “The Word in Theology from Schleiermacher to Ritschl”, in TaC. See also George Rupp, Culture-Protestantism: German Liberal Theology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Missoula: Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1977). 2 In Church Dogmatics, ii.1 (202–204), Barth argues that within the Liberal Protestant tradition epitomised by Schleiermacher, there is a tendency to emphasise God’s “supra-temporality”— his being present to the world as it stands, in the here and now. 3 tts, 277.

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arrived at through a thorough engagement with his entire corpus. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of Schleiermacher’s dogmatic work, his lectures, and his sermons, Barth not only taught about Schleiermacher, but he consistently used him both implicitly and explicitly as a foil for the emphases in his own theology. This being the case, it naturally goes beyond the scope of the present work to address Barth’s vast evaluation of Schleiermacher’s theological vision in its entirety. Here however, I seek to respond in detail simply to that which is of the most direct relevance to the central concerns of this dissertation: his specific treatment of the Christmas Dialogue. By way of introduction to Barth’s perspective however, it is prudent to note that whereas Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the frailty of human existence led him to assert that the ineffable God does not speak to Christians directly, but that Christ as God’s Word gives himself to humans in and through history,4 Barth—and especially the younger Barth, the author of the notorious ­commentary on Paul’s epistle to the Romans—understood this claim to promote the notion that God could be domesticated, or grasped and retained by finite forms. Barth thus sought to distance himself from Schleiermacher,5 and to portray divine revelation as the absolute in-breaking of the transcendent Word into the world. “The truth has encountered us from a frontier we have never crossed”, Barth wrote in his Romans commentary—“it is as though we had been transfixed by an arrow launched at us from beyond an impassable river”.6 The early Barth wished to stress the freedom and the glory of God— a God unbound by time or space, who cannot be located in human history, whose acts cannot be explicated in human language, but who is “already the Victor”, and “enters the conflict [over human redemption] as a consuming fire”. Certainly, the Barth of the Romans commentary stressed that human faith is not something which is self-made, self-sustained, or even something that can properly be called “of this world”7 Instead, he impressed upon his readers that “genuine faith is a void, an obeisance before that which we can never be, or do, 4 Compare Richard Niebuhr’s comment, in Schleiermacher on Christ and Religion, 44–45: “There is no hint of an immediate, mystical relationship to Christ himself as that which constitutes the meaning of Christmas. There is no trace here of a Kierkegaardian notion of timeless, direct contemporaneity with the God-man. Contemporaneity in The Christmas Eve, to the extent one can speak of it at all, is with Christ as he is reflected and refracted in the innumerable facets of socially mediated experience”. 5 See James E. Davison, “Can God Speak a Word to Man? Barth’s Critique of Schleiermacher’s Theology”, Scottish Journal of Theology 37, no. 2 (1984): 189–211. 6 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. E.C. Hoskyns, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 238. 7 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 39. See also 40: “Faith lives of its own, because it lives of God”.

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or possess; it is a devotion to him who can never become the world or man, save in the dissolution and redemption and resurrection of everything which we here and now call world and man”.8 In the early Barth’s view, then, it is precisely what we might call the “horizontal” emphasis in Schleiermacher’s theology—his focus on historical humanity, and the nature and strength of human communion—that renders it unsound.9 To borrow a phrase from his mature multi-volume Church Dogmatics, Barth’s overarching statement about Schleiermacher was that he “anthropologized theology”.10 Schleiermacher failed to uphold the sovereignty of the Word of God, Barth thought, and in so doing he collapsed the divine and the human into one eternal category of being, and rendered the divine Word merely a symbol of shared human endeavour. And Schleiermacher’s domesticated God—this theological liberalism, and his cultural accommodationism—was typified, in Barth’s eyes, in his Christmas Dialogue. The following passage, taken from Schleiermacher’s preface to the text’s ­second edition (1826), helps us to illustrate Barth’s very real and understandable concerns. Schleiermacher writes: If, in our life within polite and cultivated society, we often find cause to regret that men who merit each other’s love and influence are completely divided and cut off from one another, perhaps it will be a gratifying view [erfreulicher Anblick]—and not one unworthy to be offered as a ­Christmas gift—to be shown how the most varied ways of understanding Christianity [die verschiedensten Auffassungsweisen des Christentums] may peacefully co-exist in an ordinary living room, not by ignoring each other, but by amiably engaging each other in common reflection and sharing of views.11 Schleiermacher explains in delicate terms here that his book will dramatise Christian community, revealing it to allow individual difference in a shared space free from conflict and full of discussion. If the passage seems tentative and courteous, then it is worthwhile noting what it misses about the original context for its composition. For Schleiermacher’s references to peace and happy co-existence in the 1826 edition will have come amid memories of war, 8 Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, 88. 9 Bruce McCormack’s book Karl Barth’s Critically Realistic Dialectical Theology: Its Genesis and Development 1909–1936 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), gives a rich account of the ­development in Barth’s theological thinking. 10 Barth, Church Dogmatics, i.ii. 20 (40). 11 Chr 25–26.

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struggle and occupation. In the Autumn of 1806—the year Schleiermacher published the original book—Halle was overrun by Napoleon’s troops, his house was looted by French soliders, he lost many of his possessions and he and his neighbours were left without money or fuel. For weeks they would struggle by with donations from the French commissary.12 In the text itself there are nods to lost fathers and brothers, and in the light of Schleiermacher’s travails, and the social and material upheavals endured by his audience during the Napoleonic wars, we esteem that the notion of co-existence which features here in this passage isn’t simply a flippancy. And yet, it is nevertheless significant that in this passage, Schleiermacher does not use theological language nor invoke the transcendent to describe the drama in his book. Instead, in this introductory note he uses terms that could be used about any group of people who come together around a shared cause or ideal. Moreover, the attempt that follows in the Christmas Dialogue itself to demonstrate this amiable, civilised, yet diverse picture of the Christian f­aithful—what Schleiermacher refers to as “a wide variety of ways for understanding Christianity”—means depicting a lawyer, wary of religious enthusiasm; a pious child, lovely and effusive; a young father, with mystical theological inclinations; a young mother, who professes to see Christ in the face of her daughter.13 Gathered here in this “ordinary living room” are individuals that we could certainly describe as carrying particularities and idiosyncrasies, their own subjective perspectives. And yet, in light of Barth’s critique we wonder whether the differences between them are relatively superficial, given that they all fit snugly into that plush drawing room which Schleiermacher furnishes with the manners, dress, language, and categories of the gebildet Prussian bourgeois.14 If we approach the text from this perspective and include our own ­reservations about the limitations of Schleiermacher’s conception of Bildung, we thus meet Schleiermacher as an advocate of a private, familial and 12

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Life 62. In a letter to Henriette von Willich during this period, Schleiermacher explains how he and his sister Nanni were doing their best to calm others through the terror. His incorrigible wit remains—he adds that “his health is suffering very much from the privation of wine” and explains that he keeps on going at his Plato project, despite the disturbances. Wei 13: “weil ich in der Tochter, wie Maria in dem Sohne, die reine Offenbarung des ­Göttlichen recht demütitg verehren kann…”; Chr 36. In her unpublished PhD dissertation, Liberty A. Hall has argued that the Christmas Dialogue reflects both literary and ethical dimensions of Schleiermacher’s thinking on Bildung. See “Schleiermacher’s Narrative of Bildung: Polarity and Family in Christmas Eve”, Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University, 2009.

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household Christianity. A few years earlier, in On Religion, Schleiermacher had written emphatically that “we await a time at the end of our artful cultivation when no other preparatory society for religion will be needed except pious domesticity”.15 And in this dialogic text he mirrors this sentiment by presenting the family home not only as the stage for all of the action, but also as the most authentic worldly setting for the cultivation of Christian joy. By contrast, tradition, liturgy, and the established church appear only obliquely and infrequently in the book. This much is epitomised in the stories that three of the women—Ernestine, Agnes, and Karoline—are invited to share with the party. At the centrepoint of the Christmas Dialogue’s action, each of these women relates a tale about a previous Christmas Eve and in each case it is the institution of the family rather than the established church which is depicted as the cradle of the Christian life. Agnes’s story concerns the impromptu baptism of a newborn, administered by the baby’s cleric father in the intimacy of their own home. Karoline’s tale also takes place around the crib of a child, who on Christmas Eve makes a ­miraculous recovery from presumed terminal illness. It is in Ernestine’s story, however, that the institution of the church—at least, in its historic and concrete form—is explicitly designated as a bleak and stale place. Ernestine recalls that as a young girl she was thoroughly taken with the idea of attending Christmas Eve matins. She had to wait a number of years before she could attend such a service, and so each year, naturally, her anticipation and excitement grew. When the opportunity finally came however, her joy was instantly deflated by the dull tableau awaiting her. Faced with “few uneven voices”, and “old grey walls, impervious to light”,16 a crestfallen Ernestine started to leave the church. Yet before she reached the door, she was struck by what she describes as “the noblest scene” [die edelsten Bildung] that she had ever witnessed—“the sanctuary, the holy place [das Heiligtum], that I had been seeking so long in vain”. What Ernestine encountered that night was not the sort of grand spectacle one might expect to follow these lofty words, however, but simply a mother holding a baby. A little pair, who in their own little eddy of meaning quite apart from the minister in the church, the underwhelming singing, or the liturgy unfolding behind her, appeared to Ernestine as if they were “an artist’s picture of Mary and child, in living exemplar” [lebendige Gestalten].17 With this story, Ernestine thus offers a dreary vision of established liturgical practice, 15 16 17

kga i.2, 290; OR 93. Elsewhere in the dialogue, light takes on its traditional role as a sign for the coming of Christ, the presence of Christ in the world. Wei 34; Chr 58.

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juxtaposed with her rapturous delight at a simple and informal encounter taking place between strangers. Indeed, the women’s stories as a whole seem to offer a loose and liberal ecclesiology—a church nestled in the human home and the heart, with only a peripheral regard for traditional liturgical structures. Barth’s own interest in these stories from the women stems from the ­implications he thinks they have for Schleiermacher’s christology. Since they witness to faith as something which emerges in the mundane, depict the loving interaction between mother and child as an ideal for harmonious religious fellowship, and suggest that divine revelation can take place within everyday human encounter, Barth esteems these stories to promote an emaciated picture of Christ’s divinity and his role as the standard and guarantee of human redemption. In Barth’s view, Schleiermacher fails to attest to the glory and uniqueness of the Incarnation, which, ordained by God as a specific event in time, effects a radical transformation through human history as a whole. Instead, Schleiermacher appears to domesticate the Incarnation and its influence, and to depict the completion and exaltation of the human race as a process that can be realised by humans themselves. In Barth’s rendering, there thus seems to be little to distinguish Schleiermacher’s Christianity from a religion of merely Feuerbachian proportions, consisting simply of projected or objectified [vergegenständlichen] human ideals.18 For Schleiermacher’s Dialogue, Barth argues, portrays humans as agents who “obviously can be and already are the same”.19 It preaches that redemption is a possible outcome of every human experience or human encounter, regardless of the specific events surrounding the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.20 In Schleiermacher’s character Eduard, Barth finds another voice who fails to assert Christ’s concrete, objective, and singular authority “as this One” [als ­dieser Einer]21 in whom and through whom all humans are saved. Eduard be18

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In his introductory essay to Feuerbach’s Wesen des Christentums, Barth explains how Feuerbach’s conception of religion as a projection of the human self-consciousness rose out of the same cultural climate as did Schleiermacher’s theology—a shared imaginary according to which “man is not only the measure of all things, but also the epitome, the origin and end of all values”. See Karl Barth, “An Introductory Essay”, trans. James Luther Adams, in The Essence of Christianity, by Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper & Row, 1957), xxviii. dts 129; tts 69. Barth thus agrees with Wilhelm Dilthey’s interpretation of the Christmas Dialogue, that it is about “personal experience in the fellowship of Christians”, and that in it, ­Schleiermacher presents the Christian religion “as the exalted and liberated life of the human mind and emotions in general”, whose core and goal is “exalted humanity, completely sanctified [vollendet geheiligte] humanity”. (dts 112; tts 59). dts 129; tts 69.

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gins his speech to the group by explaining that for him, the festival of Christmas does not bring to mind the particular and historical identity of Jesus Christ. At Christmas, he clarifies, he does not tend to imagine Christ as “a child of such an appearance, born of this or that parent, here or there”.22 Instead, Eduard understands the festival through the lens of the Johannine prologue, and interprets the announcement that the Word of God became flesh to mean that Christ is “the appearing of the original and the divine” [das Hervortreten dieses Ursprünglichen und Göttlichen], in the form [Gestalt] of “finite, limited, sensible nature”. Barth’s understanding of this passage is that Eduard universalizes human dignity in the eyes of God. Eduard, he thinks, depicts Christ as one who celebrates merely the “universal dignity of man in general, in his participation in being as one who is becoming [in seiner als Werdender gesetzten Teilnahme am Sein]”.23 In Barth’s view then, Eduard preaches a christology consistent with that offered in the women’s stories—one whereby: the relation between the individual Christ and the individual Christian can obviously be reversed, that the communication [Mitteilung] which founds the church must originate independently again with each ­individual, and that man in himself can be born and take shape [gestalten] in each individual.24 A further example that Barth uses to communicate his damning analysis of Schleiermacher’s christology is Leonhardt’s speech to the assembled party. This is because Leonhardt asserts that Christianity’s greatest mechanism for preserving belief in Jesus Christ and promoting among its adherents a sense of joy and wonder at his birth, is not the catechesis that Christians receive, nor any continued attention to scripture or doctrine. Rather, it is the affective force of the Christmas festival. Leonhardt insists that the place that Christianity ­retains in contemporary society is indebted to the popularity of its ceremonies, feasts, and festivals. He asserts that the Christian faith has “far less a connection” with the personal activity of Jesus of Nazareth on earth than most people assume, and that “the common folk [das Volk] hold so much more to rites and customs than to narratives and doctrines”.25 Leonhardt thus offers a blunt refusal of the notion that Christ’s identity as a historical figure makes a difference to 22 23 24 25

Wei 57; Chr 82. dts 129; tts 69. These are Barth’s own terms, not Schleiermacher’s. It is significant that the latter does not use this language of “participation” [teilnehmen], with its ontological implications. dts 129; tts 69. Wei 46–48; Chr 70–73.

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human faith,26 while he also implies that christological formulae need not include details of Christ’s historical situation and the discrete events that made up his life. Leonhardt’s speech here thus firmly bolsters Barth’s thesis that Schleiermacher’s Christ is merely the symbol of a universal human dignity, having no objective authority, or real salvific function of his own. It has become clear that Barth makes a series of sound and ­theologically-motivated criticisms of the content of Schleiermacher’s text. Yet at this juncture we have also covered enough material from Barth’s assessment of the work to see how he exhibits that tendency, which we underlined in Chapter seven, to treat it as if it were a fully worked-out systematic theology— one which carries a linear trajectory, a single voice, and a unified purpose. What we have seen is that Barth assumes Leonhardt’s speech, the women’s stories, and the content of Eduard’s address to be different strands of a single argument—a single argument which aims to speak in general terms. According to Barth’s perspective, all of these elements point towards the problematic christology that he identifies as their conclusion. Momentarily, I will appraise this aspect to Barth’s interpretation in light of my argument about the significance of literary form. Yet before I do this, it is necessary to consider an important justification that Barth offers for his claim that “Schleiermacher himself speaks” in Leonhardt’s speech to the group.27 The justification in question is the following: in the second edition of the Christmas Dialogue, published twenty years after the first, Schleiermacher ­revises the content of Leonhardt’s speech on the significance of Christian festivals. In doing so, he pulls this speech closer into line with his own increasingly careful approach to human history, and the role that recorded history plays in Christian faith and the Christian tradition.28 And since the mature dogmatic theologian Schleiermacher chooses to edit Leonhardt’s 26 27 28

Barth sums up Leonhardt’s contribution in the following manner: “Das Christentum sei zwar gelten zu lassen als starke und kräftige Gegenwart, aber das hänge mit der wirklichen Person Christus wenig zusammen”. (dts 118). TaC 149. Emphasis my own. A number of the revisions that Schleiermacher makes to Leonhardt’s speech involve subtle shifts in terminology. The “first appearance [Erscheinung] of the Redeemer in the world” becomes “the first entrance [Eintritt] of the Redeemer into the world”, for instance. An example of a more substantial revision that Schleiermacher makes, however, is his decision to include a few lines in the speech about the issue of Christ’s miraculous ­activity. In the second edition, Leonhardt specifically states that participating in festivals makes a Christian believer more likely to believe in Christ’s miracles. Festivals are thereby presented as providing a kind of context or everyday background for faith—as enabling apprehension of the miraculous and the supernatural. And with these new lines on miracles, Leonhardt also provides a longer and more careful introduction to his view

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speech, and to replace or refine some of the expressions he uses about festivals, the reader can infer that Leonhardt’s (carefully edited) views actually represent Schleiermacher’s own. To put it another way: Leonhardt’s statements have undergone a change between editions, and so we deduce that Leonhardt speaks on behalf of Schleiermacher. Barth suggests: the way [Schleiermacher] clarified and softened this speech in 1826 and adapted it to his later, more cautious attitude towards history shows too clearly that Leonhardt’s speech was not given in order to be refuted.29 Barth’s inference is worthy of our attention. For why would Schleiermacher amend Leonhardt’s words between editions, were he not invested in the meaning of these words as somehow communicating an important and meaningful point, or as somehow reflective of his own opinion, which had since changed? Barth prompts us to ask whether we might reasonably put our concerns about literary form to one side and treat the book instead simply as a straight and ­ systematic presentation of Schleiermacher’s theology. In  response to these considerations, Edmund Newey has more recently proposed that Schleiermacher revised Leonhardt’s speech because he thought with hindsight that it would be helpful to make these orthodox boundaries clearer, for the sake of his reading public. In other words, Newey’s suggestion is that while Schleiermacher matured, and took on a position of more power and responsibility within both Church and academy, it became more of a priority for him to avoid confusing his readers.30 With these revisions, then, we are dealing with an increasingly conservative Schleiermacher—a minister less at the margins of the established Prussian church (the sort of preacher willing to defend Schlegel’s Lucinde and keep intimate company with salonières and avant grade literati), and more at the centre. This is something we can also see, Newey avers, in Schleiermacher’s decision to amend Ernst’s speech too in 1826, so as to bind the universal import of Christmas more tightly to the particular person of Christ—shifting the very general language of “Christentum”, to the more specific “Christus”.31 Indeed, according to Newey’s perspective, Schleiermacher’s revisions across his text as a whole betray the burgeoning anxiety of their mature author, richer in administrative and institutional that “the ritual [Handlung] is more powerful than the word”—a view which appears in both editions. See kga i.5, 84–85. 29 TaC 149. 30 Edmund Newey, Children of God: The Child as the Source of Theological Anthropology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 103–104. 31 See kga i.5, 92.

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responsibility, and cognizant that his book and its characters may mislead his readers, and that due care might be taken to avoid such misunderstandings. These revisions would be matched, of course, by the much more deliberate set of changes Schleiermacher made to On Religion over time. The suggestion is that we are dealing with a writer who is gaining an increasing sense of responsibility over this work and wishes increasingly to be in control of the impression his book is making. To supplement Newey’s points, however, it is also worth noting that the substantial revisions that Schleiermacher made to Ernst’s and Leonhardt’s speeches stand out in the second edition as the most significant changes to a book he otherwise altered only gently and stylistically. Schleiermacher insisted that he made only a “few and insignificant amendments” to the text in 1826—changes which “serve only to fasten down and secure what seems to me to have been expressed with insufficient clarity and definiteness, and to do so without disturbing any essential feature”.32 And of the 328 revisions that S­chleiermacher made in total, most of these could be described as minor changes of style and presentation. Schleiermacher does not appear to revise his text as if it were a teaching document or work of constructive theology, one bursting with concrete arguments and propositional statements. Rather, he seems to treat it as a crystallised piece that needn’t be changed so much as clarified and refined—a piece that can remain as it is in essentials, but might be expressed more beautifully.33 If we read the Christmas Dialogue as a straight or linear text, as it were, then I agree with Barth that we would have much theological cause for concern and for debate. But by neglecting the distinctive form of the Christmas Dialogue, it is worth asking whether Barth has occluded something constitutive of its 32 33

Friedrich Schleiermacher, “Vorerrinnerung zur zweiter Ausgabe”, in Die Weihnachtsfeier: Ein Gespräch, Berlin: George Reimer, 1826, iii; Chr 25. The judgment I offer here—including my note that there are a total of 328 revisions to the text—is indebted to the extensive work that Terrence Tice has done as a translator of, and commentator on, the Christmas Dialogue. Having studied the revisions that ­Schleiermacher made for the second edition of his text, Tice concludes that nearly all of these are stylistic. And of the editing that Schleiermacher does to Leonhardt’s words and Ernst’s speech, he writes: “[this] replaces some unpropitious expressions in the first edition and presents elucidations of several points inadequately made; but it shifts the original impression very little”. See Tice, Introduction, in Chr 21. In 1990, Tice relied on Hermann Mulert’s 1908 edition of the text to make his comparisons between Schleiermacher’s 1806 and the 1826 versions (See Friedrich Schleiermacher, Weihnachtsfeier, ed. Hermann Mulert, Leipzig: Verlag der Deutschen Buchhandlung, 1908). My own references have been to Volume i.5 of the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (DeGruyter, 2011), however, because this text also presents the first edition of 1806, with all changes to the second edition indicated in notes.

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meaning. We remember that Kierkegaard ventured of Schleiermacher’s review of Schlegel’s Lucinde, that here Schleiermacher had produced an open-ended and dialogic piece—a text that doesn’t deliver a singular or completed m ­ essage but offers the reader the space for their own reflections and contributions. And faced with the Christmas Dialogue, which again does not proffer a singular authorial perspective or unified christological standpoint, we find that the dialogue’s multiple voices provide a constant and polyvalent witness to the specific difficulty of trying to reconcile the relationship—to appropriate a well-established phrase—between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.34 This is not a struggle that Schleiermacher’s text claims to overcome, either, in the same way that he depicts church buildings ambiguously and ambivalently in the text, plays with the notion that a child’s faith is the richest in the whole house, and gives no certain signal of theological authority across the group. In Leonhardt’s speech of course, we hear praise for the opiate-like quality of the Christmas festival. Leondardt effectively extols the jolliness and communicability of the event as much more useful to Christianity than scriptural witness, liturgy, practice or prayer. But seeing as Schleiermacher has gently mocked Leonhardt elsewhere in the book, are we to take his statements now as somehow authoritative? Are we to entertain the view that this is Schleiermacher’s own voice speaking to us earnestly and persuasively, trying to reason with us? Indeed, in a certain, pointed way, it would also be an interpretative p ­ ossibility for us to consider Leonhardt’s critique as bringing in a bite of uncertainty to the whole procedure. Might not Leonhardt even be the lingering doubt which—as Schleiermacher attested in To Cecilie—reveals religious feeling itself to be much more than simply fideistic trust, an ignorance of life’s clutter and its complications? And similarly, if we come back to those stories that the women offer in the text and consider them from the finite and creaturely 34

This phrase is said to have originated with Martin Kähler’s text Der sogenannte historische Jesus und der geschichtliche, biblische Christus [The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ], which was published in 1896, some sixty years following S­ chleiermacher’s death. It is of course often linked with the philosophy of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), however, who famously spoke about the gulf between contingent historical truths [zufällige Geschichtswahrheiten], and the “necessary truths of reason” [notwendigen Vernunftwahrheiten], as “the ugly ditch which I cannot get across, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make the leap”. (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Lessing: Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 87.) While the anxiety of this “gulf” between reason and history is certainly operative in Schleiermacher’s character Leonhardt, however, his other characters—namely the women, little Sophie, and the enigmatic Josef—demonstrate, by contrast, the role of the suprarational and affective in religious belief. Their questions seem to be more of the type: “how does what I feel and experience relate to history?”

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perspective that Schleiermacher advertises elsewhere in his corpus, then we find them testifying to the surprising nature of grace. That is—they attest the unpredictability of divine work against the solid assumptions and expectations of human creatures. These women meet God in the midst of the mundane, in unlikely places, in the face of another human being. Since Barth reduces all of these voices merely to aspects of Schleiermacher’s own opinion in his analysis, however, and treats the dialogue as if it were one of his sermons, he simultaneously casts the christological tension which plays out across the text as a tension that is simply internal to the author’s mind. To assert against Barth that Schleiermacher does not impose such a totalizing a­ uthorial grasp over the dialogue, then, means paying attention to the differences between the voices in the text, treating these voices as independent, and as being able to represent perspectives which lie beyond Schleiermacher’s own. It means recognising that the text is not a teaching document. And it is here, then, that I suggest that the dialogue form (which of its very nature eschews moves to totalise and universalise) becomes a fruitbearing aspect to Schleiermacher’s work. For this form enables him to attest to human particularity and the situated nature of human existence, where this may not be stressed in the explicit content of the piece alone. He can focus on a group of very specific characters—in this case, a well-appointed and middleclass Prussian home—without this focus meaning a presumption that their tastes, reality, or their habits are universal to humanity. And the form also lends his work a provisionality. This is not a priest giving forth in the pulpit— rather, it is an author who has both voluntarily and involuntarily generated the possibility for numerous readings, and who has invited the reader him or herself to take part in the interpretation and completion of the text. Now that I have made these claims about how I think we might profitably read the Christmas Dialogue, it is possible to see, I think, how my study of Schleiermacher’s early ethical writings provides an insightful background to the structure of his theological thinking more generally. For as I sought to demonstrate in Part 2 of the present study, Schleiermacher theorised difference as something integral to human life, and ventured that it is something which is not to be overcome or ironed out. Loving friendships, he argued, are found and sustained through difference. In his Soliloquies, Schleiermacher thereby depicted human society in a way which sought to recapture the vision that St Paul delivers in his first letter to the church in Corinth (12: 12–30), of an ecclesial body made up of distinct but interdependent members.35 If a community is to flourish, Schleiermacher argues, then each human being must be 35

kga i.3, 18; S 31.

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treated according to their nature as a microcosm of humanity as a whole. Writing mournfully in his Soliloquies about the stratified, restrictive, and stale nature of Prussian society in the nineteenth century, he explained that it was this stale structure that prohibited individuals from developing abiding and meaningful bonds with each other. “Even if he, whose heart seeks love everywhere in vain, should learn where dwelt his friend and his beloved”, Schleiermacher wrote, “[he would nevertheless be] restricted by his station in life, by the rank which he holds in that meagre thing we call society”.36 Schleiermacher’s words here carry anything but optimism about the strength of universal humanity to look after itself or to know what is good for it. Instead, he offers a sharp and melancholic critique of the loveless managerial structures that humans surround themselves with—structures which stifle and strangle and sanitise. This is also an issue of epistemology and of the quality of human nature. Schleiermacher’s perspective is that knowledge of one’s self, as well as of one’s friends and neighbours, is generated in the course of those same reciprocal ­relationships that define and form us. And from such knowledge love is issued, as in the pushing and pulling of our inter-dependent, mutually-affective relationships, we are bonded to one another and become significant to one another. Schleiermacher conveyed this point in a further passage from his Soliloquies—a sombre one about friendship and death, which I raise here for the first time. He writes: I can assert that death will never part my friends from me, for I take up [aufnehmen] their lives in mine, and their influence [Wirkung] upon me never ceases. But it is I myself who slowly perish in their death… e­ very creature that loves another kills something in that other through its death, and he who loses many of his friends is finally slain himself at their hands, since cut off from influencing those who were his world, his spirit [Geist] is driven inward and forced to consume itself.37 In light of passages like the one above, it is possible to find a hook from which to challenge Barth’s critique that Schleiermacher’s Christ is merely a  ­hypostatization—a revered symbol, with no history or particularity or flesh—of what is a universally-possible relationship between humanity and God. We saw earlier in our discussion of On Religion that Schleiermacher thinks it impossible for humans to distinguish God from the world with the intellect or through knowledge. We cannot know God outside of our family ties, 36 37

kga i.3, 31; S 54. kga i.3, 51; S 86–87.

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Schleiermacher urges, or beyond our culturally-couched prejudices. However, when faced with the charge that Schleiermacher’s understanding of human redemption thus incorporates a vision of generalised human experience, I would wish to maintain that there are ways in which Schleiermacher’s anthropology, both ethical and theological, avoids such generality. The patterns of imagination that Schleiermacher employs when describing individual human beings—their being precarious, incarnated, and socially formed—do not match up to the notion that “humanity” either has a general “existence” that can be properly articulated in universal terms, or that it can be saved through the means of an abstracted, purely formal ideal. Indeed, what we find in the Dialogue, and what I think Barth’s critique gets at, takes issue with, but never properly considers or makes hermeneutical room for, is that the orientation of Schleiermacher’s theological imagination is such that it begins from the perspective of the single individual. It always returns to and starts from the present moment, the finite experience of the firstperson perspective. Let us turn back to Eduard’s speech at this stage, which Barth takes to be typical of Schleiermacher’s tendency to render Christ merely a symbol for universal human dignity. For in this speech, Eduard argues that what Christians celebrate in the festival of Christmas is not just one baby, born in a manger, but humanity in general, who by the light of the Incarnation are able to imagine themselves as completed human beings. Does not this ­emphasis on humanity in general, as opposed to the particular work and person of Jesus Christ, begin to look like the (unchristian) Romantic vision of religion that we attributed to the young Schlegel in previous chapters? Eduard’s words here forget the human flesh of Jesus, they occlude his death and resurrection, they omit his radical teaching and action and his mission to the poor. This is a grand omission which—were this to be the beginning and sum of a systematic theology—surely renders Barth’s critique justified. And yet if we read on, there is another aspect to Eduard’s speech which suggests that his emphasis on the whole of humanity here does not n ­ ecessarily herald the view that human redemption—or the completion of human nature—occurs because of an abstract principle that exists before Christ and perhaps despite Christ. For since he proceeds to make the Johannine prologue central to his account of the significance of Christmas, Eduard is able to maintain the traditional language of the Word of God become flesh, and with it the teaching that it is in one human that redemption is made possible. Eduard, then, does not necessarily portray Christ merely as a brilliant symbol of completed humanity, but his emphases do invoke a tradition whereby he is heralded as the mystical body of God incarnate. Christ is the head of the body to which all Christians belong, and of which all Christians partake. Christ

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becomes him to whom I owe my salvation. And it is to this end that we can read Eduard’s comments later in the same speech, that: The Son needs no rebirth [Wiedergeburt] but is born of God originally [ursprünglich]… Until he enters history, all else is presage ­[Vorbedeutung]: all human life is related to his life, and only through this relation [Beziehung] does it partake of goodness and divinity. And now that he has come, in him we celebrate not only ourselves but all who are yet to come as well as all who have been before us.38 “All human life is related to Christ’s life”, Eduard urges here—a flickering ­prelude, perhaps, to Schleiermacher’s own declaration in his Glaubenslehre, that “there is no way to obtain participation in Christian community other than by faith in Jesus, viewed as the Redeemer”.39 By offering this alternative reading of Eduard’s speech, my intention is not to replace Barth’s thesis about “Schleiermacher’s christology” with a new o­ verarching theory or schema of my own. For the speech that Eduard delivers so confidently here—his grand references to the divine purpose, and the metaphysical relationship binding humanity together in divine love—is thrown into relief, and even made to seem remote and conceptually burdensome, by the cheerful household scenes and cosy exchanges that pervade the rest of the dialogue. In these scenes, joy and love are experienced in the immanent domestic relationships that exist between friends and relatives, while the question of how these relationships are connected to the transcendent, if at all, remains completely open. Schleiermacher’s Dialogue is not dogmatic, and it does not attempt to prove the reality of that which is hidden to the direct experience of the senses and concealed in the mundane rhythms of everyday life. What it reveals about the nature of Schleiermacher’s theological epistemology is once more, refracted from a different angle, this emphasis on human finitude. In On Religion we were told that we cannot know the Infinite “without” the world, and thus none of our claims about the divine can be abstract or general. In this Christmas Dialogue, I contend, we are now invited to consider—without coersion, dogma or sermon—whether we can know God without Christ. Indeed, such is Schleiermacher’s commitment to stressing finitude, and inviting conversation, that the Dialogue offers only gestures and hints to that transcendent and hidden relation which Eduard tries and in many ways fails 38 39

Wei 59; Chr 84. Emphasis mine. CF §14, (102).

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to invoke directly. The child’s excitement about the concealed contents of her Christmas gifts, and the role that the characters allot to music—unconfined as it is by contingent things40—appear in the end to be the most fitting and fruitful accompaniment for religious feeling [das religiöse Gefühl]. 2

Music and the Transcendent

I mention music here as a means through which the Dialogue invokes the transcendent and signals a reality behind and beyond particular objects and contingent events. Indeed, as well as being a motif that appears throughout the text—practiced, thought about, and alluded to by Schleiermacher’s ­characters—music does also appear to have this special role, as an art form best equipped to gesture towards the divine, whose meaning cannot be grasped with words, concepts, or concrete formulations. Schleiermacher’s character Agnes epitomises this idea for instance, when she employs the following musical metaphor to speak about the nature of the religious life: I do not know how to describe with words how deeply and ardently I then felt that all radiant, serene joy is religion; that love, pleasure, and ­devotion are tones making up a perfect harmony, tones which fit in with each other in any phrasing and in full chord [die auf jede Weise einander folgen und zusammenschlagen können].41 Furthermore, and as I mentioned briefly in the previous chapter, an appeal to music constitutes part of Josef’s greeting to the group, when he appears at the end of the text and chides the three other men for their speech-making. Calling an end to their debating, Josef explains that the methodical, “rigid”, and “cold” form of the men’s addresses renders them an inappropriate way of celebrating the Christmas festival. “Now just think of all the lovely music [the women] could have sung for you”, he exclaims, “in which all the piety of your discourse could have dwelt more profoundly”.42 Josef’s suggestion that music allows ­piety to “dwell” [wohnen], indicates the freer form of musical performance—free (or perhaps loose), in the sense that an audience or participant is given room to interpret a piece in their own particular way. Music’s meaning, in other words, is not bound to concrete references, facts, or propositional statements. It is, 40 41 42

Wei 24; Chr 47. Wei 40; Chr 63. Wei 61; Chr 85.

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however, able to address the heart and the senses as well as the mind—a fact that is also conveyed with this language of “dwelling”. Moreover, Josef also proposes musical performance as a more accessible activity, which in this case and context—the singing of Christmas songs—can be entirely communal and enjoyed even by little Sophie. “Come then”, Josef exclaims, “and above all bring the child if she is not yet asleep, and let me see your glories [Herrlichkeiten], and let us be glad and sing something religious and joyful!”.43 In the closing section of this chapter, I will briefly explore this idea that ­music has a special function in the religious life for Schleiermacher, and that it is a means for invoking the transcendent and the unseen. Doing so will allow me to recapitulate my points about Schleiermacher’s attention to human particularity, even in the religious life. I will suggest that Schleiermacher’s appeal to music is fruitful, because it helps him to situate the religious life as higher than a person’s “ethical life” and their “natural sentimentality”.44 And yet with this focus on music, Schleiermacher still refrains from rendering the religious life merely as a retreat inward, away from language, debate, and rational enquiry, or as a devotion to purely human ideals. This last concern—that since Schleiermacher privileges music, he eschews the role of language in the religious life and renders religion a merely private and subjective affair—is again one that Barth expressed. And indeed, Barth twins this concern with a critique of Schleiermacher’s decision to foreground the female characters in his Dialogue. Women, that is, who prioritise the quiet development of their inner spirituality, who claim to find God in their ­interactions with others (especially their own children), and who are ­foremost preoccupied with the private context of the family home. From Barth’s perspective, the way that Schleiermacher treats both of these subjects once again enables him to prioritise the universal at the expense of the p ­ articular. Since he emphasises the musical and the feminine, that is, Barth sees ­Schleiermacher as depicting the possibility of a purified humanity, one which is exalted already now on earth through the exchange and expression m ­ erely of certain feelings. There is no work, no fraught dialectic, no conversion, ­simply peaceful and passive feminine religion. And in the context of his challenge on Schleiermacher, what Barth seems to recognise as “work” is dedicated ­critical engagement with the Christian tradition, the toil of being formed and reformed through dialectical argument, and overcoming ethical dilemmas and facing spiritual challenges. In this light, Schleiermacher’s women enjoy the triumph of completed humanity since they are depicted as having no need 43 44

Wei 61–62; Chr 86. kga i.2, 309; OR 108.

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for conformation or transformation to Christ. They do not share the struggling nature of the men of the household, who, inevitably entangled in dialectical speeches and christological theories, can only gesture falteringly at the real meaning of Christmas. Instead, Barth explains, what we find here is that “the woman already is and has what we celebrate at Christmas, so far as that is ‘the immediate union of the divine and the childlike’”45 This critique also enfolds Schleiermacher’s interest in music, for Barth’s ­conclusion is that the Dialogue demonstrates music as promising an immediate and uncomplicated union with the divine. Schleiermacher’s characters, Barth argues, induce feelings through music which are greater in value than religious teachings and principles, since these latter are communicated through language and concrete concepts and offer only a secondary impression of the relationship between God and his creation. Indeed, Barth can appeal to Schleiermacher’s character to Eduard on this issue, who exclaims: [E]very fine feeling comes to the fore only when we have found the right musical expression for it. Not the spoken word, for this can never be ­anything but indirect—but a real, uncluttered tone.46 Here then, Barth once again aims to bolster his criticism of Schleiermacher, that the latter believes that humans are able attain a purified and exalted state of religious harmony through their own means. In Schleiermacher’s view, he argues, what Christmas imparts is in fact a human capability, “the supreme triumph of human nature” [höchsten Triumph der menschlichen Natur].47 And again, Barth is convinced that although Schleiermacher claims that humans can transcend finite frailties and issues in religion—and that in religion they can also transcend concrete differences too—all that his scheme achieves in the end is to collapse his notion of God into the world. This, for Barth, is the failure of Schleiermacher’s liberal Kulturprotestantismus. It is his refusal to heed the divine message as radically and absolutely other to creation—a refusal that issues in a deification of human culture and human feeling on the one hand and a domestication of God on the other. In the following passage Barth delivers this critique, while he explains why Schleiermacher exalts music as that medium through which the divine communicates itself directly:

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TaC 158. Wei 23; Chr 46. dts 133; tts 71.

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‘Why music?’ one may ask…Because the word cannot do justice to what Schleiermacher takes to be the real Christmas miracle, that is, elevated humanity; because the word as we have seen sets man before riddles [vor Rätsel stellt], entangles him in self-contradictions, and forces him into dialectical arts in which he is not really credible [glaubwürdig] to himself. Words always end with a reference to the ineffable object and ineffable joy. But this object and this joy are elevated humanity, ourselves, and how fortunate is it that, harassed and threatened by words, we can flee [flüchten] for refuge to the realm of music, to Christian music and a musical Christianity.48 It is significant that—although he does not make the link himself—Barth ­describes Schleiermacher’s treatment of music in such a way that it bears certain similarities to the views that other Frühromantiker and particularly Friedrich Schlegel expressed about the relationship between art and the divine. For famously, it was in art as individual creative expression, and specifically in poetry, that the Schlegels, Novalis, and their circle found their religion. As Oskar Walzel has explained—in poetry, the Romantics located “a means of grasping the absolute … [for] here the Infinite became finite, the absolute became experience”.49 In his Athenaeum fragments, Schlegel champions the “the religion of man and artist now springing up everywhere”—a religion, that is, which he believes will only be opposed by “the few remaining real Christians. But they too, when the sun really begins to dawn, will fall down and worship”.50 And as Schlegel explores what this Kunstreligion entails, he names the imagination as the organ through which a human comes to know the divine,51 and envisions divinity itself as “everything that is purely original and sublime, consequently the individual to the highest power”.52 Such is the interplay between art and religion for Schlegel—an interplay mediated through individual genius, originality, and creativity—that he suggests in one fragment that “only someone who has his 48 dts 132, tts 71. 49 Oskar Walzel, German Romanticism, 28–30. 50 Schlegel’s Ideas, no. 92. In Friedrich Schlegel, trans. Peter Firchow, Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 249. See J. Weltman, “The Religion of Friedrich Schlegel”, The Modern Language Review 31, no. 4 (Oct., 1936): 539–544, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 70: [For Schlegel], The artist… is that absolute mediator who “perceives the divin­ ity within himself”—who perceives himself as divine or as “the God within us”—and who is charged with “revealing”, “communicating”, and “presenting this divinity to all mankind in his conduct and actions, in his words and works”. 51 Ideas, no. 8. In Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, 242. 52 Ideas, no. 47. In Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, 245.

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own religion, his own original way of looking at infinity, can be an artist”.53 The impression we get is that in Schlegel’s view, to be religious was not to belong to a “positive” religion but to find the divine within oneself. Another contemporary trend that helps to contextualise Schleiermacher’s own position on religion and the artistic is the emergence of wordless, purely instrumental music in the late eighteenth century. This music, which would later come to be known as “absolute music” (a term that Wagner coined in the 1840s), was significant among critics, theorists, and philosophers for the way that it eschewed concrete verbal and conceptual content, and thereby totalised form.54 It influenced figures like Ludwig Tieck, W.H. Wackenroder, and E.T.A. Hoffmann to articulate theories of musical expressivism, wherein they lauded it as the primordial and most pure medium through which humans can express their innermost feelings, which cannot be described merely with words or actions.55 With such music, the composer and the musician gesture to that which cannot be said or conceptualised, but that which is nevertheless still meaningful and intelligible. Expression in absolute music does not amount simply to a denial of meaning or sense. Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1810) was a signal moment in this regard, since he describes the symphony as the outpouring of the composer’s yearning for the Infinite—a powerful expression of feelings with which it arrests and absorbs its audience.56 In Schleiermacher’s character Eduard, whom we quoted above, we thus find an echo of this expressivist perspective. For having denied that the spoken word can be a fitting vessel for conveying and inducing religious feelings, Eduard esteems music’s “uncluttered tone” for this purpose instead.57 53 54

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Ideas, no. 13. In Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, 242. The information in this paragraph has its source in Ian Bent, ed., Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), Daniel Chua. Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Enrico Fubini, The History of Music Aesthetics, trans. Michael Hatwell (Houndmills: Macmillan, 1990), 160–164. As Andrew Bowie points out in his analysis of nineteenth-century musical expressivism, Hegel rejected music as a vehicle for communicating truth, precisely because he followed the expressivists, and assumed it to be an expression of “feeling” [die Empfindung]. See Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity, 182. See Davis Charlton, ed., E.T.A Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, The Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 234–352. That it had become popular doctrine by the mid nineteenth century, that the beauty of music was tied up in its ability to express feelings, is evidenced by Eduard Hanlick’s 1854 text Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, where he argues at length against the idea. See Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music: A Contribution to the Revisal of Musical Aesthetics (7th edition), trans. Gustav Cohen, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974). Wei 23; Chr 46.

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It is important to stress the distinctive nature of Schleiermacher’s own ­ erspectives on religion, art, and human identity, however, such that they p cannot be accurately pinned down to the notion of a Kunstreligion or to the expressivism of Hoffmann.58 Both of these terms suggest an approach to religion which prioritises the inward and the individual, underscores personal and original creativity, and perceives that what is privately experienced, and inaccessible to language, is most fittingly communicated outward through forms, figures and images. In the deliberately polyphonic structure of his Christmas Dialogue, however, Schleiermacher presents an interpersonal understanding of religion that has language and communication right at its centre. Within the text, Eduard’s expressivism forms only one voice in a bigger conversation about the religious life. Indeed, as I noted in Chapter seven, the characters in Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue are drawn together as they participate in an event they believe to have cosmic significance. Their religion is not merely private and subjective, each person an architect and inhabitant of their own religious world. Instead, their feelings have a common referent. To use the analytic terminology of Schleiermacher’s speeches On Religion—they all have the same discrete intuition of the universe, and they all dwell in the same determinate form of religion, and thus share a common set of teachings and practices. Taking up a different perspective to Eduard then, Karoline highlights the reciprocal activity of gift-giving, and not music, as that which is able to express the “pure pious joy”59 of Christmas. And for Ernst, who is happily engaged to marry Friederike, it seems that celebrating the religious festival should not only be conceived in unilateral or purely formal terms, as merely the outward expression of inner feelings. Indeed, he suggests that “joyful” external events, commitments, and practices—his own engagement, the arrival of new children, Leonhardt’s travel plans—contribute to and help to make manifest the original radical joy of the Christmas event.60 Moreover, we note that when Sophie’s father presents her with sheet music as a Christmas gift, she exclaims that this present is much better than a book, for she would need to retire to her room in order to enjoy the latter.61 Sophie’s love of music is deliberately public and intelligible, incorporating and expressed through a love of company, of giving and receiving. The text also points out that Sophie’s preference was for performing church music; for songs, that is, which have familiar 58

Abigail Chantler underscores the differences between Schleiermacher and Hoffmann in her article “Revisiting E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Musical Hermeneutics”, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 33, no. 1 (Jun.,2002): 3–30. 59 Wei 22; Chr 45. 60 See Wei 11–12; Chr 35. 61 See Wei; Chr 31.

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words and imagery. What the voices of the text therefore come together to suggest, is that the external and particular joys shared by the group help to bring to light what is inward, eternal, and real to all human agents. If music has a special role in religion, then it is not to draw attention away from other ways of participating in the religious life. As Schleiermacher’s translator Terrence Tice asserts, in the Christmas Dialogue, the ability that humans have “to let music speak for us depends upon a communication of truth having already taken place. Music is not a substitute for proclamation and sharing”.62 It is possible to supplement these points by turning back to On Religion. In his third speech, for instance, Schleiermacher distinguishes his own position on religion from the notion of a Kunstreligion that he finds among his romantic contemporaries. Although Schleiermacher entertains the idea that an “artistic sense” [der Kunstsinn] can “pass over into” [übergehen] religion, he makes it clear that this is not something he himself can claim to understand. He writes: Were it not wanton to wish to go beyond oneself, I should wish ever so clearly how the artistic sense, by itself alone, changes into religion… That I am not acquainted with this path is my most acute limitation; it is the breach [die Lücke] that I feel deeply in my being, but also treat with respect [Achtung].63 Rather than intertwining religion and art so closely as to unite them, then, or asserting that it is through art alone—whether poetry or music—that one comes to find divinity, Schleiermacher’s inclination is to speak instead of a close bond between the two. We read: Religion and art stand alongside one another like two friendly souls whose inner affinity [innere Verwandtschaft], whether or not they equally surmise it, is nevertheless still unknown to them. Friendly words and outpourings [Ergießungen] of the heart always hover on their lips and return again and again because they are still not able to find the proper manner and final cause of their reflection and longing.64 In his Speeches, Schleiermacher thus resists collapsing religion and the artistic into one another. Instead, what emerges elsewhere in the same text, as well as in his Dialogue, is that music is a tool for the imagination—a source that 62 “Introduction”, Chr 14. 63 kga i.2, 262; OR 68. 64 kga i.2, 263; OR 69.

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a ­person can draw on to help them articulate what it means to believe in and honour that which is unseen, and that which cannot be exhausted or explained through words or concepts. Schleiermacher writes in the second speech of On Religion, for example, that: Religious feelings should accompany every human deed [alles Thun des Menschen begleiten] like a holy music; we should do everything with ­religion, nothing because of religion [nichts aus religion].65 Religion can be fruitfully compared to music then, in so far as we understand the latter as a possible accompaniment for human deeds and words, ­complementing them, informing them, and gracing them. Schleiermacher’s greater point is that religion does not oppose or compete with the world, with nature, or with culture. Indeed, this same type of imagery continues in the Christmas Dialogue, as Ernestine accompanies the women on the piano, improvising a series of appropriate pieces while they each relate their stories about Christmas. Here of course, the musical accompaniment is not offered as a way of replacing, interrupting, or negating the meaning of the women’s words.66 Instead, it is offered as a way of fleshing them out, and of providing bridges and links between the individual stories. In the intervals between the tales, Ernestine’s music even fills up the whole room, as she sings hymns chosen to reflect their content. With these passages in mind, we see that quite apart from dissolving ­discourse or eclipsing the need for debate, or indicating a private and personal sphere of meaning, music’s function in the Christmas Dialogue is to accompany and illuminate the action and to draw people together. To this end, it is also worth noting that in On Religion, Schleiermacher communicates the 65 66

kga i.2, 219; OR 30. As Gunter Scholtz has argued, in an essay on Schleiermacher’s approach to music and aesthetic theory: Music alone is one-sided. Schleiermacher even calls it an “accompanying art”, along with mimicry and in contrast, for example, to painting. For historically, he says, it first appears only in combination with words or dance, and in general these arts attract and complement each other… [Schleiermacher’s] essay “Christmas Eve” already shows how language and figural representation take their place alongside music as expressions of religious feeling, and later on he always wants to see religious feeling connected to the word. For every true religion, in Schleiermacher’s mind, links consciousness of God to consciousness of the world and the self, and this should also find expression in art. Gunter Scholtz, “Schleiermacher”, in Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth, eds., Music in German Philosophy: an Introduction (London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 55–57.

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same point about the pervasiveness of the transcendent—the way that the divine penetrates the created world—with the following, and emphatically visual, metaphor: is it really a miracle [Wunder] if the eternal world affects the senses of our spirit [die Organe unseres Geistes] as the sun affects our eyes? Is it a ­miracle when the sun so blinds us that everything else disappears, not only at that moment [Augenblick], but long afterward all objects we observe are imprinted with its image and bathed [übergossen] in its brilliance?67 In response to Barth then, who takes Schleiermacher’s references to music to indicate a flight from that which is concrete and objective—a withdrawal inward, to a private and subjectively owned Christianity—it is also pertinent for us to reiterate the centrality of language to Schleiermacher’s theological vision. For there is reason, I think, for resisting the assumption that S­ chleiermacher constructs and upholds an opposition between the generation of pure religious feelings on the one hand and the attempt to theologise or use words about God on the other. Rather, in Schleiermacher’s dialogue the characters all dwell in relationships that are mediated by language. And the impression is that this linguistically-mediated sociality—a sociality in which all human words are finally ordered at loving and praising the eternal, yet have a substance and history of their own, too—is our unavoidable, “natural” condition. Human agents cannot get “beyond” language or beyond words, as it were, and this is true also in the religious life.68 67 68

kga i.2, 219; OR 29. Cf. Kurt Mueller-Volmer, “Language Theory and the Art of Understanding”, The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 5: Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 173: Languages live and expand by producing a continuous chain of comparisons, new metaphors come into being, signs become signs of other signs, so that we have what Humboldt called ‘the web of language’ that encompasses all its speakers. A word is more than a sign, because it possesses an individuality of its own, on account of the particular aspect through which it presents an object to us, and in regard to what Novalis calls its ‘aura’, the fact that a word transcends its semiotic function by reflecting its historical position within the language. These are not only Schlegel’s views, they are those of Novalis, Humboldt and Schleiermacher as well. Also compare the following passage from Schleiermacher’s 1809/10 lectures on Hermeneutics: “Allein zur Sprache selbst und zur Kenntniß der übersinnlichen Dinge kommt man nur durch Verständniß menschlicher Rede”. Cited in Kurt Victor-Selge, ed., Internationaler Schleiermacher-Kongreß, Berlin 1984 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1985), 1271. In-

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In a passage I have already shared, from his Soliloquies, we find ­Schleiermacher incorporating musical metaphors into his account of how individuals communicate and establish themselves through language. He writes: Each of us need only make his language thoroughly his own and ­artistically all of a piece, so that its derivation and modulation, its logic and its sequences, exactly represent the structure of his spirit, and the music [Harmonie] of his speech has the accent of his heart and the keynote [Grundton] of his thought.69 Schleiermacher evokes music here as a structuring and scaffolding m ­ etaphor. The human personality makes sense, makes meaning, and is modulated through time by patterns, habits and returning sequences—just like a piece of music, he suggests. Music in this case does not draw Schleiermacher away from the matter of dialogue, then, or of the working out of human identity. Rather, he draws on it to help explain such working out. Later in the same text, Schleiermacher employs musical figuration again in a similar way, when we read that “the life of friendship is a sequence of harmonising chords, to a keynote which dies out when the friend passes away”.70 It is at this juncture that I am in a position to stress once again those points about language71 that I underscored in Part 2: that from Schleiermacher’s perspective, no words that issue from human lips and minds can be neutral, universally-verifiable, and unaffected by the particularity of the speaker. Even if we are dealing with two or more speakers who in theory repeat the very same

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deed, although the present study has limited itself to looking at a selection of Schleiermacher’s early religious and ethical writings, he famously developed this attention to the historical nature of language in his seminal lectures on Hermeneutics, and here in a more focussed, and systematic manner. For a demonstration of this point, see Andrew Bowie’s essay “The Meaning of the Hermeneutic Tradition in Contemporary Philosophy”, in Verstehen and Humane Understanding, ed. Anthony O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 121–143. Here, Bowie investigates the interplay between Schleiermacher’s lectures on hermeneutics and the understanding of human subjectivity that he developed among the Romantics. kga i.3, 38; S 66. kga i.3, ; S 87. As Milan Kundera offers, in his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “the most complex music is still a language”. This insight issues from Kundera’s comparison (which he says he owes to his father) of a key signature to a king’s court, where the tones play out, return, and behave according to a hierarchical order : “since each of the twelve notes has its own job, title, and function, any piece we hear is more than mere sound: it unfolds a certain action before us”. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (London: Penguin King, 1983), 178.

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words, the point remains the same, that language is not a series of abstract formulas that can be deployed anew, and identically, by every given human voice.72 Rather, the speaker always contributes to the meaning of the word she is saying, both by virtue of her spatio-temporal context, her mode and manner of expression (tone, volume, speed) and by the web of relationships in which she is immersed. It is according to this perspective on language that in Schleiermacher’s view human words are also unable to describe God in Godself. Indeed, Schleiermacher understood that in a very real sense, the terms that humans use about the God who is their eternal and ineffable creator and sustainer will always have a relative worth. This is because they speak about who God is for the community that is using them.73 In his lectures on Dialectic, Schleiermacher proposed that “we know only about the being of God in us and things. We know nothing whatever about a being of God outside the world or in himself”.74 And as Jack Forstman has put it: Schleiermacher believed that saying “God” is never “objective” in the sense that one speaks of something known entirely apart from oneself. It is always “subjective” in that the utterance is prompted by an event in personal history. This does not mean that God is distinct from man, but that to say “God” is to understand oneself to be in relation to him. Because this is the sole locus of knowledge one does not properly speak about God in himself but only relatively, as he relates to man.75 In saying this much about Schleiermacher’s treatment of language in his Christmas Dialogue, I am not of course disagreeing with Barth. Indeed, it is arguably 72

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In his lectures on Dialektik from 1814/5, Schleiermacher makes the following point: “Absolute identity of knowledge [between persons] can only arise if the individual factor were completely eliminated. That is, though, only possible with the presupposition of an absolutely universal language. But there is no means of producing such a language, even if it is also a product of the intellectual function. For language is not in all respects subordinated to construction, and it keeps a hold on the realm of nature”. (Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings, 278). Schleiermacher’s principle that religion is necessarily social means that we must stipulate how language about God has a meaning that is never “internal” to a single individual, but is gathered in community, and inherited through tradition and shared practices. As Gunter Scholtz sums it up elegantly: “Schleiermacher’s theology and philosophy lead us to conclude that he found the orientation toward a world without a unifying ground and the search for a God without a world equally one-sided”. Gunter Scholtz, “Schleiermacher”, Music in German Philosophy: an Introduction, eds. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner and Oliver Fürbeth (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 56–57. kga ii.10/1, 143. Jack Forstman, A Romantic Triangle: Schleiermacher and Early German Romanticism, 107.

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the case that Barth would go this far with us on our reading of ­Schleiermacher: the real issue is that Barth found this position problematic. As we outlined at the beginning of this chapter, Barth understood divine revelation as the inbreaking of the Word of God from a place beyond human comprehension. Furthermore, he taught that whatever the Word of God commands holds objectively. It transfixes all gazes—it is an “arrow launched at us from beyond an impassable river”.76 From this perspective, and from Barth’s understanding that theology is an attempt to repeat in human words “what is said to men through God himself about God”,77 Schleiermacher’s principle that the generation of a word’s meaning involves those human agents who are using it, is a disaster. Indeed, Eric Sean Nelson has summarised the discord between the two theologians in the following way: Their disagreement rests on how they interpret the nature of language— i.e., on whether the word is fixed via the intention of the absolute author, or whether language is an event in which the human and non-human, the sayable and the unsayable intersect.78 In response to Barth’s concerns, however, what I want to assert here is that Schleiermacher does not render theological language as a Feuerbachian ­projection—as a futile, merely self-referential endeavour. As Schleiermacher understands it, the meaning of human language is of its very nature relational, and this is also a theological pronouncement. Schleiermacher’s attention to the nature of human freedom and human formation, which I have charted throughout this book, led him to understand that no human speech is issued ex nihilo, or is lacking a prompt or object. As we have seen inscribed in his use of particular literary forms—the epistolary novel, soliloquy, and dialogue— Schleiermacher perceives human knowledge to be social, and human speech to be offered in response to a call from without. And it is likewise the case that he understands words about God to be a response to the very gift of life which God gives us gratuitously, and in loving abundance. For Schleiermacher, 76 77 78

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. E.C. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 238. TaC 200. Eric Sean Nelson, “Schleiermacher and Romanticism: Holism, Singularity and the Unconditional”, Schleiermacher, Romanticism and the Critical Arts, A Festschrift in Honor of Hermann Patsch, eds. Hans Dierkes, Terrence N. Tice, and Wolfgang Virmond. A Publication of New Atheneum/Neues Atheneum, Vol. 8. (Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), 12.

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speaking about God is therefore not a projection of human feelings, or the objectification of human self-consciousness, because speaking to God takes place in the context of a relationship. It is always a response.79 Speaking to God and about God is a gesture which that requires one to listen first—it requires one to take up a posture of openness to the world, and a willingness to be defined from without. Schleiermacher communicates this point in a lengthy passage from On Religion, where he retells the creation myth. Here, as he offers a short tale of humanity’s origin, he suggests that the human ability to know God and to ­respond to him, is found, sourced, and borne out from the relationships that a person has with other humans. He writes: As long as the first man was alone with himself and nature, the deity did indeed rule over him; it addressed the man in various ways [auf verschiedene Art], but he did not understand it, for he did not answer it… [the man] did not even develop within his soul; but his heart was moved by a longing for a world… Since the deity recognized that his world would be nothing so long as man was alone, it created for him a partner [Gehülfin],80 and now, for the first time, loving and spiritual tones stirred within him; now, for the first time, the world rose before his eyes [nun erst ging seinen Augen die Welt auf]. In the flesh and bone of humanity he discovered humanity, and in humanity the world [zu dem Fleische von seinem Fleische und Bein von seinem Beine81 endekte er die Menschheit, und in der Menschheit die Welt]; from this moment on he became capable of hearing the voice of the deity and of answering it, and the most sacrilegious transgressions of its laws [die frevelhafteste Übertretung ihrer

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Jean-Louis Chrétien, The Call and the Response, trans. Anne A. Davenport (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 1: “We speak only for having been called, called by what there is to say, and yet we learn and hear what there is to say only in speech itself”. Whereas the English translation “partner” is non-gendered, Schleiermacher’s original term indicates a female helpmate. Note that with his English translation “in the flesh and bone of humanity”, Richard Crouter eclipses just how close Schleiermacher’s words are to the words of Genesis 2:23. (It is not incidental that “das Bein” is the German term used to translate this verse in the Luther Bibel of 1545). A more literal translation of the above phrasing would be “in the flesh of his flesh and the bone of his bone he discovered humanity”—wording that emphasises interdependence and interconnection.

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Gesetze] from now on no longer precluded him from association with the eternal being.82 At the climax of this passage, we are told that it is only in fellowship with another human—who wrought in him the ability to love, and a sense of the spiritual—that the first person became able to speak to the God who created him. Before this man was given a “helpmate”, and before he could thus share his thoughts and ideas and feelings in human discourse, his soul remained unformed, and his appreciation of the world around him was shallow. It was “nothing” to him.83 Once again then, Schleiermacher’s words challenge Barth’s reading that he is a subjectivist and anti-linguistic theologian, since he stresses the mediatory force of human dialogue.84 Yet what is also significant here is that Schleiermacher’s narrative establishes how even prior to that fortifying relationship with the divine which was made possible through human dialogue, the first man is nevertheless bound to his creator, and addressed by him. In other words, the tale assumes the existence of a pre-linguistic relationship between human and divine—a relationship characterised (to use that famous term employed by the mature Schleiermacher) by the absolute dependence of the human upon God. Everything this first man owns has been given to him. And this is true about him even before he can respond to his creator. It is only in order to understand the significance of this gift of life, and to offer thanks and praise for it, that a human needs society, and with society, language. In the passage from On Religion that I have just quoted, Schleiermacher is not of course being dogmatic or programmatic. He has turned to myth, to a suggestive tale with strong biblical resonances, to signal something of what the nature of the divine-human relationship is like. “Let me disclose to you 82

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kga i.2, 228; OR 37. See also this passage from Dialectic (31–32): “Our knowing concerning God is thus completed only with our perspective on the world [Weltanschauung]. As soon as a trace of the latter exists, the basic features of the former make their appearance as well. To the degree that a perspective on the world is defective the idea of deity remains mythical”. This point has already been made by Janet Soskice. I am indebted to the reading she offers of this same passage in her essay “The Word Became Flesh and Dwelt Among Us: Incarnation, Speech and Sociality in Schleiermacher and Augustine”. John Riches critiques Barth’s understanding of God’s Word in Scripture. For Riches, a biblical scholar, Barth’s rendering of the Word of God as absolute truth, which transcends all human efforts to reach up and out for it, alienates it from historical, embodied humanity. “Truth is to be found as we live in this flux”, Riches contends, “not by leaping out of our historical skins”. See John Riches, “Reception History as a Challenge to Biblical Theology”, Journal of Theological Interpretation 7.2 (2013): 185.

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a secret”, he presses, “that lies concealed in one of the most ancient sources of poetry and religion”. But if we take this passage as such—as a piece of wisdom concealed in myth—then what sort of hermeneutical light might it shed on the Christmas Dialogue? The answer is perhaps that it recommends we consider the Incarnation from a properly creaturely and thus unavoidably linguistic perspective. Reading alongside this passage, that is, we see more clearly the Christmas Dialogue’s own suggestion that humans are able to understand and follow God’s commands only in human community and interaction. And the impact that this social model of theological knowledge has on Schleiermacher’s christology here is such that the Dialogue attests how humans come to know Christ in their encounter with each other, and that such encounters are possible between strangers, as much as they are between friends. In Schleiermacher’s view, and pace Barth, it is thus the case that Christ does not function merely as an image or beautiful piece of artwork for humanity to imitate. Instead, Christ the Word of God is a person who calls and responds to the historical community of the Church. He is a dialoguing agent. Moreover, what the above passage from On Religion also helps us to recognise about Schleiermacher’s theology, is that he believes that the relationship between humans and the Infinite is created and willed by God prior to human language, so that it cannot be exhaustively communicated by words. This is a relationship mediated through everyday life, so that humans retain their particularity, their ipseity, as they seek the Infinite. Nevertheless, it is also a relationship that Schleiermacher intuits to be grounded in things which are hidden; things not seen or graspable. Schleiermacher’s Christianity affords him the realisation that he is created as an embodied creature, bound to the earth. Moreover, he also realises that God has met him in his status as an embodied agent—that in Christ, God comes to his creatures in and through history. Yet Schleiermacher also maintains that the most secret identity of all human beings is that we are created out of nothing, in and through love. In Schleiermacher’s Dialogue, this secret identity for human beings—the secret history, indeed, to all things—is invoked as the characters experience the festival of Christmas as a celebration of new life for the world. This new life, effected in the birth of a baby, is a transformation that could never have been planned or expected by human minds and imaginations, despite its being the very thing, according to Schleiermacher’s belief, which was intended for humanity before the foundation of the world. And so as the dialogue refers to holy music, to hidden gifts, and to the spirited faith of a child (which is so alarming to Leonhardt) it attests to the

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movement of human desire towards that which cannot be fully named or seen.85 It invokes the invisible at the heart of the visible.86

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This notion that the finite world consists in that which can be “seen”, takes an interesting parallel in the origins of the english word “specific”. For according to the terms of its Latin root specere, that which is “specific” (i.e. has detail, particularity, determinate material form) is that which can be “looked at”. I have borrowed this language from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who writes: Christianity is, among other things, the recognition of a mystery in the relations of man and God, which stems precisely from the fact that the Christian God wants nothing to do with the vertical relation of subordination. He is not simply a principle of which we are the consequence, a will whose instruments we are, or even a model of which human values are the only reflection… Transcendence no longer hangs over man: he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer. Merleau-Ponty, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”, Signs, trans. Richard G. McGleary (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 70–71.

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Conclusion In my study both of the Christmas Dialogue and his speeches On Religion, I have sought to demonstrate how Schleiermacher’s attention to human particularity — or here, to human finitude — is something that he retains in his account of the religious life. A person’s worldliness, their human relationships, the size and nature of their vocabulary and experience — these are all things they take with them as they seek the Infinite. We have seen how for Schleiermacher the religious life is one to which all individual humans have access. In On Religion, he describes its entry point as intuition of the universe. This is a moment in which a person finds herself to be in in a state of fundamental passivity, as it is given to her that she is a finite creature whose life and meaning comes from an unconditioned and Infinite source — a source which is not the world, nor the totality of worldly exchanges. And yet, surrendering oneself to the Infinite in religion does not, for Schleiermacher, mean dissolving individual difference or dissipating human freedom and creativity. Nor does it render religion itself a subjective and private affair. On the contrary, in Schleiermacher’s view it is only when a person situates themselves in terms of their relation to the Infinite that they learn the true source of their individuality, as a gift which has been bestowed to them from without, and which they can develop in community with other creatures. Indeed, in On Religion, Schleiermacher lays a striking emphasis on the notion that human growth occurs within historical community. In his fifth speech, he refutes the idea that there can ever be a “general” approach to the religious life — that there could be such a thing as an abstract spirituality, with no definite form or common creed or narrative. Instead, Schleiermacher emphasises that searching and longing for the Infinite — trying to make sense of one’s life in response to the Infinite — is something that happens over time, in the midst of the finite, and in the context of discrete historical traditions. It was in light of having developed this position about the distinctive nature of historical religious communities and their beliefs, however, that Schleiermacher’s interventions in the debate over Jewish citizenship in Berlin (July 1799) saw him fail to properly defend or recognise the religious freedoms of his Jewish contemporaries. Despite his move to delineate Judaism and Christianity as distinct traditions, which are both “eternally necessary” and independent from one another, he displayed a lack of an ability to envisage that the Jewish approach to the relationship between “religion” and “politics” might well differ from the approach issuing from his own Protestant Christian assumptions. Schleiermacher was unequivocal about the need to remove any religious test

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:10.1163/9789004397828_017 Ruth Jackson

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or requirement for Prussian citizenship. And yet, in the recommendations he made in his Letters on the Occasion, concerning the need for Jews to commit to Prussia as their Fatherland, we saw his own prejudices about the superiority of Christianity emerge. Rather than prove himself able to properly dwell alongside difference here then, we saw real limits to Schleiermacher’s conception of Bildung — his assumption that Jews were “better”, the more clearly they resembled the educated Christian elite of Berlin. Here we find a failure in the heart of Schleiermacher’s ethics and politics, and one that feeds into and helps shape his theology too. In his 1806 Christmas Dialogue, Schleiermacher shifted his approach, so as to write from within the context of the Christian faith community — his own determinate tradition. Moreover, in this text, Schleiermacher also swapped his first-person mode of rhetorical address for a literary form which eschewed the suggestion of a single, authoritative, authorial voice. Indeed, since each of the characters in the Dialogue offers a distinctive perspective on the meaning of Christmas, the impression was of an abundance of voices, none of whom could speak for the whole, but each of whom could nonetheless contribute to the event itself and could help to dramatise and realise the festival’s meaning. Here, the words of human praise and delight uttered at Christmas are depicted as a response to an event which has already taken place, yet whose eternal meaning is still being played out and refracted through history. The overall effect, I contend, was that the book presented the idea that it is in acts of friendship, encounter, discourse, and reciprocal giving that humans love and honour God, who Schleiermacher gestures to here as the transcendent creator and ground of all finite existence. Karl Barth’s view, as we have just seen, confronts us with a sense of the limitations and emphases in Schleiermacher’s depiction of Christmas and its meaning. Schleiermacher’s close attention to human words and human encounter meant, Barth argued, that he was unable to do justice to the freedom and sovereignty of the Word of God. My response to this, however, was to argue that as Schleiermacher sees it, it is possible to uphold divine sovereignty and Christ’s role as redeemer in the very practice of attending to the particularity of human nature. For as a person comes into relation with God, Schleiermacher maintains, they cannot get “behind” human history in this relationship, as it were. They are unable to exempt themselves from the situated and limited nature of their knowledge, shaped as it is by language and by culture. And yet, this does not mean that they are the creators of their own destiny, or that they occlude God’s Word with their own particular words. Indeed, I have ventured that in his Christmas Dialogue, Schleiermacher’s assembly of bourgeois characters do not end up denying or eclipsing the fundamental role that Christ

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has in redemption. Rather, Christ is invoked in the dialogue as the one who unifies and anchors the plurality of voices that feature therein — the plurality of voices who are all gathered in his name. For the event of Christ’s birth — an event which transformed the entire course of human history — is located as the source of joy and love made abundant in the Christmas festival itself. As Eduard speaks of Christ in his speech: “Until he enters history, all else is presage [Vorbedeutung]: all human life is related to his life, and only through this relation [Beziehung] does it partake of goodness and divinity”.1

1 Wei 59; Chr 84. Emphasis mine.

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Epilogue Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love. gillian rose1

∵ “One is never done with Schleiermacher”, Karl Barth once exclaimed.2 If, out of context, this statement might be taken for a complaint (never done!?), then it is just as easy to harness its sentiment of inexhaustibility, and to redeploy it earnestly to describe Schleiermacher’s own methodology—his appreciation, that is, of the irrepressible ferment of life’s reality, and his attention just the same to the flimsy and finite perspective of the individual creature. In his view, to put it crudely: we are never “done” with the world. For Schleiermacher, who is the theologian often credited with establishing the academic field of “general hermeneutics”, the world—which emerges and repeats itself through history under the direction of reason—is a site of constant reengagement, retranslation, and reinterpretation. We have seen how in his lectures on ethics, Schleiermacher depicts the world as a churning nexus of reciprocal action, where no one part carries its meaning or its power in isolation from the whole. And we have also read how in his Soliloquies, he describes humanity as an ever-unfolding and ever-excessive organism, which “in the fulness of unending space and time” is made actual through the specific acts and performances of individual humans.3 The impression is that there is nothing fixed or truly final about humanity’s interpretive work for Schleiermacher; boundaries are always being re-drawn, and rules ever re-established and re-made. Schleiermacher’s awareness of this need for sustained reinterpretation was reflected in the provisionality that he lent his writing, both in its literary form and in its explicit content. (I have of course sought to establish how these two—form and content—cannot be separated in Schleiermacher’s work, but serve continually to reinforce each other). His epistolary novella To Cecilie,

1 Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995), 98. 2 tts, 277. 3 kga i.3, 18; S 31.

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itself a meditation on religious doubt, suggested the social nature of human knowledge and its temporal fragmentation also. In his experiments with irony, which we saw both in his catechetical fragment and certain scenes in his novella, Schleiermacher played with notions of double meaning and highlighted the limitations of particular categories by pushing them to the boundaries of their use. And by adopting the form of the soliloquy to write an ethical tract, Schleiermacher got at the singularity and uniqueness of human life without this spilling over into solipsism or into the assertion of difference through separation or violence. His own single voice was not one he assumed to speak for all, but one that he nevertheless recognised as representing the coming together of a community. Harnessing that organic metaphor for worldly life that we associate so vividly with Romantic philosophy, he fashioned the individual here as a microcosm of the whole. And yet, for his meditation on the Incarnation, Schleiermacher chose to write a piece which was thoroughly dialogic, or even polyphonic (to venture a Bakhtinian term), in form. Being a careful reader of Plato, this form enabled Schleiermacher to play with the notion that what is eternal, good, and true cannot be grasped and presented by one finite voice alone. But what was also distinctively Pauline about Schleiermacher’s ­approach here was his notion of harmonic difference contained inside one body. The work of the whole, we gather, cannot be completed by any one member. This provisional quality (concerning both form and content) to Schleiermacher’s work also pushed right down into his habit for issuing numerous updated editions of his texts—many of them with corrections, comments, and explanations appended. But the sense here isn’t merely that there is always more to say, and there are always more ways in which to say it. Schleiermacher’s desire to issue amendments to his work also matched his frustration that he had been misunderstood. In my analysis both of his Christmas Dialogue and of his speeches On Religion, it became clear that these changes and “explanations” to later additions went hand in hand with Schleiermacher gaining more responsibility in public life, as professor, teacher, and minister. He had to balance an appreciation for the fact that the reader him or herself contributes to the text’s meaning—an acknowledgement that the meaning of the text was in key ways “out of his control”—with an increasing burden of accountability over his words. And indeed, these last points bring us to a melancholic note in Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical thought. His appreciation of the everyday failure of communication. In the winter of 1809, Schleiermacher began his lecture course on General Hermeneutics with the following principle:

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Hermeneutics rests on the fact of the non-understanding of discourse: taken in its most general sense, including misunderstanding in the mother tongue and in everyday life.4 This proposal appears pessimistic about the efficacy of everyday communication. It is surely uncontroversial to suppose that we inevitably miss things about the other’s meaning in the course of a conversation—we misinterpret tone and gesture, we cannot possibly have the same memories or associations that the other person carries about the topic at hand. And yet, Schleiermacher’s point that the science of interpretation rests “on the fact of the nonunderstanding of discourse”, seems to mean that we begin by getting it wrong. There is, we suppose, a negative outcome of sorts to every conversation—a thin thread of excess meaning calcifying noiselessly underneath us. In his 1813 essay On the Different Methods of Translating, Schleiermacher apparently confirms this suspicion by giving a thick account of the shaping power of language and its power to divide people and their frames of reference. He writes: Whoever acknowledges the formative power of language, which is one with the particular nature of a people, must also concede that the entire knowledge of even the most exceptional man, as well as his ability to represent it, has come to him with and through language, and that no one has his language mechanically attached to him from the outside as if by straps, so that one might, as easily as one would unharness a team of horses and replace it with another, harness up a new language as it happened to suit one’s frame of mind; but rather that each person produces originally only in his mother tongue, and that the question of how he would have written his works in another language ought not even to be raised.5 We are trapped in our own tight linguistic bubbles, Schleiermacher implies. “The entire knowledge of even the most exceptional man, as well as his ability to represent it, has come to him with and through language”. And if this is the case about the mediating power of language, then what we have also seen in the present study is Schleiermacher’s equal regard for the shaping and determining power of religious traditions. We recall that in On Religion, he wrote that: 4 Cri 227. Italics my own. Die Hermeneutik beruht auf dem Factum des Nichtverstehns der Rede. 5 Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating”. In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Vernuti, (London: Routledge, 2004), 56–57.

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Just as no human being can come into existence as an individual without, simultaneously, through the same act, also coming into a world, into a definite order [bestimmte Ordnung] of things, and being placed among individual objects, so also a religious person cannot attain his individuality without, through the same act, also dwelling in a determinate form of religion.6 This passage describes positive or determinate forms of religion as immersive communities of language, praxis and belief, which contain the believer in such a way that her religion must be in strong senses incommunicable to those outside the same community. To speak to a stranger about one’s faith is thus inevitably to be misunderstood—it is to speak in a different register, or a different key. But at the same time that this characterisation of religion enabled Schleiermacher to assert the uniqueness and distinction of all religions, we also saw this suggestion of such radical difference tip over into comparison and prejudicial treatment. In his Letters on the Occasion, Schleiermacher failed in particular to uphold the freedoms of Berlin’s Jewish population. He perpetuated those specifically anti-Jewish biases which operated at an institutional level in his day. And poignantly, his participation in such biases prevented him from heeding his own commitment to individual flourishing or remembering his critique of those social structures which impede the generation of loving friendships and personal expression. Analogous failings were also visible in Schleiermacher’s project on the penal colony in “New Holland”. Here, as Schleiermacher reported on a group of people whose place and standing in the world he knew to be different from his own, he struggled and failed to find the words to articulate this difference fruitfully. He did not properly attend to the uniqueness of these individuals who were other to him—he foisted his own categories and expectations onto them, and he defined and judged them according to his assumed notion of what it means to be a flourishing human being (educated, european, white). What began as a melancholic note in Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, then, of the inevitable communication breakdown between individuals, between languages, and between religions, spilt over in Schleiermacher’s life and interactions with others, into a series of judgments made along prejudicial lines. Schleiermacher’s treatment of the Jewish religion and the racist judgments he proffers in his materials on New Holland, are features of his thought which grew in conversation with contemporary assumptions about the superiority 6 kga i.2, 308; OR 108.

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of the educated, white, Prussian citizen, and hang there as rotten, pernicious branches. Schleiermacher’s work in On Religion is undeniably Christian in its assumptions about the nature of religious belief. It is under these assumptions that—as Theodore Vial and Steven Jungkeit have shown—it generates (in a highly rhetorical manner, for the benefit of its Romantic audience) a hierarchical pyramid of religious traditions, with Christianity enshrined at the summit. As such, I think it is important to be wary about attempts to use Schleiermacher as the intellectual basis for a theory of inter-religious dialogue.7 And yet, what I have also wished to argue in this book, is that these failures in Schleiermacher’s thinking are not essential aspects to his thought. What I mean by this, is that they are not necessary outcomes of his methodology. His ethics, his philosophy, and his theology do not produce a theory of the human or a vision of what it means to be “free”, which necessitates this movement from the assertion of difference into violence against difference. Rather, in Schleiermacher’s theological vision we see a move instead to allow for there to be an identity beyond difference—but one within which those differences might flourish. One within which difference is the very catalyst for loving relationships.

…

If Barth found in Schleiermacher an enduring inspiration, opponent, and foil for his theological thinking, then the present book has been framed by the following question (even if I, after Barth, cannot claim to have done with it): why, now, should we be continuing our dialogue with Schleiermacher? Part of my response to this question has issued in correction. I have offered an alternative reading to the still all-too-common view of Schleiermacher, that he is an individualist theologian who internalises religion, and reduces religious belief to a function of human self-consciousness. For would it not be inconsistent, or erroneous even, for a man so demonstrably interested in the relationship between form and content to suppose that what is “inward” can be divorced from what is outwardly expressed and performed? To this end, I have focussed primarily on a selection of texts that Schleiermacher wrote in the early stages of his career—many of them written, indeed, before he took up his first 7 See for instance Thomas Reynolds, “Reconsidering Schleiermacher and the Problem of Religious Diversity: Toward a Dialectical Pluralism”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 73, no.1 (March 2005): 151–181., and Notger Slenzcka’s piece “Religion and the Religions: The Fifth Speech in Dialogue with Contemporary Conceptions of a ‘Theology of Religions’”, in Schleiermacher, The Study of Religion and the Future of Theology: A Transatlantic Dialogue, edited by Wilhelm Gräb and Brent W. Sockness. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010, 51–67.

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­ rofessional academic position as a Professor at the University of Halle. The p fruit of working with these early pieces—some of them left unfinished and unpublished—is that we have found therein a rich discussion of the nature of human existence, which sees Schleiermacher portray individual human identity as something which develops over the passage of time, is mediated through language, and is formed within community and networks of reciprocity. We have also gained access in these texts to the clear lines of mutual influence which criss-cross between Schleiermacher’s ethics, his politics, his philosophy of religion, and his theology. These are lines of influence which are perhaps not so visible in texts of his which were specifically arranged to be teaching documents (like his dogmatics) or were originally delivered as lectures (like his work on hermeneutics). The other part of my response to this question, however—why keep thinking with Schleiermacher?—comes down to what I have named and described as his theology of finitude. I have argued in this book that Schleiermacher emphasises human dependence, which is to say that he considers the only attribute which can be absolutely universally applied to humans is the fact of their being created. In Schleiermacher’s view then, it belongs to being worldly that one is the recipient of one’s existence rather than the author of it. And where humans are concerned in particular—we rational, creative beings—it belongs to being human that one is capable of recognising this fact. I have argued that in Schleiermacher’s work, this stress on human finitude issues in an epistemology which recognises the limitations of the individual human perspective. Where Schleiermacher himself does not honour this humble beginning that he affords his theology, and where his legacy has contributed to the silencing of other voices and religious groups, those theologians in the present who are the inheritors of his legacy (and I count myself in this number) are invited to hold him to account, to think with him, and to challenge him. But that provisional quality his work has; the way he eschews any notion of generating a “complete” system of theology or philosophy; his acknowledgement that the visible has its origin in the invisible: these are what motivate our continued engagements with Schleiermacher. Indeed, there is a flexibility to Schleiermacher’s thinking—a lack of pretension to have solved or sorted this or that—which I esteem to mirror a fruitful conception of the relation between eternity and time, wisdom and history, the Infinite and the finite.

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Bibliography Works by Schleiermacher Aus Schleiermacher’s Leben. In Briefen. Edited by Dilthey, Wilhelm. 4 Vols. Berlin: Reimer, 1860–63. Brief Outline on the Study of Theology. Translated by Tice, Terrence N. Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1966. Brouillon Zur Ethik (1805/1806) / Notes on Ethics (1805/1806). Translated by Wallhauser, John. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2003. Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on Incarnation. Translated by Tice, Terrence N., Richmond, Virginia: John Knox Press, 1967. Christian Faith, Translated by Tice, Terrence N., Catherine L. Kelsey, and Edwina Lawler. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016. “Comparison of the Political Philosophies of Plato and Aristotle”. Translated by Reed, Esther D. In Schleiermacher’s “To Cecilie”, and Other Writings By and About Schleiermacher, edited by Ruth Drucilla Richardson. A Publication of New Atheneum/ Neues Athenaeum, Vol. 6. Lewiston/Queenston/Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2001, pp. 48–49. Der Christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirke im Zusammenhange dargestellt. Edited by Redeker, Martin, 2 Vols. Berlin: de Gruyer, 1960. Die Weihnachtsfeier, ein Gespräch. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1984. Dialectic or The Art of Doing Philosophy; A Study Edition of the 1811 Notes. Translated, with Introduction and Notes by Tice, Terrence N. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholar’s Press, 1996. Friedrich Schleiermachers Sämmtliche Werke. Edited by Jonas, Ludwig, Alexander Schweizer, Friedrich Lücke, et al. 31 vols. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1835–1865. Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts. Edited by Kimmerle, Heinz. Translated by James Duke and Jack Forstman. Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1977. Kritische Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Birkner, Hans-Joachim, Gerhard Ebeling, Hermann Fischer, Heinz Kimmerle, and Kurt-Victor Selge. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1983–2005. Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Writings. Edited and translated by Bowie, Andrew. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Introduction to the Dialogues of Plato. Translated by Dobson, William. Cambridge: The Pitt Press, 1839.

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Index absolute dependence xii, 14, 35–37, 40, 56, 186, 250 as consciousness of God 36–37, 40 Allison, Henry E. 52, 63, 77 Anschauung. See intuition Anselm xiv Aquinas, Thomas xii, 19, 39 Aristotle xii, 64, 95, 123 Arndt, Andreas 41 Asad, Talal 217 atheism 40, 50, 63 Athenaeum 44, 121–125, 240 Augustine vi, xi, 208 Bakhtin, Mikhail 75, 172, 258 Barth, Karl 227–228, 239 critique of Schleiermacher as liberal  225, 227, 239 Der Römerbrief 223–224, 248 difference to Schleiermacher 247–248 Hegel’s influence on 19 influence on reception of Schleiermacher  15–16, 222–224, 250 John Riches’ critique of 250 Kirchliche Dogmatik 224 misreads the form of the Christmas ­Dialogue 229, 231, 233, 235 never done with Schleiermacher 257, 261 on divine ‘supra-temporality 222 on Feuerbach 15, 176, 203, 227 on Schleiermacher and music 238–240, 245 on Schleiermacher and religious experience 227 on Schleiermacher and women 239 on Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue ix, 12, 172, 176, 178–179, 221, 224, 230, 251, 254 on Schleiermacher’s depiction of Christ 227–229, 234–236 on the God-world relationship 222 Barth, Ulrich 152 Batnitzky, Leora 5, 26 Baumgarten, Sigmund Jacob 39, 51

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony 241 Behler, Ernst 45 Beiser, Frederick 44–45, 50, 99, 122–123, 157 Benjamin, Walter 190 Berlin 1, 7, 26, 97, 114–115, 121, 125, 141, 175, 205, 221, 254 Jewish population of 2, 6–7, 13, 95, 206, 209–210, 212, 219, 253, 260 Protestant community in 1, 210 salon culture 1–2, 7, 13, 23, 114, 124–25, 130, 230 University of 1, 4, 24, 35, 117, 200 Berman, Russell 137–138, 142 Bible 4, 173, 208 Bildung 226 failure of Schleiermacher’s commitment to 132, 136, 145–146, 215, 225 history of the term 117–121 how to define 116–117, 120, 124 importance of language for 109 relation to colonialism 135–136, 146, 162–163 relation to German citizenship 1, 114 relation to human sociality 117 relation to Schleiermacher’s conception of Judaism 216, 254 religious telos of 3, 5, 11, 40, 124, 171, 193, 201, 219 Romantic conception of 116, 121–124, 147, 196 Schleiermacher’s commitment to 11, 96, 130, 132, 148, 158 Bildungsbürgertum 118 Birkner, Hans-Joachim 41 Blackwell, Albert 23, 65, 74, 78–79, 83, 106, 112, 194 Bowie, Andrew 4, 158–159, 188, 241, 246 Brinkmann, Carl Gustaf von 48, 125 Brunner, Emil 15–16 Carter, J. Kameron 214, 218 cataphasis xii Catholicism 19, 44, 194 Charité Hospital 1, 114

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284 children 185–186 as invoking devotion to God 177, 226, 238 as the concern of women 131, 185 Barth on 239 happiness of 177, 191, 236, 238 incapable of true feeling 37 infant baptism 177 interaction with mother 227 piety of 176, 185, 187, 225, 232, 251 Schleiermacher’s interest in child development 32 the Christ child 228 Chrétien, Jean-Louis 249 Christ  vi, 173, 190, 207, 225, 227–228, 230, 234–236, 238, 251 as stumbling block for philosophy 41 as inner telos of creation 207 as Mediator 45, 197, 236, 251 ‘Christ of faith’ 232 christology 12, 136, 179, 207, 211, 227–229, 236, 251 light of the world 226 miraculous activity of 229 redeeming activity of 211, 254 relation to Schleiermacher’s conception of Judaism 207–208, 210 relation to the Church 129 Son of God xiii, 172, 197, 211 Word of God 177, 223–224, 228, 235, 248, 251, 254 Christmas 177, 186, 223, 232, 235, 239–240, 242, 254 as event with cosmic significance 177, 189–190, 242, 251, 254 Christmas Eve matins 226 in the home 175, 190, 221, 226 music 237, 242, 244 relation to the historical Jesus 221, 228–230, 235 citizenship 142, 214 modern secular 217 question of Jewish citizenship 2, 6, 13, 95, 209–210, 212–216, 218, 253 relation to religion 210, 218 Clarke, James Freeman 6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor xi Collins, David 133, 143 compatibilism 63–64

Index Crouter, Richard 26, 34, 44, 95–96, 115, 155, 189, 192, 194–195, 209, 249 Dante 114 deism 46, 161, 163, 204, 206 Deleuze, Gilles 2, 218–219 Derrida, Jacques 217, 219 Descartes, René 60, 81–82, 157 desire, faculty of 22, 64, 67, 73, 77–79, 83–86, 100, 116, 193, 252 determinism 62–64 dialogue 10, 55, 76, 186, 216 as dramatic form 182 as literary form 12, 73–75, 173, 178, 184, 191, 209, 231–233, 248 epistemological implications of 74–75, 80, 138, 179, 187, 189, 222, 242, 245, 255 Gadamer on 74 inter-religious 261 in theological thinking 242–243, 245, 250–251, 254–255 Kierkegaard on 187–189, 232 Platonic conception of 175, 179–182 relation to Bakhtin and polyphony 75 relation to music 246, 251 Shaftesbury on 183–184 structure of Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue 178–179, 184–185, 189–190, 221, 233, 236 die entgötterte Natur 42 Dilthey, Wilhelm 3–4, 12, 32, 62, 74, 156, 172, 175, 179, 227 disenchantment 43 Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von 218 Dole, Andrew 14–15, 24–25, 150 drives, human 78, 80, 83–84, 86–87, 95 Dumbreck, Geoff 14, 20, 197 Eberhard, Johann Augustus 52–53, 119, 183 ecclesiology 96, 178, 215 contrast between church and family 226 liberal 227 of St Paul 233 relation between Christ and church 228 relation between church and state 213 Romantic suspicion of the church 201 the church in On Religion 194 Ehrhardt, Christiane 155–156

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Index Eichner, Hans 104 Ellsiepen, Christof 39 Enlightenment conception of the human 116 education in Enlightenment ideas 118 in Prussia 1 Jewish 7, 195, 212 rationalist philosophy of the 18, 63, 119 relation to Pietism and Idealism 16 relation to Romanticism 12, 44 eternity 37, 130, 153, 190, 200, 207, 262 ethics as a field of study 1, 27, 35, 38, 41, 105, 123, 175, 257 as a system 101, 113 failure of Schleiermacher’s ethics 254, 261 Fichte’s 154 of ethnography 134, 138 philosophical 35, 97, 105 relation to aesthetics 109 relation to theology 34–35, 98, 262 relation to politics 262 Schleiermacher’s understanding of 31, 98, 106–107, 112, 214 scholarship on Schleiermacher’s ethics  23, 102 virtue ethics 64 Exleben, Dorothea Christiane 126 Farley, Edward 14 fatalism 50, 63 feeling 14–15, 35, 38, 54, 86, 156 Barth on 16, 239 Bible as interpretation of Christian feeling 208 cannot be systematised 203, 205 expressed in music 239, 241, 244 expressed in religious festivals 242 Feuerbach on 15 Hegel on 56 how to define 11, 36–37, 232 in children 36 in regard to the God-world relationship xii, 201 in Schleiermacher scholarship 14, 19, 25 in women 131 Lindbeck on 17

285 of absolute freedom 36 of German unity 140–142 relation to aesthetics 110 relation to desire 85 relation to Moravian piety 31 relation to philosophical understanding xiii, 60, 118 relation to reason 53–54, 58, 64, 85, 91, 100, 116 relation to religious enthusiasm 55 relation to theology 245, 249 relation to thinking and acting 14, 101, 204 religion as realm of 20, 34, 195, 203, 221, 237, 242, 244 religious feeling as consciousness of God 36, 38, 40 religious feeling in the individual 36, 38 Feuerbach, Ludwig 176, 203, 227, 15–16 Fichte, J. G. 18, 23, 44, 97, 152–155, 158, 199 finitude anthropology of 136 as universal to humanity 27, 112, 147 as universal to worldly existence 36, 199 contemplation as vehicle for transcending 165 divinity as unconstrained by 12, 18, 20, 198, 222–223 epistemology of 167 everything good comes from God 106 finite-Infinite relationship 6, 10, 35–36, 45–46, 98, 155, 171, 201, 253, 262 finite perspective of the individual 74, 235 Hegel on Protestantism and 18 Heinrich von Kleist on 200 humanity not imprisoned by 25, 103, 151 humans as highest form of finite life 100 implications for knowledge of God xii, 10, 40, 204 in Romanticism 240 not as lack xii, 10, 221 of the positive religions 205 relation to divine grace 232 relation to freedom 220 religion as issuing from the recognition of  198 religion means acceptance of 200

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286 finitude (cont.) Schlegel on 196 Schleiermacher’s emphasis on 205, 222, 236, 262 theology of 11, 33, 42, 96, 197, 220–221, 253, 262 Forstman, Jack 115, 196, 247 fragment, literary 32, 121, 182, 258 Frank, Manfred 4, 44 freedom 70, 72, 111, 196 absolute 36 as a motif in Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies 98, 111–112, 156, 219 connection to Bildung 122 connection to spiritual life 158, 201 divine 71, 223, 254 Fichtean conception of 153 German 140–141 how to define 70–72, 75–76, 95, 97, 108, 111 Hume on 88 idealistic 153 in nature 122, 165 in religion 201–202, 220, 253 Kant on 32, 62, 65–69, 71–72, 79–80, 83, 90, 100, 219 moral 27, 31, 62, 64, 69–70, 74 negative 67, 73, 76, 91 of choice 152 of speculative reason 69 of the individual 102, 113, 116, 123, 136, 146, 150, 154, 165, 171, 248 of the will 70 philosophy of 2 political 2, 95, 218 ‘positive’ 111, 115, 122 relation to anthropology 70 relation to causality 66, 68–73, 76–78, 89, 106, 111, 158 relation to determinism 73 relation to knowledge of God 156 religious 7, 13, 27, 211–213, 218–219, 253, 260 Romantic conception of 104, 123, 201 social 2, 95, 108, 112 transcendental 11, 31, 64, 66–72, 89, 100 French, Lorely 127 Freud, Sigmund 217

Index Friedländer, David 210, 212, 216 friendship among the Romantics 1, 26, 114–115, 187, 196 as ground for human flourishing 171, 233, 254 as motif in Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies 149, 154, 168 as portrayed in Schlegel’s Lucinde 188 as unfolding of self in other 150 as unfolding of self in the world 105 difficulty of cultivating 162–163, 260 in the Herrnhuter community 47 in the home 236 in the salon 2, 125, 127 loss of 48 of Schleiermacher and Schlegel 187 portrayed in To Cecilie 48 relation to death 234, 246 religious notions of 115 with women 125 Frühromantiker. See Romanticism, German Gadamer, Hans-Georg 3–4, 117 Gefühl. See feeling Germana, Nicholas A. 139–140 Germany national identity 7, 121, 137–142, 142, 163, 213 Gerrish, B. A. 17, 41 God 58, 251 according to Protestantism 18, 43, 45 as creator  xii, 5, 36, 41, 104, 155, 172, 190, 201, 211, 227, 247, 248, 250, 254 as expression of feeling 15 Barth on 16, 222–224, 228, 239 cannot know without the world  xii, 3, 10, 40, 233–234, 250 concept of divine personality 198 divine glory 22, 223 divine revelation 37, 42, 177, 198, 207, 221–222, 248, 251 divine sovereignty 16 early Schleiermacher on 57 Feuerbach on 15 for religious Schwärmer 56, 176 God-world relationship 35, 43, 46, 222, 239, 247

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Index human alienation from 45 Kant on 25, 57, 82 known in human community 249, 251 language about xii, 16, 245, 247, 249 limit to human knowledge of xi, 36, 171, 197, 200, 236, 249 no object of perception xii, 37, 39–40 of the Bible 173 personal 194 praise of 11 referent of religious feeling 14, 36, 250 relation to human self 39, 59, 238, 249, 254 relation to human art 244 relation to marriage 129 Schiller on 46 Schlegel on 45, 240 the Whence xii, 2, 10, 36, 98 the peace of 178 veiled xi, xii who grants human fulfilment 2, 75, 187 young Schleiermacher on 48 Goethe 43, 46–47, 115 Grove, Peter 24, 52, 152 Grunow, Eleonore 36, 97, 150, 157, 175, 179 Guattari, Félix 2, 218–219

287 Hegel, G. W. F. 3–4, 17–20, 56, 182, 217, 219, 241 Heidegger, Martin 3–4, 80, 82 Helmer, Christine 14, 16 Herder, J. G. 47, 76, 108, 117, 120–122, 161, 183, 207, 215, 219 hermeneutics 1, 4, 51, 111, 175, 246, 257, 260, 262 misunderstanding 259 Herms, Eilert 52 Herz, Henriette 1, 11415, 125–127, 179, 209, 215 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 241–242 Horlacher, Rebekka 119 Howard, Thomas Albert 51 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 117, 125, 245 Hume, David 63–64, 88, 119 Husserl, Edmund 82 Hutcheson, Francis 53, 119

imagination 34, 36–37, 86, 107, 115, 128, 157, 159, 161, 240, 243 imago dei 117 impulse. See drives, human Incarnation, the as depicted in Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue 228, 234–236, 251, 258 as event with universal significance 12, Hahn, Barbara 126 207, 222, 248 Halle, University of 47, 50–51, 63, 1, 114–119, as telos of history 172, 207, 227, 235 126, 183 Barth on 222–223, 227, 234, 248, 250 as centre for Pietism 50–51 human words about 254 Napoleonic invasion of 140–141, 225 in Scheiermacher scholarship 16 Neology at 51 in the Gospel of John 177, 235 opposition to Wolffian philosophy at  relation to Christmas 187 50 relation to dialogue 169, 251 Schleiermacher as Professor at 140, 171, relation to revelation 20 175, 262 Schiller on 46 Schleiermacher as student of 11, 31, Schlegel on 45 48–49, 52, 63, 95, 121 Infinite, the Schleiermacher as University Preacher at  as beyond thought and language xii, 12 199, 221 Schleiermacher’s lectures on ethics at  becoming one with 21, 201 35, 97 cannot be known directly 198, 200–201, theology faculty 4 236 ‘Wolffianism’ at 50–53, 63 Christ as mediator of 197 Hamann, J. G. 76, 119–120 E. T. A. Hoffman on 241 Harnack, Adolf von 208, 222 finite never becomes 197 Hedley, Douglas 3 Hegel on 18

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288 Infinite, the (cont.) humans as receptive to 98 in Schleiermacher scholarship 20 intuition of 207 known through the finite 204 marriage of the finite with 98 reconciliation with the finite 45 relation to finite creatures 2, 6, 35, 251 relation to the self xii, 96, 173, 253 relation to the world 40, 204, 262 religion as search for 39, 46, 171, 198–199, 203, 221, 253 Romantic conception of 157, 197, 201, 240 self-revelation of 195, 197 sought in and through community 205 who is God 37, 155 instinct 37, 83–84, 86–87 intuition as having a uniform relation to human nature 38 as the essence of religion 14, 20, 195, 197–198, 203 cannot be systematised 203 ethical self-intuition 155 how to define 11, 38 in Kantian philosophy 38, 81–82 in naturalism 203 in regard to the God-world relationship xii in Schleiermacher scholarship 19 into human individuality 23, 103 of the Infinite 6, 198, 207, 221 of the universe 38, 42, 155, 156, 197, 203, 242, 253 irony 32, 143, 163, 177, 185, 258 Jacobi xiii, 17–18, 23, 208 Johnson, William 156 Judaism 5, 26, 210, 217 anti-Judaism 9, 214 Schleiermacher on 7–8, 13, 173, 195, 206–209, 213, 221, 253 Jungkeit, Steven R. 133–134, 138, 261 Kant, Immanuel 52, 64, 66, 81, 106, 111 argument with Eberhard 52–53 categorical imperative 66–67 conception of race 6

Index conception of religion 6 covert study of 47 critical philosophy of 63, 80 critique of Berkeley 81 differences with Descartes 81 dualistic tendencies of 85 for twentieth-century phenomenology 82 Hegel on 18 Heinrich von Kleist on 200 Henry Allison on 63, 77 Herder on 76, 215 impact of Hume on 88 impact on discourse at Halle 52 influence on Schleiermacher 31, 67, 112 Mariña on 23, 62, 70, 154 Merleau-Ponty on 71, 107 Michael Mack on 217 moral philosophy of 57 on autonomy 67 on desire 77–78, 83 on epistemology 66 on freedom 11, 70–71 on God 25, 82 on God and eternal life 57 on intuition 38–39, 82 on Jewish citizenship 218 on Judaism 215 on morality 66 on reason 25 on religious enthusiasm 49 on the term ‘transcendental 71 practical philosophy of 86 Proudfoot on 19 Reinhold’s critique of 79 representational epistemology 79–80, 82 Romantic response to 44, 199 Schleiermacher doesn’t do justice to 65 Schleiermacher on Kant’s second critique  65, 68–70, 91 Schleiermacher’s critique of 11, 52, 69, 99 Schleiermacher’s critique of transcendental freedom 68–71, 79, 83, 89, 100, 106 Schleiermacher’s rejection of Kantian freedom 31 Schleiermacher’s rejection of Kantian religion 42 transcendental aesthetic 72, 81

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Index transcendental freedom 31, 64, 66–67 treatment in Schleiermacher’s On Freedom 63–65, 70, 72–73, 77–78, 91 treatment in Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies 99, 101–102, 106, 111, 219 Was ist Aufklärung? 161 Kathen, Charlotte von 130, 140–141 Kierkegaard, Søren 26, 187–189, 223, 232 Kinlaw, Jeffrey C. 62, 64, 68 Kleist, Heinrich von 200 Kulturprotestantismus 222, 239 Kundera, Milan 246 Lamm, Julia 14, 85 language about God xii, 221, 223, 242, 247–248, 251 as historical 76, 132, 246 Barth on Schleiermacher’s understanding of 239 dual nature of 110–111 Hamann on 76 human self-expression through 109–110, 148, 246 humans formed through 10, 23, 91, 108, 120, 158, 254, 259–260 Humboldt on 245 in friendship 162, 168 in postmodernism 188 in Romanticism 115, 121 in Schleiermacher’s ethics 91, 108–110 in translation theory 128 Merleau-Ponty on 252 negative function of 109, 127, 164, 259 notion of ‘universal language 96, 246–247 ‘objective language 108 of people in ‘New Holland 137 philosophy of 2, 26 relation to anthropology 65 relation to epistemology 11, 110, 167, 171, 183, 207, 262 relation to ‘inner life 174, 238 relation to music 238, 244 relation to nationalism 214 relation to theology 14, 225, 248 role of imagination in 159 theological telos of 3, 5, 40, 242, 245, 250 theological telos of 11

289 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 23, 53, 63–64, 89, 154 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 232 Levinas, Emmanuel 217, 219 Lindbeck 16–17 literary form 143, 183 difference to systematic writing 25 effect on interpreting Schleiermacher  9–10, 32 extent to Schleiermacher’s experimentation with 32, 111, 121, 248 of Schleiermacher’s Catechism fragment 128–132 of Schleiermacher’s Christmas Dialogue 12, 184–186, 229–231, 233, 235, 254 of Schleiermacher’s Letters on the Occasion 215 of Schleiermacher’s On Freedom 70, 73–75 of Schleiermacher’s penal colony project 142–143, 145 of Schleiermacher’s review of Lucinde 189 of Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies 12, 97, 148, 151–152, 164–167 of Schleiermacher’s To Cecilie 58, 60–61, 171 relation between form and content 26, 50, 74, 91, 145, 172, 178, 181, 186, 189, 191, 209, 229, 233, 257, 261 special characteristics of dialogue  180–184, 187 use in Romanticism 25, 115 Locke, John 82 love 255 divine 207, 236, 251 in friendship 104, 150, 162, 184, 224, 234, 236, 242, 250 in marriage 129 in the religious life 54, 115, 189, 191, 237 loveless marriage 125 of God 172, 254 of music 237–239, 242 of the created order 11 of wisdom 181 relation to disenchantment 42 relation to gender roles 130–131

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290 love (cont.) relation to knowledge vi, 234, 257 romantic love 187 Luther, Martin xiii, 5, 208 Mack, Michael 27, 173, 215, 217–218 Marchand, Suzanne 142 Marcionism 208 Mariña, Jacqueline 23, 41, 62, 65, 66, 70, 72, 74, 101, 154 Maurice, Frederick Denison 6 Mazusawa, Tomoko 6 McCormack, Bruce 37, 224 Meckenstock, Gunter 32, 47, 49, 74, 133, 154–155 Mendelssohn, Moses 7, 210, 217 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 71, 80–82, 107, 112, 252 Millán-Zaibert, Elizabeth 79, 122 Mill, J. S. 134 moles 84 Moravian Brethren 31, 47, 60, 176, 211 Müller, Max 6 music 185–186, 237–239, 244–246, 251 absolute 241 in aesthetic theory 240, 243–244 as tool for the imagination 243 musical expressivism 239, 241–242 performance 237, 242 relation to language 109, 238, 240, 246 Napoleonic wars 1, 139–141, 225 nationalism, German 1, 139, 141, 213–214 Nelson, Eric Sean 248 Neology 51 New Holland 11, 23, 96, 132, 134, 136–138, 143–145, 163, 167, 260 Niebuhr, Richard R. 12–13, 182, 223 Novalis 44, 115, 196, 240, 245 novella 9–11, 31, 49, 53, 95, 121, 179–180, 184, 258 Nowak, Kurt 115 Oberdorfer, Bernd 24 organic metaphors 35, 97, 100, 104–105, 110, 120, 152, 205, 214, 257–258 Otto, Rudolph 192

Index pantheism 21, 45, 204 Paul, St 223, 233, 258 Pietism 16, 49–51 Pippin, Robert 2 Plato xiii, 26, 123, 175, 179–182, 189, 225, 258 pluralism 205, 219, 261 polytheism 42, 204 post-enlightenment German thought 6 Protestantism 1, 17–19, 42–43, 45–46, 128, 141, 194, 196, 209, 222, 253 Proudfoot, Wayne 19 Pui-Lan, Kwok 133 racism 137, 146, 218–219, 260 Reardon, Bernard M. G. 115, 196, 198 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich 175–176 Reinhold, Karl Leonhard 79 religion 15, 17, 54, 202–203, 243 as encounter with the Infinite 39, 98, 156 as historical 204, 222, 253 as independent from metaphysics 21 as inherently social 10, 24–25, 61, 171, 173–174, 195, 203, 247 as joy 237 as product of human nature 25 as telos of Bildung 5, 40, 201, 219, 253, 260 as uniting force for the self 156 conception of a ‘general’ religion 195 conversion 211 criticism of Schleiermacher 13–15, 17, 19–21, 194 deism 40, 60 distorted view of Judaism and Islam 26 doesn’t entail denying the world 171 failure of Schleiermacher’s definition  8, 13 feminine 238 Feuerbach on 227 Fichte on 155 formation of religious belief 59 Hegel on 17, 19 human capacity for 22 immortality of 21, 201 in Romanticism 12, 45, 125, 195, 196, 197, 199, 200, 206, 235, 240 Kant on 42

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291

Index modern history of the term 5, 8–9, 133 myth in 251 natural religion 50, 195, 202 never private 173, 201, 238 never ‘pure’ 200 not fabricated by human mind 198 notion of a personal God 198 of Moravian Brethren 31 ‘positive’ religions 201, 203–205, 221, 253, 260 prioritisation of Christianity 8, 173, 194, 227 proof for 60 rationalism in 194 reading of Schleiermacher as religious naturalist 24 relation to citizenship 2, 218 relation to colonialism 135, 146, 195, 260 relation to epistemology 220 relation to ethics 34–35, 199 relation to feeling 14–15, 20, 203 relation to freedom 203 relation to German Idealism 154–155 relation to intuition 14, 20, 38, 197–198, 203 relation to morals 53–55, 57 relation to music 238–244 relation to nationalism 140, 142, 214 relation to philosophy 41 relation to politics 13, 212–214, 217, 220–221, 253 relation to race 6, 26, 133, 218 relation to reason 56–58, 198–199, 220 relation to the family 226, 238 Schiller on 46 Schleiermacher’s anti-Judaism 173, 195, 206, 208–209, 213–214, 216, 253, 260 Schleiermacher’s defence of 34, 46, 192–193 Schleiermacher’s definition of 6, 10, 13, 194, 205, 261 term applied to Judaism 5, 7–8, 213 religious enthusiasm 11, 23, 33, 49, 54–61, 91, 95, 177, 192, 225 religious studies 5, 8, 19, 24 representational epistemology 38, 62, 77–80, 84, 87–88, 107

Richardson, Ruth 124, 176, 197 Rieger, Joerg 133, 136, 206, 211 Ritschl, Albrecht 222 Rodde-Schlözer, Dorothea 126 Romanticism, German 44 comparison with post-structuralism 4 conception of Bildung 115, 117, 122, 196 conception of nature 104 context for Schleiermacher’s On Religion 197, 200 critique of established Church 44, 196 focus in this book on early phase of 44 how to define 43–6, 123 influence of Reichardt on 176 interpretation of Spinoza 45 motif of self-contemplation in 157 of Schlegel 199 On Religion as manifesto of 196 poetic spirit in 121, 240 relation to Roman Catholicism 44 relation to Schleiermacher 1, 12, 25, 97, 115, 196, 201, 246 religion of 45, 116, 196 Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies as paradigm text of 116 use of organic metaphors 205 women writers of 126–127 Rose, Gillian 257 Sack, F. S. G. 21, 194, 198 Said, Edward 138, 142 Schelling, Caroline 125–127 Schelling, F. W. J. von 17 Schiller, Friedrich von 42–43, 45–46 Schlegel, August Wilhelm 43, 115, 121, 125 Schlegel, Friedrich as scholar 114 conversion to Catholicism 44 correspondence 125 critique of established Church 43 editor of the Athenaeum 121 friendship with Schleiermacher 1, 97, 125, 175, 187, 196 interest in ancient cultures 120 interest in literary form 115 Lucinde 187, 189, 230, 232 on art and religion 240–241

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292 Schlegel, Friedrich (cont.) on Bildung 122–123, 147 on finitude 196 on Germany 140 on Kant’s concept of duty 100 on language 245 on philosophy 182 on religion 45, 196–197, 235 on Romanticism 199 on Spinoza 45 on the concept of Symphilosophie 26 on the goal of the religious life 45 Plato project with Schleiermacher 180 Scholtz, Gunter 244, 247 Seifert, Paul 153 Semler, J. S. 51 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of 53, 120 as ‘Plato Europens 120 influence on theory of Bildung 119–120 on dialogue 183–185 on soliloquy 149 Shakespeare 1, 115, 149 singing 177, 191, 226, 238, 242, 244 slave trade 162–163 Sockness, Brent 22–23, 32, 64, 77, 99, 116, 164 soliloquy 10, 248, 258 as disclosive event 149 as performance 153, 164 relation to anthropology 159, 172 relation to ethics 165–167, 173 relation to the imagination 165, 168 Soskice, Janet 179, 250 Spalding, J. J. 119–120 Spinoza 21, 45, 97 Strathern, Marilyn 146 Strauss, David Friedrich 179 Symphilosophie 26 Taylor, Charles 43, 80–81, 116 Teller, Wilhelm Abraham 210 Tennemann, Wilhelm Gottlieb 181–182 Thandeka 23 theology 16 account of human difference within  192 as a field of study 1, 3–4, 13, 32, 171, 175

Index as context for hermeneutics 4 as projection of human self-consciousness 227 as γνώσις 220 Barth on 222–224, 248 Barth’s influence on reception of Schleiermacher 224, 229, 230, 231, 235, 248, 15–16 boundaries with ethics 2, 13, 34–35, 98, 262 boundaries with literature 5 boundaries with philosophy 4, 41 Brunner’s influence on reception of Schleiermacher’s 15–16 concept of freedom in 220 detaching Schleiermacher’s ideas from 3, 13 dogmatic 6, 207 failure of Schleiermacher’s 173, 220, 254, 261 Feuerbach on 15–16 form of Schleiermacher’s 27, 231, 235 impact of Pietism on Schleiermacher’s 49 influence of Hegel on 4 negative vi, xii of finitude 10–11, 27, 42, 96, 197, 262 of immanence 60 Protestant 43 reception of German theology in Victorian Britain 3 relation to anthropology 25 relation to anti-Judaism 214 relation to epistemology 247 relation to language 13, 245 Romantic response to 198 relation to politics 214 Schleiermacher as father of modern systematic theology 4 Schleiermacher’s legacy for 26–27, 262 Semler on 52 Wolff on 50–51 Tice, Terrence 179, 184, 231, 233 Tieck, Ludwig 44, 115 Troeltsch, Ernst 6, 222 Vander Schel, Kevin 20 Varnhagen, Rahel 125–126

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293

Index Veit, Dorothea 125, 127, 209, 216 Vial, Theodore 6, 8, 14, 19, 96, 214, 219, 261 Wackenroder, W. H. 44, 115 Wallhauser, John 41, 106 Walzel, Oskar 157, 201, 240 Weber, Max 43 Wellmon, Chad 135, 143–145, 147–148

Willich, Ehrenfried von 97, 140, 184 Willich, Henriette von 151, 225 Wolff, Christian 50–52, 63 women writers 124–127 Zammito, John H. 118 Zantop, Susanne 139 Ziolkowski, Theodore 44, 123

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