SCHLEIERMACHER, FRIEDRICH ERNST DANIEL. - He is the founder of the school of German Romantic theology and the most distinguished representative of the break of Protestant religiosity with speculative rationalism. Born on 21 Nov. 1768 in Breslau to a pastor and the daughter of a pastor, he received a deeply religious family education with a Pietist background, which he continued at the College of the "community of the brethren" (Brüdergemeinde) in Niesky and then at the Seminary of Barby, where he experienced his first doubts about the Church. He completed his higher studies at Halle, and was then appointed preacher first at Landsberg (1794) and then at the Charité in Berlin (1796), where he met F. Schlegel and frequented, at the home of Henriette Herz, the best Berlin society. In 1799 he was preacher at Potsdam and in 1802 at Stolpe in Pomerania; in 1804 he began his university career as extraordinary professor at Halle, and in 1810 he was called to the chair of theology at the new University of Berlin. S. suffered many family sorrows (separation from his wife and loss of his beloved son Nathanael, in 1829) and had to endure bitter doctrinal struggles (especially with Hegel, who was triumphant in the Faculty of Philosophy). He died in Berlin on 12 Feb. 1834. He was the founder and president until his death of the Academy of Sciences of Berlin.
S.'s work is exceedingly vast and embraces, besides the sermons, the entire domain of the philosophical and theological sciences. His translation of Plato (the Timaeus is missing) is still classic, and his study on the philosophy of Heraclitus opened the way to modern investigations of that mysterious philosopher. S.'s thought is a synthesis between the Spinozian doctrine of the single substance and the Kantian immediacy of "feeling." Human knowledge is conditioned by the external and internal senses, from which the intellect respectively elaborates its understanding, the one "organic" and the other "intellectual," in which the a priori element is contained. Time and space are the forms of existence of things; the multiplicity of objects forms a real unity of the whole that is an unorganized whole. This is the world: the unity of the totality of the world is the divinity. Every part of the world stands in a mutual relation with all the others, of activity and passivity. That of activity is given, in man, by the feeling of freedom; that of passivity, by the feeling of dependence, on which for S. all religion is founded. His theology is nothing but the development of the "feeling of dependence" (Abhängigkeitsgefühl) through the fundamental problems of Christianity. Transferring the Romantic ideal into theological and philosophical reflection, S. seeks the direct path of access of human consciousness into the "Whole" of being and into the truth of Revelation, and he indicates it in "mysticism," in the attitude of pure passivity of feeling. A Pietist by education and a contemporary of Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, he reduced religion to the feeling of the direct relation of the soul with the divinity, independently of every historical circumstance. In the Reden über die Religion (1799), which opened his career to him, he declares: "Men make of their religion a historical religion. They see God in Judea and in Egypt, in Moses and in Jesus, but not around themselves. We need a living religion: to have in our hearts the faith that dwelt in the heart of Abraham and of Paul. I need not a bookish religion, but one emanating from all things." This religion, without dogmas and without a Church, is neither a knowing nor a doing, it is feeling, that is, the immediate consciousness of the dependence of the finite on the infinite, of man on God, and it has its seat in the affective life (Gemüt). In the Monologe of 1800 S. energetically defended freedom of conscience. In the more mature Dialektik feeling seems to assume an even more transcendental function: it is the "bearer" (Träger) of all the other functions, and therefore beyond ordinary knowing and feeling, insofar as it is the original identity of both. Therefore feeling is not subjective but actualizes its individual self-consciousness as universal: "it is the universal form of having-oneself" (Dialektik, complete ed. by R. Oldebracht, Leipzig 1942, § 215, p. 286 ff.). Revelation is not an extraordinary communication coming from on high, but consists in becoming conscious of one's own intimate life and of a new intuition that is born in it from the Infinite. The most perfect religion is Christianity, and Christ is the highest religious personality to have appeared in history: in his soul the divinity unfolded with full clarity, showing that every finite being needs a higher communication in order to adhere to God. It is therefore useless to discuss the historicity of the life of Christ and of his miracles. Revelation continues always in every discovery of the human spirit, and prophecy is nothing but an anticipation that this spirit makes of its own development. The principal work: Der christliche Glaube (1823), develops systematically the principle of the "feeling of dependence," showing how the various dogmas are the "modification" (Modification) of that feeling; therefore, of every dogmatic truth concerning the attributes of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption, sin and Grace, etc., the content valid for Christian consciousness is determined by what the "feeling of dependence" expresses in the consciousness of individuals at a given moment (Der christliche Glaube, part 1, ch. 2, 30). This feeling therefore takes the place of miracles, of prophecies, of the official magisterium and of proofs of any kind: it is the sole interpreter of "sola fides," which is here understood as the feeling that is born from the encounter of the self-consciousness of freedom in the face of nature and history (op. cit., § 32). These principles were taken up by modernism (v.) and by the advocates of the "theology of feeling" (Gefühlstheologie): it has inspired the development of the modern currents of the philosophy of religion and of the history of religions which exhaust the essence of religion in "religious experience" (R. Otto, A. Ritschl, W. Herrmann, G. Wobbermin). Radical critics of S. have been Hegel, B. Baur, Strauss, Feuerbach and the whole Hegelian left.
Bibliography21 works
Cornelio Fabro