SCHLEIERMACHER, FRIEDRICH ERNST DANIEL. — He is the leading figure of German Romantic theology and the most illustrious representative of the break between Protestant religiosity and speculative rationalism. Born on 21 November 1768 in Breslau to a pastor and the daughter of a pastor, he received a profoundly religious family upbringing with a Pietist character, which continued at the College of the “community of 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 subsequently at the Charité in Berlin (1796), where he met F. Schlegel and, at the home of Henriette Herz, frequented the finest Berlin society. In 1799 he was preacher in Potsdam and in 1802 in Stolpe, Pomerania; in 1804 he began his university career as an extraordinary professor at Halle, and in 1810 was called to the chair of theology at the new University of Berlin. S. suffered many family sorrows (separation from his wife and the loss of his beloved son Natanaele in 1829) and had to sustain bitter doctrinal struggles (especially with Hegel, who was triumphant in the Faculty of Philosophy). He died in Berlin on 12 February 1834. He was the founder and, until his death, president of the Berlin Academy of Sciences.
S.’s work is extraordinarily extensive and encompasses, in addition to sermons, the entire field of the philosophical and theological sciences. His translation of Plato (the Timaeus is missing) remains a classic, and his study of the philosophy of Eracilio opened the way to modern investigations into the mysterious philosopher. S.’s thought is a synthesis of the Spinozian doctrine of the one 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, one “organic” and the other “intellectual,” in which the a priori element is contained. Time and space are the forms of the existence of things; the multiplicity of objects forms a real unity of the whole, which is an unorganized totality. This is the world: the unity of the totality of the world is divinity. Every part of the world stands in an exchange relationship with all the others, of activity and passivity. In man, activity is given by the feeling of freedom, passivity by the feeling of dependence, on which, for S., all religion is founded. His theology is nothing other than 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 by which human consciousness may gain access to the “Whole” of being and to the truth of Revelation, and he identifies it in “mysticism,” in the attitude of the feeling’s pure passivity. A Pietist by upbringing and a contemporary of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, he reduced religion to the feeling of the soul’s direct relationship with divinity, independently of every historical circumstance. In the Reden über die Religion (1799), which opened his career, 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 Paul. I need not a bookish religion, but one emanating from all things.” This
religion, without dogmas and without a Church, is neither knowledge nor action; it is feeling, that is, the immediate consciousness of the finite’s dependence on the infinite, of man’s dependence on God, and it has its seat in affectivity (Gemüté). 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 thus lies beyond ordinary knowing and feeling, insofar as it is their original identity. Therefore feeling is not subjective, but actualizes its individual self-consciousness as universal: “it is the universal form of having oneself” (Dialektik, complete edition by R. Oldebracht, Leipzig 1942, § 215, p. 286 ff.). Revelation is not an extraordinary communication coming from above, but consists in becoming conscious of one’s intimate life and of a new intuition that arises within 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 divinity unfolded with complete clarity, showing that every finite being requires a higher communication in order to adhere to God. It is therefore useless to debate the historicity of Christ’s life and of his miracles. Revelation continues always in every discovery of the human spirit, and prophecy is nothing other than an anticipation that this spirit makes of its own development. The principal work, Der christliche Glaube (1823), systematically develops the principle of the “feeling of dependence,” showing how the various dogmas are the “modification” (Modification) of that feeling; hence, regarding every dogmatic truth concerning the attributes of God, the Trinity, the Incarnation, Redemption, sin, and Grace, etc., the valid content 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, prophecies, the official teaching authority, and proofs of every kind: it is the sole interpreter of the “sola fides,” which here is understood as the feeling arising from the encounter between self-consciousness of freedom and nature and history (op. cit., § 32). These modernism (v.) and by the proponents of the “theology of feeling” (Gefühlstheologie); it inspired the development of modern trends in the philosophy of religion and 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. were Hegel, B. Baur, Strauss, Feuerbach, and the entire Hegelian left.