SCHLEIERMACHER, Friedrich Daniel Ernst (1768-1834), theologian and philosopher, was the son of a Prussian army-chaplain of the Reformed confession, and was born November 21, 1768, at Breslau. In his fifteenth year the boy, who was of a weak constitution, was placed by his parents in a Moravian school at Niesky in Upper Lusatia, and two years later in the seminary of the same sect at Barby near Halle. Here Moravian theology proved inadequate to satisfy the deep religious needs and awakening intellect of the youth. It was particularly the doctrines of eternal punishment, of the deity and the substitutionary sufferings of Christ, and of the total corruption of human nature that were stumbling-blocks to him. He was also unable to make his own the peculiar religious experiences of his Moravian and pietistic teachers. The efforts of his strictly orthodox father and of the heads of the seminary to lead him to crush his doubts as sinful, and to shun modern theology and literature, tended only to strengthen his desire to explore the great world of knowledge. Reluctantly his father gave him permission to leave Barby for the university of Halle, and the correspondence between the father and the son on this painful crisis in Friedrich’s life supplies a striking illustration of a typical phase of distressing modern mental history. When Schleiermacher entered the university of Halle (1787) the reign of pietism there had ceased, having given way to the rationalistic philosophy of Wolf with the critical theology of Sender, though the new philosophy of Kant was rapidly displacing Wolf’s. As a student he pursued an independent course of reading and neglected to his permanent loss the study of the Old Testament and the Oriental languages. But he frequented the lectures of Semler and ...of J. A. Eberhard, acquiring from the former the principles of an independent criticism of the New Testament and from the latter his love of Plato and Aristotle. At the same time he studied with great earnestness the writings of Kant and Jacobi. He commenced thus early his characteristic habit of forming his opinions by the process of patiently examining and weighing the positions of all thinkers and parties. But with the receptivity of a great eclectic he combined the reconstructive power of a profoundly original thinker. While yet a student he began to apply ideas gathered from the Greek philosophers in a reconstruction of Kant’s system. At the completion of his three years’ course at Halle he obtained through the influence of the court-chaplain Sack an appointment as private tutor in the family of Count Dohna-Schlobitten, which he held upwards of two years, developing in a cultivated and aristocratic household his deep love of family and social life. After short engagements in tuition and as locum tenens to a clergyman of the small town of Landsberg, he received (1796) the appointment of chaplain to the Charité Hospital in Berlin, a position which he held nearly six years, and which offered no scope for the development of his powers as a preacher. He was the more induced to seek the satisfaction of his mental and spiritual necessities in the cultivated society of Berlin, and in profound philosophical studies. This was the period in which he was constructing the framework of his philosophical and religious system. It was the period too when he made himself widely acquainted with art, literature, science, aud modern culture generally. He was at that time profoundly affected by German Romanticism, as represented by his friend Friedrich Schlegel, and it required all the energy of his moral nature and the force of his intellect to preserve himself from its moral and mental extravagances. Of this his Confidential Letters on Schlegel’s Lucinde (1801), as well as his perilous relation to Eleonore Grunow, the wife of a Berlin clergyman, are proof and illustration. Gradually his sound moral nature, his deep religiousness, and his powerful intellect enabled him to emancipate himself entirely from the errors and weaknesses of a transient phase of mental and social history, and to appropriate at the same time the elements of truth and goodness which it possessed in rich measure. Romanticism unlocked for him the divine treasures of life and truth which are stored in the feelings and intuitions of the human soul, and thus enabled him to lay the foundations of his philosophy of religion and his ethical system. It enriched his imagination and life too with ideals ancient and modern, which gave elevation, depth, and colour to all his thought. Meantime he studied Spinoza and Plato, and was profoundly influenced by both, though he was never a Spinozist; he made Kant more and more his master, though he departed on fundamental points from him, and finally remodelled his philosophy; with some of Jacobi’s positions he was in sympathy, and from Fichte and Schelling he accepted ideas, which in their place in his system, however, received another value and import. The literary fruit of this period of intense fermentation and of rapid development was his “epoch-making” book, Reden Über die Religion (1799), and his “new year’s gift” to the new century, the Monologen (1800). In the first book he vindicated for religion an eternal place amongst the divine mysteries of human nature, distinguished it from all current caricatures of it and allied phenomena, and described the perennial forms of its manifestation and life in men and society, giving thereby the programme of his subsequent theological system. In the Monologen he threw out his ethical manifesto, in which he proclaimed his ideas as to the freedom and independence of the spirit, and as to the relation of the mind to the world of sense and imperfect social organizations, and sketched his ideal of the future of the individual and society. In 1802, to his great advantage morally and intellectually, Schleiermacher exchanged the brilliant circle of Berlin Romanticists for the retired life of a pastor in the little Pomeranian town of Stolpe. Here he remained two years, which were full of pastoral and literary work, as well as rich in personal and moral progress. He relieved Friedrich Schlegel entirely of his nominal responsibility for the translation of Plato, which they had together undertaken, and regarded the completion of it as the work of his life. The first volume was published in 1804, and the last (the Republic) in 1828. At the same time another work, Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803), the first of his strictly critical and philosophical productions, occupied him. This work is a severe criticism of all previous moral systems, especially those of Kant and Fichte, Plato’s and Spinoza’s finding most favour; its leading principles are that the tests of the soundness of a moral system are the completeness of its view of the laws and ends of human life as a whole and the harmonious arrangement of its subject-matter under one fundamental principle; and, though it is almost exclusively critical and negative, the book announces clearly the division and scope of moral science which Schleiermacher subsequently adopted, attaching prime importance to a “Güterlehre,” or doctrine of the ends to be obtained by moral action. But the obscurity of the style of the book as well as its almost purely negative results proved fatal to its immediate success. In 1804 Schleiermacher removed as university preacher and professor of theology to Halle, where he remained until 1807, and where he quickly obtained a reputation as professor and preacher, and exercised a powerful influence in spite of the contradictory charges of his being an atheist, Spinozist, and pietist. In this period he wrote his dialogue the Weihnachtsfeier (1806), a charming production, which holds a place midway between his Reden and his great dogmatic work the Christliche Glaube, and presents in the persons of its speakers phases of his growing appreciation of Christianity as well as the conflicting elements of the theology of the period. After the battle of Jena he returned to Berlin (1807), was soon appointed pastor of the Trinity Church there, and the next year married the widow of his friend Willich. At the foundation of the Berlin university (1810), in which he took a prominent part, he was called to a theological chair, and soon became secretary to the Academy of Sciences. He was thus placed in a position suited to his powers and in domestic and social surroundings adapted to meet the wants of his rich nature. At the same time he approved himself in the pulpit and elsewhere as a large-hearted and fearless patriot in that time of national calamity and humiliation, acquiring a name and place in his country’s annals with Arndt, Fichte, Stein, and Scharnhorst. He took a prominent part too in the reorganization of the Prussian church, and became the most powerful advocate of the union of the Lutheran and Reformed divisions of German Protestantism. The twenty-four years of his professional career in Berlin were opened with his short but important outline of theological study (Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums, 1810), in which he sought to do for theology what he had done for religion in his Reden. While he preached every Sunday, he also gradually took up in his lectures in the university almost every branch of theology and philosophy—New Testament exegesis, introduction to and interpretation of the New Testament, ethics (both philosophic and Christian), dogmatic and practical theology, church history, history of philosophy, psychology, dialectics (logic and metaphysics), politics, paedagogy, and aesthetics. His own materials for these lectures and his students’ notes and reports of them are the only form in which the larger proportion of his works exist,—a circumstance which has greatly increased the difficulty of getting a clear and harmonious view of fundamental portions of his philosophical and ethical system, while it has effectually deterred all but the most courageous and patient students from reading these posthumous collections. As a preacher he produced a powerful effect, yet not at all by the force of his oratory but by his intellectual strength, his devotional spirit, and the philosophical breadth and unity of his thought. In politics he was an earnest friend of liberty and progress, and in the period of reaction which followed the overthrow of Napoleon he was charged by the Prussian Government with “demagogic agitation” in conjunction with the great patriot Arndt. At the same time he prepared for the press his chief theological work Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche (1821-22; 2d edition, greatly altered, 1830-31). The fundamental principle of this classical work is, that religious feeling, the sense of absolute dependence on God as communicated by Jesus Christ through the church, and not the creeds or the letter of Scripture or the rationalistic understanding, is the source and law of dogmatic theology. The work is therefore simply a description of the facts of religious feeling, or of the inner life of the soul in its relations to God, and these inward facts are looked at in the various stages of their development and presented in their systematic connexion. The aim of the work was to reform Protestant theology by means of the fundamental ideas of the Reden, to put an end to the unreason and superficiality of both super naturalism and rationalism, and to deliver religion and theology from a relation of dependence on perpetually changing systems of philosophy. Though the work added to the reputation of its author, it naturally aroused the increased opposition of the theological schools it was intended to overthrow, and at the same time Schleiermacher’s defence of the right of the church to frame its own liturgy in opposition to the arbitrary dictation of the monarch or his ministers brought upon him fresh troubles. He felt himself in Berlin more and more isolated, although his church and his lecture-room continued to be largely attended. But he prosecuted his translation of Plato and prepared a new and greatly altered edition of his Christliche Glaube, anticipating the latter in two letters to his friend Lücke (in the Studien und Kritiken, 1829), in which he defended with a masterly hand his theological position generally and his book in particular against opponents on the right and the left. The same year he lost his only son—a blow which, he said, “drove the nails into his own coffin.” But he continued to defend his theological position against Hengstenberg’s party on the one hand and the rationalists Von Cölln and D. Schulz on the other, protesting against both subscription to the ancient creeds and the imposition of a new rationalistic formulary. In the midst of such labours, and enjoying still full bodily and mental vigour, he was carried off after a few days’ illness by inflammation of the lungs. He died thinking “the profoundest speculative ideas which were one with his deepest religious feeling,” and partaking of the sacrament of the Lord’s supper, February 12, 1834.
Schleiermacher’s friend, the naturalist and poet Steffens, has left the following description of his appearance about the beginning of the century :—“Schleiermacher was of small stature, a little deformed, yet hardly enough to disfigure him; all his movements were animated, and his features in the highest degree expressive; a certain keenness in his glance produced perhaps a repellent effect; indeed, he appeared to see through every one; his face rather long, all his features sharply cut, the lips firmly closed, the chin projecting, the eyes animated and flashing, his look always serious, collected, and thoughtful.”
Schleiermacher's Philosophical System.— A great antithesis lies at the basis of all thought and life—that of the real and the ideal, of organism, or sense, and intellect. But the antithesis is not absolute, for in life and being both elements are united—though without its presence life and thought would be impossible. In the actual world the antithesis appears as reason and nature, in each of which, however, there is a combination of its two elements—the ideal and the real,—the reason having a preponderance of the first and nature a preponderance of the second. At the basis of nature lies universal reason as its organizing principle, and when reason becomes a conscious power in man it finds itself in conflict as well as in harmony with external nature. The whole effort and end of human thought and action is the gradual reduction of the realm and the power of this antithesis in the individual, the race, and the world. Though the antithesis is real and deep, the human mind cannot admit its absolute nature; we are compelled to suppose a transcendental reality or entity in which the real and the ideal, being and thought, subject and object, are one. Consciousness itself involves the union of the antithetic elements, and prior to moral action nature is found organized and reason manifested or symbolized therein. We are ourselves proofs of the unity of the real and the ideal, of thought and being, for we are both, our selfconsciousness supplying the expression of the fact. As we have in ourselves an instance of the identity of thought and being, we must suppose a universal identity of the ideal and real behind the antithesis which constitutes the world. This supposition is the basis of all knowledge, for thought becomes knowledge only when it corresponds to being. The supposition may be called a belief, but it is so only in the sense in which belief appears in the religious department, where it is the ultimate ground of all action. The supposition is the basis of all ethics, for without the conviction of the correspondence of thought and reality action would be fruitless and in the end impossible. It is above all the substance of religious feeling, which is the immediate consciousness of the unity of the world, of the absolute oneness behind the infinite multiplicity of contrasts; indeed, it is the religious conviction of the unity which is the best guarantee of the truth of the suppositions of philosophy. It is “the religious consciousness of the unity of the intellectual and physical world in God” which is to overcome the scepticism of the critical philosophy. But, though this unity must be laid down as the basis of knowledge, it is absolute and transcendental. In contrast with the “world,” as the totality of being in its differentiation, this absolute unity, or God, in whom the real as manifold, and the spirit as one, find their unifying base, by its very nature is unphenomenal, indefinable, and inconceivable. The idea is outside the boundary of thought, though its necessary postulate, and it is no less inaccessible to religious feeling, though it is its life and soul. Neither member of the antithesis of the real and the ideal must be conceived as producing the other; they are both equally existent and equally constituent elements of the world; but in God they are one, and therefore the world must not be identified with Him. The world and God are distinct, but correlative, and neither can be conceived without the other. The world without God would be “chaos,” and God without the world an empty “phantasm.” But though God is transcendent and unknowable He is immanent in the world. In self-consciousness God is present as the basis of the unity of our nature in every transition from an act of knowledge to an act of will, and vice versa. As far as man is the unity of the real and the ideal, God is in him. He is also in all things, inasmuch as in everything the totality of the world and its transcendental basis is presupposed by virtue of their being and correlation. The unity of our personal life amidst the multiplicity of its functions is the symbol of God’s immanence in the world, though we may not conceive of the Absolute as a person. The idea of the world as the totality of being is, like the correlative idea of God, only of regulative value; it is transcendent, as we never do more than make approaches to a knowledge of the sum of being. The one idea is the transcendental terminus a quo and the other the transcendental terminus ad quem of all knowledge. But though the world cannot be exhaustively known it can be known very extensively, and though the positive idea of God must always remain unattainable we are able to reject those ideas which involve a contradiction of the postulate of the Absolute. Thus the pantheistic and the theistic conceptions of God as the supreme power, as the first cause, as a person, are alike unallowable, since they all bring God within the sphere of antithesis and preclude His absolute unity. On the other hand, the world can be known as the realm of antithesis, and it is the correlative of God. Though He may not be conceived as the absolute cause of the world, the idea of absolute causality as symbolized in it may be taken as the best approximate expression of the contents of the religious consciousness. The unbroken connexion of cause and effect throughout the world becomes thus a manifestation of God. God is to be sought only in ourselves and in the world. He is completely immanent in the universe. It is impossible that His causality should have any other sphere than the world, which is the totality of being. “No God without a world, and no world without God.” The divine omnipotence is quantitatively represented by the sum of the forces of nature, and qualitatively distinguished· from them only as the unity of infinite causality from the multiplicity of its finite phenomena. Throughout the world—not excepting the realm of mind—absolute necessity prevails. As a whole the world is as good and perfect as a world could possibly be, and everything in it, as occupying its necessary place in the whole, is also good, evil being only the necessary limitation of individual being.
Schleiermacher’s psychology takes as its basis the phenomenal dualism of the ego and the non-ego, and regards the life of man as the interaction of these elements with their interpenetration as its infinite destination. The dualism is therefore not absolute, and, though present in man’s own constitution as composed of body and soul, is relative only even there. The ego is itself both body and soul,—the conjunction of both constitutes it; our “organization” or sense nature has its intellectual element, and our “intellect” its organic element. There is no such thing as “pure mind” or “pure body.” The one general function of the ego, thought, becomes in relation to the non-ego either receptive or spontaneous action, and in both forms of action its organic, or sense, and its intellectual energies co-operate; and in relation to man, nature, and the universe the ego gradually finds its true individuality by becoming a part of them, “every extension of consciousness being higher life.” The specific functions of the ego, as determined by the relative predominance of sense or intellect, are either functions of the senses (or organism) or functions of the intellect. The former fall into...
[7,000 words — estimated reading time: 40 minutes]