Friedrich Schleiermacher

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Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was a German Protestant theologian and philosopher whose central argument was that religion is rooted neither in doctrine nor in morality but in a distinct movement of feeling — and who, on that basis, is usually counted the founder of modern liberal theology. Before him the question that organized Christian thought was whether its claims were true. He shifted the prior question onto the table: what, in the first place, religion is — and located the answer not in any proposition to be affirmed but in a stratum of consciousness underneath assertion and act alike.

Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) in an 1838 engraving by Auguste Hüssener — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Formation: the Brethren, the doubt, and the schools

He was born at Breslau, in Prussian Silesia, the son of a Reformed army chaplain, and was raised among the Moravian Brethren — the Herrnhut community whose warm, inward Christianity made the relation to Christ a matter of the heart rather than of assent to formulas. He was schooled at the Brethren’s institutions at Niesky and then the seminary at Barby, and there, as a young man, his faith broke down: he could no longer hold the doctrines the community required — the satisfaction wrought by Christ’s death, the eternity of punishment — and wrote to his father that the doubt had become unbearable. The rupture was real, and it cost him his father’s confidence for years. Yet he later said that he had become a Herrnhuter again, only of a higher order: the affective, experiential core of that pietism — religion as a felt and lived relation rather than a creed — survived the collapse of its dogmas and became the seed of his mature theology.

He went on to the University of Halle in 1787, where the warm religion of the Brethren met the cold instruments of the German Enlightenment. He read Aristotle and, decisively, Immanuel Kant, whose critical philosophy had cordoned off the supersensible from theoretical reason and made the old metaphysical proofs of God look like trespass. Kant had relocated religion within the bounds of practical reason — religion as a support for morality, God as a postulate the moral will requires. Schleiermacher absorbed the Kantian limits on knowledge and never tried to step back over them; but he refused the reduction of religion to ethics as firmly as he refused its reduction to a failed metaphysics. Religion, he would argue, had a province of its own. Ordained in the Reformed church, he served as a tutor in the household of Count Dohna and then, from 1796, as chaplain at the Charité, the great Berlin hospital.

A portrait of Schleiermacher reproduced in Popular Science Monthly, volume 65 (1904) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The Speeches and the discovery of a third thing

In Berlin he was drawn into the circle of the early Romantics — the salons, and above all the friendship with Friedrich Schlegel, with whom for a time he shared lodgings. It was this brilliant, irreligious company, contemptuous of the churches and indifferent to dogma, that pressed him to set down what he actually thought, and the result was the book that made his name: On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799). It was addressed, exactly as the title says, to the despisers — the educated contemporaries who had concluded that religion was a residue of superstition or, at best, a serviceable prop for public order. To them Schleiermacher conceded almost everything they said against doctrine and church, and then told them they had never met religion at all.

For religion, on his account, is neither a kind of knowing nor a kind of doing. It is not metaphysics in devotional dress, not a theory of first causes; nor is it morality with a heavenly sanction. It is a third thing, prior to both: intuition and feeling — in his German, Anschauung und Gefühl — a sense and taste for the infinite within the finite, an immediate awareness of the whole within which a person finds themselves placed and carried. To be religious, in this reading, is to meet each finite thing as a disclosure of the infinite universe, to feel the All in the particular. Doctrines and scriptures are not this awareness; they are its precipitate, the reports a religious consciousness gives of itself after the fact. In the Romantic key of the Speeches the note sounded close to the monism of Benedictus de Spinoza — Schleiermacher saluted Spinoza in the text as one possessed by the world-spirit and full of religion — and his critics promptly read the book as a refined pantheism. He resisted the charge; in his later lectures he argued for a transcendent ground beyond the Spinozist nature-as-self-producing, and he denied being any follower of Spinoza. Where scholars disagree is on how far the early Speeches can be saved from the pantheist reading at all — the text’s intuition of the universe as the one infinite life sits uneasily with a God set over against the world, and the question of Schleiermacher’s exact relation to Spinozist monism remains, by general consent, unsettled at the level of the 1799 edition. He revised the book repeatedly across his life, softening the more vertiginous formulations.

The Christian Faith: piety as absolute dependence

The intuition of the Speeches hardened, in his mature dogmatics The Christian Faith (Der christliche Glaube, first edition 1821–22, recast in a second edition 1830–31), into a precise and consequential formula. The essence of piety, he held, is the feeling of absolute dependence — in German, the schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit, a dependence with no remainder. Self-conscious existence, he reasoned, always carries a double sense: a feeling of relative freedom (one acts on the world) braided with a feeling of relative dependence (the world acts on one). But beneath the whole exchange lies a further consciousness that one’s existence as such — the entire give-and-take, the self and the world together — is not self-grounded but received. That consciousness of being utterly, unconditionally dependent is the feeling of absolute dependence; and the word God, in the first instance, is the name for the whence of that feeling, the source toward which it points. It is not, on these terms, an inference to an external being but the immediate co-givenness, in self-consciousness, of the ground on which the self rests.

The method that follows is the lever that turns the whole inheritance. Christian doctrines, Schleiermacher held, are accounts of Christian religious affections set forth in speech — descriptions of states of the believing consciousness, not reports about a supernatural order standing behind it. Theology thus proceeds by examining the life of faith in the church rather than by deducing propositions from premises or from the bare text of revelation. On these terms he reread the entire apparatus of Christian belief, and the rereadings were exact and disconcerting: the doctrine of creation becomes the dogmatic expression of the absolute dependence of everything finite on God; the divine attributes name not properties of a being inspected from outside but modes in which the feeling of dependence is related to its source; even the miracle is reread — not denied as an event, but refused as a category, since to call an event a breach in the order of nature is, for him, to mistake the grammar of religious speech, which names an occurrence miracle in proportion to its religious significance for the consciousness that receives it, not by its violation of natural law. Whatever in the inherited creed could not be derived from the religious self-consciousness — and he was willing to follow this far — he treated as no proper part of the science of faith. The redeemer remains central: in the recast dogmatics Christ is the one in whom the God-consciousness was perfectly potent, and redemption is the communication of that consciousness to others. But the whole structure is built upward from the experienced life of piety, not downward from an authority assumed in advance.

The translator of Plato and the founding of hermeneutics

Schleiermacher was, in the same years, a working translator and theorist of interpretation, and these were not side projects but the same mind at a different task. The project, begun with Schlegel near the turn of the century and carried alone after the friendship cooled, produced a German Plato — most of the dialogues, issued from 1804 — that remained standard reading for generations and shaped how German-speaking philosophy met the Greek. Schleiermacher did not translate the dialogues as a heap of doctrines; he read each as a living whole, ordered to lead a reader’s mind, and he set out a controversial sequence for them, treating the arrangement itself as an interpretive argument. The Platonic and the Neoplatonic inheritance — the dialogue as a graded ascent of the soul, the conviction that thought is formed in the act of understanding another mind — runs underneath his whole account of interpretation.

That account is the second of his durable founding acts. His lectures on hermeneutics, delivered from 1805 and reworked across nearly three decades, took interpretation out of its old confinement to scripture and law and made it general: the art of understanding any utterance whatsoever, the avoidance of misunderstanding raised to a method. He divided the work into a grammatical side — the utterance located within the language it shares with all other speakers — and a psychological or technical side — the utterance traced back to the singular mind and life that produced it; the interpreter must move constantly between the two, and at the limit must read divinatorily, reconstructing the author’s act of composition from within. To understand a text, on this account, is in principle to understand its author as well as, and finally better than, the author understood themselves. Wilhelm Dilthey, who wrote the foundational study of Schleiermacher’s life and seized on the hermeneutics as the method of the human sciences, and after him Hans-Georg Gadamer, who in Truth and Method made Schleiermacher the figure to argue with, carried the discipline into the twentieth century — Gadamer largely by contesting the psychological, mind-to-mind emphasis he read in him. Through that line of dispute and inheritance Schleiermacher stands at the head of modern hermeneutics whether one builds on him or against him.

He was, throughout, a man of the institution as much as the study. He took a leading part in the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, held a chair of theology there, served as the first dean of its theological faculty, sat as secretary in the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and preached week by week at Trinity Church until his death in 1834. His Brief Outline of the Study of Theology (1811, revised 1830) reorganized the discipline itself into philosophical, historical, and practical theology — the architecture of the theological curriculum that the German research university would carry outward across the world.

The University of Berlin, which Schleiermacher helped found in 1810 and where he held a chair of theology, in a steel engraving of about 1850 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Texts and scholarship

The German critical edition is the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGA), in progress from De Gruyter since 1980, which is gradually replacing the older nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Sämmtliche Werke. In English, the two primary texts most read are Richard Crouter’s translation of the 1799 On Religion (Cambridge, in the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series) and the H. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart translation of the second edition of The Christian Faith (1928), reissued in a corrected modern form; the programmatic Brief Outline of Theology as a Field of Study exists in Terrence N. Tice’s revised translation of the 1811 and 1830 editions, which prints both recensions with critical notes. The standard scholarly biography in English remains Martin Redeker’s Schleiermacher: Life and Thought (German 1968; trans. John Wallhausser, Fortress Press, 1973). Richard Crouter’s Friedrich Schleiermacher: Between Enlightenment and Romanticism (Cambridge, 2005) gathers the essays that have shaped the anglophone reading, and Jacqueline Mariña’s The Cambridge Companion to Friedrich Schleiermacher (Cambridge, 2005) maps the present state of the field across his philosophy, theology, and cultural context. The analytic reconstruction of his thought as a whole — the philosophy of religion, the hermeneutics, the dialectic, the ethics — is set out at length in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on Schleiermacher, with a full bibliography; a compact narrative of the life and works, with the principal dates, is given by the Encyclopædia Britannica. The hermeneutics has its own dedicated literature, where the line from Schleiermacher through Dilthey to Gadamer is the standard frame for the rise of modern interpretation theory.

The contested legacy

His legacy is genuinely contested, and the contest is itself a measure of how much he moved. Admirers credit him with rescuing theology from a double death — rationalist dismissal on one side, brittle confessional orthodoxy on the other — by grounding it in something neither could touch: the experienced life of faith. To his heirs in liberal Protestantism he made it possible to be modern and Christian at once, to surrender the apologetic defense of miracle and literal cosmology without surrendering religion. His severest critic, Karl Barth, granted him the stature of the greatest of the liberal Protestants and then repudiated the whole project: to begin theology from human feeling, Barth charged, is to make God a function of the religious self, to risk saying nothing about God at all but only about the changes God effects in human consciousness — to speak of God, in Barth’s phrase, merely by speaking of the human being in a loud voice — and so to dissolve revelation into psychology and leave the door open to Ludwig Feuerbach’s reduction of theology to a projected anthropology. The exchange has never closed; the twentieth-century swing to Barth’s dialectical theology was a swing away from Schleiermacher, and the later return of interest in him a swing back. He kept a contrasting company in his own generation: Franz Xaver von Baader, the Munich Catholic who pressed the speculative mysticism of Böhme into debate with the Idealists, anchored religion not in feeling but in con-scientia, a knowing-with God — a different route out of the isolated Enlightenment self, beginning from participation in divine knowledge where Schleiermacher began from a feeling beneath all knowing. The two stand as the era’s two great refusals of the lone reasoning subject, reached from opposite ends.

What is not in dispute is the shift he forced. After him the question of what religion is — before any question of whether its claims are true — became one that theology could no longer skip.

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