Information for Schleiermacher’s On Religion Eric Watkins Humanities 4 UCSD

Friedrich Schleiermacher is the most important Protestant theologian of the period and is a major proponent of Romanticism. In On Religion he articulates his own conception of religion, against Enlightenment conceptions of religion (such as Kant’s) and against conceptions of Romanticism (like Schiller’s) that do not attribute any significant role to religion (or religious experience). Rather than thinking that one should simply focus on being a good person by doing one’s duty (and hope that God will reward good behavior in an afterlife, if there is one), Schleiermacher thinks that religion is essentially about one’s personal immediate relation to a higher power, the infinite, or God, which he identifies with Nature as a whole.

Historical and Intellectual Background: •Kant emphasized the importance of morality and thought that whatever was important about religion could be reduced to morality. So to be a genuine Christian would require not that one have just the right theological beliefs (e.g., about transubstantiation or the trinity), but rather that one act according to the Categorical Imperative. The Kingdom of Ends formulation of the Categorical Imperative is, in effect, a religious expression of the moral law, but the religious connotations are not essential to his basic idea, which is most fundamentally secular (because based solely on reason, which is the same for everyone, regardless of their religious beliefs). Kant coins an interesting phrase in referring to “the invisible church”; the idea is that what matters is not the physical buildings that one might worship in, but rather the moral relations that obtain between free rational agents (and which generate our obligations not to lie, harm others, commit suicide, etc.). •There were various anti-Enlightenment thinkers, such as Hamann, who rejected the very idea of a universal reason as a myth. Different people and different communities reason in different ways, in part because they live and breathe in different communities according to different cultural and social standards. What is primary for Hamann is direct experience (esp. religious experience of reading the Bible as a sacred book). •Other Romantics, including Schiller, thought that Kant’s division between reason and desire created an unnatural and unhealthy division within man, a kind of inner conflict that they wanted to reject. They thought that aesthetic experience, which was itself a special kind of harmonious interplay between our various cognitive faculties, could re-create the unity of heart and mind that had been split asunder and so make human beings whole again. •Spinoza was an early modern Jewish thinker who held that God was not a transcendent being who created the world out of nothingness, but rather Nature or the World itself. Thus everything in nature is, in a sense, God, or divine-like. Spinoza’s rejection of a transcendent God was thought by many to be tantamount to atheism. However, in the 1780s, Spinoza’s pantheistic view became popular, and was in turn adopted by Schleiermacher.

Schleiermacher’s Main Position: •Schleiermacher’s attack on Enlightenment conceptions of religion is multi-faceted, but its core claim is that he thinks that they do not have the right conception of religion, so their objections to religion are misguided since based on a false conception. (In fact, he often agrees with their criticisms of what they call religion.) •Schleiermacher thinks that what is crucial to religion is experiencing a higher being in whatever form it might present itself. He sometimes characterizes religion, or at least religious experience, as involving an “intuition of the infinite” (p. 90). The infinite is God, or the higher power, which 2 many religions posit. And the intuition of the infinite is an immediate non-intellectual feeling of the infinite in whatever form it arises in the world around us. As such, it is distinct from scientific knowledge (which is intellectual) and also from ethical beliefs (which are about action), and thus forms its own distinctive kind of experience.

Reading Questions: 1. “I wish to lead you to the innermost depths from which religion first addresses the mind. I wish to show you from what capacity of humanity religion proceeds, and how it belongs to what is for you the highest and dearest. I wish to lead you to the pinnacles of the temple that you might survey the whole sanctuary and discover its innermost secrets.” (p. 87) How does this quote fit into Schleiermacher’s argument against Enlightenment conceptions of religion?

2. “You must seek these heavenly sparks that arise when a holy soul is stirred by the universe, and you must overhear them in the incomprehensible moment when they are formed” (p. 92). How does Schleiermacher’s focus on “heavenly sparks” fit with his conception of the religion, and why is the moment in which they are formed incomprehensible?

3. “Religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe, wishes devoutly to overhear the universe’s own manifestations and actions, longs to be grasped and filled by the universe’s immediate influences in childlike passivity…. Religion wishes to see the infinite, its imprint and its manifestation, in humanity no less than in all other individual and finite forms” (p. 102). What elements of Schleiermacher’s conception of religion can be identified in this quotation?

4. “Religion is the sensibility and taste for the infinite” (p. 103). Explain Schleiermacher’s conception of religion as expressed in this quotation.

5. “We should do everything with religion, nothing because of religion” (p. 110). How is this giving expression to Schleiermacher’s critique of Enlightenment conceptions of religion?