1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Schleiermacher, Friedrich Daniel Ernst

SCHLEIERMACHER, FRIEDRICH DANIEL ERNST (1768-1834), theologian and philosopher, was the son of a Prussian army chaplain of the Reformed confession, and was born on the 21st of November 1768 at Breslau. He was educated in a Moravian school at Niesky in upper Lusatia, and at Barby near Halle. Moravian theology, however, soon ceased to satisfy him, and his doubts rapidly took definite shape. Reluctantly his father gave him permission to leave Barby for the university of Halle, which had already (1787) abandoned pietism and adopted the rationalist spirit of Wolf and Semler (see ../Rationalism). 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 acquired 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 was for two years private tutor in the family of Count Dohna-Schlobitten, developing in a cultivated and aristocratic household his deep love of family and social life. In 1796 he became chaplain to the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Having no scope for the development of his powers as a preacher, he sought mental and spiritual satisfaction 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 and general culture. He was at that time profoundly affected by German Romanticism, as represented by his friend Friedrich Schlegel. Of this his Confidential Letters on Schlegel's Lucinde (Vertrauten Briefe über Schlegel's &ldquo;Lucinde,&rdquo; 1801; ed. 1835; by Jonas Fränkel, 1907; R. Frank, 1907), as well as his perilous relation to Eleonore Grunow, the wife of a Berlin clergyman, are proof and illustration. Though his ultimate principles were unchanged he gained much from the struggle. It showed him much of the inner truth of human feeling and emotion, and enriched his imagination and life 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 &ldquo;epoch-making&rdquo; book, Reden über die Religion (1799; ed. Göttingen, 1906), and his &ldquo;new year's gift&rdquo; to the new century, the Monologen (1800; ed. 1902). 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.

From 1802 to 1804, Schleiermacher was pastor in the little Pomeranian town of Stolpe. These years were full of 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 (vols. 1-5, 1804-1810; 3rd ed., 1855-1861; vol. 6, Repub. 1828; 2nd ed., 1855-1862). At the same time another work, Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803; 2nd ed. 1834), 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 &ldquo;Güterlehre,&rdquo; 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 atheist, Spinozist and pietist. In this period he wrote his dialogue the Weihnachtsfeier (1806; 4th ed. 1850), a charming production, which holds a place midway between his Reden and his great dogmatic work, Der 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, 1811; 2nd ed. 1830), 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, pedagogy 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 &mdash; 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 &ldquo;demagogic agitation&rdquo; 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 (1821-1822; 2nd ed., greatly altered, 1830-1831; 6th ed., 1884). 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 supernaturalism 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 &mdash; a blow which, he said, &ldquo;drove the nails into his own coffin.&rdquo; 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, on the 12th of February 1834.


 * (J. F. S.; X.)