Friedrich Schleiermacher · 12 of 15

Fifth Speech. The Religions. · Part 2

In my opinion, then, you will see that the existing forms should not in themselves hinder any man from developing a religion suitable to his own nature and his own religious sense. The question of abiding in one of them or of constructing a religion of one’s own, depends entirely on what relation developes in a man as fundamental feeling and middle-point of all religions.

This is my provisional answer, but if he will hear more I would add that, except by misunderstanding, it would be very difficult to find oneself in such a position. A new revelation is never trivial, and merely personal, but always rests on something great and common. Hence adherents and fellow-believers have never failed the man really called to institute a new religion. Most men, following their nature, will belong to an existing form, and there will be only few whom none suffices.

Yet—and this is my chief point—the authority being the same for all, the many are no less free than the few, and do no less fashion something of their own. If we follow any man’s religious history, we find first dim presentiments which never quite stir the depths of the heart, and, being unrecognized, again disappear. Around every man, especially in earlier days, they doubtless hover. Some hint may awaken them, and they may again vanish without reaching any definite form and betraying aught characteristic. Afterwards it first comes to pass that the sense for the Universe rises once for all into clear consciousness. One man discovers it in one relation, another in another. Hereafter all things are referred to this relation, and so group themselves around it. Such a moment, therefore, in the strictest sense, determines every man’s religion. Now I hope you will not consider a man’s religion less characteristic, less his own, because it lies in a region where already several are collected. In this similarity you are not to find a mechanical influence of custom or birth, but, as you do in other cases, you are to recognize a common determination by higher causes. This agreement is a guarantee of naturalness and truth, and cannot, whether one is first or last, be hurtful to individuality. Though thousands before him and after him referred their religious life to one relation, would it, therefore, be the same in all?

Remember that every definite form of religion is exhaustless for any one man. In its own way it should embrace the whole, a thing too great for any man. And not only so, but in itself there exist endless varieties of cultivation which are, as it were, subordinate types of religion. Is there not here work and scope enough for all? I, at least, am not aware that any religion had succeeded in so taking possession of its territory, and had so determined and exhibited everything therein, according to its own spirit, that, in any one professor of distinguished gifts and individuality of mind, nothing is wanting to perfection. Only to few of our historical religion has it been granted, even in the time of their freedom and higher life, to develope rightly and perfectly the neighbourhood of the middle-point, and, in even a few forms, to give individual impress to the common character. The harvest is great but the labourers are few. An infinite field is opened in each of those religions, wherein thousands may scatter themselves. Uncultivated regions enough present themselves to every one who is capable of making and producing something of his own.

The charge that everyone who allows himself to be embraced in a positive religion, can only be an imitator of those who have given it currency and cannot develope himself individually, is baseless. This judgment no more applies here, than it would to the state or to society. It seems to us morbid or quixotic for any one to maintain that he has no room in any existing institution, and that he must exclude himself from society. We are convinced that every healthy person will, in common with many, have a great national character. Just because he is rooted in it and influenced by it, he can develope his individuality with the greatest precision and beauty. Similarly, in religion only morbid aberration so cuts off a man from a life in fellowship with those among whom nature has placed him, that he belongs to no great whole. Somewhere, on a great scale, everyone will find exhibited or will himself exhibit what for him is the middle-point of religion. To every such common sphere we ascribe a boundless activity that goes into detail, in virtue of which all individual characteristics issue from its bosom. Thus understood, the church is with right called the common mother of us all.

To take the nearest example, think of Christianity as a definite individual form of the highest order. First there is in our time the well known outward division, so definite and pronounced. Under each section there is then a mass of different views and schools. Each exhibits a characteristic development, and has a founder and adherents, yet the last and most personal development of religiousness remains for each individual, and so much is it one with his nature that no one can fully acquire it but himself. And the more a man, by his whole nature, has a claim to belong to you, ye cultured, the more religion must reach this stage in him, for his higher feeling, gradually developing and uniting with other educated capacities, must be a characteristic product.

Or if, after unknown conception and rapid birth-pangs of the spirit, the higher feelings develope, to all appearance suddenly, is not then a characteristic personality born with the religious life? There is a definite connection with a past, a present and a future. The whole subsequent religious life is linked in this way to that moment and that state in which this feeling surprised the soul. It thus maintains its connection with the earlier, poorer life, and has a natural uniform development. Nay more, in this initial consciousness there must already be a distinctive character. Only in a shape and only under circumstances thoroughly definite, could it so suddenly enter a life already developed. This distinctive character, then, every subsequent moment displays and is thus the purest expression of the whole nature. The living spirit of the earth, rending itself from itself as it were, links himself as a finite thing to one definite moment in the series of organic evolutions and a new man arises, a peculiar nature. His separate existence is independent of the mass and objective quality either of his circumstances or his actions. It consists in the peculiar unity of the abiding consciousness that is linked to that first moment, and in the peculiar relation to it which every later moment preserves. Wherefore, in that moment in which in any man a definite consciousness of his relation to the highest Being has, as it were, original birth, an individual religious life originates.

It is Individual, not by an irreversible limitation to a particular number and selection of feelings and intuitions, not by the quality of the religious matter. This matter all who have the spiritual birth at the same time and in the same religious surroundings have in common. But it is individual by what he can have in common with no man, by the abiding influence of the peculiar circumstances in which his spirit was first greeted and embraced by the Universe, and by the peculiar way in which he conducts his observation and reflection on the same. This character and tone of the first childhood of his religion are borne by the whole subsequent course of his views and feelings, and are never lost, however far he may advance in fellowship with the Eternal Fountainhead.

Every intelligent finite being announces its spiritual nature and individuality by taking you back to what I may call a previous marriage in him of the Infinite with the finite, and your imagination refuses to explain it from any single prior factor, whether caprice or nature. In the same way you must regard as an individual everyone who can point to the birthday of his spiritual life and relate a wondrous tale of the rise of his religion as an immediate operation of the Deity, an influence of His spirit. He must be characteristic and special, for such an event does not happen to produce in the kingdom of religion vain repetition. Everything that originates organically and is self-contained can only be explained from itself. If its origin and individuality are not regarded as mutually explanatory and identical, it can never be quite understood. Thus you can only understand the religious person in so far as you know how to discover the whole in the notable moment that began his higher life, or from the developed manifestation can trace back this uniform character to the first, dimmest times of life.

All this being well considered, it will not be possible for you, I believe, to be in earnest with this complaint against the positive religions. If you still persist in it, it can only be from prejudice, for you are far too careless about the matter to be justified by your own observation. You have never felt the call to attach yourselves to the few religious men you might be able to discover. Though they are ever attractive and worthy enough of love, you have never tried by the microscope of friendship, or even of closer sympathy, to examine more accurately how they are organized both by and for the Universe.

For myself I have diligently considered them, I have sought out as patiently and studied them with the same reverent care that you devote to the curiosities of nature, and it has often occurred to me whether you would not be led to religion simply by giving heed to the almighty way in which the Deity builds up, from all that has otherwise been developed in man, that part of the soul in which He specially dwells, manifests His immediate operation, and mirrors Himself, and thus makes His sanctuary quite peculiar and distinct, and if you only noticed how He glorifies Himself in it by the exhaustless variety and opulence of forms. I, at least, am ever anew astonished at the many notable developments in a region so sparsely peopled as religion. Men are distinguished by all degrees of receptivity for the charm of the same object and by the greatest difference of effect, by the variety of tone produced by the preponderance of one or other type of feeling, by all sorts of idiosyncrasies of sensitiveness and peculiarity of temperament, and the religious view of things nevertheless is perpetually prominent. Again I see how the religious character of a man is often something quite peculiar in him, strongly marked off to the common eye from everything else shown in his other endowments. The most quiet and sober mind may be capable of the strongest, most passionate emotions; a sense most dull to common and earthly things feels deeply even to sadness, and sees clearly even to rapture and prophecy; a heart most timid in all worldly matters testifies even by martyrdom to the world and to the age. And how wonderfully is this religious character itself fashioned and composed. Culture and crudeness, capacity and limitation, tenderness and hardness are in each, in a peculiar way, mixed and interwoven.

Where have I seen all this? In the peculiar sphere of religion, in its individual forms, in the positive religious which you decry as utterly wanting in variety. I have seen it among the heroes and martyrs of a definite faith in a way for which the friends of natural religion are too cold, among enthusiasts for living feeling, in a way they hold as too dangerous, among the worshippers of some new sprung light and individual revelation. There I will show you them, there at all times and among all peoples. Nowhere else are they to be met. No man as a mere single being can come to actual existence. By the very fact of existence he is set in a world, in a definite order of things, and becomes an object among other objects, and a religious man, by attaining his individual life, enters by this very fact into a common life, which is to say into some definite form of religion. The two things are simply one and the same divine act, and cannot be separated. If the original capacity of a man is too weak to reach this highest stage of consciousness, by fashioning itself in a definite way, the stimulus must also be too weak to initiate the process of a characteristic and robust religious life.

And now I have rendered you my account. It is for you now to tell me how, in respect of development and individuality, it stands with your boasted natural religions. Show me among its professors an equally great variety of strongly marked characters. For myself I must confess that I have never found among them anything of the sort. Your boast of the freedom that this kind of religion gives its adherents to develope themselves religiously according to their own sense, seems merely of freedom to remain undeveloped, freedom neither to be, nor to see, nor to feel anything at all that is definite. Religion plays in their mind far too wretched a role. It is as if religion had no pulse, no vasculary system, no circulation, and so had no heat, no assimilative power. It has no character of its own, no peculiar presentation. Everywhere it shows itself dependent upon the cast of a man’s morals and sensibility. In union with them, or rather meekly following them, it moves idly and sparingly, and is only perceptible when it is patiently, and, as it were by drops, separated from them.

Many estimable and strong religious characters, indeed, I have met, whom the adherents of the positive religions, not without wondering at the phenomenon, regard as adherents of natural religion. But on closer view they recognized them as their confrères. Such persons have always swerved somewhat from the original parity of the religion of reason, and have accepted something arbitrary, as it is called, something positive.

But why do those who respect natural religion at once distrust everyone who introduces any characteristic feature into his religion? They also would have uniformity, though at the opposite extreme from sectarianism, the uniformity of indefiniteness. So little is any special personal cultivation through the positive religions to be thought of, that its most genuine adherents do not even wish the religion of man to have any history of its own at all or to commence with any notable event. Too much there has been already for their taste, moderation being for them the chief matter in religion, and all who can boast of religious emotions issuing suddenly from the depths of the heart, come at once into the evil repute of being infected by baleful enthusiasm. By little and little men are to become religious, just as they become wise and prudent and everything else they should be. All must come to them by instruction and education. There must be nothing that could be regarded as supernatural or even as singular.

I would not say that in making instruction and education everything, natural religion has pre-eminently fallen into the evil of being mixed with metaphysics and morals, nay, of being changed into them: but this at least is clear, that its adherents have not started from any living self-contemplation and allowing nothing to mark their cast of thought, whereby in any characteristic way men might be affected, they have no sure middle-point. The belief in a personal God, more or less anthropomorphic, and in a personal immortality, more or less materialized and sublimated—the two dogmas to which they reduce everything—depends, as they know themselves, on no special way of viewing or comprehending. Hence, any one who joins them is not asked how he came to his faith, but how he can demonstrate it. Thus they assume that he must have reached everything by demonstration. Any other and more definite middle-point you would have difficulty in indicating. The little that their meagre and attenuated religion does contain is of great ambiguity. They have a providence in general, a righteousness in general, a divine education in general. Now it is in this perspective and fore-shortening, now in that, so that the value of everything is perpetually changing. Or if there is any common reference to one point, it is to something alien to religion, such as how to remove obstacles from morality, or sustain the desire for happiness, or something else about which, in ordering the elements of their religion, truly religious men have never asked. Their scanty religious possessions are thereby still more scattered and dispersed.

This natural religion, then, does not unite its religious elements by one definite view and is no definite religious form, no proper individual representation of religion. Those who profess it have in its territory no definite dwelling, but are strangers whose home, if indeed they have any, must be elsewhere. They remind one of the thin and dispersed mass said to float between the worlds, which is here attracted by one and there by another, but not enough by any to be swept into its rotation. Why it exists the gods may know. It must be to show that the indefinite also can have a certain existence. Yet it is properly only a waiting for existence, to which they can only attain by the power of some force stronger and of a different kind from any they have been subjected to heretofore. More I cannot ascribe to them than the dim presentiments that precede that living consciousness in which religious life comes to visibility for man. There are certain dim impulses and conceptions that have no coherence with a man’s individuality and only, as it were, fill up the vacant spaces. They originate only in the collective life, and are uniformly the same in all. The religion of men of this kind is thus the inarticulate echo of the piety around them.

At the highest it is natural religion in the sense in which men used to speak of natural philosophy and natural poetry. The name was applied to such productions as lacked originality, and which, without being clumsy, conscious imitations, were but crude utterances of superficial endowments. The epithet was meant to distinguish them from the works of living, plastic science and art.

The better part found only in the productions of the religious societies, they do not wait for with longing, they do not esteem it more highly because they cannot reach it, but they oppose it with all their might. The essence of natural religion consists almost entirely in denying everything positive and characteristic in religion and in violent polemics. It is the worthy product of an age, the hobby of which was that wretched generality and vain soberness which in everything was most hostile to true culture. Two things are hated supremely, a commencement in anything extraordinary and incomprehensible, and subsequently any suggestion of a school. This same corruption you will find in all arts and sciences. Into religion also it has forced its way, and its product is this empty formless thing. Men would be self-produced and self-taught in religion, and they are rude and uncultured, as is common with such persons. For characteristic production they have neither power nor will. Every definite religion they resist because it is a school, and if they should light on anything whereby a religion of their own might be fashioned, they would be as violent against it, seeing that from it also a school might arise.

Hence their resistance to the positive and arbitrary is resistance to the definite and real. If a definite religion may not begin with an original fact, it cannot begin at all. There must be a common ground for selecting some one religious element and placing it at the centre, and this ground can only be a fact. And if a religion is not to be definite it is not a religion at all, for religion is not a name to be applied to loose, unconnected impulses. Recall what the poet says of a state of souls before birth. Suppose someone were to object to come into the world because he would not be this man or that, but a man in general! The polemic of natural religion against the positive is this polemic against life and it is the permanent state of its adherents.

Go back then, if you are in earnest about beholding religion in its definiteness, from this enlightened natural religion to those despised positive religions. There everything appears active, strong and secure, every single intuition has its definite content and its own relation to the rest, and every feeling has its proper sphere and its peculiar reference. You find somewhere every modification of religiousness and every mental state in which religion can place men, with each of its effects somewhere complete. Common institutions and single utterances alike testify that religion is valued almost to forgetfulness of all else. The holy zeal with which it is contemplated, communicated and enjoyed, and the child-like longing with which new revelations of heavenly power are expected, guarantee that no element visible from this standpoint shall be overlooked, and that nothing has disappeared without leaving a monument. Consider the variety of forms in which every single kind of fellowship with the Universe has already appeared. Do not be scared either by mysterious darkness or by wonderful dazzling grotesque traits. Do not admit the delusion that it may all be imagination and romance. Dig ever deeper where your magic rod has once pointed, and without fail you will bring forth the heavenly stream to the light of day.

But regard also the human which is to receive the divine. Do not forget that religion bears traces of the culture of every age and of the history of every race of men. Often it must go about in the form of a servant, displaying in its surroundings and in its adorning the poverty of its home and its disciples. You must not overlook how it has often been stunted in its growth from want of room to exercise its powers, and how from childhood it has pined miserably from bad treatment and ill-chosen nourishment.

And if you would comprehend the whole, do not abide by the various forms of religion that for centuries have shone and have dominated great peoples, and have been glorified in many ways by poets and sages. Recollect that what is historically and religiously most noteworthy is often distributed among but few, and remains hidden to the common eye.

But when, in this way, you have wholly and completely within your vision the right object, it will ever remain a difficult business to discover the spirit of the religions and from it to interpret them. Once more I warn you not to try to deduce it as an abstraction from the elements common to all the adherents. You will wander into a thousand vain researches, and come in the end not to the spirit of the religion but to a definite quantity of matter. You will remember that no religion has quite reached actuality, and that you cannot know it until, far removed from seeking it in a narrow space, you are able to complete and define it in the way it would develope if its scope had been large enough. And as this applies to every positive religion, it applies to every period of it and to every subordinate form of it. You cannot enough impress it upon yourselves that it all resolves itself into finding the fundamental relation. Without that, knowledge of details is unavailing, and you have not found it till all details are fast bound in one.

Even with this principle of research as a touchstone, you will be exposed to a thousand errors, for much will meet you to withdraw your eyes from the true path. Above all, I beseech you, never forget the difference between the essence of a religion, in so far as it is a definite form and representation of religion in general and its unity as a school.

Religious men are throughout historical. That is not their smallest praise, but it is also the source of great misunderstandings. The moment when they were first filled with that consciousness which they have made the centre of their religion is always sacred for them. Without reference to it, they never speak of what for them is characteristic in religion and of the form to which in themselves it has attained. You can easily imagine, then, how much more sacred still the moment must be in which this infinite intuition was first of all set up in the world as the foundation and centre of one peculiar religion. To it the whole development of this religion in all generations and individuals is historically linked. Now this sum of the religion, and the religious culture of a great body of mankind, is something infinitely greater than a man’s own religious life, and the little mirror of this religion which he personally exhibits. This fact then is glorified in all ways; every ornament of religious art is heaped upon it. It is worshipped as the greatest and most blessed miracle of the Highest. Men never speak of their religion, nor ever exhibit any of its elements except in connection with this fact.

As a consequence nothing is more natural than that this fact should be confused with the fundamental intuition of the religion. This has misled almost everyone and distorted the view of almost all religions. Never forget that the fundamental intuition of a religion must be some intuition of the Infinite in the finite, some one universal religious relation, found in every other religion that would be complete, but in this one only placed in the centre.

I beg you also not to regard everything found in the heroes of religion or in the sacred sources as religion. Do not seek in everything the decisive spirit of that religion. Nor do I exclude trifles merely, or things that on any estimate are foreign to religion, but things often mistaken for it. Recollect how undesignedly those sources were prepared, so that it was impossible to provide for the exclusion of everything not religion. And recall how the authors lived in all sorts of circumstances in the world, and could not say at every word they wrote, this does not belong to the faith. When they speak worldly wisdom and morality, or metaphysics and poetry, therefore, do not at once conclude that it must be forced into religion, or that in it the character of religion is to be sought. Morality, at least, should be everywhere only one, and religion which should not be anywhere one, cannot be distinguished by the differences of morality, which are always something to be got rid of.

Above all I beg you not to be misled by the two hostile principles that everywhere, and almost from the earliest times, have sought to distort and obscure the spirit of religion. Some would circumscribe it to a single dogma, and exclude everything not fashioned in agreement with it, others, from hatred to polemics, or to make religion more agreeable to the irreligious, or from misunderstanding and ignorance of the matter, or from lack of religious sense, decry everything characteristic as dead letter. Guard yourselves from both. With rigid systematizers or shallow indifferentists you will not find the spirit of a religion. It is found only among those who live in it as their element, and ever advance in it without cherishing the folly that they embrace it all.

Whether with these precautions you will succeed in discovering the spirit of the religions I do not know. I fear religion is only comprehensible through itself, and that its special architecture and characteristic difference will not become clear till you yourselves belong to some one religion.

How you may succeed in deciphering the rude and undeveloped religions of remote peoples, or in unravelling the manifold, varied religious phenomena lying wrapped up in the beautiful mythologies of Greece and Rome, I care very little. May your gods guide you! But when yon approach the holiest in which the Universe in its highest unity and comprehensiveness is to be perceived, when you would contemplate the different forms of the highest stage of religion which is not foreign or strange, but more or less existent among ourselves, I cannot be indifferent as to whether or not you find the right point of view.

Of one form only I should speak, for Judaism is long since dead. Those who yet wear its livery are only sitting lamenting beside the imperishable mummy, bewailing its departure and its sad legacy. Yet I could still wish to say a word on this type of religion. My reason is not that it was the forerunner of Christianity. I hate that kind of historical reference. Each religion has in itself its own eternal necessity, and its beginning is original. But the beautiful childlike character of Judaism charms me. This is so entirely overlaid, and we have here such a notable example of the corruption and utter extinction of religion in a great body in which it formerly existed, that it will well repay a few words. Remove everything political and moral as well, so God will, whereby this phenomenon is supposed to be characterized. Forget the experiment of joining the state to religion, if I should not say to the church; forget that Judaism was, in a certain sense, an order founded on an ancient family history and sustained by priests. Regard only its strictly religious elements, and then say what is the human consciousness of man’s position in the Universe and his relation to the Eternal that everywhere shines through. Is it anything but a relation of universal immediate retribution, of a peculiar reaction of the Infinite against every finite thing that can be regarded as proceeding from caprice? In this way everything is regarded, growth and decay, fortune and misfortune. Even in the human soul freedom and caprice interchange with immediate operation of the Deity. All other recognized attributes of God express themselves in accordance with this principle, and are always regarded in their bearing upon it. The Deity is throughout represented as rewarding, punishing, disciplining single things in single persons. When the disciples asked Christ, “Who has sinned, this man or his parents?” the religious spirit of Judaism appeared in its most pronounced form, and his answer: “Think ye that these have sinned more than others ?” was his polemic against it.