Friedrich Schleiermacher · 5 of 15

Second Speech. The Nature of Religion · Part 3

You see how immediately this beautiful modesty, this friendly, attractive forbearance springs from the nature of religion. How unjustly, therefore, do you reproach religion with loving persecution, with being malignant, with overturning society, and making blood flow like water. Blame those who corrupt religion, who flood it with an army of formulas and definitions, and seek to cast it into the fetters of a so-called system. What is it in religion about which men have quarrelled and made parties and kindled wars? About definitions, the practical sometimes, the theoretical always, both of which belong elsewhere. Philosophy, indeed, seeks to bring those who would know to a common knowledge. Yet even philosophy leaves room for variety, and the more readily the better it understands itself. But religion does not, even once, desire to bring those who believe and feel to one belief and one feeling. Its endeavour is to open in those who are not yet capable of religious emotions, the sense for the unity of the original source of life. But just because each seer is a new priest, a new mediator, a new organ, he flees with repugnance the bald uniformity which would again destroy this divine abundance.

This miserable love of system rejects what is strange, often without any patient examination of its claims, because, were it to receive its place, the closed ranks would be destroyed, and the beautiful coherence disturbed. There is the seat of the art and love of strife. War must be carried on, and persecution, for by thus relating detail to finite detail, one may destroy the other, while, in its immediate relation to the Infinite, all stand together in their original genuine connection, all is one and all is true. These systematizers, therefore, have caused it all. Modern Rome, godless but consequent, hurls anathemas and ejects heretics. Ancient Rome, truly pious, and, in a high style religious, was hospitable to every god. The adherents of the dead letter which religion casts out, have filled the world with clamour and turmoil.

Seers of the Infinite have ever been quiet souls. They abide alone with themselves and the Infinite, or if they do look around them, grudge to no one who understands the mighty word his own peculiar way. By means of this wide vision, this feeling of the Infinite, they are able to look beyond their own sphere. There is in religion such a capacity for unlimited manysidedness in judgment and in contemplation as is nowhere else to be found. I will not except even morality and philosophy, not at least so much of them as remains after religion is taken away. Let me appeal to your own experience. Does not every other object whereto man’s thinking and striving are directed, draw around him a narrow circle, inside of which all that is highest for him is enclosed, and outside of which all appears common and unworthy? The man who only thinks methodically, and acts from principle and design, and will accomplish this or that in the world, unavoidably circumscribes himself, and makes everything that does not forward him an object of antipathy. Only when the free impulse of seeing, and of living is directed towards the Infinite and goes into the Infinite, is the mind set in unbounded liberty. Religion alone rescues it from the heavy fetters of opinion and desire. For it, all that is is necessary, all that can be is an indispensable image of the Infinite. In this respect, it is all worthy of preservation and contemplation, however much, in other respects, and in itself, it is to be rejected. To a pious mind religion makes everything holy, even unholiness and commonness, whether he comprehends it or does not comprehend it, whether it is embraced in his system of thought, or lies outside, whether it agrees with his peculiar mode of acting or disagrees. Religion is the natural and sworn foe of all narrowmindedness, and of all onesidedness.

These charges, therefore, do not touch religion. They rest upon the confusion between religion and that knowledge which belongs to theology. It is a knowledge, whatever be its value, and is to be always distinguished from religion. Just as inapplicable are the charges you have made in respect of action. Something of this I have already touched upon, but let us take a general glance at it in order to set it entirely aside, and to show you exactly what I mean. Two things must be carefully distinguished. In the first place, you charge religion with causing not infrequently in the social, civil, and moral life, improper, horrible, and even unnatural dealings. I will not demand proof that these actions have proceeded from pious men. I will grant it provisionally. But in the very utterance of your accusation, you separate religion and morality. Do you mean then that religion is immorality, or a branch of it? Scarcely, for your war against it would then be of quite another sort, and you would have to make success in vanquishing religion a test of morality. With the exception of a few who have shown themselves almost mad in their mistaken zeal, you have not yet taken up this position. Or do you only mean that piety is different from morality, indifferent in respect of it, and capable therefore of accidentally becoming immoral? Piety and morality can be considered apart, and so far they are different. As I have already admitted and asserted, the one is based on feeling, the other on action. But how, from this opposition do you come to make religion responsible for action? Would it not be more correct to say that such men were not moral enough, and had they been, they might have been quite as pious without harm? If you are seeking progress—as doubtless you are—where two faculties that should be equal have become unequal, it is not advisable to call back the one in advance. It would be better to urge forward the laggard.

Lest you should think I am merely quibbling, consider that religion by itself does not urge men to activity at all. If you could imagine it implanted in man quite alone, it would produce neither these nor any other deeds. The man, according to what we have said, would not act, he would only feel. Wherefore, as you rightly complain, there have been many most religious men in whom the proper impulses to action have been wanting, and morality been too much in the background, who have retired from the world and have betaken themselves in solitude to idle contemplation. Religion, when isolated and morbid, is capable of such effects, but not of cruel and horrible deeds. In this way, your accusation can be turned into praise.

However different the actions you blame may be, they have this in common, that they all seem to issue immediately from one single impulse. Whether you call this special feeling religious or not, I am far from disagreeing with you when you so constantly blame it. Rather I praise you the more thorough and impartial you are. Blame also, I pray you, not only where the action appears bad, but still more where it has a good appearance. When action follows a single impulse, it falls into an undue dependence and is far too much under the influence of the external objects that work upon this one emotion. Feeling, whatever it be about, if it is not dormant, is naturally violent. It is a commotion, a force to which action should not be subject and from which it should not proceed. Quiet and discretion, the whole impress of our nature should give action birth and character, and this is as much required in common life as in politics and art. But this divergence could only come because the agent did not make his piety sufficiently evident. Wherefore, it would rather appear that, if he had been more pious he would have acted more morally. The whole religious life consists of two elements, that man surrender himself to the Universe and allow himself to be influenced by the side of it that is turned towards him is one part, and that he transplant this contact which is one definite feeling, within, and take it up into the inner unity of his life and being, is the other. The religious life is nothing else than the constant renewal of this proceeding. When, therefore, anyone is stirred, in a definite way, by the World, is it his piety that straightway sets him to such working and acting as bear the traces of commotion and disturb the pure connection of the moral life? Impossible.

On the contrary, his piety invites him to enjoy what he has won, to absorb it, to combine it, to strip it of what is temporal and individual, that it may no more dwell in him as commotion but be quiet, pure and eternal. From this inner unity, action springs of its own accord, as a natural branch of life. As we agreed, activity is a reaction of feeling, but the sum of activity should only be a reaction of the sum of feeling, and single actions should depend on something quite different from momentary feeling. Only when each action is in its own connection and in its proper place, and not when, dependently and slavishly, it corresponds to one emotion, does it exhibit, in a free and characteristic way, the whole inner unity of the spirit.

Consequently your charge does not touch religion. And, if you are speaking of a morbid state of it, you are speaking of what is quite general and is not in any way original to religion nor specially seated in it, and from which consequently nothing is to be concluded against religion in particular. Religion is of course finite, and therefore subject to imperfections, but it must be apparent to you that in a healthy state, man cannot be represented as acting from religion or being driven to action by religion, but piety and morality form each a series by itself and are two different functions of one and the same life. But while man does nothing from religion, he should do everything with religion. Uninterruptedly, like a sacred music, the religious feelings should accompany his active life.

That by this representation of religion I am neither deceiving you nor myself, you can easily see, if you observe that each feeling in proportion as it bears the character of piety, is disposed to withdraw itself into the heart and not break forth into deeds. Would not a pious person who was right deeply moved find himself in great perplexity, or even quite fail to understand you, if you asked him by what particular action he proposed to give expression and vent to his feeling? They are bad spirits and not good that take possession of man, and drive him. The legions of angels with which the Father provided His Son, exercised no power over Him. They had no call to help Him in any doing or forbearing, but they poured serenity and calm into a soul exhausted with doing and thinking. For a little, in that moment when His whole power was roused for action, these friendly spirits were lost to His view, but again they hovered round Him in joyous throng and served Him. But why do I direct you to instances and speak in images ? Because by starting from the separation which you make between religion and morality, and following it closely, we have come back to their essential unity in real life. This separation means corruption in the one and weakness in the other; and if one is not what it should be, neither can be perfect.

There are, however, other actions you often speak of. The distinct purpose of them is to produce religion. Being of no importance for morality, they are not moral, and being of no importance for sense, they are not immoral, but they are nevertheless disastrous, because they accustom man to attach himself to what is void and to value what is worthless. Let them be ever so inane and meaningless, they, far too often, take the place of moral action or hide its absence.

I know what you mean. Spare me the long catalogue of outward disciplines, spiritual exercises, privations, mortifications and the rest. All these things you accuse religion of producing, and yet you cannot overlook the fact that the greatest heroes of religion, the founders and reformers of the church, have regarded them with great indifference. There is a difference, I admit, but I believe that, in this regard also, the subject I defend will justify itself.

First of all, let us understand what we are dealing with. It is with action as an exercise of feeling, not with any symbolical or significant action meant to represent feeling. We have already seen how those dogmas and opinions that would join themselves more closely to religion than is fitting, are only designations and descriptions of feeling. In short, they are a knowledge about feeling, and in no way an immediate knowledge about the operations of the Universe, that gave rise to the feeling. We saw also, how it necessarily resulted in evil, when they were put in place of the feeling, of the proper and original perception. Similarly this conducting and exercising of feeling which often turns out so vain and meaningless, is an acting at second-hand. Just as that knowledge made feeling an object to be contemplated and understood, this acting makes it an object to be operated upon and cultivated. What value this kind of activity may have, and whether it may not be as unreal as that kind of knowing, I shall not here decide, In what sense man can act upon himself and particularly upon his feeling is difficult to determine, and needs to be well weighed. Can it be the result of a personal resolve, or does it not rather appear to be the business of the Whole, and therefore a given product of life? But as I said, this does not belong here, and I would rather discuss it with the friends of religion than with you. So much, however, is certain, and I grant it fully, that few errors are so disastrous as the substitution of these disciplinary exercises of feeling for the original feeling itself. Only, it is plainly an error into which religious men could not fall.

If you would recall that something quite similar is to be found in morality, you would perhaps at once agree with me. Men, as they say, lay down for themselves just such acting upon their own acting, just such exercisings of morals, to the end of self-improvement. It happens that these are sometimes put in place of direct moral action, of goodness and righteousness themselves, but you would not admit that it is through moral men. Men do all kinds of things, accepting them from one and transmitting them to another, though they have no meaning or value for themselves.

These actions are always, however, to be understood as being done to rouse, sustain and direct religious feeling. Where the activity is self-produced and really has this meaning, it manifestly rests on the man’s own feeling. A special state of feeling of which the man is conscious, is presupposed, a knowledge of his own inner life with its weaknesses and inequalities. It presupposes an interest, a higher self-love directed to himself, as a morally feeling person, as an essential part of the spiritual world. When this love ceases, the action also must cease. By supplanting feeling, it abolishes itself, and such an error could only arise among those who are in their hearts hostile to piety.

For them such exercisings of feeling have a special worth, as if they also had some of the hidden virtue, seeing they can outwardly imitate what, in others, has a deep significance. Consciously or unconsciously, they deceive themselves and others with the appearance of a higher life which they do not really have. Either it is base hypocrisy or wretched superstition, and I willingly expose it to your condemnation. No exercise of this kind is of any value, and we shall reject not only what, regarded by itself, is manifestly void, unnatural and perverted, but all that in this way arises, however specious. Severe mortifications, dull renunciation of the beautiful, empty phrases and usages and charities shall all be reckoned at the same value. Every superstition shall be alike unholy.

But we must never confuse it with the well-meant endeavours of pious souls. The difference is easy to discern. Each religious person fashions his own asceticism according to his need, and looks for no rule outside of himself, while the superstitious person and the hypocrite adhere strictly to the accepted and traditional, and are zealous for it, as for something universal and holy. This zeal is natural, for if they were expected to think out for themselves, their own outward discipline and exercise, their own training of the feelings, having regard to their own personal state, they would be in an evil case, and their inward poverty could be no longer hidden.

The most general, almost preliminary truths have long delayed us. They should have been understood of themselves, but neither you, nor many who would at least wish to be counted among you, understood the relation of religion to the other branches of life. Wherefore, it was necessary to drain off at once the sources of the commonest misconceptions, that they might not afterwards retard us. This having been done to the utmost of my ability, we have now, I hope, firm ground beneath us. We have attached ourselves to that moment, which is never directly observed, but in which all the different phenomena of life fashion themselves together, as in the buds of some plants blossom and fruit are both enclosed. When, therefore, we have asked where now among all it produces is religion chiefly to be sought, we have found only one right and consistent answer. Chiefly where the living contact of man with the world fashions itself as feeling. These feelings are the beautiful and sweet scented flowers of religion, which, after the hidden activity opens, soon fall, but which the divine growth ever anew produces from the fulness of life. A climate of paradise is thus created in which no penuriousness disturbs the development, and no rude surrounding injures the tender lights and fine texture of its flowers. To this I would now conduct you, your vision having been purified and prepared.

First of all, then, follow me to outward nature, which is to many the first and only temple of the Godhead. In virtue of its peculiar way of stirring the heart, it is held to be the inmost sanctuary of religion. At present, however, this outward nature, although it should be more, is little else than the outer court, for the view with which you next oppose me is utterly to be repudiated. The fear of the powers which rule in nature, which spare nothing, which threaten the life and works of man, is said to give the first feeling of the Infinite, or even to be the sole basis of religion. Surely in that case you must admit that if piety came with fear it must go with fear.

Let us then consider the matter. Manifestly the great aim of all industry spent in cultivating the earth is to destroy the dominion of the powers of nature over man, and to bring all fear of them to an end. Already a marvellous amount has been done. The lightnings of Zeus terrify no more since Hephaistus has prepared for us a shield against them; and Hestia protects what she has won from Poseidon, even against the angriest blows of his trident; the sons of Ares unite with those of Aesculapius to ward off the deadly arrows of Apollo. Man is ever learning to resist and to destroy one of these gods by means of the others, and is preparing soon, as conqueror and lord, to be but a smiling spectator at this play. Were fear then the ground of reverence for the powers of nature, by thus mutually destroying one another, they would gradually appear ordinary and common; for what man has controlled or attempted to control, he can measure, and what is measurable cannot stand in awful opposition to him as the Infinite. The objects of religion would thus be ever more and more unfaithful to it. But, are they? Would not these gods, conducting themselves towards one another as brethren and kinsfolk, and caring for man as the youngest son of the same Father, be just as zealously worshipped? If you are still capable of being filled with reverence for the great powers of nature, does it depend on your security or insecurity? When you stand under your lightning conductors, have you, perhaps, a laugh ready wherewith to mock the thunder? Is not nature protecting and sustaining quite as much an object of adoration? Or, consider it in this way. Does the great and infinite alone threaten man’s existence and oppose his working? Does he not also suffer from much that is small and paltry, which, because it cannot be definitely comprehended or fashioned into something great, you call accident and the accidental? Has this ever been made an object of religion and been worshipped? If you have such a small conception of the Fate of the Ancients, you must have understood little of their poetic piety. Under this dread Fate the sustaining powers were as much embraced as the destructive. Very different from that slavish fear, to banish which was a credit and a virtue, was the holy reverence for Fate, the rejection of which, in the best and most cultured times of Antiquity, was accounted, among better disposed persons, absolute recklessness. Such a sacred reverence I will readily acknowledge as the first element of religion, but the fear you mean is not only not religion itself, it is not even preparatory or introductory. If it should be praised, it must be for urging men, by the desire to be rid of it, into earthly fellowship in the state. But piety first begins when it is put aside, for the aim of all religion is to love the World-Spirit and joyfully to regard his working, and fear is not in love.

But that joy in Nature, which so many extol, is just as little truly religious. I almost hate to speak of their doings when they dart off into the great, glorious world to get for themselves little impressions: how they inspect the delicate markings and tints of flowers, or gaze at the magic play of colours in the glowing evening sky, and how they admire the songs of the birds on a beautiful country-side. They are quite full of admiration and transport, and will have it that no instrument could conjure forth these sounds and no brush attain this gloss and marking. But suppose we take their course and subtilize after their fashion! What is it that they do admire? Rear the plant in a dark cellar, and, if you are successful, you can rob it of all these beauties, without in the least degree altering its nature. Suppose the vapour above us somewhat differently disposed; instead of that splendour, you would have before your eyes one unpleasant grayness, and yet what you are contemplating would be essentially the same. Once more, try to imagine how the midday sun, the glare of which you cannot endure, already, appears to the inhabitants of the East the glimmering twilight. Is it not manifest, then, when they have not the same sensation, that they have gone after a mere void appearance? But they do not believe in it merely as an appearance; it is for them really true. They are in perplexity between appearance and reality, and what is so doubtful cannot be a religious stimulus, and can call forth no genuine feeling. Were they children who, without further thinking and willing, without comparison and reflection, received the light and splendour, their hearts being opened for the world by the soul of the world, so that they are stirred to pious feeling by every object; or were they sages in whose clear intuition all strife between appearance and reality is resolved, and who, therefore, undisturbed by these refinements, can again be stirred like children, their joy would be a real and pure feeling, a living impulse, a gladly communicative contact between them and the world. If you understand this better way, then you can say that this also is a necessary and indispensable element of religion. But do not present me that empty affected thing that sits so loose and is but a wretched mask for their cold, hard refinement, as an emotion of piety. In opposing religion, do not ascribe to it what does not belong to it. Do not scoff, as if man entered most easily into this sanctuary by being debased to fear of the irrational, and by vain trifling with transitory show, as if piety were easiest, and most becoming to timid, weak, sensitive souls.

The next thing to meet us in corporeal nature is its material boundlessness, the enormous masses which are scattered over illimitable space and which circulate in measureless orbits. Many hold that the exhaustion of the imagination, when we try to expand our diminished pictures of them to their natural size, is the feeling of the greatness and majesty of the Universe. This arithmetical amazement which, just on account of their ignorance, is easiest to awake in infants and ignoramuses, you are quite right in finding somewhat childish and worthless. But would those who are accustomed to take this view grant us that, when these great orbits had not yet been calculated, when half of those worlds were not discovered, nay, when it was not yet known that these shining points were worlds, piety, lacking one essential element, was necessarily poorer? Just as little can they deny that, in so far as it can be conceived—and without that it means nothing for us—the infinity of mass and number is only finite and the mind can comprehend every infinity of this kind into short formulae, and reckon with them, as daily happens. But they would certainly not grant that anything of their reverence for the greatness and majesty of the Universe is lost through advancing education and skill. As soon, however, as we are in a position to compare these units, which are our measure of size and motion, with those great world units, this spell of number and mass must disappear. As long as this feeling rests on difference of mass, it is merely a feeling of personal incapacity, which is doubtless a religious feeling, but is not that glorious reverence, as exalting as it is humbling, which is the feeling of our relation to the Whole. Neither a world operation too great for an organization, nor anything beyond it from smallness, can constitute this feeling, but it must be just as strong when the operation is equal and conformable to our powers.

What moves us so wondrously is not the contrast between small and great, but the essence of greatness, the external law in virtue of which size and number in general first arose. Life alone can work on us in a characteristic way, and not what is captive to weight and in so far dead. The religious sense corresponds not to the masses in the outer world, but to their eternal laws. Rise to the height of seeing how these laws equally embrace all things, the greatest and the smallest, the world systems and the mote which floats in the air, and then say whether you are not conscious of the divine unity and the eternal immutability of the world.

By the most constant repetition, some elements in these laws cannot escape even common perception. There is the order in which all movements return in the heavens and on the earth, the recognized coming and going of all organized forces, the perpetual trustworthiness of the rules of mechanics, and the eternal uniformity in the striving of plastic Nature. But, if it is allowable to make a comparison, this regularity gives a less great and lively religious feeling than the sense of law in all difference. Nor should this appear strange to you.

Suppose you are looking at a fragment of a great work of art. In the separate parts of this fragment you perceive beautiful outlines and situations, complete and fully to be understood without anything besides. Would not the fragment then rather appear a work by itself than a part of a greater work, and would you not judge that, if the whole was wrought throughout in this style, it must lack breadth and boldness and all that suggests a great spirit? If a loftier unity is to be suspected, along with the general tendency to order and harmony, there must be here and there situations not fully explicable. Now the world is a work of which you only see a part. Were this part perfectly ordered and complete in itself, we could be conscious of the greatness of the whole only in a limited way.

You see that the irregularity of the world, so often employed against religion, has really a greater value for religion than the order which is first presented to us in our study of the world and which is visible in a smaller part. The perturbations in the course of the stars point to a higher unity and a bolder combination than those we have already discovered in the regularity of their orbits. The anomalies, the idle sports of plastic Nature, compel us to see that she handles her most definite forms with free, nay capricious arbitrariness, with a phantasy the laws of which only a higher standpoint can show.