Friedrich Schleiermacher · 6 of 15

Second Speech. The Nature of Religion · Part 4

Wherefore, in the religion of the Ancients, only inferior divinities and ministering virgins had the oversight of all that recurred uniformly and had an already discovered order but the exceptions which were not understood, the revolutions for which there was no law, were the work of the father of the gods. We also have strange, dread, mysterious emotions, when the imagination reminds us that there is more in nature than we know. They are easy to distinguish from the quiet and settled consciousness that everything is involved in the most distant combinations of the Whole, that every individual thing is determined by the yet unexplored general life. This consciousness is produced by what we understand in Nature, but I mean those dim presentiments which are the same in all, even though, as is right, only the educated seek to elucidate them and change them into a more lively activity of perception. In others, being comprehended in ignorance and misunderstanding, they grow to a delusion which we call pure superstition, under which, however, there manifestly lies a pious shudder of which we shall not be ashamed.

Furthermore, consider how you are impressed by the universal opposition of life and death. The sustained, conquering power, whereby every living thing nourishes itself, forcefully awakes the dead and enters it on a new course by drawing it into its own life. On every side we find provision prepared for all living, not lying dead, but itself alive and everywhere being reproduced. With all this multitude of forms of life, and the enormous mass of material which each uses in turn, there is enough for all. Thus each completes his course and succumbs to an inward fate and not to outward want. What a feeling of endless fulness and superabundant riches! How are we impressed by a universal paternal care and a childlike confidence that without anxiety plays away sweet life in a full and abundant world! Consider the lilies of the field, they sow not, neither do they reap, yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them, wherefore be not anxious. This happy view, this serene, easy mind was for one of the greatest heroes of religion, the fair profit of a very limited and meagre communion with nature. How much more should we win who have been permitted by a richer age to go deeper!

Already we know something more of the universally distributed forces, the eternal laws, whereby individual things, that is things which have their souls in themselves apart, in a more definite boundary, in what we call bodies, are fashioned and destroyed. See how attraction and repulsion, everywhere and always active, determine everything; and how all difference and opposition are again resolved into a higher unity. Only in appearance, can anything finite boast itself of a separate existence. See how all likeness is concealed by being distributed in a thousand different shapes. Nothing simple is to be found, but all is skillfully connected and interwoven. We would see and exhort all who share in the culture of the age to observe, how, in this sense, the Spirit of the World reveals itself as visibly, as completely, in small as in great, and we would not stop with such a consciousness of it as might be had anywhere and from anything. Even without all the knowledge which has made our century glorious, the World-Spirit showed itself to the most ancient sages. Not only did they have, by intuition, the first pure speaking image of the world, but there was kindled in their hearts a love for nature and a joy in her, that is for us still lovely and pleasing. Had this but penetrated to the people, who knows what strong and lofty way religion might have taken from the beginning? At present it has penetrated to all who would be considered cultured. Through the gradual operation of the fellowship between knowledge and feeling, they have arrived at the immediate feeling that there is nothing even in their own nature that is not a work of this Spirit, an exhibition and application of these laws. In virtue of this feeling, all that touches their life becomes truly a world, a unity permeated by the Divinity that fashions it. It is natural, therefore, that there should be in them all, that love and joy, that deep reverence for nature which made sacred the art and life of Antiquity, which was the source of that wisdom, which we have returned to and are at length beginning to commend and glorify by fruits long delayed. Such a feeling of being one with nature, of being quite rooted in it, so that in all the changing phenomena of life, even in the change between life and death itself, we might await all that should befall us with approbation and peace, as merely the working out of those eternal laws, would indeed be the germ of all the religious feelings furnished by this side of existence.

But is it so easy to find original in nature the love and resistance, the unity and peculiarity, whereby it is a Whole for us? Just because our sense tends in quite another direction, is there so little truly religious enjoyment of nature. The sense of the Whole must be first found, chiefly within our own minds, and from thence transferred to corporeal nature. Wherefore the spirit is for us not only the seat of religion but its nearest world. The Universe portrays itself in the inner life, and then the corporeal is comprehensible from the spiritual. If the mind is to produce and sustain religion it must operate upon us as a world and as in a world.

Let me reveal a secret to you that lies almost hidden in one of the oldest sources of poetry and religion. As long as the first man was alone with himself and nature, the Deity ruled over him and addressed him in various ways, but he did not understand and answered nothing. His paradise was beautiful, the stars shone down on him from a beautiful heaven, but there awoke in him no sense for the world. Even from within, this sense was not developed. Still his mind was stirred with longing for a world, and he collected the animal creation before him, if perhaps out of them a world might be formed. Then the Deity recognized that the world would be nothing, as long as man was alone. He created a helpmate for him. At length the deep-toned harmonies awoke in him, and the world fashioned itself before his eyes. In flesh of his flesh, and bone of his bone, he discovered humanity. In this first love he had a foretaste of all love’s forms and tendencies—in humanity he found the world. From this moment he was capable of seeing and hearing the voice of the Deity, and even the most insolent transgression of His laws did not any more shut him out from intercourse with the Eternal Being.

The history of us all is related in this sacred legend. All is present in vain for those who set themselves alone. In order to receive the life of the World-Spirit, and have religion, man must first, in love, and through love, have found humanity. Wherefore, humanity and religion are closely and indissolubly united. A longing for love, ever satisfied and ever again renewed, forthwith becomes religion. Each man embraces most warmly the person in whom the world mirrors itself for him most clearly and purely; he loves most tenderly the person whom he believes combines all he lacks of a complete manhood. Similarly the pious feelings are most holy that express for him existence in the whole of humanity, whether as blessedness in attaining or of need in coming short.

Wherefore, to find the most glorious elements of religion, let us enter upon the territory where you are in your peculiar, your most loved home. Here your inner life had its birth, here you see the goal of all your striving and doing before your eyes, and here you feel the growth of your powers whereby you are evermore conducted towards it. Humanity itself is for you the true universe, and the rest is only added in so far as it is related to it or forms its surroundings. Even for me, this point of view suffices. Yet it has often pained me that, with all your interest in humanity, and with all your zeal for it, you are always in difficulties with it, and divided from it, and pure love cannot become right prominent in you. Each of you in his own way harasses himself to improve it, and to educate it, and what will not come to an issue you finally cast aside in dejection.

I make bold to say, that this also comes from your lack of religion. You wish to work on humanity, and you select men, individuals for contemplation. They displease you vastly. Among the thousand possible causes, unquestionably that which is finest in itself, and which belongs to the best of you, is that you are, in your own way, far too ethical. You take men singly, and you have an ideal of the individual to which no one corresponds. If you would begin with religion, you would have far more success. If you would only attempt to exchange the objects of your working and the objects of your contemplation! Work on individuals, but rise in contemplation, on the wings of religion, to endless, undivided humanity. Seek this humanity in each individual; regard the nature of every person as one revelation of it, and of all that now oppresses you no trace would remain. I at least boast myself of a moral disposition, I know how to value human excellence, and commonness could almost overwhelm me with the unpleasant feeling of contempt, were it not that religion gives me a great and glorious view of all.

Just consider what a consummate artist the Genius of humanity is. It can make nothing that has not a nature of its own. As soon as it assays its brush, or sharpens its pencil, there appear living and significant features. It imagines and fashions countless forms. Millions wear the costume of the time, and are faithful pictures of its necessities and its tastes. In others there are memories of the past, or presentiments of a distant future. Some are most lofty and striking types of the fairest and divinest, others resemble grotesques produced in the most original and fleeting mood of a master. The common view, based on a misunderstanding of the sacred words that there are vessels of honour and vessels of dishonour, is not pious. Only by comparing details could such an opposition appear to you. You must not contemplate anything alone, you must rather rejoice in everything in its own place. All that we can be conscious of at once, all, as it were, that stands on one sheet, presents one movement of the complete working of the Whole, and belongs, as it were, to one great historical picture. Would you make light of the chief groups that give life and affluence to the Whole? Should not each heavenly form be glorified in having a thousand others that regard it and are related to it, bowing before it? Indeed, there is more in this presentation than a mere simile. Eternal humanity is unweariedly active, seeking to stop forth from its inward, mysterious existence into the light, and to present itself in the most varied way, in the fleeting manifestation of the endless life. That is the harmony of the Universe, the wondrous and unparalleled unity of that eternal work of art.

Being occupied in the outer court of morality, and there only with elements, caring for details and satisfied with them, and despising high religion, you slander its magnificence by your demands for a lamentable dismemberment. This is sufficient to indicate your need, may you now recognize it and satisfy it! Make search among all the circumstances in which the heavenly order portrays itself, and perhaps some favourite passage of history may be a divine sign to you, whereby you may more easily recognize how real the insignificant is, and how important for the Whole. Then what you regard with coldness or contempt may draw you with love. Or, allow yourselves to be pleased with an old, rejected conception; seek out among the holy men, in whom humanity is pre-eminently revealed, someone to be a mediator between your limited way of thinking, and the eternal laws of the world. And when you have found one who, in a way you understand, by imparting himself, strengthens the weak, and gives life to the dead, traverse humanity, and let all that has hitherto seemed useless and wretched be illuminated by the reflection of this new light.

What would the uniform repetition of even a highest ideal be? Mankind, time and circumstances excepted, would be identical. They would be the same formula with a different co-efficient. What would it be in comparison with the endless variety which humanity does manifest? Take any element of humanity, and you will find it in almost every possible condition. You will not find it quite by itself, nor quite combined with all other elements, but you will find all possible mixtures between, in every odd and unusual combination. And if you could think of unions you do not see, this gap would be a negative revelation of the Universe, an indication that, in the present temperature of the world, this mixture is not possible, in the requisite degree. Your imagination thus gives you a glimpse beyond the present boundaries of humanity, and whether it be only a ray from a vanished past, or an involuntary and unconscious prophecy of the future, it is a real higher inspiration. And just as this, that seems to come short of the requisite infinite variety is not really too little, so what, from your standpoint appears superfluous, is not really too much.

This oft-bewailed superfluity of the commonest forms of humanity, ever returning unchanged in a thousand copies, does not disturb the pious mind. The Eternal Mind commands that the forms in which individuality is most difficult to discern, should stand closest together, and even the finite mind can see the reason why. And each has something of its own, and no two are identical. In every life there is some moment, like the coruscation of baser metals, when, by the approach of something higher, or by some electric shock, it surpasses itself and stands on the highest pinnacle of its possibilities. For this moment it was created, in this moment it fulfilled its purpose, and, after this moment its exhausted vitality again subsides. To call forth this moment in ordinary souls and to contemplate them during it is a pleasure to be envied, and to those who have not known it, the whole existence of them must appear superfluous and despicable.

Yet the existence of such an ordinary soul has a double meaning in respect of the Whole. If I arrest in thought the course of that unresting machinery whereby all that is human is woven together and made interdependent, I see that each individual in his inner nature is a necessary complement of a complete intuition of humanity. One shows me how any fragment, if only the plastic impulse of the Whole still quickens it, can calmly progress, fashioning itself in graceful, regular forms; another how, from want of a vivifying and combining warmth, the hardness of the earthly material cannot be overcome; while, in a third, I see how, in an atmosphere too violently agitated, the spirit within is disturbed in its working, so that nothing comes clearly and recognizably to light. One appears as the rude and animal portion of mankind, stirred only by the first ungainly motions of humanity; another is the pure dematerialized spirit that, having been separated from all that is base and unworthy, hovers with noiseless foot over the earth. But everything between also has a purpose. It shows how, in the minute detached phenomena of individual lives, the different elements of human nature all appear at every stage and in every manner. It is not enough that among this countless multitude there are always a few at least who are the distinguished representatives of humanity, who strike different melodious chords that require no further accompaniment, and no subsequent explication, but who, in the one note, charm and satisfy by their harmony the whole soul. But even the noblest only presents mankind in one way and in one of its movements, and in some sense everyone is a peculiar exhibition of humanity and does the same thing, and were a single figure to fail in the great picture, it would be impossible to comprehend it completely and perfectly. If now every one is so essentially connected with that which is the inner kernel of our own life, how can we avoid feeling this connection, and embracing all, without distinction of disposition or mental capacity, with heartfelt liking and affection? That is one meaning that every individual has in respect of the Whole.

Do I, on the other hand, observe the eternal wheels of humanity in motion, this vast interaction, nothing moved by itself, nothing moving only itself, I am greatly quieted about the other side of your complaint, that reason and soul, sensuality and morality, understanding and blind force appear in such separate masses. Why do you see things singly that are not single and do not work by themselves? The reason of one and the disposition of another have as strong a mutual influence as if they were in one and the same subject. The morality that belongs to this sensuality is set apart from it, and do you suppose its dominion is, on that account, limited? Would the sensuality be better ruled if the morality, without being specially concentrated anywhere, were divided out in small, scarce noticeable portions to each individual? The blind power which is allotted to the great mass, is not, in its operation on the Whole, abandoned to a rude peradventure, but the understanding, concentrated at other points, leads it, without being aware of the fact, and it follows, in invisible bands, quite as unconsciously. The outlines of personality which appear to you so definite, from my standpoint, dissolve. The magic circle of prevailing opinions and infectious feelings surrounds all and plays around all like an atmosphere filled with dissolving and magnetic forces. By the most vital diffusion it smelts all things, even the most distant, into a single activity, the issue of which is to impel those who are really in possession of light and truth to activity, so that some are deeply influenced, and others have at least a superficial illumination, brilliant and deceptive.

In this connection of everything with the sphere to which it belongs and in which it has significance all is good and divine, and a fulness of joy and peace is the feeling of those who allow all things to work upon them in this great connection. But they will also feel how contemplation isolates single things in single moments. The common impulse of men, who know nothing of this dependence, is to seize and retain this and that, to hedge in their Ego and to surround it with manifold outworks. They seek to conduct their own existence according to their own self-will and not be disturbed by the eternal current of the world. And when we who have an entirely opposite impulse perceive how fate necessarily sweeps all this away and how they wound and torture themselves in a thousand ways, what is more natural than the most heartfelt compassion with all the bitter suffering that must arise from this unequal strife, and with all the stripes which awful Nemesis deals out on every side?

From these wanderings through the whole territory of humanity, pious feeling returns, quickened and educated, into its own Ego, and there finds all the influences that had streamed upon it from the most distant regions. If, on returning with the consecration of intercourse with the world still fresh upon us, we give heed how it is with us in this feeling, we become conscious that our Ego vanishes, not only into smallness and insignificance, but into one-sidedness, insufficiency and nothingness. What lies nearer to mortal man than unaffected humility? And when gradually our feeling becomes quick and alert to what there is in the path of humanity that sustains and forwards, and what, on the contrary, must sooner or later be conquered and destroyed, if it is not recast and transformed, and when from this law we regard all doings in the world, what is more natural than deep contrition for all in us that is hostile to human nature, the submissive desire to conciliate the Deity, and the most earnest longing to put ourselves and all that belongs to us in safety in that sacred region where alone there is security against death and destruction? Advancing further, we perceive how the Whole only becomes clear to us, how we only reach intuition of it and unity with it in fellowship with others, by the influence of those who have long been freed from dependence on their own fleeting being, and from the endeavour to expand and isolate it. How, then, can we avoid a feeling of special affinity to those whose actions have defended our existence, and happily guided it through threatening dangers? Though by us they become conscious of their life in the Whole, we honour them as those who, before us, have reached this union.

Not by examples which are rare, but by passing through these and similar feelings you discover in yourselves the outlines of the fairest and the basest, the noblest and the most despicable. You not only find at times all the manifold degrees of human powers within you, but when self-love is quite submerged in sympathy, all the countless mixture of human tendencies that you have ever seen in the characters of others appears simply arrested impulses of your own life. There are moments when, despite all distinction of sex, culture, or environment, you think, feel, and act as if you were really this or that person. In your own order, you have actually passed through all those different forms. You are a compendium of humanity. In a certain sense your single nature embraces all human nature. Your Ego, being multiplied and more clearly outlined is in all its smallest and swiftest changes immortalized in the manifestations of human nature. As soon as this is seen, you can love yourselves with a pure and blameless love. Humility, that never forsakes you, has its counterpart in the feeling that the whole of humanity lives and works in you. Even contrition is sweetened to joyful self-sufficiency. This is the completion of religion on this side. It works its way back to the heart, and there finds the Infinite. The man in whom this is accomplished, is no more in need of a mediator for any sort of intuition of humanity. Rather he is himself a mediator for many.

But there is not merely the swinging of feeling between the world and the individual, in the present moment. Except as something going on, we cannot comprehend what affects us, and we cannot comprehend ourselves, except as thus progressively affected. Wherefore, as feeling persons, we are ever driven back into the past. The spirit furnishes the chief nourishment for our piety, and history immediately and especially is for religion the richest source. History is not of value for religion, because it hastens or controls in any way the progress of humanity in its development, but because it is the greatest and most general revelation of the deepest and holiest. In this sense, however, religion begins and ends with history. Prophecy and history are for religion the same and indistinguishable, and all true history has at first had a religious purpose, and has taken its departure from religious ideas.

What is finest and tenderest in history, moreover, cannot be communicated scientifically, but can only be comprehended in the feeling of a religious disposition. The religious mind recognizes the transmigration of spirits and souls, which to others is but graceful fiction, as, in more than one sense, a wonderful arrangement of the Universe for comparing the different periods of humanity according to a sure standard. After a long period, during which nature could produce nothing similar, some distinguished individual almost entirely the same returns. But only the seers recognize him, and it is they who should judge by his works the signs of different times. A movement of humanity returns exactly like something of which some distant foretime has left you an image, and you are to recognize from the various causes which have now produced it, the course of development and the formula of its law. The genius of some human endowment awakes as from slumber. Here and there rising and falling, it has already finished its course. Now it appears in a new life in another place and under different circumstances. Its quicker increase, its deeper working, its fairer stronger form, indicate how much the climate of humanity has improved, and how much fitter the soil has grown to nourish nobler plants. Peoples and generations of mortals appear as all alike necessary for the completeness of history, though, like individuals, of different worth. Some are estimable and spirited, and work strongly without ceasing, permeating space and defying time. Others are common and insignificant, fitted only to show some peculiar shade of some single form of life. For one moment only they are really living and noticeable. One thought they exhibit, one conception they produce, and then they hasten towards destruction that the power that produced them may be given to something else. As vegetable nature, from the destruction of whole species, and from the ruins of whole generations of plants, produces and nourishes a new race, so spiritual nature rears from the ruins of a glorious and beautiful world of men, a new world that draws its first vital strength from elements decomposed and wondrously transformed. Being deeply impressed with this sense of a universal connection, your glance perhaps passes so often directly from least to greatest and greatest to least, going backwards and forwards, till through dizziness it can neither distinguish great nor small, cause nor effect, preservation nor destruction. This state continues, and then that well-known figure of an eternal fate appears. Its features bear the impress of this state, being a marvellous mixture of obstinate self-will and deep wisdom, of rude unfeeling force and heartfelt love, of which first one seizes you and then another, now inviting you to impotent defiance and now to childlike submission.

Penetrate further and compare this partial striving of the individual, the fruit of opposing views, with the quiet uniform course of the Whole. You will see how the high World-Spirit smilingly marches past all that furiously opposes him. You will see how dread Nemesis, never wearied, follows his steps, meting out punishment to the haughty who resist the gods. Even the stoutest and choicest who have with steadfastness, worthy perhaps of praise and wonder, refused to bow before the gentle breath of the great Spirit, it mows down with iron hand. Would you comprehend the proper character of all changes and of all human progress, a feeling resting on history must show you more surely than aught else, that living gods rule who hate nothing so much as death, and that nothing is to be persecuted and destroyed like this first and last foe of the spirit. The rude, the barbarian, the formless are to be absorbed and recast. Nothing is to be a dead mass that moves only by impact and resists only by unconscious collision; all is to be individual, connected, complex, exalted life. Blind instinct, unthinking custom, dull obedience, everything lazy and passive, all those sad symptoms of the death slumber of freedom and humanity are to be abolished. To this the work of the minutes and the centuries is directed, it is the great ever advancing work of redemptive love.

Some prominent emotions of religion connected with nature and humanity, I have now sketched in vague outline. I have brought you to the limits of your horizon. Here is the end and summit of religion for all to whom humanity is the whole world. But consider that in your feeling there is something that despises these bounds, something in virtue of which you cannot stay where you are. Beyond this point only infinity is to be looked into. I will not speak of the presentiments which define themselves and become thoughts which might by subtilty be established, that humanity, being capable of motion and cultivation, being not only differently manifested in the individual, but here and there really being different, cannot possibly be the highest, the sole manifestation of the unity of spirit and matter. As the individual is only one form of humanity, so humanity may be only one form of this unity. Beside it many other similar forms may exist, bounding it and standing over against it. But in our own feeling we all find something similar. The dependence of our earth, and therefore of the highest unity it has produced, upon other worlds, has been impressed upon us both by nature and by education. Hence this ever active but seldom understood presentiment of some other marriage of spirit and matter, visible and finite, but above humanity, higher and closer and productive of more beautiful forms. But any sketch that could be drawn would be too definite. Any echo of the feeling could only be fleeting and vague. Hence it is exposed to misconception and is so often taken for folly and superstition.

This is sufficient reference to a thing so immeasurably far from you. More would be incomprehensible. Had you only the religion that you could have! Were you but conscious of what you already have! Were you to consider the few religious opinions and feelings that I have so slightly sketched, you would be very far from finding them all strange to you. Something of the same kind you must have had in your thoughts before. But I do not know whether to lack religion quite, or not to understand it, is the greater misfortune. In the latter case also it fails of its purpose, and you impose upon yourselves in addition.