Friedrich Schleiermacher · 1 of 30

Biographical Sketch. · Part 1

IT seems desirable that those who make public references to a man of note should have an opportunity of making themselves acquainted with his opinions and character. A religious paper some time ago filled up a corner with this little piece of intelligence: “It is a very notable fact that a son of Hegel, a son of Schelling, and a daughter of Schleiermacher, are not only orthodox Christians, but most deeply interested in the progress of religion.” Another periodical presently repeated the paragraph, prefaced by the remark that what is true in regard to faith—that it is not hereditary—is happily no less true in regard to unbelief. No; faith is not hereditary in the strictest sense, as Schleiermacher took pains to make clear, enforcing in his baptismal addresses, as well as on other occasions, the truth, “that which is born of the flesh is flesh.” And yet we know, not only from Scripture, but from the undeniable witness of history, public and private, that there is a blessed heritage of faith; that “the seed of the righteous is blessed”; and she were no true daughter of Schleiermacher who should be otherwise than most deeply interested in the progress of true religion. As to orthodoxy, that is a term in these days so difficult to define that the readers of this volume must be left to judge for themselves whether or not it is anything wonderful that a child of the author of these sermons should be an orthodox Christian. This is, on every ground, more desirable than that a translator unversed in the fine distinctions and definitions of theologians, should attempt to give a categorical statement of the views of one to whom has been imputed, on the one hand, every shade of heterodox opinion,—who has been denounced in turn as pietist, rationalist, pantheist, even atheist; and who, on the other hand, has been held to fill a place in the Christian Church not inferior to that of Luther or even of Paul.

The sermons have been selected with a view to as wide a range of subjects as possible, from the four volumes of Schleiermacher’s published discourses; and they are arranged, so far as this could be done, according to the order of time in which they appeared, that the reader may be more able to judge of the development and progress of the author’s mind. It will also tend to a clearer understanding and a juster appreciation of the sermons, as well as give them a more living and personal interest, that the reader be made acquainted with something of the author’s history, and of the times in which he lived and worked.

Friedrich Ernst Schleiermacher, born at Breslau, November 21st, 1768, was the firstborn son of a poor army chaplain of the Reformed faith; a man of earnest, evangelical piety, whose heart, as well as that of the mother, was set on the spiritual prosperity of their children. The little Fritz, in the frequent necessary absences of his father, took his first steps in education under his mother’s care. At five years old he went to school, where, as he tells us, by his ready memory and the ease with which he acquired mere verbal knowledge, he came to be thought very clever,—an opinion with which he himself entirely agreed; and so became very conceited. But from the character of his master’s school reports, it is plain that the boy was not only clever, but a uniformly good and diligent pupil. The removal of his parents, when he was in his tenth year, to Pless, and then to Anhalt, brought a change that was greatly to the benefit of the delicate child. For nearly two years he lived much in the open air in the country, his mother wisely judging that if he kept up the book-knowledge he had, it was enough for his years. “Fritz,” she says, “is all spirit, and Carl all body.” So, for the time, Fritz occupied himself in making Latin and French translations, acted as schoolmaster to his wild little brother, teaching him reading and arithmetic, and, these duties accomplished, shared his games and rambles out of doors, sometimes joined by the quiet, retiring elder sister Lotte, the loving, beloved and trusted friend of Fritz through all changing circumstances till the day of her death in 1831.

But even in those earliest years the boy was a thinker; and open and docile as he was to all his good mother’s Christian instructions, the active, inquiring mind could take nothing for granted. “I had already,” he tells us, “sustained manifold internal religious conflicts. The doctrine of eternal punishment and reward had already exercised a disturbing power over my childish imagination; and in my eleventh year I spent several sleepless nights in consequence of not being able to come to a satisfactory conclusion concerning the mutual relation between the sufferings of Christ and the punishment for which these sufferings were a substitute.” A boy of ten losing his sleep, not through anxiety as to his own spiritual safety, but in the endeavour to solve a theological problem which has exercised the minds of devout and scholarly men in every age of the Church! It was clear this boy’s life would not run on common or smooth lines. He spent most of two years in a boarding-school at Pless, where scepticism attacked him in the form of doubting the authenticity of all the ancient authors, because he himself did not know any proofs of their genuineness. But a politic fear of losing his much-valued reputation for cleverness, by betraying his ignorance, made him keep a wise silence about those doubts until he should be able to sift the matter for himself.

Before Friedrich was thirteen, lie and Carl, as well as their sister Charlotte, were placed under the care of the Moravian Brethren, at first, for a time, at Gnadenfrei, whence the boys went in 1783 to Niesky. Steeped as Germany then was, almost universally, in the benumbing poison of rationalism, or wrapped in the chilling slumber of a deep formalism, the faithful few, like the good chaplain and his wife, with whom the pure gospel light and life still remained, felt themselves a somewhat helpless and discouraged remnant; and the parents thought they found in the pious, tranquil, well-ordered life of the Congregation a haven of safety for their children. And the children themselves, impressed by what their parents represented to them of the depravity and dangers of the world, became, as the father writes, “more and more anxious not to be sent away from us and out into the world, full of their natural corruption, and implored to be allowed to go to Niesky.” Here the boy spent several happy years, pursuing eagerly every path of knowledge that was opened to him; the seeds of pure faith and love and Christian fellowship, sown from his tenderest years on good soil, and fostered by this genial atmosphere, already bringing forth fair fruit. His letters to his sister, during his stay at Niesky, show how honestly and earnestly the young heart was set on serving and pleasing the Saviour whom he already loved. “He alone is my stay; the God who died for me on the cross. . . . Ah, did but the love of Christ fill our hearts day and night! . . . did we but cling to Him, so that not even for one moment could we be drawn away from Him!” “In this short period how much have I not experienced; that is to say, much evil as regards myself, and much mercy as regards the Saviour. I have merited wrath, say I, on my side; I have atoned for yon, cries the Lamb, from the cross.” Expressions such as these indicate what was the prevailing tone of the young student’s letters for some years.

But it was necessary that he who was to lead others to new and firmer standing-ground should himself struggle through the flood and test every step; it was fitting that the soldier who was to lead the fight against the deadly evils of his time should learn the use of his weapon in battling for his own life and liberty. Even at Niesky, the earnest, loving heart, longing after real communion with the Saviour, yet as rigidly honest with himself as with others, had undergone sore perplexities and struggles from having never been able to feel sure that the spiritual experiences which he saw and believed to be real in those around him, and which he felt to be very desirable for himself, were, in his own case, anything but inventions of his imagination. And when, in his seventeenth year, he was sent to the seminary at Barby, while these difficulties still perplexed him, he was soon plunged into deeper troubles. These will be most clearly explained in his own words.

In the autumn of 1786 he writes to his father: “With one thing only I am not content. I wish very much to study theology, and that thoroughly; but I shall not be able to boast of having done anything of the kind when I leave this, for, in my opinion, we are kept within too narrow limits in point of reading. Except what we see in the scientific periodicals, we learn nothing about the objections, arguments and discussions raised in the present day in regard to exegesis and dogmatics. Even in the lectures delivered to us sufficient mention is not made of these matters, and yet knowledge of them is absolutely necessary for a future theologian. The fact that they fear to lay them before us awakens in many minds a suspicion that the objections of the innovators must approve themselves to the intellect and be difficult to refute. I do not, however, share this opinion.”

This was meant to prepare the father for what the son knew would be a terrible blow to him—the avowal of the change in his views, which he thus makes in a letter six months later: “Alas! dearest father, if you believe that, without this faith, no one can attain to salvation in the next world, nor to tranquility in this and such, I know, is your belief—oh! then, pray to God to grant it to me, for to me it is now lost. I cannot believe that He, who called Himself the Son of man, was the true, eternal God; I cannot believe that His death was a vicarious atonement, because He never expressly said so Himself; and I cannot believe it to have been necessary, because God, who evidently did not create men for perfection, but for the pursuit of it, cannot possibly intend to punish them eternally because they have not attained it.”

Let it be remembered that these are the words of a lad of little more than eighteen; and yet the letter in which they occur is the furthest possible from resembling the utterance of some callow theologian, who imagines that because an idea is new to him it is new to every one else, and whose most profound conviction seems to be, “I have more understanding than all my teachers.” On the contrary, its tone is throughout humble, self-distrustful, full of deepest regret for his lost faith and for the conclusions to which he has felt, in the meantime, compelled to come; and full, even more, of reverential tenderness towards his father and bitterest sorrow for the pain which he is so unwillingly inflicting, and which he tries to soften by the hope of a change by-and-by. “Comfort yourself, dear father,” he writes; “for I know you were long in the same state in which I am now. Doubts assailed you at one time as they now do me, and yet you have become what you now are. Think, hope, believe that the same may be the case with me.” He entreats to be allowed to go to study at Halle; representing that by so doing, and having the opportunity of examining different views, he would be much more likely to change his own; whereas, by remaining among the Brethren, “I should never,” he says, “be able to get rid of my doubts. For I am debarred from the possibility of examining for myself in how far the objections of the innovators may or may not be well founded, as I am forbidden to read anything of the kind, and no one here will even refute my own objections.”

The correspondence following this letter is pathetic in its painfulness. The father, whose deep affection for his son and pride in his superior gifts only added a tenfold keenness to the sting of the disappointment, could see nothing in the youth’s doubts but the pride and depravity of his heart, and a longing after the world and its honours; and poured out tears and reproaches, mingled with entreaties to return from his evil way. He even spoke of feeling compelled to discard him; but this is evidently a mere figure of speech. And the son, on his side, miserable with the strife in his own mind, heart-broken because of his father’s grief, meekly justifying himself against misunderstandings, and yet unable to give the only comfort that would avail, suffered probably still more keenly.

The question of leaving Barby was settled by the Brethren, who refused to allow one who had imbibed such views to remain among them even on probation. Thus cut off from all his moorings, external as well as spiritual, his position was sufficiently trying. But in his uncle Stubenrauch, his mother’s brother, then a professor of theology at Halle, he found the very friend for his need; one who, while better able than the father to understand .the young man’s position, gave him sound and Christian advice, and also set things before his brother-in-law in so wise and hopeful a light that ere long the old man’s letters to his son regained all their wonted affectionate tone. Under the roof of this kind uncle, Schleiermacher spent two years at Halle, studying with his usual passionate eagerness, but without any definite plan; as he says himself, taking a taste of everything, making a fragmentary study of all sciences, and “hindered in various ways by that conceit which is peculiar to the self-educated.” The necessity of self-support led him to cultivate the English and French languages with a view to teaching; and when at the end of those two years the uncle retired to a living at Drossen, the nephew accompanied him, and spent another year chiefly in adding to his knowledge of theology. His life-long gratitude to this fatherly friend finds graceful expression in his own words: “Nothing gives me more pain than to think that I have not availed myself sufficiently of his friendship to be able to say, in lieu of all praise, ‘See what I have become, and to him I owe it.’”

What great and essential changes took place in his views during these and succeeding years will be best seen in the following sermons. Throughout his life he retained a most kindly feeling towards the Brethren, with whom a strong tie remained for him through his sister having taken up her permanent abode among them. He often and gratefully spoke of what he owed to his early training among them, and more than once revisited them. On one of those occasions, writing from Gnadenfrei, Charlotte’s home, he says, “Here it was that that mystic tendency developed itself which has been of so much importance to me, and has supported and carried me through all the storms of scepticism. Then it was only germinating, now it has attained to its full development; and I may say that, after all that I have passed through, I have become a Herrnhuter again, only of a higher order.” And later, in 1805, after spending the Easter as a welcome and honoured guest at Barby—that Barby which had cast him out as poison—he describes to his friend the “beautiful service on Good Friday, based altogether on the great idea of the Atonement,” and goes on to say, “there is not, throughout Christendom, in our day, a form of public worship which expresses more worthily, and awakens more thoroughly, the spirit of true Christian piety than does that of the Herrnhut brotherhood! . . . I could not but feel deeply how far behind them we are in our church, where the poor sermon is everything . . . and is rarely animated by a true and living spirit.

“It will soon be my duty to institute divine service here [at Halle], which is to present a pattern, and to act as a stimulus, to new and far-spread generations of religious teachers; but how wretchedly cramped am I as to means, and how much I deplore that I cannot transplant hither the best and most attractive elements of what I witnessed at Barby!”

These long extracts, while showing his own feeling towards the Brethren and their institutions, will also serve to show what estimate they had by that time formed of his Christian character.

In the summer of 1790 Schleiermacher passed his examination as a licentiate of theology, and soon afterwards obtained a situation as private tutor in the family of Count von Dohna of Schlobitten. Here he spent three years very happily, treated with great kindness by the whole family, delighting in the happy domestic life and in the opportunity of forming his manners in polished society; preaching, visiting the sick, and studying as diligently as time permitted. This pleasant episode was brought to a close through his being unable conscientiously to agree with the views of the parents as to the system to be followed in the children’s education. After about half a year spent in teaching in Berlin, he was appointed and ordained as assistant to an aged pastor at Landsberg on the Warthe. He writes to his father on entering on this new office: “From my heart I do wish that God’s blessing may be upon my sermons, so that they may be sources of true edification and speak to the heart, as, I trust, they will ever come from the heart. To you I need not say how deeply I am moved at the thought of being numbered among those to whom so important an office is entrusted, nor need I assure you that I do not now, and never shall, look upon it merely as a means of livelihood.”

After two years of faithful pastoral work at Landsberg, he was appointed preacher to the Charity House in Berlin, a position which he held for the next six years. These years mark a new and most influential era in his life. He very soon became a daily and honoured guest in the house of the Jewish physician, Dr. Marcus Herz and his beautiful and highly gifted wife Henrietta. There he met the most intellectual and cultured society in Berlin, as well as many distinguished foreigners, for whom the Herzes always kept open house. In this congenial and stimulating atmosphere, Schleiermacher’s mind revelled and expanded, while ever steadily holding on its own independent course. He carried on his researches now, as throughout his life, in every department of knowledge—literature, science, philosophy, theology; he gave a candid and attentive hearing to the views of others, patiently and without prejudice weighed them, and held to what he accounted truth, whether sup ported by others or alone. “I do not believe,” he says, “that I shall ever attain to a fully wrought-out system, so that I could answer every question that could be raised, conclusively, and in agreement with all my other knowledge. But I have all along believed that the proving and investigating, the patient hearing of all witnesses and all parties, is the only means for attaining at last to a sufficient amount of certainty, and above all to a well-defined boundary between that about which one must necessarily take a side, and that which one may leave undecided with out detriment to his repose and happiness.”

In this social circle also, not only his intellect but his large, deep heart found the outlet and the sympathy which seemed to him a necessity of life. From childhood onwards he felt it impossible to live without loving and being beloved. To one friend he writes: “I stretch forth all my roots and leaves in search of affection, . . . and when I am unable to drink in full draughts of it, I at once dry up and wither.” In forming his friendships ho was slow to give confidence till sure of his ground. Intellect and genius no doubt attracted him, but in a friend he demanded more than these. “I cannot,” he says, “allow any one to penetrate into the inmost recesses of my mind until I am satisfied of the purity and uprightness of his character. I cannot philosophize with any one whose moral sentiments I do not approve.” And again: “For his intellect alone I love no man. Schelling and Goethe are two mighty intellects, but I shall never be tempted to love them.” And once more, in defending himself against the charge of having undesirable friends: “Never will I be the friend of a man of disreputable principles; but neither will I ever, out of fear of the world, withdraw the consolation of my friendship from any one who has innocently incurred its ban.” But when sure of a pure, true character, he was ready to love in spite of many faults; and having once given his confidence, he was eager to lay open his whole soul to his friend, and to receive a like fulness of communication in return; to have a constant and full and sympathetic interchange of opinions and feelings on all possible subjects. It was perhaps this need of expression that in part made it more natural to him to form friendships with women than with men; though more probably the reason was in the deep, delicate tenderness of his nature. With Henrietta Herz, who was as lovely in character as in person, he formed a friendship that lasted for life; and with several other female friends, all distinguished both by intellectual culture and by personal character, he kept up the closest intimacy.

His faithful sister Charlotte, whom, in her cloistered seclusion, he kept fully acquainted with all his doings and interests, feared, not entirely without reason, that these friendships might injure him in his professional position by exposing his conduct to misconstruction, and also that there might be a danger of his deceiving himself as to the nature of his feelings. He replies at great length, affectionately and patiently going into detail to relieve her loving anxiety. He grants, as to the latter point, that the danger does exist, but assures her that he is always and entirely on his guard, and that between Mrs. Herz and himself any warmer feeling than friendship would never have been possible. And as to the danger to his position, he expresses his conviction that, just because he is a minister, it is his duty to disregard appearances, not, of course, out of mere bravado, but when ever there is good and sufficient reason. And therefore, as he feels sure that these friendships are, on the one hand, essential to him in the cultivation of his mind and heart, and that, on the other hand, they enable him to do much good, he maintains his right to enjoy them.

One faculty which Schleiermacher greatly valued in his friends, that of minutely and exactly observing and describing their own mental processes, was a very strongly marked characteristic of his own mind. This feature indeed comes out so very prominently in his letters that we are obliged to remind ourselves that they are the letters of a German. And yet this habitual, deliberate introspection, which is so commonly an indication and accompaniment of a morbid self-consciousness, was far from being so in his case. Self-conscious he was, in the sense of being fully and intensely aware of every phase and variation in his inner life; but in his relations with his fellow-men his manner had the childlike simplicity that marks every truly great man.

There must have been few more attractive guests in those days at Mrs. Herz’s gatherings than the small, slightly deformed man, with keen, flashing eye, and calm, self-possessed manner, who quietly listened and discussed and gave his opinion, and at the same time saw and heard all that was done or said in the room; whose face expressed at once intellectual power and a most winning kindliness.

The most notable of the male friends whom Schleiermacher acquired during this first residence in Berlin was Friedrich Schlegel, who arrived in the city not long after him, and who for some time shared his lodgings. He regarded Schlegel’s mental powers with intense admiration, and considered his intimate association with him as the greatest possible advantage to himself. “In regard to intellect,” he says, “he is so infinitely superior to me that I cannot speak of his mind but with profound reverence.” For a few years his connection with Schlegel occupied a large place in his thoughts and time; a connection of which he said that it would ever remain one of the most remarkable epochs in his life. Mrs. Herz says he was liable to the not very uncommon weakness of greatly exaggerating the merits of his friends; and it is evident that whatever Schlegel’s real merits were, his friend saw him through some glorifying medium in his own imagination. “I cannot help,” he says, “loving the ideal that dwells in him, al though I am very doubtful whether it will not be shivered to atoms before he succeeds in embodying a harmonious presentment of it, either in his works or in his life. How ever, I see before me, in imagination, the great and truly sublime image of what he may be if he ever attain his true development. How could I then feel otherwise towards him than I do? “It was probably from thus idealising his friend, and also from a generous feeling of his having been unfairly dealt with, that Schleiermacher was moved to write a series of letters in defence of Lucinda, a book of Schlegel’s which was severely condemned, and, it would seem, not without good reason; and which Schleiermacher himself had at first disliked. Of this incident a German critic remarks, that “the astonishment felt at seeing a healthy and pure mind, such as Schleiermacher’s, finding pleasure in the Lucinda is exceeded by the admiration experienced at beholding the purified reflection of the work furnished by the pure mind.” Schleiermacher probably did in this case like the godly old woman who, after hearing a sermon that was very dry bones to most of the hearers, gave notes of it that were savoury and wholesome food. She had read her own devout thoughts into it.

On his twenty-ninth birthday he writes to Charlotte a lively account of how he had been surprised in the morning by the arrival, first of two young Dohnas, (his former Schlobitten pupils, now officers resident for a time in Berlin,) and then of Schlegel and some of his lady friends; how his table was spread with chocolate and cakes, how “Mrs. Herz gave me a watchguard and Mrs. Veit a pair of gloves and a small wineglass out of which to drink the Burgundy she had ordered for my stomach, and Schlegel a small bottle of perfume for my linen, which he knows I am very fond of.” And then he goes on to say how Schlegel had incited the others to join in extorting from him a promise to produce something original in writing before the end of the year; “a promise that weighs heavily on me, as I have not the least desire to be an author.” This promise was redeemed by his beginning to contribute short papers to the Athenaeum, then conducted by the brothers Schlegel.

But he soon found weightier work for his pen. In the spring of 1799, during a short absence at Potsdam, he completed in two months his Discourses on Religion, addressed to the cultivated Classes among its Contemners. He was very far from anticipating what was to be the effect of this work, and had doubts of its being allowed to pass by the public censor; doubts not unfounded, for it was barely sanctioned. Its aim was to prove that religion is an eternal necessity in human nature, and to distinguish what is essential in it from the accidental and false additions of men.

The book startled the nation as with the blast of a trumpet. Men awoke, especially young men, from the torpor of unbelief or fashionable indifference, and began to inquire, What is truth? The appearance of the work is regarded as forming a distinct epoch in the religious history of Germany. Harms, who had become dissatisfied with rationalism, relates of himself after reading the book twice through, hardly pausing to eat or sleep: “I suddenly recognised that all rationalism, and all aesthetics, and all knowledge derived from ourselves, are utterly worthless and useless as regards the work of salvation; and the necessity of our salvation coming from another source, so to say, flashed upon me. . . . I may, with truth, call it the hour in which my higher life was born. I received from that book the impulse of a movement that will never cease.” The great Neander also regarded the reading of these Discourses as the turning-point in his religious life, and many of the most noted thinkers and preachers of Germany were no loss deeply impressed and influenced. It is significant of how little the author sought or valued fame that in none of his letters of that period is there the slightest reference to the sensation produced by the book, nothing indeed to indicate that he was even aware of it. On its being sent to the printer he writes to Mrs. Herz: “It is a strange coincidence that one of my sermons should have appeared at the same time as my Discourses on Religion. My name thus stands among a number of great theologians and preachers, and in order to excuse himself for having placed it there, B— has been so bold as to say in the preface that I am highly valued in Berlin on account of my talents and my knowledge. . . . What may I not yet become in this sublunary sphere!”