George Cross · 3 of 40

A. A Sketch of Schleiermacher’s Life. · HIS BOYHOOD

We now turn more particularly to the career of his more famous son. Friedrich, or Fritz as he was usually called at home, was the junior of his sister Lotte and the senior of his brother Carl. He was an unusually bright child, and in his early school days made such rapid progress in his studies and showed such a disposition to pry into difficult subjects that his mother became alarmed at what seemed his pride and conceit. When only ten years of age, according to his own testimony, his mind was greatly distressed with the thought of the eternal happiness and woe of men, and many sleepless nights were spent in seeking some solution of the relation of the sufferings of Christ to the punishment of human sin. The attempt to indoctrinate the boy in such matters evidently brought only confusion and pain to his sensitive nature. The mother’s conversion to Moravianism introduced a new and powerful religious influence into the home, but this only increased his unhappiness The attempt to reproduce in himself that sense of utter sinfulness and that experience of miraculous change which was demanded as the inward response to the orthodox teachings, was for a long time fruitless. The Moravian profession of a conscious soul-inter course with Jesus prompted him to longings and strivings which for years remained unsatisfied. The mother saw in all this an answer to her prayers, but when he besought her for help she could only tell him to pray to Jesus for the gift he sought. It is evident that the boy’s mind was overwrought and his spiritual development abnormal, but at the same time it is clear that he was possessed of a nature wonder fully endowed and capable of high religious attainment.

The family moved to Pless in Upper Alsatia in the year 1778 and the year after to Anhalt, where they remained till the summer of 1780. That year Fritz attended a boarding-school at Pless. While there he came under the influence of Ernesti, the famous exegete and advocate of the grammatico-historical method of Scripture-interpretation, whose enthusiasm awakened in the boy the desire for a scholastic career and a love for the ancient classics. The rich fruit of this appeared in later years in Schleiermacher’s splendid translation of Plato’s Dialogues and his deep acquaintance with Greek philosophy. During those years there came over him “a strange skepticism,” as he calls it. It consisted in a suspicion that the whole of what was contained in ancient history was unreal, because he knew nothing of the proofs of the genuineness of the events mentioned in the literature of those far-off times and because the accounts themselves seemed disjointed and fanciful. Though much troubled by these doubts he kept them to himself. The death of Ernesti in 1781 led to his return to his father’s house. Here with no experienced teacher to direct his studies he developed that tendency, after ward deplored by him, to follow his own choice of books and subjects rather than those more regular academic courses which are based on long scholastic experience.

At the same time these were days of spiritual profit. At Anhalt and at Gnadenfrei, whither the family soon removed, he saw a good deal of his father and they often talked together of religious matters. Long afterward, in 1802, when on a visit at Gnadenfrei, he wrote his friend Reimer of those happy days. He recalls a walk in company with his father when there came to him the feeling that he was a subject of divine grace and he began to entertain the hope that he had entered on a higher life:

Here it was that there came to me for the first time the consciousness of man’s relation to a higher world . . . . Here it was that mystical temperament was developed which has been of so much worth to me and which through all the storms of skepticism has supported and preserved me. Then it was only in germ, now it has attained to full development, and I can say that, after all that I have passed through, I have become a Herrnhuter again--only of a higher order [italics mine].

He is not unmindful of certain dangers attendant on such an experience:

Here were laid the germs of an imaginativeness in matters of religion, which, had I been of a more ardent temperament, would probably have made me a visionary, but to which I am nevertheless indebted for many a precious experience, and which is the reason that, while in most people the disposition of the mind is formed unconsciously by theory and observation, in my case, it bears the impress, and is the conscious product, of my own mental history.

In those days, however, he was still tossed about by the fear lest all these experiences might be only from himself, and his young soul was still harassed by the questionings which had troubled him before. He began to share his father’s dread of the effect of a contact with the dangerous tendencies toward irreligion and immorality in the larger schools then open to him, and when the father proposed to seek admission for him to a school of the Brethren at Niesky, known as the Paedagogium, he eagerly assented; for by this time he had made up his mind to join the Moravian society, cost what it might.

Application was duly made in May, 1783. It was not easy to obtain admission, for first of all the casting of the lot, which the Brethren regarded as indicating, immediately the Savior’s will, must result favorably, and the directors at Barby, which was at that time their educational headquarters, must approve. After a few weeks of waiting his desire was granted and he entered the Paedagogium in June. With this step the home life was brought to an end. He never saw his parents again, for his devoted mother died in the following December, and his father’s path and his own began to run apart.