George Cross · 5 of 40

A. A Sketch of Schleiermacher’s Life. · A PERIOD OF SKEPTICISM

When he first went to Barby he gave himself mostly to exegetical studies and followed the Herrnhuterite methods, He held distinctly to the Moravian faith and hoped to become one of the society’s accepted laborers, though how or where he could not tell. But he soon turned to the study of philosophy. A philosophical club was formed among the students and he became an active member of it along with Albertini, his room-mate. The progress of his thought, at first glance, seems to have been startlingly rapid. Ernesti’s influence was not dead. Those fine intellectual powers that showed their presence so early in life, and that had been so long subordinated to a sup posed religious interest, were now revived. That inquiring spirit, exhibited in the questionings of his schoolboy days, reasserted its claims. A change came over him. The rational understanding began to take precedence of the religious feeling. He felt suspicious of an orthodoxy that shunned an open battle with its foes. Suspicion developed into doubt and doubt into skepticism. He awoke as if from a dream. By the end of the second semester he had definitely rejected the orthodox system. The strain of this new situation soon became unbearable. He decided, though with much hesitancy, to unburden his mind to his father. The letters that passed between the father and the son on the subject have been so interesting to the present writer that extracts from them are given herewith in the hope that similarly they may interest the reader.

The first intimation that a change was in progress was given in a letter to his father in July, 1786. He complains that his desire for a thorough study of theology has not been met by his teachers. Students 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 at the present day in regard to exegesis and dogmatics.” A suspicion has been aroused in his mind that the objections of the “innovators” must be difficult to refute. In reply the father assures him that ignorance of the objections and criticisms of the innovators is no loss. “Keep out of the way of this tree of knowledge and of that dangerous love of profundity which would lure you to it. . . . . Besides, you do not intend to be a vain theologian but are preparing to equip yourself to bring souls to the Savior, and for that purpose you do not need all that vain knowledge.” Then, as if half-divining the purpose so soon to be formed in the son’s mind, he adds, “You cannot sufficiently thank your Savior for having brought you into the community of the Brethren where you can do so well without it.” In lieu of modern scientific and philosophic studies he urges the young man to content himself with the Bible and certain edifying books whose theme is “the martyrdom of God . . . . who died on the cross for us.”

In January, 1787, six months after his first intimation of the intense struggle that had begun within him, he wrote that letter which announced to his astonished and bewildered parent the disappointment of all the hopes of former days. That faith which his father believed to be essential to salvation in the next world and tranquillity in this, is now lost to him. Here are his words:

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 him self; 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 to it.

He declares that it pains him to the depth of his soul to write as he has done; indeed, he has shrunk from it and has brought himself to do it at last only at the command of his superiors at college, to whom he had evidently communicated his thoughts. He has not abandoned utterly the hope of returning to the views of the Brethren, but that can never be if he remains at the seminary. He pleads to be permitted to go to Halle, where he could live under the guardianship of his uncle, Professor Stubenrauch, and pursue his investigations unhindered. He concludes: “In sorrow, dear father, I kiss your hands, and entreat you to look at everything from the most favorable side, and to consider well, and to bestow upon me in future also, as far as it is possible, that fatherly affection which is so indescribably valued by your distressed and most dutiful son.”

This letter gives evidence in every sentence of the clearest sincerity of purpose and earnestness of soul. Further, we must not do young Schleiermacher the injustice of charging him with youthful precipitancy in expressing himself as he did. He was only eighteen at the time, but he was far beyond most men of his years in maturity of judgment. In order to understand his radical expressions of doctrinal dissent we must keep in mind that the views of Zinzendorf were at that time generally accepted by the Brethren, and to them Jesus was virtually identical with God the Father (although they denied the charge of patripassionism), or perhaps we might say that Jesus had displaced God the Father in their minds. The substitutionary death of God on the cross--with a good deal of emphasis on the physical--was the very essence of the gospel. Schleiermacher knew that from his father’s point of view, and from his own up to that time (and as yet he appeared to have found nothing to take its place), the rejection of that doctrine meant the renunciation of Christianity itself. But the letters which followed this first fateful message make it quite evident that the young man had not renounced his religion but was unable to make quite clear to himself or to others the distinction between religious faith and belief in a doctrine of religion. At this point I may be permitted to quote the words of W. Robertson Nicoll in reference to this event:

The letter . . . . is the farthest possible from resembling the utterance of some callow theologian who imagines that because an idea is new to him it is new to everybody else . . . . 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 felt, in the meantime, compelled to come; and full, even more, of reverential tenderness toward 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.

The distracted father’s reply is extremely painful reading. Pleading, rebuke, warning, counsel, and denunciation mingle. He breaks out: “O, thou insensate son! Who has deluded thee, that thou no longer obeyest the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ was pictured, and who now crucifiest him?” He charges the son’s error to love of the world’s honors, to wickedness, conceit, and pride of heart. Then he turns to answer the son’s arguments, which he thinks a child could refute. At length, in exasperation, he goes so far as to declare, “With heart-rending grief I discard thee, for discard thee I must.” But this is hardly intended literally, for the letter closes with an outburst of affection and the desired permission to go to Halle.

One cannot help admiring the depth of affection and unswerving loyalty to his father and the unruffled patience which Schleiermacher exhibited in those trying weeks of excitement and suspense. In all his letters he addresses the disappointed parent, as “Tenderly beloved and best of fathers,” or in similar terms. Ere the father’s first reply can reach him, he writes another letter to mollify the wound his first letter made:

Oh! how often have 1 wished that I had been less honest, and that I had not disclosed my thoughts to anyone, or at least that I had not sent off the letter to you. I should then have spared my good father all the pain and troublous consequences of this matter, the end of which God only knows. But it had to be done some time and now I am glad that I took courage.

Most respectfully and yet most firmly in a later communication he defends his own sincerity throughout, and beseeches his father, “Do not look at every thing from the worst side; do not seek in my views everything exactly the reverse of what you think.” And then, after modestly traversing the father’s arguments, he quietly asserts that the father’s refutation of his doubts has not convinced him. Still later he even attempts to revive the father’s drooping faith in the persistent goodness and faithfulness of God: “Oh! that I could now already send you the joyful tidings of my conversion, instead of referring you to the future, begging you not to give up all hope. God, who is the Father of all, will watch over and guard me, and will direct everything for the best.” He meekly receives the father’s rebukes as to his faults, and says, “You have at once, dear father, put your finger on my most dangerous enemy--pride.” A softening of the father’s bitter feeling was one result and before long the tone of reproach in his letters dies away.

The permission to go to Halle was granted none too soon, for the officials at Barby could not tolerate, such a heretic in their midst. He knew he “could reckon upon no pity, no mercy here, nor hope to be allowed to remain here.” They had decided to turn him adrift.

It is worth while in passing to notice that this great change in Schleiermacher had a lasting effect on the mind of the father himself. As he followed his son’s career with fatherly interest and concern, his own earlier interest in philosophical and theological studies began to return and, whether for better or for worse, his Moravian sympathies were weakened and broader views found a place in his convictions.

It can scarcely be disputed that the influence of Moravianism on the mind of Schleiermacher was permanently beneficial. To that, more than to any other single element in his character, he owes the peculiar, place he has won in the world. His experiences at Niesky and Barby may be regarded as having set for Schleiermacher the problem of his whole life, which, Lücke says, was the “union without compromise of free science and Christian piety.” If we may anticipate at this point the backward survey which naturally occurs when his whole career has been described, we can say that he was above all else a religious man and his religion was characterized by the warmth of feeling, love of brotherly fellowship, vivid realization of the nearness of God, and peculiar regard for the person of the Savior which is associated with Moravianism. At the same time it cannot be doubted that his separation from them was a distinct gain. Had he remained with them he could never have attained to that breadth of human sympathy, deep insight into the relation between the religious life and the common things of the world, and that intellectual wealth which made him one of the great forces in the modern religious and theological world. It was the defects of Moravianism that drove him out. The union of Herrnhuterite religious feeling with Calvinistic theology was rather forced. The correspondence effected between experience and the external authority of doctrine was artificial. There was, after all, a subtle legalism in it all. When a wider knowledge of human thought brought a new world into view, it was inevitable that his over-strained spirit should revolt and seek for freedom elsewhere.