Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834)

Birth in Breslau and Moravian formation

Friedrich Schleiermacher was born on 21 November 1768 in Breslau, capital of Prussian Silesia, into a family of Reformed pastors: his father, Gottlieb Schleiermacher, was a military chaplain in the army of the King of Prussia, and his paternal grandfather had himself been a pastor, linked to the rigorist Pietist currents of the "Zionites"^[1]. Around 1778, his parents drew closer to Moravian piety — that of the Brethren of Herrnhut (Herrnhuter Brüdergemeine), a Pietist movement founded by Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf in the 18th century, centred on the personal and affective experience of the Saviour rather than on systematic theology^[2].

The young Friedrich was sent to the Moravian boarding schools of Niesky in Upper Lusatia (1783) and then Barby, near Magdeburg (1785), where teaching combined Pietist rigour with a solid humanist culture — Latin, Greek, Hebrew^[3]. It was there that he formed, in the words he would repeat all his life, his conviction of having remained at bottom a "Moravian of a higher order" (ein Herrnhuter höherer Ordnung): the man who would break intellectually with Moravian dogmatics never ceased to place the lived religious feeling inherited from Herrnhut at the heart of all his later theology^[4].

The letter to his father of 21 January 1787: the inner break

It was at the Barby seminary that the young Schleiermacher, then eighteen years old, began reading the rationalist critiques of orthodox theology — notably the writings of the philosopher Johann August Eberhard — and lost his certainty about the central dogmas he had been taught: the substantial divinity of Christ, the necessity of his expiatory death, the eternity of the pains of hell^[5]. On 21 January 1787, in a letter that has remained famous, he confessed his doubts to his father with shattering frankness:

"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." — Friedrich Schleiermacher, letter to his father Gottlieb Schleiermacher, Barby, 21 January 1787^[6]

This letter is the founding document, before any theological writing, of Schleiermacher's entire career: it already contains, in germ, the rejection of vicarious satisfaction, the relativisation of the divinity properly speaking of Christ, and the conviction — which he would keep all his life — that eternal damnation is incompatible with divine goodness. His father, a piously orthodox pastor, was shattered but nevertheless let him leave Barby for the university^[7].

Halle and the critical exegesis of Semler and Eberhard

In 1787, Schleiermacher enrolled at the Halle university, more liberal, where he studied theology while taking philosophy and classical philology as secondary subjects^[8]. There he was exposed to the teaching of the theologian Johann Salomo Semler, often presented as one of the pioneers of the historical-critical method applied to Scripture, who already distinguished the "word of God" from the biblical letter itself, opening the way to a reading of the Bible as a human document among others^[9]. This twofold formation — critical exegesis and rationalist philosophy — left a lasting imprint: Schleiermacher never quite abandoned the Christian framework, but from then on he rebuilt its foundations on a basis he judged safe from rationalist objections: no longer the propositional authority of Scripture, but religious experience itself. He passed his theology examinations in Berlin in 1790, then worked as a private tutor in the family of Count von Dohna-Schlobitten until 1793^[10].

Chaplain at the Charité and the Romantic circle

Ordained pastor in 1794, Schleiermacher first exercised a brief ministry at Landsberg (1794–1796) before being appointed, in 1796, chaplain of the Charité hospital in Berlin^[11]. It was in the Prussian capital that he frequented the most brilliant literary salons of his time — notably that of Henriette Herz — and formed a decisive intellectual friendship with Friedrich Schlegel, leader of early German Romanticism^[12]. Together they co-founded the review Athenaeum (1798–1800), manifesto of the Romantic movement, and lived for a time under the same roof in Berlin.

This immersion in nascent German Romanticism profoundly shaped Schleiermacher's theology: against the dry rationalism of the waning Enlightenment and against frozen dogmatic orthodoxy, the Romantics sought a higher form of knowledge through intuition, feeling and creative individuality — categories Schleiermacher would transpose directly into his theory of religion^[13].

A thwarted affair: Eleonore Grunow

During these Berlin years, Schleiermacher entered into a seven-year affair (1798–1805) with Eleonore Christiane Grunow, the unhappy wife of a Berlin pastor, whom he hoped to marry after a divorce that was never finally obtained^[14]. This biographical episode, often minimised by liberal Protestant hagiography, illuminates a constant trait of his thought: the conviction, already present in his Monologues of 1800, that authentic morality must spring from each person's inner individuality rather than from an externally imposed uniform precept — including on questions of marriage and divorce.

The On Religion (1799): "intuition and feeling of the universe"

In 1799, at thirty, Schleiermacher anonymously published his most resounding work: Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers)^[15]. The text speaks directly to the cultured elites of his time, largely won over to the deism or religious indifference inherited from the Enlightenment, offering them a radical redefinition of what religion is — one supposedly proof against both rationalist attacks and the dogmatic dryness of Protestant orthodoxy.

Its central thesis: religion is neither metaphysics nor morality, but an autonomous province of the human spirit, founded on intuition (Anschauung) and feeling (Gefühl) of the infinite universe — summed up in the most famous formula of the whole book: religion is a "sense and taste for the infinite" ("Sinn und Geschmak fürs Unendliche", 1799 spelling)^[16]. The vocabulary of the "feeling of absolute dependence", by contrast, is not that of the Speeches: it belongs to the mature summa, The Christian Faith (1821–1822)^[17]. Authentic religion, for Schleiermacher, consists neither in knowing truths about God (that would be metaphysics), nor in obeying moral commandments (that would be ethics), but in intuitively experiencing the infinite universe within the finite — an experience each historical religion, Christianity included, then expresses in its own particular and always imperfect way.

This definition had an immediate and considerable consequence: if religion is first of all feeling, then dogmas, creeds and conciliar definitions are no longer the primary content of faith, but only secondary, changing and perfectible translations of a religious experience which itself remains primary and normative. It is this methodological reversal that all later liberal Protestant theology — from Ritschl to Troeltsch, down to 20th-century liberal theology — would develop in his wake.

Exile in Stolp and the Halle professorship

Following Berlin tensions linked notably to his affair with Eleonore Grunow, Schleiermacher accepted in 1802 a post as Reformed pastor at Stolp, in Pomerania, far from the intellectual circles of the capital^[18]. It was a period of studious solitude during which he undertook, initially in collaboration with Friedrich Schlegel then alone, the great scholarly enterprise of his life: the complete translation of Plato into German, published in volumes from 1804 to 1828, which remains a reference in the German-speaking world to this day^[19].

In 1804, he was appointed professor of theology at the Halle university, where he taught until the university's closure ordered by Napoleon after the Prussian defeat at Jena (October 1806)^[20]. This university period saw his system mature: it was at Halle that he began developing his lecture courses on dialectics, hermeneutics and ethics, which would form the philosophical bedrock of his later systematic theology.

Return to Berlin under French occupation

After the closure of Halle, Schleiermacher returned to Berlin, then occupied by Napoleon's troops, where he was appointed in 1807 and then definitively as pastor of Trinity Church (Dreifaltigkeitskirche) in 1809^[21]. On 18 May 1809, he married Henriette von Willich, widow of a pastor friend who had died prematurely, whose children he also became guardian of^[22]. It was in this context of national defeat and foreign occupation that Schleiermacher, until then above all a man of salons and study, became a preacher with an avowedly patriotic tone.

The foundation of the University of Berlin (1810)

After the closure of Halle by Napoleon, the Prussian minister Wilhelm von Humboldt undertook the foundation of a new university in Berlin, conceived as an intellectual "fortress and rampart" of resistance to the French occupation^[23]. Three men were its intellectual architects: Humboldt himself, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, and Schleiermacher — whose plan, finally preferred by Humboldt to Fichte's, judged too authoritarian, provided for keeping a genuine faculty of theology within the modern university, whereas other reformers wished to exclude it in the name of the secularisation of knowledge^[24]. The university opened its doors in 1810; Schleiermacher obtained the chair of theology which he would keep until his death, and also became secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences^[25]. He was elected rector for the year 1815–1816^[26].

The patriotic preacher of Trinity Church against Napoleon

An influential preacher at Trinity Church, Schleiermacher took an active part in the national resistance effort against the Napoleonic occupation: when the war of liberation broke out in 1813, lists of volunteers were opened in the university's Senate hall, and teachers and students alike enlisted en masse to fight^[27]. This experience of the Prussian national revival reinforced in Schleiermacher the conviction — consistent with his theology of feeling — that authentic religious life must be concretely embodied in the life of the people and the nation, rather than remain an abstract orthodoxy cut off from collective lived experience.

The Prussian Evangelical Union (1817): erasing the frontier between Luther and Calvin

For Schleiermacher, whose theology precisely grounds Christian unity in common religious feeling rather than in exact doctrinal agreement on, for example, the Real Presence in the Eucharist, this institutional fusion of Lutherans and Reformed was not a mere political operation willed by the king: it followed logically from his theological system. If the dogmatic quarrels between Luther and Calvin — on the Supper, predestination, Christology — are "secondary translations" of one and the same fundamental religious feeling, then nothing prevents, in theory, merging them administratively without ever really resolving the doctrinal questions that had divided them since the 16th century.

Neither metaphysics nor morality: a third province of the mind

Taking up and deepening the thesis of the 1799 Speeches in his mature work, Schleiermacher holds that the life of the human mind unfolds according to three faculties irreducible to one another: knowledge (which aims at the true, the domain of metaphysics and science), action (which aims at the good, the domain of ethics), and feeling or immediate self-consciousness (which aims at neither the true nor the good, but at the unity of being in relation to the infinite)^[31]. Authentic religion belongs exclusively to this third province: it is neither knowledge about God to be demonstrated, nor a moral code to be observed, but an immediate modification of self-consciousness insofar as it feels itself radically dependent on something absolutely beyond it.

This immediate consciousness, which he calls in his great systematic treatise the feeling of absolute dependence (das schlechthinnige Abhängigkeitsgefühl), constitutes in his view the common and universal core of all religious experience, whatever the historical religion that then comes to express and "translate" it into doctrines, rites or institutions^[32]. Christianity is, within this framework, only the particular historical form — admittedly judged by Schleiermacher the highest and purest — in which this universal feeling of absolute dependence finds its most accomplished expression through the figure of Jesus.

The Christian Faith (1821–1822): rebuilding dogmatics from experience

His great systematic work, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der evangelischen Kirche (The Christian Faith according to the Principles of the Evangelical Church), appeared in two volumes in 1821–1822, then in a second deeply reworked edition in 1830–1831^[33]. The project was one of radical methodological daring: to reconstruct all the traditional articles of the Christian faith — creation, sin, incarnation, redemption, Trinity, last things — no longer from the propositional authority of Scripture and the councils, but from a phenomenological description of the Christian experience of "God-consciousness" (Gottesbewusstsein) as lived in the believing community.

Each traditional doctrine was thus systematically reinterpreted as the expression, in the language of a given age, of a determinate state of religious consciousness — and no longer as the statement of an objective metaphysical truth about the nature of God or about precise historical events. It is this method, even more than any particular doctrinal content, that would earn Schleiermacher his identification, a century later, as the direct methodological ancestor of the Modernist theology condemned by the Catholic Magisterium.

Christ, summit of "God-consciousness", not the Incarnate Word of Nicaea

The most consequential point of The Christian Faith concerns the person of Christ. Schleiermacher rejects the classical Christology of Nicaea and Chalcedon, which he judges imprisoned in a Greek metaphysics of "two natures" foreign, in his view, to religious experience itself^[34]. In its place, he proposes understanding Jesus as the man in whom God-consciousness (Gottesbewusstsein), common in germ to all humanity, attained for the first and only time an absolute and uninterrupted power — making him not the eternal Word made flesh according to the conciliar definition, but the perfect archetype and historical founder of a new collective life of God-consciousness, which he transmits to his disciples by spiritual and communal contagion rather than by an objective redemption accomplished on the Cross^[35].

On Redemption itself, the consequence is direct: Christ redeems humanity not principally by offering God, on the Cross, a vicarious satisfaction for sin — a doctrine Schleiermacher already rejected, as we have seen, in his 1787 letter to his father — but by communicating to believers, through existential and communal assimilation, the intensity and perfection of his own God-consciousness. Salvation thus becomes a psychological and communal transformation of consciousness rather than a juridical and objective reconciliation accomplished once for all by a propitiatory sacrifice.

Miracles, dogmas and Scripture reduced to symbolic expression of feeling

Consistent with its premises, Schleiermacher's theology treats the miracles reported by the Gospels less as objective historical interventions of divine power in nature than as symbolic expressions, in the pre-critical language of a given age, of a profound religious experience which alone remains essential^[36]. Likewise, conciliar dogmas (Trinity, two natures of Christ, transmitted original sin) are for him never revealed truths to be believed for their own sake, but dated doctrinal formulations, liable to revision as the collective Christian consciousness evolves — provided the reformulation keeps faithfully expressing the same fundamental feeling of absolute dependence redeemed through Christ.

Scripture itself, in this system, ceases to be the verbally revealed and inspired Word of God in the classical sense, becoming instead the historical witness — admittedly privileged and normative for the Christian community — of the originary religious experience of the first disciples: a human document, therefore, analysable by the same historical-critical methods as any other ancient text, rather than a deposit of revealed truths to be interpreted in the light of Tradition and the Magisterium.

Alongside his theology, Schleiermacher developed, in courses given at Halle then Berlin between 1805 and 1833, a general theory of textual interpretation — hermeneutics — which remains foundational for all contemporary human sciences^[37]. His most famous thesis reverses the ordinary presumption of reading: whereas we spontaneously assume we understand a text unless proven otherwise, Schleiermacher holds that misunderstanding is the rule and that genuine understanding must always be methodically sought, never simply presupposed^[38].

To this end he distinguishes two complementary and simultaneous operations: grammatical interpretation, which studies the text as a fact of the language common to its age, and psychological (or "technical") interpretation, which seeks to reconstitute, by a form of intuitive divination, the author's individual creative process — what Schleiermacher calls the hermeneutic circle, the permanent back-and-forth between the part and the whole of the text to be understood^[39].

Applied without distinction to every text — Holy Scripture included — this method has a decisive theological consequence: the Bible ceases to occupy, in the very act of reading it, a radically distinct position from other ancient texts. It must be understood, first of all, like any other human document issued from a determinate author and age — opening the way, among his 19th- and 20th-century heirs, to a historical-critical exegesis that systematically treats the supernatural content of the text (prophecy, miracle, verbal inspiration) as a secondary question, if not one suspect on principle.

The death of his son Nathanael (1829) and the final years

In 1829, Schleiermacher lost his only son, Nathanael, aged nine, who died in Silesia far from his parents^[40]. His biographers report that this loss affected him in a particularly deep and lasting way until the end of his life^[41]. His final years were also marked by repeated theological polemics with conservative confessional Lutherans, notably Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg, who accused him of dissolving by his method the whole of the Protestant dogmas inherited from the Reformation, and by a brief period of political suspicion on the part of the Prussian authorities, worried after 1819 about any "demagogic agitation" in the universities^[42].

Death in Berlin (12 February 1834)

Schleiermacher died in Berlin on 12 February 1834, aged sixty-five, of pneumonia^[43]. His funeral, followed by a considerable crowd of Berlin students and notables, marked the immediate recognition of his status as a major theological figure of his time — well before the scale of his posthumous influence on the whole of liberal Protestantism would fully reveal itself over the following century.

A partly sound intuition, diverted from its foundation

It would be unjust to Schleiermacher to see in him only a mere destroyer of faith. His insistence on the lived, inward and affective dimension of religious life meets, on one precise point, an intuition Catholic spiritual theology has never ignored: faith is not a pure exercise in cold disembodied logic, but engages the whole heart of man. Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint John of the Cross and so many other Catholic mystics likewise insisted on the lived experience of God — without ever founding, on it alone and independently of the objective revelation transmitted by the Church, the very content of what must be believed.

It is precisely here that Schleiermacher's theology makes a decisive and, from the Catholic point of view, untenable shift: he does not merely say that faith engages feeling, he affirms that faith is a feeling, and that this feeling constitutes the ultimate source and norm of all doctrine — revelation itself included, understood no longer as objective divine communication but as a mere subjective "becoming aware" of an experience already inward to the believing subject. This is the exact inverse of the Catholic structure of the act of faith, in which feeling may accompany assent but can never replace it nor constitute its foundation.

What Vatican I frontally opposes: Dei Filius against feeling as sole foundation

The First Vatican Council, convened barely forty years after Schleiermacher's death, defined with a precision that seems almost directly aimed at the system he had just bequeathed to German Protestantism. The dogmatic constitution Dei Filius (1870) first teaches that God can be known with certainty by the sole natural light of human reason from created things^[44] — against any theory which, like Schleiermacher's, would make all religious knowledge depend on an inward experience irreducible to demonstrative reason. It then teaches that faith itself is a supernatural assent of the intellect, moved by grace, to objectively revealed truths from God — not a mere modification of feeling:

"If someone says that divine Revelation cannot be made credible by external signs, and that therefore men should be moved to faith only by each person's inward experience or by private inspiration: let him be anathema." — First Vatican Council, Dei Filius, chapter III "On faith", canon 3, 24 April 1870 — Denzinger-Hünermann, no. 3033^[45]

This canon is a direct and anticipated disavowal, even before the letter, of the method inaugurated by the 1799 Speeches on Religion: for Vatican I, the credibility of revelation rests on objective outward signs — miracles, fulfilled prophecies, the holiness and spread of the Church, the coherence of doctrine — and not on the sole inward resonance it awakens in the feeling of each believer taken in isolation. Reversing this order, as Schleiermacher systematically does, deprives faith of every objective criterion of truth: a feeling of absolute dependence can, by definition, never be contradicted by any outward fact, since it claims to describe no objective fact — making the doctrine derived from it structurally incapable of error as much as structurally incapable of demonstrable truth.

The matrix of Modernism: from Schleiermacher to Pascendi Dominici Gregis (1907)

A little over a century after the Speeches on Religion, Saint Pius X published, on 8 September 1907, the encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis, which systematically analysed and condemned the Modernist theology then widespread in certain Catholic circles. Yet the very structure Pius X describes there as the intimate mainspring of Modernism reproduces, almost term for term, the one Schleiermacher had established more than a century earlier for Protestantism:

"It is in man himself that it is to be found, and, as religion is a form of life, in the very life of man. This is religious immanence. […] The need of the divine arouses in the soul inclined to religion a particular sentiment. This sentiment has this peculiarity about it, that it regards God both as its object and as its inward cause." — Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, § 7, 8 September 1907^[46]

And Pius X adds, a few lines further on, the consequence directly attached to the theory of revelation: "This sentiment which appears in consciousness — and God who, in this sentiment, though still confusedly, manifests Himself to the soul — is this not a revelation, or at least the beginning of a revelation?"^[47], summing up in one rhetorical question the very approach of the 1799 Speeches, which make every new and original intuition of the universe a revelation, rather than the effect of an extraordinary communication from above^[48]. Pascendi never names Schleiermacher — the encyclical is aimed directly at contemporary Catholic theologians — but the intellectual genealogy running from Schleiermacherian religious feeling to the Modernist theory of "vital immanence" is recognised by the whole of theological historiography, Catholic and Protestant alike: between the two unfolds the mediation of Albrecht Ritschl, then Ernst Troeltsch and the history-of-religions school, before certain Catholic Modernists took up, without always explicitly knowing it, the same methodological structure applied this time to Catholic dogma itself^[49].

The Catholic Encyclopedia itself, as early as 1912, thus summed up Schleiermacher's founding role in this genealogy:

"Schleiermacher had already banished metaphysics from Christian philosophy, and explained the nature of religion subjectively as springing from the feeling of our absolute dependence on God." — Catholic Encyclopedia, art. "Ritschlianism", New York, Robert Appleton Company, 1912^[50]

Christ reduced to a supreme example, against the objective Incarnation and Redemption

The Christology of The Christian Faith poses an even more radical doctrinal problem than method alone. By dissolving the hypostatic union defined at Chalcedon (451) — a single divine Person subsisting in two natures, fully divine and fully human, without confusion or separation — into a mere "perfect degree" of God-consciousness accessible in germ to all humanity, Schleiermacher removes from Christianity its most decisive specificity: that God became man, once for all, in history — not that humanity supposedly attained, in one particularly religiously gifted man, the summit of a spiritual potentiality common to all. The following table summarises the gap, on the essential doctrinal points, between conciliar Catholic Christology and the one proposed by Schleiermacher.

This table shows that the gap between the two Christologies is not a matter of secondary theological nuance, but touches the very heart of the Creed: the real Incarnation of the eternal Word, the objective Redemption accomplished by the Cross, and the normative authority of Scripture and the Magisterium. On each of these three points, Schleiermacher's theology offers not a mere refinement of Catholic doctrine, but its methodical replacement by a reconstruction founded on subjective experience — which explains why the Catholic Magisterium as a whole places this theology not as an acceptable variant of historic Christianity, but as one of the major intellectual starting points of its modern dissolution.

An ambivalent posterity: Ritschl, Troeltsch and the Barthian revolt

Schleiermacher's direct influence on 19th-century German Protestant theology is immense: Albrecht Ritschl takes up and systematises his experiential method while seeking, unlike him, a more assured historical and biblical foundation for the figure of Jesus as "founder of the perfect moral religion"^[51]; Ernst Troeltsch and the history-of-religions school generalise the approach still further by relativising Christianity itself to the rank of one religious expression among others, likewise founded on man's experience of the sacred. At the turn of the 20th century, almost the whole of German liberal Protestant theology claimed, directly or indirectly, the method inaugurated by the 1799 Speeches.

It was precisely against this heritage that the Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth, traumatised by the rallying of most of his liberal teachers to German war propaganda in 1914, undertook after the First World War a resounding theological break with the entire Schleiermacherian tradition, reproaching it with having substituted religious anthropology for revealed theology properly speaking. The debate Barth then opened with Schleiermacher's legacy would go on structuring, throughout the 20th century, the great controversies of Protestant theology — from Paul Tillich to Rudolf Bultmann — without either camp ever quite returning to the objective and propositional structure of revelation as constantly defined, for its part, by Catholic doctrine from the Fathers of the Church down to Vatican I and Vatican II.

• Martin Luther (1483–1546) — the first reformer, whose doctrinal heritage was partly dissolved by Schleiermacher's experiential method within the Prussian Union of 1817.
• John Calvin (1509–1564) — the Genevan reformer, whose Reformed heirs merged with the Lutherans in the Prussian Evangelical Union championed by Schleiermacher.
• The Council of Trent (1545–1563) — the Catholic doctrinal answer on grace, justification and the authority of Scripture and Tradition, two and a half centuries before Schleiermacher.
• The Protestant Reformation — overview of the movement of which Schleiermacher's liberal theology constitutes, three centuries later, one of the great late branches.
• Answers to Protestantism — Catholic apologetic synthesis facing the formal principles of the Reformation which Schleiermacher pushes to their ultimate dissolution.
• The Modernist Crisis (1893–1914) — Pius X's 1907 condemnation of the theory of vital immanence and of religious sentiment as the foundation of faith, whose genealogy goes back to Schleiermacher.
• Karl Barth — the Reformed theologian who broke in the 20th century with Schleiermacher's entire theological heritage.