Schleiermacher and the "Religion of the Heart"
Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), "The Cross in the Mountains," 1808.
Friedrich, one of the most innovative and enduring of German Romantic landscape painters, effected a religious and symbolic transformation of the conventions and purposes involved in representing "sublime" landscapes. In the late 1790's, Friedrich associated himself with the Romantic group that included August and Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and Schleiermacher. The painter shared with Schleiermacher an emphasis on the authority of "feeling" in religion and art. Again, in a manner reminiscent of Schleiermacher's account of religion in his Speeches on Religion, Friedrich's landscapes invoke an experience of the infinite that transcends and relativises particular ecclesiastical and dogmatic loyalties. These works acknowledge a contemplative knowing of God that exceeds and overflows the demands of morality or metaphysics. "The Cross in the Mountains" was eventually sold as an altarpiece for a private chapel. The purchaser thereby affirmed those aspects of the work that had originally caused scandal. Inescapably "religious" in tone, the painting is also a landscape. Here lies its ambiguity: nature is saturated with religious feeling, not simply as a testimony to the glorious works of the Almighty but as a manifestation of Divine presence. The natural world has become an "altar" and the Christ removed from any ecclesiastical context. Contemporaries - for and against - recognized that Friedrich's landscapes violated both artistic and religious conventions and, within art, transgressed the boundary between "religious" painting and the depiction of nature. Confronted with hostile criticism of "The Cross in the Mountains," the painter composed this description in his defence:
Description of the Picture: On the peak of the rock the cross is raised high, surrounded with evergreen firs and with evergreen ivy entwining its base. The sun sinks radiating beams of light and in the crimson glow of evening the Saviour gleams on the Cross.
Interpretation of the Picture: Jesus Christ, nailed to the wood, is turned towards the sinking sun, as to the image of the eternal life-giving Father. The old world - the time when God the Father moved directly on the earth - died with the teaching of Jesus. This sun sank and the earth was no longer able to comprehend the departing light. The purest, the most precious metal of the Saviour's figure on the Cross shines forth in the gold of the evening light and thus reflects it on the earth in softened brilliance. The Cross stands erected on a rock unshakably firm as our faith in Jesus Christ. Evergreen, enduring through all ages, the firs stand round the Cross, like the hope of mankind in Him, the Crucified.
Friedrich's landscapes disconcert with their burden of divine evocation, the pressure of an inner urgency. Their composition achieves this through the strange use of perspective and, often, an odd positioning of the viewer. Thus, the subject of "The Cross in the Mountains" appears to be seen as if one was suspended in mid-air or, perhaps, looking out of a high window. In other paintings, foreground is abruptly cut away or the viewer is placed on the brink of vertigo. Rarely do we have a sense of having our feet on the ground. There is also, in many of Friedrich's works, a melancholy sense of loss and separation that accompanies the symbolization of an infinite and incomprehensible divine space. The picture below, "Monk by the Sea" (1809), is a good example. Despite their exhortatory tone and their affirmation of the eternal, indiminishable power of religion, this mood is present also in Schleiermacher's Speeches on Religion, for instance, when he contemplates, in the third speech, the inevitable "fall" of the "true church" into the corruptions of its institutional forms.
Caspar David Friedrich, "Monk by the Sea."
"The Divine is everywhere," Friedrich wrote, "even in a grain of sand." His friend Carl Gustav Carus described the "spirituality" that Friedrich had infused into landscape painting:
Stand on the peak of the mountain, contemplate the long ranges of hills, observe the courses of the rivers and all the glories offered to you view, and what feeling seizes you? It is a calm prayer, you lose yourself in unbounded space, your whole being undergoes a clarification and purification, your ego disappears, you are nothing, God is everything.
Recognizing its importance, Schleiermacher, in the Speeches, takes up the relationship between religion and nature. Does nature offer a special access to the knowledge of God? Schleiermacher's attitude to nature as a mediator of religious feeling is a carefully qualified one. Given that religion is "the sensibility and tase for the infinite," he recognizes that any privileging of a particular medium would compromise the freedom and universality of religion. As a sense of the "all in the one," religion must be evocable anywhere and everywhere and everything must, in some measure, be capable of occasioning religious feelings. Furthermore, Schleiemacher sees the danger of a simplistic identification of religious emotion with the fear and awe that natural phenomena can stimulate. After all, if religion is dependent upon such awakenings then the scientific knowledge that explores nature or even our daily familiarity with it is a threat to the continuance of religion. Nevertheless, there are ways of approaching the natural world that "acclimatize," ready us, for genuinely religious awareness:
Certainly a greater yield is vouchsafed to us who have been per-mitted by a richer age to penetrate deeper into nature's interior. Its chemical powers, the eternal laws according to which bodies them-selves are formed and destroyed, these are the phenomena in which we intuit the universe most clearly and in a most holy manner. See how attraction and repulsion determine everything and are uninter-ruptedly active everywhere, how all diversity and all opposition are only apparent and relative, and all individuality is merely an empty name. See how all likeness strives to conceal itself and to divide into a thousand diverse forms, and how nowhere do you find something simple, but everything is ornately connected and intertwined. That is the spirit of the world that reveals itself in the smallest things just as perfectly and visibly as in the greatest; that is an intuition of the universe that develops out of everything and seizes the mind. But only the person who in fact sees it everywhere, who, not only in all alterations but in all existence, finds nothing else but a production of this spirit and a representation and execution of these laws, only to him is everything visible really a world, formed and permeated by divinity, and is one.
Friedrich too, though, recognizes that there is no direct route from the empirical observation of nature to religion. The mediator, for him, is art. Thus, as we've seen, Friedrich's landscapes transform the observation of nature in such a way as to freight what is seen with intimation of the Divine. As he advised his pupils, the painter must "follow his inward voice." So, "close your physical eye so that you can first see your picture through your spiritual eye. Then bring to light what you have seen in the dark so that it may effect the viewer through its external appearence." The relationship, in both Friedrich and Schleiermacher, between God, nature, and ourselves, is a distinctively post-Kantian one. On the one hand, "experience" is the inescapable ground, we become "subjects" in and through our experience of the world. On the other hand, the world is inseparable from our experience of it: the objectivity of the world appears only through our subjectivity. There is no direct way from the observation of nature to the affirmation of God as cause or "designer." For Schleiermacher, "experience" - the unity of "intuition" and "feeling" - is not limited to sense experience but involves also the reception, in a unity of intuition and feeling, of the One that comprehends and embraces the Many: "a having and possessing of all in God and of God in all." In such moments, we grasp the blooming, buzzing confusion of our lives and of all that we experience or might experience, in its unity as a manifestation of the Infinite, the one life of the Divine. This "sensibility and taste for the Infinite" accompanies and tints all our particular experiences whilst being identifiable with none of them. Thus, with Schleiermacher, our subjectivity becomes the point of intersection between the multiplicity of the world and the embracing unity of the Infinite. This understanding of religion, therefore, reflects the Kantian critique of natural theology and the "turn to subjectivity." It also, however, expresses a frustration with the limitations of Kant's "moral faith."
The "Religion of the Heart"
Schleiermacher's parents were converts to the Herrnhuter (or Moravian) Bretheren, a community founded by Count N. L. von Zinzendorf. Until he entered the University at Halle in 1787, Schleiermacher was educated in Herrnhuter schools. Whilst he repudiated what he considered the intellectual narrowness and conservatism of Moravian education, Schleiermacher continued to acknowledge, with respect, the formative role of a "Pietist" upbringing. In a famous letter, he wrote:
Here it was that for the first time I awoke to the consciousness of the relations of man to a higher world.... 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 skepticism. Then it was only germinating; now it has attained 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.
The presence of the Herrnhuter, in an idealized, purified form appears also in the Speeches on Religion. The description is a of a "democratic" religious community bound together by a "religion of the heart," by unity of religious feeling rather than the authority of office and doctrine.
I wish I could draw you a picture of the rich, luxuriant life in this city of God when its citizens assemble, all of whom are full of their own power, which wants to stream forth into the open, all full of holy passion to apprehend and appropriate everything the others might offer them. When a person steps forth before others, it is not an office or an appointment that empowers him to do so, not pride or ignorance that fills him with presumption. It is the free stirring of the spirit, the feeling of most cordial unanimity of each with all and of the most perfect equality, a mutual annihilation of every first and last and of all earthly order. He steps forth to present his own intuition as the object for the rest, to lead them into the region of religion where he is at home and to implant his holy feelings in them; he expresses the universe, and the community follows his inspired speech in holy Si-lence. If he should now disclose a hidden miracle or, in prophetic confidence, link the future to the present, if he should confirm old perceptions by new examples, or if his fiery imagination should trans-port him in sublime visions into other parts of the world and another order of things, a practiced sense of community accompanies him everywhere; and when he returns to himself from his wanderings through the universe, his heart and the heart of each are but the common stage for the same feeling.
Below is an extract from a sermon by Count Nicholas Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf (1700-60) who founded the Moravian Brethren in 1722. Zinzendorf's theology influenced John Wesley as well as the young Friedrich Schleiermacher. This sermon was preached at the Brethren's Chapel, London in 1746. Even in this short extract, themes appear that are later reflected in Schleiermacher's work: the insistence that true Christianity - or, for Schleiermacher, true religion - transcends denominational allegiance; the relativization of the authority of dogma and of religious "externals;" belief in the necessity of a "felt" relationship with Christ, of an emotionally realized conversion of heart; and Christocentricity (as far as Schleiermacher is concerned, the latter is not apparent in the Speeches but much more so in Christmas Eve and very clear in the major dogmatic work, The Christian Faith (1821-2).
From a Sermon by Count N. L. von Zinzendorf:
Text: John 21:16: "Do you love me?" [RSV]
My purpose is to make clear from these words what constitutes the essential Christian. We want to look first at the essential character of a Christian, and secondly we will consider the circumstances of his life.
The genuine character of a Christian consists absolutely in this:
When he speaks with the Savior, when he speaks with his brethren, when he has anything to straighten out with God the Father, when he needs the ministry of angels, when he shall present himself on the day of the Lord to join in judgment over the living and the dead - then he absolutely does not appeal to his religious denomination, but rather to his nature, to his descent. For the most serious objection on that day will be, "I do not know you nor where you come from" (Luke 13:25). This is the Crinomenon [judgment], which decides on that day and in all similar circumstances and upon which it depends that one is re-ceived and the other cast away. The Savior does or does not call a person to mind. "I will acknowledge him; I will say, 'I know you'"(Matt. 10:32).
Therefore, it is a rule belonging absolutely to the character of the true Christian that, properly speaking, he is neither Lutheran nor Calvinist, neither of this nor the other religious denomination, not even Christian. What can be said more plainly and positively? What reformer, be it Hus or Luther or Wycliffe, or whatever his name might be, would be so presumptuous as to maintain that men are saved because they are his followers? For Paul excludes Christ him-self when he says, "Not of Paul, not of Cephas, not of Apollos, not of Christ" (1 Cor. 1:12).
It is really a great misfortune that people read the Scriptures but read them without the proper attention and that such main passages are not noticed. For seventeen hundred years men have written this for all the world to see, Christianus sum [I am a Christian] and for as many centuries have put this into the mouths of all the martyrs, Christianus sum, which is contrary to the plain words of the apostle Paul, who has expressly forbidden that any man call himself "of Christ" or Christian. Let our enemies call us that, let the Turks and pagans, let the Jews call us this in derision: Vir bonus, sed malus, quia Christianus est [He is a good man, and bad because he is a Christian], it is a pity that he is a Christian. But we must not speak this way. To be sure, the ancient fathers have themselves given occasion to this confu-sion: Prudentius says, "Secta generosa Christi nobilitat Viros," that is, the noble, the excellent religion of Christ makes people even more noble than they were before.
Who directed the people to do this? Who directed them to make a religion out of the family of Christ, in direct contradiction to the Holy Scriptures? It does not matter that men have confessions of faith; it does not matter that they are divided into religious denomina-tions; they may very well differentiate themselves according to their Tropo Paedias [form of doctrines]. An upright Christian man can say, I side with Calvin; an upright Christian man may also say, according to my judgment I rather side with Luther. But this gives neither the one nor the other the least warrant, the least right to salvation; this only distinguishes him according to his insight and as an honest man among the faithful; it entitles him not to be arbitrarily judged in his manner of acting, in his form, his method of treating souls, and in the outward appearance of his worship. Each thing has its peculiar external form, its external shape, and everything does not look alike. No man has the same point of view as another, and by this means he dis-tinguishes himself innocently and inoffensively. For as soon as any-one appeals to the fact that he does not hold with another's logic, in that moment the other's right to censure him ceases. And it is a vulgar, mean disposition of mind when people of one religious denomi-nation take pleasure in opposing people of another, or when on that account they show enmity toward each other. For as soon as someone says that he is of a persuasion different from mine, then he has taken away my spiritual right over him to censure him.
Now thus far it is good that we have many religious denominations; up to this point I am in agreement, so much so that I despise anyone who, without the deepest and most thoroughly examined rea-son, changes over from one denomination to another; so much so that nothing sounds more ridiculous to my ears than a proselyte. Only with the greatest difficulty can I make myself deal with such a per-son, when I become aware that he has left his former denomination, especially among the Protestants, who all take the Scriptures as the guiding principle of faith. Therefore, frivolity should not govern denominational matters. The differences in religious denominations are important and venerable concerns, and the distinction of religious denominations is a divine wisdom. No peculiarity should cause a disturbance. But all of these ideas still betray their human origin, of which it may be said that three hundred, five hundred, a thousand years ago things were not yet conceived in this way. There is only one of whom ~ it may be said, "Yesterday, today, and forever he is ever still the same" (Heb. 13:8).
And his church stands as she has stood,
Jehovah the Father is her God;
She still retains her very first dress:
Christ's own blood and righteousness.
Now then, I have said what a Christian is not, what a person must not presume to comprehend under the name Christian, in what respect a person must not boast of Christ, what a Christian upon occasion must consider entirely skybala, refuse, as Paul calls it (Phil. 3:8), whenever it tends to interfere with the foundation, with the main point, even were it good and real in itself or could in a certain sense be valid.
Now, what then is the proper character of a Christian? Take notice, my dear friends, for here we must in advance set aside the com-mon word as it is used in all languages, except the German, which has something special in its usage. In all languages one says a Christian, and in our German alone one says, ein Christ, and that is the right word. "All things are yours, and you are Christ's" (1 Cor. 3:22b-23a); you belong to Christ, you are his heirs, you are his family. And in another place it is also put quite "germanly": "You are bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh and this refers to Genesis 2:23. "She shall be called Woman [Mannin] because she was taken out of Man [Mann]" (Gen. 2:23b). All the prophets make allusion to this when they say, "Those who are called according to my name" (Isa. 43:7). In no way are we called by the name of Jesus or Christ in the sense of a religious denomination as if Christ were our teacher, as if Christ were our prophet, our lawgiver as if he were the founder, the author of our religion, as it is sometimes expressed by a pagan historian, as for example in Lucian. The founder of this religion was crucified" [Lucian, The Passing of Peregrinus, 5:13]. "The man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world." In this sense we are not Christians. Rather, we are Christians in the same way that, in our European countries, a wife takes the name of her husband and af-terward is called not by her maiden name but by her husband's name. Thus every soul who has the right to call herself by this name, "because she was taken out of Man" (Gen. 2:23), belongs to Christ, is Christian.
Now whoever will not grasp this and has no other support for himself than that he has read the teaching of Jesus and industriously given lectures on it, that he can recount this teaching, and that he is established in its principles according to his religious denomination - such a person can be considered nothing more than one of those Christianly religious people. And even though he discharges all the duties according to his religious denomination, so that there can be no objection to him, yet he cannot on that basis lay claim to this: "O Lamb of God, you who take away the sin of the world John 1:29), ac-knowledge me!" Rather, whoever wishes to claim this, he must be christened in his heart, as here in England it is said of one who is baptized, "He is christen'd"; he must be made a Christian; he must be of the bone and spirit of Christ; he must in truth take pride in this: "My Maker is my husband" (Isa. 54:5); he has not only created me, and he is not only the potter of my clay, but "he is the husband of my soul, who has betrothed himself to me forever and has betrothed himself to me in grace and mercy, yet, has betrothed himself to me in faith" (Hos. 2:19f.). I am certain who my husband is; I know him.
Thus far I have spoken about the character of a Christian, of a man who can call himself Christian without being a liar or a foolish, stupid person who does not know what he is saying.
Now I come to the other part of my discourse, to the chief circumstances which are found in the case of such a Christian....
Extract taken from ed. P. Erb, Pietists: Selected Writings.