Schleiermacher, FRIEDRICH ERNST DANIEL, the greatest German theologian since Luther, was the founder of that modern theology which seeks to understand Christianity without doing despite to the reasonable convictions of the human mind. What marked him out as reformer was first and foremost his mental constitution, in which a profoundly religious temperament was happily blended with an acute intelligence, and an unhesitating independence of thought and feeling with an exceptional susceptibility to the most various impressions from without. Then he was fortunate in having his various gifts developed by the course of his education and the experiences of his life.
He was born on the 21st November 1768 at Breslau, the son of an army chaplain belonging to the Reformed confession. The pious atmosphere of his home awakened vivid religious feelings in the boy, which attained fuller growth at the Moravian educational institutes of Niesky and Barby, where he studied from 1783 till 1787. But deep as was the impression made upon him by the godliness of social life amongst the brethren, the narrow and rigid dogmatic form of religion as taught by them was simply intolerable to the eager mind of Schleiermacher, already leavened by the wisdom of classical antiquity; and he felt that he could no longer profess this faith without a lie against his own nature. There was a painful conflict of opinion between him and his rigorously orthodox father ere the son forsook the theological seminary of Barby to study philosophy and theology at Halle. Of the philosophers it was mainly Plato, Spinoza, and Leibnitz, and afterwards also Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, who made a permanent impression on him and moulded his mental development. A powerful influence was also exerted from 1797 onwards by the intimacy into which, now a preacher in Berlin, he was drawn with the devotees, both male and female, of Romanticism (q.v.). He thoroughly sympathised with that cultus of personal feeling and that contempt for mere intellectual Aufklärung which the romanticists carried to an extreme; but he was saved from falling into the speculative and practical excesses of the romanticists by the anchor which his character had found in personal piety, and by the scientific prudence and breadth that came of his constant study of philosophy, ancient and modern. To this first sojourn in Berlin belong the earliest of those publications which made Schleiermacher known to the learned world: the Reden über Religion (1799; new ed. 1879), the Monologen (1800; 7th ed. 1868), and the ethical work, the Grundlinien einer Kritik der bisherigen Sittenlehre (1803). In these he expounded in scientific form that hostility to the traditional moral philosophy and the Kantian ethic of the categorical imperative to which he had already (1801) given audacious expression in the 'Confidential Letters on Schlegel's Lucinde,' where he attempted a defence of the notorious romance of his friend Friedrich Schlegel. A more valuable undertaking was the translation of Plato, which the two friends set about jointly, but which was ultimately carried through in 1804-10 by Schleiermacher alone. This work, epoch-making for the comprehension of Plato's philosophy, was in great part the fruit of the involuntary idleness imposed upon the translator by Napoleon, when in 1806 he closed the university of Halle, at which since 1804 Schleiermacher had been extra-ordinary professor. Returning to Berlin, he entered into close relations with Stein and Humboldt, with the philosopher Fichte, and with other patriots; and he took an active share in all the efforts which were being made to bring about the moral regeneration and the political restoration of the German Fatherland, especially of Prussia. One scheme with this aim was the establishment of the new Frederick-William university of Berlin, in which Schleiermacher took part; and in the theological faculty of this university he became professor in 1810. The fame of his academic lectures on all branches of theology and philosophy attracted yearly increasing crowds of enthusiastic students; and as preacher at the Dreifaltigkeitskirche he exercised a profound religious influence by his sermons, both on hearers and readers. Equally influential were his labours in the sphere of church politics; he was the soul of the movement which led to the union in 1817 of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches in Prussia; and it was not his fault that his far-sighted proposals for the preparation of a new constitution and forum of ritual suited to the wants of the united church were not adopted. His resolute bearing in these controversies was the more to his honour, inasmuch as it made him so unpopular with the government that for years he ran the risk of losing his university chair.
Yet all these public labours—some of them trying and ungrateful—could not prevent the indefatigable scholar from devoting concentrated energy to the advancement of learning. The outcome of these studies was on the one hand short essays on ethical problems and on points connected with ancient philosophy which were published in the transactions of the Berlin Academy; and on the other the theological works Die Weihnachtsfeier (1806; Eng. trans. Christmas Eve, 1889); a critical treatise on the first epistle to Timothy (1807); Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811); and finally his most important work, Der Christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen der Evangelischen Kirche im Zusammenhang dargestellt (1821; 2d ed. 1831; 6th ed. 1884). He died 12th February 1834; and after his death friends published several other works from his manuscripts or from notes of his lectures taken by students. Of these the most important are Die Christliche Sitte (1843), Leben Jesu, Sermons, a work on Dialectic, and a sketch of a system of Ethics. A collection of letters, of great importance for understanding Schleiermacher's very singular personality, was edited by Dilthey in four volumes (1860-64; partly trans. by Frederica Rowan, 1860). Dilthey began a biography, of which only the first volume has appeared (1870). A multitude of larger and smaller books and articles dealing with the man and his work appeared on occasion of the centenary of his birth, 1868. In 1825 Thirlwall published a translation of his Essay on St Luke; his Introduction to Plato's Dialogues was translated into English by Dobson in 1836; and a volume of Selected Sermons was issued in England in 1890.
Schleiermacher has been for theology what Kant was for philosophy. Kant submitted the theoretical and practical reason to a critical analysis, in order to distinguish the primordial and perennial laws of thought and will from the ever-changing sensations which supply the materials of experience. In like manner Schleiermacher undertook a critical analysis of religion, in order to discover what in it was the original essence and what were the derivative forms. Dogma, he taught, is not religion, but a statement about religion which is the product of reflection; religion itself is feeling, the immediate sense of our dependence on the divine source of all things, on God. But devout feeling, though the inmost part of individual life, is not itself merely individual; the individual man is conditioned by the community he belongs to, and the mode in which that community experiences the religious emotion, in a manner common to its members, rests on and is conditioned by the historical and fundamental fact of the establishment of the community. In this fact we may recognise a 'revelation,' inasmuch as a creative religious personality communicates to others its own peculiar religious feeling, its consciousness of God. Every historical religion rests in this sense on a revelation, on the communication of the original religious life of creative personalities, such as could not be thought out a priori or deduced from universal truths. This is especially true of Christianity, which is peculiarly a positive religion, one to be realised through experience, inasmuch as it has for its very centre the relation to the historical person of Jesus Christ as the redeemer; and by this fact all statements of doctrine as to God and the world and mankind must be regulated. The Christian church recognises that it has received 'Redemption'—liberation and strengthening of the consciousness of God heretofore trammelled by nature—as the influence of the person of Christ, and that it continues to receive the same by means of the spirit of the church, which has proceeded from Christ. From this experience the church is led upwards to its cause in the person of Christ, and for that reason believes in the typical perfection of Christ; this distinguishes Christ from all other men, yet without abrogating his true humanity. Similarly our faith in Christ rests only on that quickening of the pious disposition which we experience through and from him, and which in a sense is common to us with him. But this faith is independent of all historical reports of miraculous events that took place in him or by him. It is not because of the Bible and its miracles that we believe in Christ; it is because of Christ, whose influence we experience in our consciousness of redemption, that we believe in the Bible. That is, we ascribe to the Bible a normative dignity, as containing a substantially true picture of Christ; while it must not, however, prevent us from submitting its story in detail to the same critical tests as we apply to all historical traditions whatsoever. Schleiermacher did not expressly deny all miracle; but he laid down the general principle that it is not to the advantage of piety to hold, in the case of any single events, that their connection with the order of nature is interrupted by their dependence upon God. His general conception of the relation of God to the world, of the mutual correspondence of the infinite with the many finite causes (which approximates very closely to Spinoza's view), excludes the possibility of miracles in the fully supernaturalistic sense of the word. In this reference Schleiermacher has avoided and superseded alike supra-naturalism and rationalism, by emphasising Christian experience, and insisting on the historical character of the Christian religion in the person and influence of Christ. He has interpenetrated theology with philosophical idealism by taking as its basis the human self-consciousness. On the other hand, he set philosophy free from the unhistorical individualism and rationalism which had elung to it even in Kant's hands by widening the religious and ethical consciousness into the social consciousness of the community; in the common consciousness of ethical beings he discovered reason historically developing itself, and saw in the individual reason no more than the special form of manifestation, the organ which is but its servant. By means of his dogmatics and his ethics Schleiermacher has done more than any other thinker to solve the great problem of this age—the reconciliation of the individual with the community, of private conscience with the claims of historical tradition.
See, besides books referred to above, the article RELIGION in this work; Lichtenberger, History of German Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1873; Eng. trans. by Hastie); and The Development of Theology since Kant (1890), and The Philosophy of Religion (Eng. trans. 1886-88), by the present writer.