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Schleiermacher On Language and Feeling
By Richard R. Niebuhr

FRIEDRICH Schleiermacher's pioneering position in the development of the modern principles of interpretation has long been recognized. However, the actual basis and content of his contribution to hermeneutics and its significance for an understanding of his theology are not widely known. This is a state of affairs to be regretted, both for the relative obscurity in which it leaves one of the most important books in Protestant history, and for the uncertainty which it creates in the continuing efforts of contemporary theologians to push beyond the limits of Schleiermacher's position. One cannot realistically maintain that Schleiermacher's hermeneutical theory is the fabled secret key to his thought, any more than it is possible so to treat his idea of the "feeling of absolute dependence." But the following essay does seek to illustrate the necessity of seeing the roots of his theology in his vision of man as a being who is essentially determined by his living relationship to others as well as the Other, and to this end nothing can suffice as well as an examination of Schleiermacher's principles of understanding and the correlative act of self-impartation.

I

Schleiermacher began his lectures on hermeneutics in the summer of 1805 at the University of Halle, but he already had behind him a fund of relevant experience. We know that as a youth he developed an extreme sensitivity for nuance and tone in the utterances and gestures of others. At school he was acutely conscious that he lacked some of the decisive inward religious experiences presupposed by the community, and he was therefore constantly comparing his own psychic states with those of his schoolmates.¹ Later, as a member of various cultivated and sophisticated circles, he received a

¹ The Life of Schleiermacher as unfolded in his Autobiography and Letters, trans. Frederica Rowan, (London, 1860), Vol. 1, pp. 7, 26.

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thorough training in the art of sociability. In an address before the Prussian Academy of the Sciences, Schleiermacher urged his fellow practitioners of interpretation not to confine themselves to written documents. "I would like most urgently to advise the interpreters of written works that they industriously exercise the interpretation of the more significant conversation . . . very often in private conversation I resort to hermeneutical operations, if I am not content with the ordinary level of understanding but wish to explore how, in my friend, the transition is made from one thought to another, or if I would seek out the views, judgments, and endeavors that are connected with the fact that he expresses himself in one way rather than in another with respect to the subject of our conversation."² Writing to Eleonore Grunow, Schleiermacher stated the presupposition of the ability to understand others, namely that one know oneself and that one find everything in oneself, perversity and corruption, greatness and beauty. "True simplicity and innocence can never arrive at a . . . knowledge of man."³

A second relevant biographical fact is that Schleiermacher came to Halle in the midst of his work as a translator and editor of the Platonic dialogues, on which he had been at work since 1799. Schleiermacher himself was deeply interested in the form of the dialogues, believing that an understanding of the form would offer the key to the problems of authenticity and chronology. As a result of his long critical labors, he came to appropriate something of Plato's realism and to assert that we can participate in one another's thinking. One of the objective results of the work on Plato is the dialogue that Schleiermacher wrote in the late fall of 1805, Die Weihnachtsfeier, in which he discusses the sense in which those who celebrate Christmas can be said to participate in the nature of Jesus Christ.

The third biographical fact that needs to be mentioned here is that Schleiermacher was deeply occupied with the first sketches of his system of philosophical ethics during this same period at Halle, and it is in the notes on the system that we find suggestions for the theoretical foundations of his treatment of language as it informs the Hermeneutik. The significance of the fact that the principles of the hermeneutics are actually explicated in the ethics becomes

² Sämmtliche Werke, III/3, "Ueber den Begriff der Hermeneutik mit Bezug auf F. A. Wolfs Andeutungen und Asts Lehrbuch," p. 352.
³ Quoted by Wilhelm Dilthey, Leben Schleiermachers, ed. Herman Mulert (Berlin, 1922). P. 526.

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evident, when we bear in mind that Schleiermacher used his ethics to frame the architectonic of his whole thought-world. Ethics was, for him, one of the two basic disciplines, the other being physics, and he defined it as "the science of history, that is, of intelligence as appearance."⁴ He steadfastly declined to deduce either one of the two basic sciences from the other. Instead, he maintained ethics and physics in a permanent tension, so that no science ever has to do with pure reason but only with reason in history, that is, with reason as conditioned by nature and as individualized by the material with which it is united as its organ. Consequently, ethics is a descriptive science, and never more than that.

Schleiermacher's treatment of language exemplifies the method of his ethics. While we posit reason alike in all men, we do not directly perceive it in itself in mankind; rather, we perceive it only as it is already united with its organ, language. Thinking is inner speech, and speech is externalized thinking. We can perceive even our own thoughts only through words.⁵ From the point of view of ethics, as the description of reason in history, it is, of course, proper to characterize language as the symbol of reason. But, again from the point of view indicated in the definition of ethics as descriptive of reason in history, it is not proper or possible to attempt a deduction of language as reason's symbol from reason itself, for language is also a natural fact; it is the organ of reason and conditions the reason that unites itself to language as its organ. Reason, then, appears in history only in and through specific languages, which bear the marks of time and place which a people, a class or an individual lives. Since reason is always particularized by its organ, it is futile to search for a universal philosophy, simply because there is no universal language.⁶

Language, however, reflects not only its natural matrix or particularity but also the individuality of the speaker-thinker. It is just as important to say that speech is externalized thinking as to say that thinking is internal speaking, and it is therefore necessary to have in mind Schleiermacher's concept of individuality as well, if one is to appreciate the significance of his ideas of language and interpretation. This is furthermore the point at which the idea of feeling begins to play a rôle in Schleiermacher's thought.

⁴ Fr. D. E. Schleiermacher, Werke, ed. Otto Braun and D. J. Bauer, Bd. II (Leipzig, 1913), "Brouillon zur Ethik," p. 80.
⁵ Ibid., p. 97.
⁶ Ibid., p. 101.

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As reason actualizes itself in the historical discourse of the individual subject, it induces in him an awareness that thinking is an activity in which all men participate together. That is to say, thinking carries with itself a species- or kind-consciousness (Gesammtbewusstein or Gattungsbewusstein) a consciousness that cannot be described as a thought but only as a feeling.⁷ This consciousness of kind expresses the moral weight of the activity of thinking, according to Schleiermacher, the outward impetus of reason from the individual toward the community and the dependence of reason in the individual upon a like impetus and feeling in others. A thinking, for example, that merely takes up the thoughts of others as they lie in the language and that fails to register its own thoughts in the language also, betrays a stultified humanity, for it indicates the individual's failure to recognize his organic responsibility in the community of uttered thought.⁸ This consciousness of kind, which accompanies the activity of thinking in the presence of others, illustrates the sense in which Schleiermacher understood thinking and feeling to be co-present functions of the self. In this particular instance, we see that the relationship between thinking and feeling is neither that of complete independence nor that of simple dependence, but each is a perfectly original expression of the whole self in its ontological and historical situation, just as thinking and doing are equally original yet related functions of the self. Feeling, however, includes a much broader stratum of the self than merely that of kind-consciousness. Specifically, it includes the all-important immediate consciousness of self, and this together with consciousness of kind constitutes the essential affective moments of individuality. This latter kind of feeling is a genuine consciousness, although it is not yet mediated by the self's commerce with the world of finite agents and objects. In distinction from thinking, it stands for an individualized awareness that cannot be articulated, but it is not to be mistaken for the locus of the irrational in the self. On the contrary, this feeling is just as much an expression of the work of reason in nature as is thought, but it represents in every individual the "originally different arrangement of consciousness which forms the unity of his life" and qualifies all of his relations to his world.⁹

Individual feelings, which emanate out of the fundamental life-

⁷ Ibid., "Ethik 1816" (Einleitung und Güterlehre I), section 54, p. 590.
⁸ Ibid., section 57, p. 592 f.
⁹ Ibid., section 52, p. 589, cf. also Ästhetik, ed. R. Odebrecht (Berlin, 1931), p. 34.

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unity of the self, cannot be communicated as thought can be communicated. This is not to say that such feeling cannot be transmitted at all, for reason as it embodies itself in uttered thought can never wholly leave behind the individuality of the thinker-speaker. Nevertheless, it is true that the immediate feeling of self cannot directly communicate its own content. Instead, it issues in gestures, facial expressions, inflection and so forth. To be sure, an individual moment of feeling in one life can be likened to a moment of feeling in another life, but the fundamental life-unities out of which specific feelings arise cannot be conceptually compared. Therefore, while it is possible (e.g., in the natural sciences) for one man to complete the thought of another, it is not possible for one individual to participate similarly in the feelings of another. Language communicates, but gestures, inflections, etc. disclose or reveal, and while we understand the meaning of speech, we must divine or construct the meaning of gestures on the basis of our own immediate self-consciousness.¹⁰ In practice, of course, revelation and communication necessarily accompany each other. We cannot know the meaning of another's speech except by interpreting the significance of his inflection. Divination stands, therefore, as an essential function of all right understanding of what others wish to impart. So far as the theoretical concept of the self is concerned, it is important to realize that the relationship in which these two poles of feeling stand, as it is exhibited by the acts of communication and interpretation, indicates the dimensions of Schleiermacher's idea of individuality. The lull import of this concept will emerge subsequently, but it is already evident that Schleiermacher places the individual in the community of uttered thought not as a monad that stands in either an external or predetermined relationship to all other individuals but rather as a particular rational life in which consciousness of self and of community or kind nourish each other organically.

The acts of speaking and thinking, then, are fundamental to Schleiermacher's idea of individuality. Furthermore, Schleiermacher's analyses of these acts show how impossible it is for him to render human nature by the principles of universal and particular alone, for the two are always mediated through individuality and its complementary concepts, community and sociability. The proper word for this concept is, in fact, person, and it is for the elucidation of

¹⁰ Ibid, section 61, p. 596 ff.

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this concept that Schleiermacher laid down all of the principles in his introduction to ethics that we have examined so far. "The concepts of person and personality," he says there, "are accordingly wholly dependent on the ethical realm and the way in which the one and the many exist there; for the positing of others next to the self is just as essential to the concept as the differentiation of the self [from within]."¹¹

The import of Schleiermacher's principles of ethics for his hermeneutics can be summed up in the following two propositions: (1) Thinking-speaking constitutes a moral act, for it is only when the individual in and through these activities sees and constructs humanity as a living principle, in others, that the spirit and consciousness of humanity are concretely and personally present in the self. (2) Thinking-speaking constitutes a moral act, for reason is fully reason only when it registers itself in the common language through the speech of the individual. These principles mean that for Schleiermacher the basic human situation is to be understood as the "teaching-learning" situation, the situation of dialogue, the situation in which there is an implicit faith relationship between the speakers.¹² In brief, these are the considerations that led Schleiermacher to make dialectic the basic form of philosophy, to insist on the historical character of all thinking and to assert that history as a science rests upon the external, descriptive method and the internal, intuitive method. The historian or the interpreter, that is to say, whoever is involved in the situation described above, can learn from others only in so far as he is able to recognize and construct their humanity over against and in relationship to his own. The point of fundamental importance here, however, is to see that the function of language is to express this situation, yet language also is the presupposition of the teaching-learning process, of the actualization of humanity.

II

The lectures on hermeneutics unfold the implications of the principles of his ethics, as the latter are brought to bear upon the task of the historian. The most striking contribution of Schleiermacher in this area lies in his exposition of the problem of inter-

¹¹ Ibid., section 71: p. 604 f.
¹² Ibid., section 57 p. 592 f.

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preting the individuality of the author or speaker through the comparative and divinatory methods, namely the famous section on psychological interpretation.

Schleiermacher defines hermeneutics as the art of correctly understanding the speech of another.¹³ Of course, a technical mastery of the philological, historical, and literary tools is demanded, so that on one side hermeneutics does constitute a science. The individual author, for example, must always be regarded as the inheritor of a given language, grammar, vocabulary, and certain literary forms. Technically, he must be considered as just one of innumerable vessels through which the language expresses and maintains itself. Talk about the weather illustrates the autonomous life of language, in which the individuality of the vessel is reduced to a virtual nil. More important, however, is the fact that the author is himself spiritually modified by the language that he inherits, so that he does not stand in a merely external relationship to it. (Schleiermacher's ethics has already prepared us to understand why the author's language is a decisive, spiritual life-moment that illuminates his entire identity.) Consequently, the author or speaker cannot, for example, express thoughts for which his language provides no occasion. Hence a thorough knowledge of the development of the given language is necessary, in order that the interpreter be aware of the limits of the author's thought and in order that he not construct anachronisms in his exegesis of the text. In sum, then, we must acquire a knowledge of all the elements that condition the individuality of the author in question, including not only the grammar of his language but also all possible information concerning his total historical situation and his relationship to the people whom he addresses in his writing. Schleiermacher describes this aspect of hermeneutical investigation as the "objective" and "subjective historical," by which he means the understanding of how the discourse or text "relates itself to the totality of the language and to the knowledge contained within the language as a production of it" and a knowledge of how the discourse or text "is given as a fact of the spirit" of the author.¹⁴ But Schleiermacher entertained a much more ambitious ideal for hermeneutics than is indicated by the objective and subjective historical method. "The task," he continues, "can also be expressed in this way: to understand the text just as well as and then better than the

¹³ S.W. I/7, Hermeneutik, section 1, p. 7.
¹⁴ Ibid, section 18, p. 31 f.

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author himself understood it."¹⁵ The achievement of this goal requires that the interpreter employ the psychological method as a supplement to the historical or grammatical, a method that is as intrinsic to the nature of the task as the historical but that immediately requires him to think of hermeneutics as transcending the concept of science and as approaching that of art.

Schleiermacher preferred to define hermeneutics as an art rather than a science, because ultimately its success rests upon the ability of the interpreter to re-construct the individuality of the author, a process for which no technical rules can suffice. No rules can suffice, for as we have seen, the immediate self-consciousness of the author can never pass wholly over into communication but remains at the level of self-disclosure, which itself can be appropriated only by an act of intuition or divination on the part of the interpreter. Again, no rules can suffice, because in principle each individual entails an infinite number of relations to the universe. To reconstruct the individuality of an author, to select out of a potential infinity those relations that are most important and to arrange them in their proper order, is obviously an art for which both genius and inspiration are required.

In defining hermeneutics as an art, Schleiermacher has not yet gone the length of maintaining that the reconstruction of the past is a work of art, but he means only that it rests upon personal talents, specifically, the talent for understanding language from within, as a living reality, and the talent for knowing individual men. The priority of these talents, or of the artistic side of interpretation, is illustrated when we confront a term, such as "kingdom," in the New Testament. A lexigraphical definition of "kingdom" furnishes points with the aid of which a curve of the meanings of the term can be plotted, but it is up to the interpreter to decide precisely where on this curve the word should be located, when it is uttered by John the Baptist or Jesus. This decision will finally rest upon the way in which the interpreter comprehends the utterance of the word "kingdom" as a deed of John or Jesus, as a life moment issuing out of an immediate self-consciousness or life-unity. Such a decision obviously takes the interpreter far beyond the purview of the lexicon and the grammatical side of the discipline and makes demands upon his personal talent as described above. Talent of this sort is basically

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 32.

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a native endowment and can never be merely acquired, yet the fact of the matter is that in nearly all instances in which the practice of interpretation is worthwhile, the psychological tact of the interpreter is very important. Schleiermacher evidently regarded the success of hermeneutics as dependent, therefore, upon the willing cooperation of those who excelled in the grammatical side with those men who enjoyed a developed psychological talent. Error is bound to arise, if the interpreter insists upon applying only the historical or grammatical method, for then he is, in effect, denying the possibility that an individual can modify a language, the possibility, in a word, of originality.¹⁶ Needless to say, the co-operation is equally necessary for the sake of the psychological method, to prevent it from becoming fantastic. The two methods must be prosecuted with integrity, side by side.

"The whole purpose," Schleiermacher says in introducing the psychological part of the Hermeneutik, "is to be described as the complete understanding of the style." "We are accustomed," he continues, "to understand by 'style' only the way in which the language is handled. But thoughts and language always inform each other, and the distinctive way in which the object is grasped informs the arrangement (of the elements of the composition) and thereby also the handling of the language."¹⁷ Style, as it is used here in the hermeneutics, corresponds to the concept of individuality, as the latter is presented in the philosophical ethics.. and the search for style represents the quest of that psychological whole through which all the individual parts-words, sentences, paragraphs, and books-can be interpreted. To be sure, a certain penetration of the individuality of an author is possible simply by virtue of the fact that he uses language, for language as the means for the sociality of thinking invites us forthwith to become aware of the common humanity that we as interpreters share with the author. But this sense of common humanity is never enough to grasp the basic contingency that is present in every authorship and in every individual, for that matter: namely, the germinal resolution in the life of the author out of which the literary document or the discourse has emerged, and which, in turn, is itself a part of a larger contingency, the author's sense of identity and of mission.

¹⁶ Ibid., section 13, p. 20 f.
¹⁷ Ibid., section 3, p. 145.

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At this point, the psychological method of interpretation must be subdivided into two approaches, each of which presupposes the other: the divinatory and the comparative methods. As we have seen in the ethics, awareness of self is presented as a manifold, including a sense of common humanity and a sense of selfhood that can never be wholly communicated but at the most revealed or disclosed. Schleiermacher does not understand these two poles as two selves or egos, however, but as constitutive of a single individuality, in which each phase of selfhood or personality requires the other. In the lectures on hermeneutics, he defines the divinatory method as that which seeks to grasp the individuality of the author or speaker immediately, by transforming the interpreter into the other. Such divination is possible, because every man has a sensitivity for all others; but this sensitivity itself ". . . appears to rest only on this fact, that each individual carries in himself a minimum of all others, and divination consequently is stimulated through comparison [of the other] with oneself."¹⁸ The comparative method seeks to arrive at the individuality of the author in question by setting him under some universal type and then comparing him with others under that universal, but ultimately such a method presupposes an immediate grasping of the identity of the author, if not at the level of his inmost individuality nevertheless at some level, for otherwise we would become involved in an infinite regression of comparative operations, until we had arrived at Adam or pure, abstract man.¹⁹ While Schleiermacher calls divination the characteristically feminine talent and comparison the masculine, it is clear that the ultimate relation of the two is simply the nature of the self as he has described it in the Ethik. So far as the hermeneutics is concerned, the significance of the twofold psychological method is that it enables the science of understanding others to be at once concrete and yet deal with wholes rather than with mere fragments of meaning.

The dialectic between the two methods can never be completed or synthesized, and hence the goal of completely understanding the style of the author-of understanding the principle on which he selects and rejects concepts, words, literary forms, etc.-can be approached only asymptotically. Here we have one of the reasons why hermeneutics, in distinction from criticism, will be practiced forever, for, according to Schleiermacher's conception of the dis-

¹⁸ Ibid., section 6, p. 147.
¹⁹ Ibid.

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cipline, it is nothing but the special application of the dialectic that is the hall-mark of self-hood, that is, the teaching-learning situation, in which each member of the dialogue is called upon to construct the self-hood of the other member(s) in his appropriation of their uttered thought and in so doing to become himself and stamp his own self-hood on the common speech.

III

The full extent of the role that these principles play in Schleiermacher's theology is extremely difficult to assess. Nevertheless, it is feasible to point out one or two significant manifestations of the ideas of language and understanding in the theology, a hint of which we gain in the concluding remarks of the lectures on hermeneutics themselves. Despite the fact that historical, aesthetic, and scholarly interests are all motives operative in disciplined interpretation, the latter is also inseparably bound up with the most universal of all interests, the religious. Indeed, only if religion should vanish would the discipline of interpretation come to a stop, for one can understand and appropriate the religious consciousness only through language. So far as the Church is concerned, even if the primary hermeneutical task can never be perfectly realized, i.e., exegesis of the New Testament, on account of the imperfect state of the materials, ". . . nevertheless, the highest is still possible, namely to apprehend ever more completely the common life in [the authors of Scripture], the being and the Spirit of Christ."²⁰

The role that the Church plays, as the vitalizer of understanding, presupposes Schleiermacher's view of human nature, which, as we have already seen, allows him to maintain that every function of human consciousness can properly form the basis of a specific community. What he calls "consciousness of kind" is, we have already seen, a quality that attends other functions of consciousness or "essential elements of human nature," but this attendance is not limited to the function of thinking; it can also be evoked by other feeling. Hence, the Church, as the kind of community that is founded upon religious feeling and perpetuates and cultivates such piety, occupies a wholly natural place in the cosmos that is delineated by the principles of the philosophical ethics. Specifically, church communities are founded upon that immediate self-consciousness or

²⁰ Ibid., P. 262.

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feeling that has to do with the life-unity of the self, that is to say, with its fundamental identity.²¹ In the church community this feeling is mediated and awakened in each. But in order to understand the character of this community, we must remember that the feeling in question here, namely the feeling of absolute dependence, belongs to the general phenomenon of feeling that Schleiermacher describes in his ethics as being the work of reason, quite as much as thinking-speaking and doing are also historical embodiments of reason. Feeling, thinking, and doing are not to be conceived as faculties absolutely divided from one another but rather as all sharing in the life of reason within the individual. Feeling definitely has then a cognizing function although it can never pass over into communication, as does the cognition that expresses itself in language. Nevertheless, it stands for the distinctive, existential relationship of the individual to "the ideal form of being" and to "the world."²² When, in The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher says that feeling is an abiding-in-self, in distinction from knowing and doing, he does not mean that feeling is an empty passivity of the self; rather it "is the universal form of having the self."²³ And, further, when he maintains that feeling lies between knowing and doing, and indeed is the identity of the two, he does not mean that feeling is their undifferentiated ground or that it is the annihilation of the finite self and its individuality, but that here doing becomes knowing and knowing doing, and both of these activities are mediated by and accompanied by an immediate self-consciousness.²⁴ In other words, knowing and doing can never express a merely abstract consciousness of the world, but must also embody or be qualified by an immediate self-consciousness. The feeling that Schleiermacher describes as piety, the feeling of absolute dependence, is consequently not to be interpreted as either an instrument of mystical experience or as a special faculty or sense for the divine. It is feeling whose inner referent is the entire self. It is not the limitedness of the self that is accented in this feeling, but rather the givenness of the self in a unity for which the self's relations

²¹ Braun, II, "Ethik 1812/13," § 69, p. 273.
²² Ästhetik, p. 34. In The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher quotes from the following passage in Henrik Steffens whose idea of feeling, he says, is close to his own: "What we call feeling here is the immediate presence of the whole, undivided personal existence [Dasein], both sensible as well as spiritual, the unity of the person and its sensible and spiritual world." (In the English translation, Dasein has been incorrectly rendered as Being.) Op. cit, section 3, 2, note. Cf. Steffens, Von der falschen Theologie (Breslau, 1823), pp. 99 f.
²³ Dialektik, ed. R. Odebrecht, Leipzig (1942), p. 288. Cf. op. cit., section 3, 3.
²⁴ S.W. III/42, Dialektik, ed. Jonas, p. 429. Cf. also Odebrecht's edition, pp. 286 ff., and that author's informative article, "Das Gefüge des religiosen Bewusstseins bei Fr. Schleiermacher," Blätter für deutsche Philosophie (Berlin, 1934), VIII, 4/5, pp. 284-301.

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to the world could never account. In so far as self-consciousness involves the consciousness of other, Schleiermacher explains, it also includes reciprocal feelings of dependence and freedom. The feeling of absolute dependence is feeling to which the consciousness or presence of no finite other corresponds, or, in other words, it is a feeling that refers to and represents an other which is related not to any specific element or faculty in consciousness of the individual's being but to his total consciousness as such, to his total being, and indeed to his total being in its relatedness to all other being.²⁵ In this connection, Schleiermacher explicitly writes: "a feeling of absolute dependence, strictly speaking, cannot exist in a single moment as such, because such a moment is always determined, as regards its total content, by what is given, and thus by objects towards which we have a feeling of freedom. But the self-consciousness which accompanies all our activity, and therefore, since that is never zero, accompanies our whole existence, and negatives absolute freedom, is itself precisely a consciousness of absolute dependence. . . ."²⁶ Such feeling does represent a genuine relation to, and cognition of God, but it is not a cognition that can be communicated save indirectly through the life-unity of the self as such and even less directly through the gestures and expressions that reveal individual feelings rooted in this basic self-consciousness or, as Schleiermacher puts it in one place, mood (stimmung).²⁷

The reader should keep in mind that Schleiermacher at this point in The Christian Faith (section 4) is not speaking of a natural knowledge of God, for individuals are always historically qualified. The feeling of absolute dependence becomes a part or grade of consciousness only as the self achieves its individuality and personal status in social dialogue. Bare expression of feeling, Schleiermacher says, ". . . which is entirely caused by inward [affection] and which can be very definitely distinguished from any further and more separate action into which it passes, does indeed at first arouse in other people only an idea of the person's [inner state]. But, by reason of the consciousness of kind, this passes into living imitation; and the more able the percipient is (either for general reasons, or because of the greater liveliness of the expression, or because of closer affinity) to pass into the same state, the more easily will that state be produced

²⁵ Dialektik, ed. Odebrecbt, p. 289 f.
²⁶ The Christian Faith, trans. M. R. Mackintosh and J. S. Stewart (Edinburgh, 1928), section 4, 3.
²⁷ Ästhetik, p. 71.

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by imitation. Everybody must in his own experience be conscious of this process from both its sides, the expressing and the perceiving, and must thus confess that he always finds himself, with the concurrence of his conscience, involved in a [manifold community] of feeling, as a condition quite in conformity with his nature, and therefore that he would have coöperated in the founding of such a [community] if it had not been there already. As regards the feeling of absolute dependence in particular, everyone will know that it was first awakened in him in the same way, by the communicative and stimulative power of expression or utterance."²⁸ Hence, the church form of association is understood by Schleiermacher to be, like all other forms, a community of dialogue, a community in which the teaching-learning situation provides the basic ethos.

The presupposition of Schleiermacher's dogmatic theology is, then, that there is not an absolute but only a relative distinction between feeling and the less private functions of thinking and doing. If it were absolute, then feeling would remain wholly ineffable and have nothing to contribute to the constitution of that self which is the moral person. But in fact, when he is speaking of the Christian Church, Schleiermacher asserts that here the moral self achieves its highest manifestation, here active self-consciousness is most fully developed. Part of this claim rests upon his belief that a fully explicated world-consciousness depends upon the clarification of the confused polytheistic self-consciousness that monotheism effects, but the aspect of the claim that is of most immediate relevance here is the stated conviction that Christianity necessarily entails a very high stage of linguistic development, for the ". . . whole work of the Redeemer himself was conditioned by the communicability of his self-consciousness by means of speech, and similarly Christianity has always and everywhere spread itself solely by means of preaching."²⁹

By Jesus' own preaching, Schleiermacher does not mean what later liberalism does, the teachings of Jesus divorced from his own person. Nor does he mean divinely authorized doctrine, in the fashion of the orthodox, but simply the self-proclamation of Jesus, that is to say, his self-impartation.³⁰ Schleiermacher cannot make a distinction in principle between Jesus' life or being and his preaching, but rather, in conformity with the ideas that we have seen already in the ethics

²⁸ The Christian Faith, section 6, 2.
²⁹ Ibid., section 15, 2; cf. particularly the first edition of Die Glaubenslehre, section 10.
³⁰ Ibid., section 19, Postscript.

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and hermeneutics, must view the preaching of Christ as the means of communicating that life. These are the considerations that lie behind the insistence, in the tenth proposition of the dogmatics, that revelation does not act upon man as a cognitive being. The original fact, Schleiermacher there argues, must be the "unique existence" of Jesus disclosed through a "total impression" working directly upon us, not simply upon our cognitive faculty, but upon our "self-consciousness." This means that Jesus' preaching must be apprehended as a "life moment" issuing out of a life unity and that it can be understood by us only as we construct the life unity in our own self-consciousness of the one who proclaims the gospel. The preaching of the Church is the setting forth of this same life.

We see, then, that preaching in the Christian Church represents a form of communication intrinsic to the universal, human dialogue which informs Schleiermacher's view of history. In this sense, preaching appears to him as something entirely natural, and his own preaching clearly and warmly illustrates his conception, for it is graced by a spontaniety, sincerity, and lack Of didacticism that appear together in the sermons of only a very few in the history of the Church. But preaching is also the communication of life, not merely doctrine, though that too. So much has already been stated in the words cited above about the dependence of Jesus' work on the communicability of his self-consciousness. What needs to be emphasized here is that the presupposition for receiving and understanding Jesus' preaching is precisely the content of his communication. namely himself. Consequently, the Christian God-consciousness, structured by the antithesis of sin and grace, is not accidentally related to Jesus Christ, but actually arises only in the participation in him through his words and the Church's exposition of them. Christ is not simply the first in the series that constitutes the historical Christian community, and he is not merely externally related to the present self-consciousness of the Church, but rather he is the substance of its present God-consciousness; be is the one in whom preaching and hearing must participate, in order to be what they are. To be sure, the feeling of absolute dependence is inalienably the individual's own, just as is his individuality as such, but at the same time, it has to be given him by the mediation of Christ and the Church. Both of these points about the nature of preaching are illustrated in a sermon, delivered at Halle, on the text, "I have called

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you friends." "That we have all made the beginning, I presuppose," Schleiermacher says there. "Through his revelations and our growing up into his community, our first life has taken the direction that we understand the language of the Lord. . . ." Understanding must be founded on true likeness and friendship, Schleiermacher explains, and the likeness of the disciple to the master, and hence his ability to understand what the master does and says, is itself founded upon the self-impartation of the master, on his act of choosing the disciple. And, in another sermon, we read that ". . . faith can have no other foundation on which it can rest with serenity except experience; it comes consequently only from preaching . . . but preaching can effect nothing of itself, but the Lord himself must give the power. . . ."³¹ It is not surprising, therefore, that over and over in his sermons Schleiermacher used the Johanine Christological title, life, for word and life were correlative realities in his view. Schleiermacher is not, of course, a logos theologian in the ancient and proper sense of the term, but he undoubtedly embodies more adequately than any other modern figure the great intuition of the cosmos culminating in a humanity with a divine destiny that inspired the minds of an Athanasius and an Irenaeus.

This is not the occasion to go more deeply into Schleiermacher's understanding of the person of Christ, though it may be mentioned here that he firmly insisted in his lectures on the life of Jesus that the whole work and person of Christ must be construed in such a way that his humanity is not violated. Schleiermacher therefore rejected not only the classical two natures terminology but also the old double kerygma concept of exegesis, according to which certain words and deeds are to be interpreted within the human and others within the divine nature of Christ. For Schleiermacher, the communicability of Christ's redeeming work requires that he be an exemplar (Vorbild) in whom we can participate, whose life we must be able, in principle, to reconstruct from within and whose actions we must be able to "calculate." We can do none of these things, if the presence of a divine nature makes his humanity wholly other than ours. On the other hand, the ability to do these things, or to aspire after them, does not imply that we are placing ourselves on a level above Christ, but rather implies the beginning of his influence upon us.³² Christ is quite literally, to Schleiermacher's mind, life

³¹ S.W. II/1, P. 214 f.; II/8, p. 106.
³² S.W. I/6, Das Leben Jesu, pp. 10, 17.

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itself, the one who implants in us a new vitality and the vitality so implanted is not formless-here we see the radical distinction between Schleiermacher and the Lebens-philosophie of Bergson, for example-but is mediated and structured by the words and self-consciousness of Christ himself. For this reason, he defines the work of Christ, in The Christian Faith, as a person-forming activity. This definition is not in contradiction but rather in support of the assertion in the introduction to the effect that the whole Christian life goes back to the preaching of Christ, for the edification of personhood occurs precisely in the situation of speaking and hearing, revealing and divining. The difference here between Christ in his self-impartation and men in their communication and self-disclosure is that he, "even as a human person was ever coming to be simultaneously with the world itself." And, ". . . just as creation is not concerned simply with individuals (as if each creation of an individual had been a special act), but it is the world that was created and every individual as such was created only in and with the whole, for the rest not less than for itself, In the same way the activity of the Redeemer too is world-forming, and its object is human nature, in the totality of which the powerful God-consciousness is to be implanted as a new vital principle. He takes possession of the individuals relatively to the whole . . . and thus the total effective influence of Christ is only the continuation of the creative divine activity out of which the person of Christ arose."³³

What has been said above represents, naturally, only a sketch of certain of the basic themes that inform Schleiermacher's thinking and that occupy a significant and formative place in his theology. Further extensive comment is not appropriate here, for the purpose of this essay is only to contribute to the re-newed and increasing serious consideration of the substance of Schleiermacher's theology. The final estimate of his real worth and place in modern thought can come only later. One thing, however, is undeniably clear: the representation of Schleiermacher as the systematic theologian whose dogmatics flows out of a single formal principle (the feeling of absolute dependence) with an inexorability that stuns the intellect and troubles the conscience-such a representation is a caricature. In actuality, the common principles that inform his ethics, hermeneutics, and

³³ The Christian Faith, section 97, 2 and section 100, 2.

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theology show the intensity and scope of his struggle to think in the face of the real, rather than in simple dependence on absolute idealist logic, to remain with Plato and Kant over against Fichte and Schelling, in brief, to reflect historically. The theologian for whom word and feeling were correlative fundaments of human existence was seeking to execute a vision of man in the historical cosmos, an historical cosmos whose apex is the living Church and its indwelling head, Jesus Christ.