2 0 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 6 - 2 Fa l l 2 0 2 0 ition is connected with feeling . Schleiermacher regrets that he can speak about intuitions and feelings only as two separate entities. He attempts to describe a religious experience, when intuition and feeling fuse, in a famous passage, later called the ‘love scene’ (Stratis 2019, 32). That first mysterious moment that occurs in every sensory perception, before intuition and feeling have separated, where sense and its objects have, as it were, flowed into one another and become one, before both turn back to their original position – I know how indescribable it is and how quickly it passes away …A manifestation, an event develops quickly and magically into an image of the universe. Even as the beloved and ever-sought-for form fashions itself, my soul flees toward it; I embrace it, not as a shadow, but as the holy essence itself. I lie on the bosom of the infinite world. At this moment I am its soul …With the slightest trembling the holy embrace is dispersed, and now for the first time the intuition stands before me as a separate form; I survey it, and it mirrors itself in my open soul like the image of the vanishing beloved in the awakened eye of a youth; now for the first time the feeling works its way up from inside and diffuses itself like the blush of shame and desire on his cheek. This moment is the highest flowering of religion. If I could create it in you, I would be a god … (Schleiermacher 2015, 31–32). Schleiermacher mentions how important and determinate the first of such a religious experience is. To remember it and to recognize its importance, will contribute to a better under - standing of the start and development of one’s religious per - sonality: “ each religious personality is also a completed whole, and your understanding of it rests on your seeking to fathom its first revelations. ” (2015, 107). Also important for the understanding of the essence of religion are Schleiermacher’s remarks on immortality. In order to become one with the universe we have to go beyond ourselves. That state can be reached in death, but already be experienced during lifetime, with a special attitude: “ To be one with the infinite in the midst of the finite and to be eternal in a moment, that is the immortality of religion. ” (2015, 54). 2.4 The Meaning of Religion in Modernity Schleiermacher defends the thesis that religion “ springs necessarily and by itself from the interior of every better soul, it has its own province in the mind in which it reigns sovereign ” (2015, 17). This connects to the task of themediator to “ awaken the slumbering seed ”. But religions do not exist only for the religious person. Schleiermacher wants to give religion its own domain, a place in a secularizing society. He frees religion from: morality, the urge to know and systematize everything, utility, state intervention and religious institutions. This freedom is in accordance with the bases of secularization, with a modern humanity that freed itself from God as the central point of reference. In this emancipated form, religion can try to fulfill meaning in a modern world and relate independently to other fields that try to make themselves more and more free from religion, especially to metaphysics and morals, as Schleiermacher shows. He also pleas for another approach of reality: not to see everything from one point of view– your own – and from the outside, but from its specific middle point, and to approach it from all possible relations to that middle point. If one sees an object in its own essence and in its own perfection, it can be seen as part of the totality. And the universe is only something worth, because of this totality. Once again this is a cri - tique to the problematic situation in which man put himself as reference point of the universe; not free but bound to his own point of view. Schleiermacher’s view on religion leads to an attitude of respecting every point of view and keeping everything together. So, religion is unifying, but always with a sense of the uniqueness of the individual experience. Although in his vision of the society of religious people Schleiermacher goes as far as stating, “ [t]hey are no longer merely people, but also humanity; going out beyond themselves, triumphing over themselves, they are on the way to true immortality and eternity. ” (2015, 94). Here we see the transcendental unifying meaning of Schleiermacher’s religion.
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